International data analysis company IDC "Global AR/VR Headset Market Quarterly Tracking Report, Fourth Quarter of 2021", the annual global AR/VR headset shipments reached 11.23 million units in 2021, an increase of 92.1% year-on-year, of which VR headset shipments reached 10.95 million units, breaking through the important inflection point of the industry with annual shipments of 10 million units. It is expected that in 2022, 15.73 million VR headsets will be shipped worldwide, an increase of 43.6% year-on-year. IDC believes that 2021 is the year when the AR/VR headset market breaks out again after 2016, compared with 5 years ago, from the perspective of hardware equipment, technical level, content ecology, and creative environment, compared with five years ago, there has been a substantial improvement, the industry ecology is healthier, and the industrial foundation is more solid.
As far as the domestic market is concerned, since May 2021, domestic local VR manufacturers have successively launched new products, and the pace of iteration has accelerated significantly. Among them, the local manufacturer iQIYI Adventure performed strongly in the fourth quarter, with omni-channel sales increasing by 475.9% year-on-year, and the market share reached 22.5%, leading the industry. From the perspective of the whole year, in the online e-commerce channel, iQIYI Adventure VR shipments accounted for 27.4%, ranking second in the industry, and the industry's leader ByteDance's Pico jointly divided more than half of the market share.
Industry insiders believe that the current Chinese VR first echelon represented by ByteDance Pico, iQiyi Adventure VR, etc. has been formed. Its advantages come from deep accumulation, unlike mature PCs, mobile phones, TVs, VR is a very special screen, it pays attention to immersion, exclusive to a personal experience, and to support large-scale games, so in the human-computer interaction logic, display effects, performance / power consumption, weight / ergonomics and many other aspects of the need for a lot of technical support, these work obviously for all manufacturers can not be achieved overnight. With the increase in shipments, the advantages of the two brands of PQ (Pico, Adventure) in the supply chain will continue to increase, and they will do a good job in 6Dof interactive experience, 4K screen display, video and game ecology, and their competitive advantages will continue to expand.
PQ has the same growth path: high investment, spare no effort
The development of the VR industry, due to the lack of reference to successful cases, so it takes a lot of manpower and financial resources and time to explore, taking Facebook as an example, Zuckerberg uses about 20% of employees to engage in VR & AR business, and this part of the income is less than 2%, which shows how strong the demand for personnel and technology in the early development of VR business is.
In contrast, from the perspective of the two head brands of domestic PQ, both sides have experienced the same difficult high-investment stage in the development process from 0 to 1. Before being acquired by ByteDance, Pico has carried out a B+ round of financing, with a financing amount of 240 million yuan, and the same period of adventure also got a B round of hundreds of millions of yuan financing two months in advance, the official said that the funds will be used for vr key technologies, algorithms and new products research and development, and will continue to invest in the construction of content ecology.
With high investment, both brands have achieved strong technical reserves. Pico belongs to Bird Look Technology and its affiliates in 126 countries /regions, a total of 758 published patent applications, of which invention patents accounted for 64.25%, patent layout mainly focused on virtual reality, display equipment, headsets, cameras, depth images, sensors, microcontrollers and other professional and technical fields. It is worth noting that the annual number of patent applications in recent years has stabilized at more than 45, and the proportion of patents in the pending state is more than 35%, which shows that the technical reserves of Adventure have become more and more abundant in these years.
At the same time, you can also see more technology landings on the product - in March 2017, Adventure released the world's first and only Adventure VR all-in-one machine that uses a 4K ultra-high-definition screen; in 2018, Adventure launched the world's first 4K VR all-in-one machine that supports 8K panoramic video playback, as well as the iQUT future theater based on the VR platform; in March 2020, the Adventure 2Pro 6DoF VR somatosensory game console was released. On January 7, 2021, Adventure released the first CV (computer vision technology) leader 6DoF VR interaction technology in China - chasing light. As well as Adventure 3, which is regarded as opening the game strategy, the industry's first thousand-yuan high-quality VR all-in-one machine - Adventure Dream, etc.
The two PQ brothers have very different styles: one is a social cow and the other is not good at expression
After being acquired by Byte, Pico's extroverted personality was finally revealed, transforming into a social cow and everywhere. Don't believe you open the vibrato, open screen ads, all kinds of information flow content, and several almost non-stop live broadcast rooms. Pico on Douyin released several topics visually measured to have nearly 1 billion plays, during the Spring Festival Zhang Jin, Cai Shaofen, Yang Di, Yang Wei and other traffic stars have promoted Pico on the Douyin platform, related video playback also over 100 million. Backed by the huge traffic pool of bytes, Pico brings out the traffic advantage to the fullest. At the same time, in terms of marketing delivery, Pico is also holding high this year, such as appearing on the Spring Festival Gala stage to send red envelopes, cooperating with the "Ace to Ace" variety show, and large-scale offline experience stores, there is no doubt that under the large investment will further expand the contact area of Pico products and users, accelerating the popularity of VR, for other players in the industry, it is also a happy thing.
Compared with Pico, a social cattle brand, Strange Encounter is not good at words, but the style of doing things is fierce and cruel to himself. In terms of marketing, Adventure has always been weaker than Pico, so the brand awareness is not high in the public view, but it is a brand with a very good reputation in the VR professional players and equipment enthusiasts. In the past six months, the market goal of Adventure is to go out of the circle - from the professional and head VR enthusiasts to the wider crowd.
For this goal, Adventure did two things: in September last year, Adventure released the flagship product of the first flagship game, Adventure 3, in order to promote the product to jump out of the professional game circle, Adventure will be 30 of the most mainstream VR games directly reduced to 0 yuan, and this part of the revenue, in fact, vr manufacturers' main source of profit, after all, the hardware market is very transparent, almost all VR manufacturers want to build a content ecology to promote profit growth. The tough approach of Adventure has achieved good results, and the brand awareness has rapidly expanded from the professional circle and has been recognized by many ordinary netizens.
Not long ago, Adventure once again took the initiative to launch a new Adventure Dream Premium Edition, and highlighted a more powerful marketing plan for this new product: as long as the user completes 300 days of punching in a year, they can enjoy 100% of the purchase cashback, which is equivalent to the real zero yuan purchase. After the launch of this event, the number of appointments exceeded 40,000 in less than an hour, and soon exceeded 70,000, 80,000, 100,000... At the moment, this number is still growing rapidly. This even exceeded official expectations for the event, which was replenished several times a week during the period, but each time it was a second empty.
This may be the reason why Although The Adventure has not been promoted in a large area, it can still enter the head camp in terms of sales. Now, the domestic VR market has been awakened by the metacosm, and then the two head brands of PQ continue to promote popularity. It is not difficult to imagine that as PQ further divides the market, the barriers of the head camp will be raised again, which reminds me of a sentence on the football field: there is not much time left for others.