Huawei fell, Xiaomi, Apple, OPPO, vivo to eat.
Limited by the impact of chip inventory, Huawei became the mobile phone manufacturer with the largest sales decline in 2021, down 68% year-on-year; at the same time, Xiaomi and Apple sales increased by 40% and 47% respectively, in addition, OPPO and vivo also achieved good results. But from the overall point of view, the domestic smartphone market is not too optimistic, the overall sales decline for four consecutive years, 2% year-on-year decline in 2021.
However, it is this seemingly sluggish mobile phone market that has attracted the attention of car companies one after another. In September 2021, Geely founder Li Shufu founded Hubei Xingji Times Technology Co., Ltd., announcing that it will create a high-end mobile phone for the global market; the new force Weilai has also begun to initially build a mobile phone business department, led by Yin Shuijun, former president of Meitu Mobile Phone.
Representatives of traditional car giants and new energy vehicle companies have come down, and even Glory CEO Zhao Ming can't look at it.
For car companies to enter the mobile phone industry, Zhao Ming said that Glory will not enter the automotive field in the next few years, and welcome car companies to make mobile phones, but it is recommended not to underestimate the difficulty of making mobile phones, from the perspective of consumer experience to create a mobile phone that truly makes consumers satisfied.
It's not without lessons
Zhao Ming's remarks are largely because too many cross-border big men have underestimated the difficulty of making mobile phones before and turned back. Including Gree Electric Appliances, TCL, Hisense, Haier and other home appliance companies, they have released their own brands of mobile phones, but they have not achieved good performance.
Take Gree as an example, into the mobile phone industry for six years, there are currently six mobile phone products, but a hot selling one is not, Gree mobile phone 3 listed in a month only sold 23 units, greatly loose G7 10 days to sell 2461 units. Even Dong Mingzhu, who has shouted that "Gree mobile phone sales of 50 million or 100 million are not a problem", "Gree does mobile phones to kill Xiaomi in minutes", "when I hope Huawei is the first in the world, Gree is the second in the world", now he also sees a huge gap with Huami OV and has to admit his fate.
Although the mobile phone is small, the requirements for product design, research and development capabilities and channel layout are very high, and the attention and requirements of mobile phone users for brand and experience are much higher than home appliances and automobiles. Huawei, Xiaomi, Glory, OPPO, Apple, etc. have long become the absolute head, and it is more difficult for crossovers to insert a foot and achieve a brand breakthrough from scratch.
Previously, some car company leaders expressed their disapproval of making mobile phones. Tesla founder Elon Musk has publicly responded on social media that smart watches and mobile phones are yesterday's technologies, and brain-computer interfaces are the future. Yin Tongyue, chairman of Chery Holding Group, also said publicly not long ago that Chery will not make mobile phones, and the cake of the car is big enough.
Maybe a little more room for imagination
However, for the automotive industry, which is itself a high-tech density, the transfer to the low-tech density mobile phone industry is logically feasible. More importantly, as the most important data entrance to the current Internet of Everything, especially in the smart car scene, the mobile phone plays an indispensable key role.
With the popularity of autonomous driving in the future, the car will become a completely intelligent carrier tool, but limited by the large size and inconvenient characteristics of the car itself, car companies need to find an effective market connection point to complete the deep binding of users and cars. Apple CEO Tim Cook has pointed out that the car is the ultimate form of mobile devices.
For the manufacture of mobile phones, Li Shufu said, "Mobile phones are the application carriers of electronic product market verification and software innovation, which not only allows users to share innovative achievements as soon as possible, but also transfers a safe and reliable part of the results to the application of cars, so as to realize the close interaction between car machines and mobile phone software technology." ”
In the vision of car companies, the future of intelligent terminals is no longer today's islands, the formation of intelligent ecological closed loop, is the consensus of mobile phone manufacturers and car manufacturers. However, the linkage of the two is on the one hand, the intelligent car manufacturers do not want car data to flow into external mobile phone manufacturers to defend data sovereignty, which is one of the main reasons why car companies "make mobile phones".
In general, automakers enter the mobile phone industry, not to challenge the status of several major mobile phone head companies, but to feed back the main business with the help of mobile phones, such as improving the car machine experience, saving traffic costs, storing core strength and achieving ecological linkage. From the perspective of consumers, if the mobile phones made by car companies can really achieve the above advantages, as long as there is no big hard injury in software and hardware, then maybe they will really pay for it.
The two paths of self-development and acquisition
Cross-border mobile phones, car companies have differentiated into two roads led by Geely Li Shufu "acquisition" and Weilai-led self-research, which is also in line with the respective styles of the leaders of the two car companies.
Li Shufu has staged the acquisition of Volvo's "snake swallowing elephant" drama, today's thinking is as always, at the beginning of this year, there were a number of media reports that Geely's mobile phone company Xingji Times is in contact with Meizu to negotiate the acquisition, has entered the due diligence stage.
In response to the rumors, Geely responded that "there is no comment on the market rumors", and Meizu responded that "thank you for your concern for Meizu technology, there is no relevant news at present", the two attitudes are ambiguous, which shows that the rumors are not false.
As far as the current situation is concerned, Geely is more urgent. Since the transformation of new energy vehicles, Geely's progress has not been particularly smooth, and the kryptonian 001, which was previously pinned on high hopes, was sought after with super fast charging, ultra-long endurance, and 3.8 seconds and zero hundred acceleration, but finally failed on the car machine system. The operation page, which could not be turned on for a full minute, directly beat 0.1% of the world's users, and was once spat on the hot search.
Obviously, Li Shufu hopes to "transfer a safe and reliable part of the results to automotive applications" as soon as possible by entering the high-end mobile phone market.
In contrast, Weilai is not hurried to develop the pace of self-development, the former Meitu mobile phone president Yin Shuijun joined Weilai, responsible for the mobile phone line, before the "Securities Daily" reporter checked the third-party recruitment website learned that Weilai is recruiting including wireless test engineers, communication test engineers, BSP test engineers and other staff strongly related to the mobile phone business.
According to the 2021 financial report released by NIO, in 2021, NIO delivered a total of 91,429 vehicles, an increase of 109.1% year-on-year; achieved operating income of 36.14 billion yuan, of which vehicle revenue reached 33.17 billion yuan. Net loss narrowed to 4.02 billion yuan, narrowing by 24.3% year-on-year, and the gross profit margin of the whole vehicle reached 20.1%. Judging from the loss data, profit data, and sales data, It is difficult for Weilai Automobile to give a satisfactory answer to the capital market.
Compared with Geely's urgency, Weilai, which has not yet achieved a turnaround, may be more of a new story to tell, so that the capital market is willing to continue to pay.
Bell description
The fundamental reason why car companies make mobile phones lies in data sovereignty. At present, the future of car companies to make mobile phones is not clear, the smart phone supply chain may be perfect enough, it is not too difficult to create a mobile phone, but in the face of the already saturated market, it is difficult for new brands to get a certain share from the head.
It's more like a game of "drunkards don't want to drink", what will the ending be? We might as well wait for the bullets to fly a little longer.