Compared with Glory, OPPO and Xiaomi, who often fight on the Internet, Vivo and founder Shen Wei are very low-key. Recently, there have been more news from Vivo.
The upcoming release of the first tablet and the first folding screen mobile phone, the high-end NEX series into the X series, new product launches and product line adjustments in parallel, it seems to be well prepared for the competition in 2022.
However, it is still slower than one beat - other manufacturers' tablets and folding screen mobile phones have been updated several times, and high-end products are selling hot. The slogan of "dare to be the queen of the world" has not appeared in propaganda for a long time, but vivo is practiced everywhere, and it is difficult to say whether this is a strategy or a kind of dullness.
Clichéd machine-sea tactics
The strategy of "machine sea tactics" is now like an ancient thing, which should have been sealed in the dust of history, but Vivo is still in use today.
As early as the era of functional machines, Nokia dominated the mobile phone industry with machine sea tactics, launching products at different prices and different styles, but too many product lines were inevitably repeated, and were criticized as "technology to change shells".
Entering the era of smart machines, Motorola and Lenovo have imitated the tactics of the machine sea, but have not achieved much success, which shows that this tactic is not invincible, perhaps an effective means of continuing influence in a specific period, but it is also more likely to be a trap that hurts the brand power.
With the maturity of the mobile phone industry, smart phones have been facing the current situation of excessive performance and homogenization, and major manufacturers have begun to sort out product lines, reduce model releases, and avoid the chaos of "shell changers".
Looking at the situation last year, Vivo still adheres to this ancient strategy. According to the statistics of Wukong Review, in 2021, Xiaomi, Redmi and Black Shark released a total of 25 mobile phones, Huawei and Honor released 12 and 23 respectively, OPPO released 21 models, Vivo released 36 models, and at the same time, iQOO under the Vivo system also released 13 models.
In terms of time distribution, in addition to February, Vivo released new machines in 11 months last year, less than one, more than five or six models, compared with other brands "huge".
It is true that with the "diligent" bombardment of the whole timeline and massive models, Vivo won the 2021 domestic mobile phone sales championship with sales of 71.5 million units, but it remains to be seen whether it can take effect for a long time.
In fact, the fatigue of the aircraft sea tactics has already emerged. According to data from CINNO Research, a third-party research organization, in January this year, the Chinese market ranked first in smartphone sales, OPPO ranked first, followed by vivo. Vivo's main sales model is S12, starting at 2799 yuan.
Looking at vivo's product series, the NEX series and the image flagship X series that have been cut have covered a large span price of 3000-7000 yuan, and the rest of the series are below 3000 yuan. At present, vivo has no actual high-end product line, and the X series that is the most out of the circle has always been the main mid-range market.
Adhere to the tactics of the machine sea, so that vivo has become the "old-fashioned" faction of the mobile phone circle, how to deal with the new changes in the industry that focuses on high-end and high-quality products today, vivo needs to find the answer as soon as possible.
Slow rudder
In terms of products, the adjustment is slow, the strategy is turning on the rudder, and vivo is also full of old.
On January 24 this year, Shen Wei called 2021 the "first year of qualitative change" in his New Year's speech, and he believed that 2022 will be the most challenging year for the smartphone industry, and vivo should continue to "dare to pursue the ultimate and continue to create surprises".
The NEX series, which once undertook vivo's mission to pursue the ultimate, has recently been announced to be abolished. On March 3, Jia Jingdong, vice president of Vivo, said on Weibo that in the future, "any expectations that everyone has for NEX can be answered on the new X series."
There are few examples of such a direct cut of high-end brands. The NEX series was first launched in 2018, once carrying the hope of vivo to hit the high-end, and when it came out, it achieved industry leadership with more than 90% of the front screen. If Xiaomi MIX is the "pioneer" of the design direction of the full screen, vivo NEX is a great "promoter".
Sometimes, however, the other side of "extreme" is "extreme". The follow-up NEX 3 adopted a "waterfall screen" design with large curvature, which attracted negative reviews due to incomplete display, side color casts and other issues - flashy.
More critically, the NEX 3's screens are already lagging behind the industry in terms of practical parameters. In 2019, a brand brought a high refresh rate trend, screen parameter competition became more and more fierce, and NEX 3's "waterfall screen" did not turn in time, still walking on the road of visual technology sense, the lack of 90Hz refresh rate NEX 3, in fluency and other practicality is inferior.
After NEX's loss at the high end, Vivo began to reorganize its product line, but it was too late. Xiaomi has a MIX series, OPPO has a Find series, and the gradually rejuvenated glory also has a Magic series, and Vivo can only rely on the X series that has always been positioned in the middle.
The action of domestic manufacturers to rush to the high-end is to open sub-brands, and the main brand will explore the high-end market with higher profit margins. At the beginning of 2019, Vivo woke up like a dream, and Shen Wei found Feng Yufei, an old minister of Vivo, and asked: "Or should we do this brand?" At this point, the online performance machine brand iQOO was born.
At this time, the high-end brand OnePlus, which has an inextricable relationship with OPPO next door, has been working online for 7 years, and Redmi, the predecessor of Xiaomi's Redmi, has been established for 6 years.
Vivo's sub-brand strategy not only came late, but also some turmoil. iQOO and X series focus on high-end business and elite groups, for e-sports and young people, but in the pursuit of performance in the stack of materials inevitably raise costs, iQOO 8 and iQOO 9 often more than 5,000 yuan the price has deterred many young people, iQOO sales can only stay at about 3 million units.
At the end of last year, Feng Yufei, the founder and head of the iQOO brand, quietly left his job, which made the prospects of iQOO even more unclear.
Trailing the second curve
If it were not for the news that vivo's first tablet will be released in the first half of this year, most people still think that vivo will be absent from this field that has been attacked by Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, and OPPO.
Today, after three years of discontinuation, the Xiaomi tablet has recently launched the fifth generation, Huawei MatePad Pro, Honor Tablet V7 and other opponents are also competing, OPPO's first tablet OPPO Pad was also released on February 24 this year.
Behind the belated arrival of the tablet is the lag of vivo in the ecological layout of the IoT. OPPO founder Zhang Mingyong made a judgment at the end of 2019, "there will be no pure mobile phone companies in the future", I don't know if Vivo founder Shen Wei also thinks so. On the surface, what is seen is that in the IoT layout, vivo is not only far behind Xiaomi Huawei, but also inferior to OPPO.
Huawei first mentioned the "1+8+N" strategy in 2019, and now it has covered the Internet of Things to cars; Xiaomi laid out the Internet of Things in 2014, proposed the "1+4+X" strategy in 2019, and set "mobile phone × AIoT" as the core strategy of the next decade in 2020, and the number of AIoT devices (excluding mobile phones, tablets and laptops) exceeded 400 million.
OPPO's IoT layout is not too early, starting in 2018, after the release of several smart watches, the launch of smart TVs in 2020, and the official proposal of the "3 +N + X" strategy.
Vivo's layout time is not much behind OPPO, but the advance is slow. Strategically, it was only proposed in August last year that "1+3+N", "1" naturally represents mobile phones, "3" contains tablets released soon, and the other two have no more information.
In the "smart hardware" entry on the official website of vivo, only four products are listed, namely two smart watches and two wireless headphones, which are far from the various categories and quantities of Xiaomi PCs, tablets, TVs, and smart speakers. Even compared with OPPO, which started at a similar time, there is no small distance, oppo smart TV has iterated out a number of products.
Of course, it cannot be said that vivo's IoT layout is unprofitable. In 2020, vivo's Jovi InCar in-vehicle business has cooperated with 80+ car brands, but it is not deeply involved in the construction of the Internet of Vehicles like Huawei.
The smartphone market has gradually approached the ceiling, and the larger-scale Internet of Things is a good area for seeking a second growth curve, and vivo is also lagging behind in opening up a new battlefield.
For a long time, Shen Wei of Vivo and Chen Mingyong of OPPO have adhered to the business thinking of Duan Yongping in the BBK era and hung up their "duty". Time has passed, Chen Mingyong is active and enterprising, Shen Wei is somewhat conservative, in a series of strategic shifts, vivo is slow, in order not to be marginalized by increasingly fierce competition, vivo urgently needs to run fast.