Founder & currently Senior Vice President of OPPO Liu Zuohu
disciple
The distance between Beijing Wukesong and New York Times Square is about 10,991 km.
Seven years ago, Liu Zuohu used a OnePlus mobile phone to smooth the distance between the two places, allowing Americans to change their impression of a copycat of Chinese brand mobile phones. Foreign friends lined up and set up tents to buy the Chinese company's newly released mobile phone, which is a user treatment that can only be enjoyed when Apple's mobile phone is released. Later, whenever the company released a new product, regardless of the domestic response, it would post photos of foreigners lining up to buy mobile phones to flaunt the popularity of mobile phones.
For the mobile phone industry, it is indeed a golden age for entrepreneurs.
Apple swept Nokia into the dustbin of history with an iPhone, and a new era began. Those who do education and training, those who sell MP3s, those who engage in computers, and even those who do PPT are all flocking to the mobile phone industry one after another. Although everyone is reluctant to admit it afterwards, in fact, they are all disciples of Xiaomi.
The pricing of Xiaomi's first smartphone, the 1999, caused a huge sensation
On August 6, 2011, Xiaomi released its first smartphone, the MI 1. Everyone believes that this conference has a milestone significance in the development of China's smart phones, but at that time, almost all traditional mobile phone manufacturers did not think that the "low price + Internet direct sales" model will have a big way out.
According to the report of "Deep Net", He Zhiqiang, who was in charge of Lenovo Lek's Phone mobile phone business at that time, and several executives saw this mobile phone, and their first reaction was to look at it completely, how could Lei Jun make a mobile phone? No one can take his turn. Because Lenovo made Android phones from 2008, the first product Le Phone was released in early 2010. OPPO CEO Chen Mingyong also said that he was dismissive of the practice of blindly relying on low prices to pursue market share: "The company pays dividends to shareholders at the end of the year, can each shareholder share a few market shares?" ”
Later, things developed beyond everyone's expectations. At the end of 2012, Xiaomi's annual shipments reached 7.19 million units, more than doubling year-on-year. Relying on the "cost performance + Internet" set of mentality, Xiaomi can be said to have taken the limelight in China's smartphone market. Traditional mobile phone manufacturers have also begun to realize the importance of online channels, and Ren Zhengfei even once believed that Huawei should not do offline, only e-commerce because of the rapid growth of millet.
In addition to Ren Zhengfei, there is also OPPO CEO Chen Mingyong.
According to reports, on a Saturday in November 2013, OPPO CEO Chen Mingyong called Liu Zuohu and said: "If we say that we will do a new brand, how about you take charge?" Liu Zuohu did not hesitate at all, nor did he have any discussion with his family, and immediately agreed to come down.
Liu Zuohu trusted Chen Mingyong, just as Chen Mingyong trusted Duan Yongping in the first place. From his entry in 1998 to 2013, Liu Zuohu followed Chen Mingyong for 15 years, all the way from a graduate of Zhejiang University who could not get a degree certificate to a vice president. Chen Mingyong did the same, following Duan Yongping to leave the limelight of the small bully to establish backgammon, and became the head of OPPO in one fell swoop.
This is the duty of a worker – to follow the right person and do the right thing. It is no wonder that Huang Zheng, who also studied under Duan Yongping, will take "duty" as a value that Pinduoduo employees need to follow, after all, no matter how tired they are, as long as they can be promoted and raised, the workers are always willing.
However, success depends on the individual struggle of one's own duty, but also the historical process must be considered. Liu Zuohu, born in 1975, can have the opportunity to become the "founder of the OnePlus brand" by relying on his duty; but young people born in 1995 may die suddenly by relying only on their duty. Of course, these are all afterwords.
Liu Zuohu, who was responsible, took over the letter of appointment from Chen Mingyong's hand, and also demanded from the former boss that the new mobile phone brand should be completely independent and would not hold OPPO's thigh. It can be seen that Liu Zuohu has the intention of sitting on the card table and becoming a dealer. But on the day of the official establishment of OnePlus Technology, GUANGDONG OUJIA Communication Technology Co., Ltd., the controlling shareholder of OPPO, still held 80% of the company's shares. The meaning is very clear, that is, you can do things, but the dealer still has to be the boss.
On the day that Liu Zuohu left OPPO, Lei Jun also forwarded Liu Zuohu's Weibo that he welcomed him to join the Internet mobile phone camp, which had a sense of ceremony for the teacher to pick up the new apprentice. However, the new apprentice did not buy it. Liu Zuohu replied that he did not know what an Internet mobile phone was, and Lei Jun then deleted the Weibo.
It seems that rather than following the labor model in the Internet industry, Liu Zuohu still prefers to be a disciple of Buffett in China.
At this point, Luo Yonghao did not do well enough. The front foot has just established himself as a portal, and the back foot begins to complain about the idealistic people of the former boss Yu Minhong's "too fake". Lao Luo is still not stable enough, and does not understand the sophistication of people in the workplace. Otherwise, when he owes 600 million yuan of foreign debt, Lao Luo can also find New Oriental to borrow, after all, multiple friends have many roads.
road
Liu Zuohu and Luo Yonghao (Source: Video of their conversation in 2020)
The luck of the people who do their duty will not be too bad. As Liu Zuohu and Luo Yonghao, who entered the mobile phone industry at about the same time, should all agree with this. It's just that this identification is from two opposite directions.
After the establishment of OnePlus, the first mobile phone was released on April 23, 2014; the release time of Luo Yonghao's hammer T1 mobile phone was in May 2014. From the point of view of time, the timing of the two people's entry has been relatively late. The year before that, Honor announced independence from the Huawei brand, and released the Honor 3C and Honor 3X in December 2013; Xiaomi's annual mobile phone sales in 2013 had reached 18.7 million units.
In addition to these large manufacturers, OnePlus and Hammer also face endless small competitors such as Nubia, IUNI, ZUK, Little Pepper, Big Coke and so on in the domestic market. According to Caijing, at the peak of internet mobile phones, there are at least 1,000 registered mobile phone companies in Shenzhen.
In the era of the rise of the masses, the upstream supply chain has naturally become a place where soldiers must compete, and at the same time, they also hold the power of life and death of small brands. At this time, Liu Zuohu's duty score was one plus to win the opportunity to continue to win the card.
Liu Zuohu's requirement when he left his job was to "not hold OPPO's thigh", but in fact, the person who did things would always leave a way back for himself. By sharing a supply chain with OPPO, OnePlus has easily avoided the problem of capacity climbing that has caused headaches for all new brands. At the same time, Liu Zuohu escaped the fierce competition in the domestic market through the path of curve competition and found a new world of OnePlus on the other side of the ocean.
Liu Zuohu later recalled that the reason why OnePlus was popular overseas was because it originated from a "Smash the Past" marketing campaign. The rules of the game are: user registration, OnePlus selects 100 from the applicants, and these 100 consumers record a video upload of the old mobile phone completely smashed, and you can exchange one dollar for a OnePlus mobile phone. But after the event began, many people did not see the rules of the game and directly smashed their mobile phones.
This event allowed OnePlus's popularity to quickly climb overseas and became a hot topic on Twitter for a time.
"In the United States, it is actually difficult to see a Chinese brand product that can get so much attention and recognition." Walt Mossberg, a well-known American technology product reviewer, said that this is the most Silicon Valley-flavored Chinese company. Time magazine praised OnePlus as "hard to imagine having such a suitable mobile phone for Android enthusiasts", which at the time was the only domestic mobile phone brand reported by it.
Finally, the total sales volume of one plus 1 was 1.5 million units, of which overseas markets accounted for 60%.
However, the love-loving Lao Luo was not so lucky.
Hammer's first mobile phone, T1, chose Foxconn OEM, which made its voice very low from the beginning. Compared to Hammer's sales of less than a million, Foxconn is clearly more willing to take care of Apple's business. Coupled with Luo Yonghao's almost harsh pursuit of industrial design, only the addition of three physical buttons on the glass screen has reduced the yield index of T1.
Later, with the hammer repeatedly jumping tickets, public opinion carried out a fierce and indiscriminate attack on the man who claimed to be buying Apple. In the end, Lao Luo withdrew from the stage of history with a foreign debt of 600 million yuan.
An interesting detail is that also in the early days of OnePlus's production capacity climb, Liu Zuohu adopted the sales method of online invitation code, and later an invitation code was once speculated to 3,000 US dollars. This is actually the "hunger marketing" of The Xiaomi Advanced Edition, but the advantage is that the invitation code method of OnePlus does not have to bear the insults of users who have failed to buy because of "hunger marketing".
As for whether OnePlus is the Internet mobile phone that Lei Jun said, the answer is no longer important. The sales volume of 1.5 million allowed OnePlus to have a positive cash flow in the first year of its establishment, but it was still less than one-tenth of Xiaomi's sales in the previous year. At the same time, the first step from Huawei's independent Glory, the total sales volume in 2014 also reached 20 million units.
"We never wanted to win big. I often tell my colleagues, don't go to learn Xiaomi, you are not Lei Jun, how you learn can not learn. Liu Zuohu once said that everything about OnePlus originates from products. If OnePlus suddenly dies, there must be something wrong with the product. It is said that when OnePlus first went on sale, South Korea's second-largest operator company issued an order of 400,000 yuan. But Liu Zuohu refused, saying: "If people don't want it halfway, my company will die." ”
The man who did this chose the safe path, and also decided the way he was replaced from the table next. Because, from the perspective of the long river of business, the people who change the world and create great enterprises are never those who follow the rules.
Will
In the next few years, Liu Zuohu and OnePlus also took some detours.
For example, the failure of OnePlus 2 and OnePlus X in 2015. In order to expand offline channels, Liu Zuohu suddenly opened 45 offline stores; OnePlus X was priced at 1499 yuan, which was lower than the flagship machine, and the market feedback was poor. When summing up the lessons afterwards, Liu Zuohu concluded that he was "not responsible enough" and should not blindly expand offline stores, and chose to shut down all offline stores.
The two failures made OnePlus lose nearly 30 million yuan, but what Liu Zuohu did not know was the later mobile phone market, as online traffic peaked, offline channels became a weapon for each company to compete for the sinking market. He could have won big, but because of his duty, he chose to "lose small". It was not until 2020 that Liu Zuohu decided to lay out offline channels and issued an internal letter to ask employees to have "intentions", but everything came late.
Of course, compared with Jin Li, Hammer and Lao Jia, who "returned to China next week", who have long disappeared into the market, Liu Zuohu still maintains a certain degree of security at this time by relying on his duty.
In the Indian market, OnePlus surpassed Apple to become the first place in the local high-end market; in the United Kingdom, users in London rushed to the scene at 3 a.m. to grab the front row, and fans have begun to shout excitedly before the event began; in the United States, OnePlus entered the retail channel of the US operator T-Mobile, which is one of the most important sales channels in the US mobile phone market.
Even so, one-plus's influence is gradually very limited compared with Xiaomi, Huawei, Honor, Vivo, and Apple. When product functions and value propositions can only be concentrated in a small circle, it is doomed to be difficult for OnePlus to become a mass brand. After all, no matter how long times Square's queue is, it is not as shocking as the server that crashed when Apple went on sale.
Geeks, after all, are not the mainstream of the market; monopoly is the essence of survival.
Times have changed. Compared with 7 years ago, the annual sales growth rate of global smartphones in 2021 is only 6%year-on-year; the growth rate of the Chinese market is even lower, only 1.1%. In a market full of mud and sand, the concept of small and beautiful will naturally be easily torn apart by the iron law of "winner takes all".
A data that can be corroborated is that the market share of more than 70% of the global mobile phone market in 2021 has been concentrated in the hands of Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, Vivo and OPPO. In 2014, when one plus mobile phones were released, only Xiaomi and Apple were among the top ten in terms of market share, and the two shares added up to only 21.6%.
Liu Zuohu returned to OPPO as Senior Vice President of OPPO
According to the retail store information on the official website of OnePlus, the current offline channels of OnePlus are mainly cooperating with Suning, Shundian, Di Xintong and JD.com. As of December 2020, OnePlus' retail network has covered 31 provinces and 240 cities, and by mid-March this year, there were more than 700 stores selling OnePlus products nationwide, mainly in the eastern and central regions
In such a market environment, Liu Zuohu unsurprisingly made the most responsible choice in 2021 - to return to OPPO. The return after seven years has also made his Title more "senior" in front of the original vice president.
"Through deeper integration with OPPO, OnePlus will have more resources, bring better products to users, and will also make the team more efficient, such as faster and more stable system updates." Liu Zuohu released an internal email saying that the OnePlus team and the OPPO team will be fully merged, and OnePlus will become an independently operated brand under OPPO.
Judging from the effect of the merger, the return of OnePlus will undoubtedly promote OPPO's international brand to a large extent. At the same time, one plus, which focuses on the middle and high-end, will become an important chess piece for OPPO to impact the high-end market. But for Liu Zuohu, the return means that he has completely lost the possibility of controlling a mobile phone brand.
On the other hand, change is also happening with OnePlus. Models including oneplus 9, 10, and 10pro are uniformly equipped with OPPO's ColorOS system in China. Previously, hydrogen OS, which had always been regarded as the embodiment of the spirit of one plus geeks, was abandoned in the corner. In the knowledge, under the topic of "what makes you full of disappointment with OnePlus mobile phones", users began to redefine the term "geek".
After 7 years of going back and forth, Liu Zuohu never seems to have escaped the circle of duty. Perhaps, one of the truths of the world is that if the duty is not fulfilled, it will eventually become the general; the duty of the worker is still the worker. (This article was first published on Titanium Media App, author/Rao Xiangyu, editor/Zhong Yi)
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