Author: Yun Pan
Source: Business People (ID: biz-leaders)
From the sun in the sky to the "disappearing", the generation of famous machines in the era of Coolpad - "China Cool Union" only took four years.
Since last year, it has disappeared for a long time and began to appear frequently in the public eye. Although the response to the new machine and the flag is flat, the recently released 2021 financial report has attracted a lot of people's attention, "Is it still alive?" ”
Coolpad mobile phones shipped 126,300 units in 2021, with 76,200 monthly active users, which is the reality of the domestic mobile phone giants that launched dual-SIM dual-standby mobile phones in the world in the past and once "pressured" Apple and Samsung.
How brilliant it used to be, now with about 10,000 mobile phone shipments per month, it seems so lonely.
At the end of 2020, Coolpad announced its return to the Chinese market, and in October 2021, Coolpad Chairman and CEO Chen Jiajun immediately set the goal of "returning to the first echelon of domestic mobile phone brands within 3 years". Coolpad has sounded the clarion call for a return with a series of measures such as forming a new team, accelerating financing in the capital market, and building sales channels.
Coolpad has recruited a number of executives with Xiaomi backgrounds to form a new management team, two of whom are from the business of innovative channels and e-commerce channels. Since the end of 2020, Coolpad has completed financing of more than HK$2.1 billion in the capital market to expand the company's mobile business in China.
Coolpad has been established for nearly 30 years, witnessed the ups and downs of the mobile phone market, and also experienced the disaster of falling from the peak to the abyss, and now whether it can return to China and reshape the glory of the past has become the focus of attention of the outside world.
one
As a member of the era of the domestic mobile phone "China Cool Union", Coolpad was once a hit.
In 1993, Guo Deying, who came from a communication engineering background, quit his teaching job at Shenzhen University and went to the sea to establish Shenzhen Yulong Computer Communication Technology Co., Ltd., which was the first to engage in BP machines, encoders, paging station base station transmitters, wireless fixed-line PDAs, etc.
In 1999, the BlackBerry "mobile phone" (to be precise, a device that only supports mail delivery and receiving) and the launch of the Motorola Tiantuo A6188, the world's first touchscreen mobile phone known as the originator of smartphones at the end of that year, let Guo Deying smell an unusual taste: feature phones are becoming the past, and smart phones are the future.
In 2002, Guo Deying reversed the "bow of the ship", shifted the main business of Coolpad from pagers to mobile phones, and launched the first CDMA1X color screen resistive touch screen mobile phone with China Unicom the following year, followed by the next city in 2004, launching the first GSM mobile phone.
Coolpad mobile phones have been hanging up since then, and mobile phone sales exceeded 1 billion yuan in 2004. In the same year, Guo Deying landed on the main board of Hong Kong with Coolpad, and was named China's BlackBerry at that time.
In the second year of its listing in Hong Kong, Coolpad brought a "historic" product - the world's first CDMA/GSM dual-mode dual standby smartphone. In 2008, Coolpad suffered its first major turning point, the outbreak of the US subprime mortgage crisis caused the global economic market to be impacted, coolpad stock price fell to HK$0.16 at its lowest. Also this year, the company's net profit fell twice, with a range of 21.2% and 140% respectively. At the same time, it suffered the fourth restructuring of China Telecom, from 5 to 3 operators.
Guo Deying decided to bind the operator at a critical moment, produce custom mobile phones, and replace the operating system of Coolpad mobile phones from Windows CE to android. This was nothing less than a gamble for the cool guys of the time.
It turned out that Coolpad had won the bet. In 2010, Coolpad United Telecom released its first Android machine, The Coolpad N930, and then cooperated with China Unicom to launch the first thousand-dollar Android mobile phone W711. Subsequently, Coolpad used crazy machine sea tactics to expand its territory.
According to market research firm Sainuo data, Coolpad in May 2014 in China's 4G mobile phone market, with a market share of 23.1%, overpowering Samsung and Apple (15.7%), to the first place.
At the same time, Coolpad's performance in 2014 also hit a new high, with revenue and net profit reaching 24.9 billion yuan and 411 million yuan respectively. This is also the last "madness" of Coolpad in the domestic smart phone market.
two
Coolpad also (bound operator) channel, defeat also (bound operator) channel.
Coolpad relied on the fate it formed with operators in the early years of operating BP machines and fixed calls in the communications industry, and in 2008, when the 3G license was issued, it was allowed to enter the market, when custom machines were the mainstream.
The deep binding between mobile phone manufacturers and operators can not only save channel costs, but also ensure sales, coupled with the temptation of subsidies, Coolpad has not loosened the "thigh" of operators, and successfully ranked among the first echelon of domestic machines "China Cool Union" in the 3G era and the early 4G era. However, this also lays hidden dangers for subsequent development.
2012-2014 is the best time for Coolpad, and the net profit of revenue continues to grow, but even in the days of scenery, the gross profit margin of Coolpad mobile phones in the traditional mobile phone industry has remained low for a long time at about 12%.
In the past three years, Coolpad is the fastest growing brand in China's mobile phone market, relying on the tactics of the machine sea and the subsidies and channel support of operators, snatching 10% of the share of China's mobile phone market from Xiaomi, Huawei, Samsung, etc., ranking in the top three in the domestic mobile phone market, and ranking seventh in global sales. But Coolpad has also failed to break the vicious circle of prosperity and decline.
As operators shrink subsidies for customized machines of mobile phone manufacturers, the quota for mobile phone collection is compressed. For many years, relying only on operator channels, ignoring the construction of offline physical store channels and online e-commerce channels, Coolpad was caught off guard. Operator customized machines accounted for 80% of all Coolpad mobile phones.
Although Coolpad also embraced the Internet at the end of 2014 under the leadership of Guo Deying to make changes, the channel was split into brands and businesses, and the Coolpad brand was split into "Coolpad" for operator channels, ivvi for social channels and god for e-commerce channels.
But at that time, China's smart phone market competition has been white-hot, before there are Samsung, Apple and other international giants, after xiaomi, Meizu and other Internet brands, coupled with Huawei, Lenovo, OPPO, vivo and other brands of the pinch, Coolpad mobile phone in technology, channels and other shortcomings exposed, Coolpad's city wall gradually lost.
Coolpad's decline in mobile phone sales has been most intuitively reflected, from more than 40 million units in 2014 to about 38 million units in 2015, after 2016 sales and market share is a sharp decline, in 2018, China's mobile phone sales of the top ten list has long been no Coolpad figure, and now it is classified as Others.
In order to stop the decline, Guo Deying hopes to complete the transformation by binding Internet companies, and in 2015, he married Zhou Hongyi, who was eager to develop his own mobile phone, and established a joint venture company Qiku, which also classified the Big God series into Qiku.
At the same time, Guo Deying also intends to "give" the controlling right of Coolpad out, according to the "First Financial Daily" quoted industry insiders, "Guo Deying had a feeling of retreat at that time." ”
There are rumors that Guo Deying rejected Ma Yun at that time and eventually switched to Jia Yueting's "embrace", and LeTV won 29% of Coolpad shares for nearly HK$3.8 billion to become the largest shareholder. At the same time, Coolpad broke with 360 and eventually ended with Coolpad losing control of Qiku. Zhou Hongyi also exploded in the circle of friends for this reason, "Stabbing me in the back with a knife trying to scrib me, my principle is to definitely fuck back." ”
Marriage, equity transfer, etc. are useless, and with the outbreak of the LeTV crisis in 2017, it will drag Coolpad, which is already in trouble, into the abyss, and Coolpad, which is still profitable in 2015, has not increased or decreased since Jia Yueting became the majority shareholder of Coolpad, and the loss is serious. In 2016 and 2017, Coolpad's net losses amounted to HK$4.21 billion and HK$2.674 billion.
On August 5, 2016, due to health and other issues, Guo Deying, the founder of Coolpad for 23 years, resigned as chairman and CEO of the group, which also means that the old Coolpad is in the past.
Pulling Coolpad out of the abyss is Wihi Venture Capital. At the beginning of 2018, Weiri Venture Capital won the largest shareholder of Coolpad with 897 million shares of 670 million yuan, and Coolpad Group ushered in a new stage of development, and at the end of that year, Coolpad's net loss narrowed sharply to HK$411 million.
three
The frequent changes in senior management reflect the turmoil and struggle of Coolpad from the side, from Guo Deying's resignation as CEO, this position has been replaced by three successors: from Liu Jiangfeng of LeTV (former glory president), to Jiang Chao, a veteran minister of Coolpad, to Chen Jiajun, the second son of Weiri Venture Capital (behind which is the Chen Hua family of kingkey group founders).
In fact, since the Jiang Chao period, Coolpad has been looking for a way out for the "defeat" of the domestic mobile phone market, and overseas markets such as Asia, Africa, North America and Europe, which have been laid out since 2010, are the best choice for Coolpad at that time.
In 2018, Coolpad, which has no opportunity in the domestic market, set its sights on the United States, which began to lay out early. Jiang Chao, who was the CEO of Coolpad at the time, said, "Coolpad will be committed to overseas markets in the future, and will gradually realize the localization of the operation headquarters and research and development headquarters in the United States, while China mainly exists as a manufacturing base." ”
Coolpad's "land of rebirth" U.S. market has similarities with the Chinese mobile phone market in the cool highlight stage, both are dominated by operators, and they hope to follow the previous gameplay and build themselves into a global AI system and mobile terminal supplier on the basis of mobile phones, 5G, etc. as the core business.
And this forward-looking layout also brings hope to the cool in the desperate situation. According to the 2019 financial report, due to the high recognition of a number of mobile phone categories newly listed in North America that year, the performance increase was considerable, and Coolpad achieved a turnaround, with revenue of HK$1.858 billion, an increase of 45.50% over HK$1.277 billion in 2018, net profit of HK$112 million, and an overall gross profit margin of 23.25%, an increase of 28.88% over the gross margin of -5.63% in 2018.
Coolpad's overseas market revenue accounts for 93% of the total revenue, which is also an important reason why the domestic mobile phone market has been completely lost and can still be "alive". Coolpad's 2021 financial report shows that the company's overseas revenue is HK$552 million, accounting for 83.07% of the total revenue of HK$665 million.
Perhaps what worries Coolpad is that at the end of 2020, Coolpad has begun to "return to China", but the 2021 financial report shows that the domestic market revenue only increased by 2.87% year-on-year to HK$113 million, accounting for only 16.93% of the total revenue, but the domestic net loss expanded by 45.34% year-on-year to HK$572 million.
In addition, Coolpad's performance in the capital market is not satisfactory. Since 2016, the stock price has been hovering below HK$1, and as of the close of trading on March 30, Coolpad fell 3.85% to HK$0.20, with a total market capitalization of only HK$2.761 billion. Compared with the highest point of HK$2.09 set on 29 June 2015, it has shrunk by more than 90%.
And the amount of coolpad's debt is not optimistic about today's volume. By the end of 2021, the company's total liabilities are 2.581 billion yuan, and the asset-liability ratio is 33%. Today, Coolpad has only 815 million yuan in cash, plus more than HK$21 in financing.
The coolpad in the first year wants to rely on the existing reserves of channels, technology, talents, research and development, funds, etc., to complete the counterattack within three years, especially in the moment when the smart phone dividend has almost disappeared, the epidemic has been repeated, and the upstream core components continue to be in short supply.
When the heavens and the earth work together, the heroes are not free. Coolpad founder Guo Deying predicted in 2015 that "in the next 5 years, the global mobile phone market will be dominated by Chinese mobile phone brands, and it is estimated that only 4-5 manufacturers will survive and survive well in the global market." ”
Now Guo Deying's prediction has come true, but I don't know if he ever expected that there would be no cool guys in the team that lived well.
*Title image purchased from Visual China