Zhi DongXi (public number: zhidxcom)
Author | Yunpeng
Edit | Heart edge
How long have you not changed your phone? Two years, three years, or five years? When I threw this question to a friend yesterday, her reply to me was: "My iPhone 8 Plus can fight again!" ”
"Why don't young people want to change their phones?" This may not only be a problem on the hot search list, but also a problem thrown to the entire mobile phone industry.
"Mobile phones are really not easy to sell." From the end of last year to the beginning of this year, many dealers have issued such an exclamation.
"Now, except for Apple, I really don't know what to sell, and these brands in China are not selling ideally..." Li Qing, a mobile phone dealer who has been in the industry for more than 20 years, told me.
But in fact, even today, even Apple, the situation is not as optimistic as it seems. The three generations of new iPhone SE products just released have recently been rumored to have suddenly suffered a single cut, with a single cut of between 2 million and 3 million units, accounting for about 20% of the total sales.
Apple for between 3000-4000 yuan between the low-end models, seems to have some lack of confidence, you know, two years ago Apple released the second generation of iPhone SE, until 2021 are ranked in the world's best-selling smartphone TOP10.
▲ 2021 Global TOP10 Best-Selling Mobile Phone Ranking, Source: Counterpoint
Recently, TSMC Chairman Liu Deyin told the media that due to geopolitical uncertainty and the epidemic lockdown, the demand for consumer electronics has shown signs of slowing, and areas such as smartphones, laptops and TVs have been affected.
Guo Mingxi, a well-known Apple analyst at Tianfeng Securities, also gave his opinion: At present, from high-end to low-end brands are cutting orders, and the mobile phone industry is undergoing structural adjustment.
Recently, market research institute CINNO Research released a sales report for the domestic smartphone market in February, and its data shows that the overall sales volume of China's smartphone market in February fell by more than 20% year-on-year and 24% month-on-month. The coldness on the sales side seems to be true.
▲Domestic TOP5 mobile phone brand sales in February 2022, source: CINNO
Objectively speaking, the significance of this structural adjustment for the entire smart phone industry may not be only a simple advantage or disadvantage, and what are the driving factors behind this adjustment? Will the harsh winter facing the smartphone industry today evolve into an "ice age" and how will the giants respond? All deserve our deep thinking.
First, there is a lot of mourning at home and abroad, and Apple is not spared
After consulting with a number of supply chain people, I found that everyone gave a similar answer, and the current mobile phone market is indeed not optimistic.
A management of Shunyu Optical Technology, a major domestic smart phone lens manufacturer, told Zhidong that the overall situation of the mobile phone market is not optimistic, and the shipment decline is about 20%-30%.
At present, the inventory of Android mobile phone manufacturers has begun to become higher, but the demand for mobile phones has become lower, and the intuitive feeling brought about is that mobile phones cannot be sold.
According to CINNO Research data, mobile phone sales in the domestic market in February were about 23.48 million units, down 20.5% year-on-year, down 24% month-on-month, and down both year-on-year. The sales volume of domestic head mobile phone manufacturers fell to a maximum of about 45% year-on-year, close to the waist.
From the January domestic market data released by the agency, we can also see a similar situation, OPPO, vivo, millet and other domestic head mobile phone manufacturers sales have declined year-on-year, and the maximum decline of more than 20%.
▲January 2022 domestic TOP5 mobile phone brand sales, source: CINNO
It can be said that in the past two months since the beginning of 2022, the domestic mobile phone market has really experienced a cold spring.
Not only the domestic market, the situation of overseas giant Apple is not optimistic, Apple analyst Guo Mingxi for the newly released iPhone SE third-generation shipment forecast from 25-30 million units to 15-20 million units, the forecast decline of up to about 40%.
Not long ago, Apple predicted that it will release a subscription service in the future, which is simply to allow users to "rent an iPhone" and pay a certain monthly fee to use the iPhone.
Some insiders believe that this is actually another policy that reflects Cook's strong inventory management capabilities, apple continues to lower the threshold for users to use iPhones, expand the user base, in order to cope with the increasingly weak global smartphone market.
The domestic market research institute Tide Electric Think Tank has predicted that from 2022 to 2024, global smartphone shipments will fluctuate between 1.1 billion units and 1.2 billion units, compared with 1.5 billion units at its peak.
According to industry information, in the face of this severe winter, domestic and foreign mobile phone manufacturers have not only cut orders and lowered market expectations, but also reduced the specifications and configuration of mobile phone products.
In short, it is to start to increase efforts to "roll up" the low-end smartphone market. Today's low-end smartphone market has a very limited space left, this operation has a "drinking and quenching thirst" feeling.
Of course, this aspect is also because domestic manufacturers have not gone well in impacting the high-end market, and most of the high-end machine market left by Huawei has been robbed of most of it by Apple.
▲ Global smartphone sales share of more than $400 in 2021, source: Counterpoint
In addition to making mobile phones "more difficult to sell", this harsh winter has also had a profound impact on enterprises and practitioners.
Zhi Dong and a number of mobile phone industry people learned that the turnover rate of peer friends around them has increased significantly this year, and most of these people who left the company later turned to smart cars, smart homes, AR/VR and other tracks with higher potential.
Some formers said that now that the mobile phone industry is "internally involved", they feel very tired and feel that their love for this career has been consumed a lot.
Whether it is the overall order cutting of the mobile phone industry, or the cold sales of the retail end, or many practitioners have changed careers, it shows that everyone's expectations for the smart phone market are actually not optimistic.
There is no doubt that the mobile phone industry is going through its own difficult period, and this harsh winter is not in vain, but has penetrated into every corner of the industry.
However, it is worth noting that in contrast to the weak sales, some market research institutions are still optimistic about the shipment of the smartphone market in 2022, believing that shipments will reach 1.43 billion units in 2022. How the actual situation will develop, the market will give its own answer.
▲2009-2022 global smartphone shipment statistics and forecasts, data source: Counterpoint
Second, weakness is not the pot of the epidemic, how long have you not changed your new mobile phone?
So, why is the smartphone industry showing such a weak trend? Behind this harsh winter, why can't mobile phones be sold, and why are consumers unwilling to pay for new machines?
1, the epidemic suppressed the desire to consume, "not bad" I will not change
If you look at it from a macro perspective, one of the most direct reasons is naturally the impact of the epidemic. Although the epidemic has increased the number of home office, study and life, these needs are more concentrated in tablets, PCs and various AIoT products, and the driving effect on mobile phones is not large.
I have received similar feedback in my exchanges with mobile phone dealers and supply chain manufacturers, that is, the two-year epidemic from 2020 to 2021 has indeed slowed down global economic growth, and consumers' willingness to consume and purchasing power have also declined to a certain extent.
"Now everyone has more money in their pockets than before, but in the past two years of the epidemic, everyone has spent more cautiously, especially for more expensive electronic products such as mobile phones, basically there is no need to change it." Li Qing told me very frankly.
You know, whether it is the global or Chinese smartphone market, the main force of shipments has always been low-end models, especially thousand yuan machines and hundred yuan machines.
And these thousand yuan machine, the main shipment market of the hundred yuan machine is mainly second-, third- and fourth-tier cities, in large cities with a high degree of digital office, people can still "work online" in the face of the epidemic, but in many small and medium-sized cities, the epidemic has brought a lot of impact to many people who need offline work.
CINNO Research reported that from the end of February to the present, the epidemic situation in many parts of the country has recurred, which has also brought more adverse effects to the resumption of work and production of domestic mobile phone manufacturers, which is one of the main reasons for the decline in the overall performance of mobile phones in February.
Of course, in addition to the unfavorable environment caused by the epidemic, there are also many internal factors in the smartphone products themselves that have led to the downturn in demand for replacement.
According to statistics, the current mobile phone replacement cycle has increased to about 32 months, that is, nearly three years, compared with the data of the Institute of Information and Communications Technology, the domestic market has released more than 400 new machines in 2021, with an average of 1.32 models per day.
But do consumers really have such a big demand for replacement? Today, with the improvement of mobile phone quality, the failure rate of mobile phones has been significantly reduced.
The mobile phone supply chain system and the large-scale production of parts and components have been very mature, and in the increasingly fierce competitive environment, manufacturers have higher and higher requirements for mobile phone quality control, after all, in the past two years, manufacturers who have withdrawn from the mobile phone market have almost "flipped over" in quality control.
At the same time, the fierce inner volume of domestic manufacturers has also made the mobile phone material more and more "luxurious", and even the models of about 2,000 yuan can use chips with performance comparable to the top flagship mobile phones.
The workmanship of mobile phones is getting better and better, and the performance is getting stronger and stronger. For consumer goods such as relatively expensive mobile phones, many consumers even hold the attitude of "using bad calculations", if there is no problem, they will not consider replacing the new machine.
2, the average price of mobile phones rose by 4%, android flagship machines have broken through the 7,000 yuan mark
With the improvement of mobile phone materials, the price of mobile phones has also risen, compared with the main sales of Android machines 2000-3000 yuan price range and 100 yuan machine, thousand yuan machine, today's Android straight board flagship smart phone top version price has mostly come to about 7000 yuan.
In addition, from last year to this year, the domestic mainstream manufacturers almost all showed their own folding screen mobile phones, and the folding screen mobile phone mobile phone basically has to start from 8,000 yuan, and the price is a common thing.
According to Counterpoint data, the average global price of smartphones reached $322 (about 2,046 yuan) in 2021, an increase of 4% year-on-year, reaching an all-time high.
▲ The average price of global smartphones in 2016-2020, data source: Counterpoint
4% doesn't sound like much, but in the economic downturn, how many people can increase their incomes by more than 4%?
It is worth noting that apple iPhone in the past two years in the same storage specifications of the model, the price has not risen, and even some "increase the amount of no price" operation, so the main driver of the average price of mobile phones, is the Android mobile phone manufacturers.
According to Counterpoint data, the proportion of global smartphone sales of more than $400 (about 2541 yuan) in 2021 has increased to 27%, an increase of 4 percentage points in just one year.
▲ 2016-2020 global smart phone sales accounted for more than $400 sales, data source: Counterpoint
There is no doubt that mobile phones are indeed selling more and more expensive now.
3, the lack of innovation is a hard injury, technological upgrading is difficult to have "qualitative change"
Of course, whether it is the negative impact of the epidemic or the improvement of mobile phone quality, or the rise in prices, it seems that it is not enough to become a decisive factor leading the mobile phone industry into a harsh winter.
Whether it is chatting with family, friends, colleagues around us, or communicating with industry insiders, it points to a similar conclusion: the slowdown in mobile phone technology updates and the lack of attractive enough innovation points in products are one of the fundamental reasons why we "don't want to change the machine".
In the eyes of a senior person who has paid attention to the consumer electronics industry for many years, it is said that the wine is not afraid of the deep alley, and now the alley is very shallow, almost to bring the wine to you, but the problem is that the wine is not fragrant at all.
As the industry insider said, after deeply picking up the core of smart phone chips, screens, photography, fast charging, operating systems and other major technical areas, we have indeed found that the experience upgrade points that can make consumers shine have been few.
In the field of mobile phone chips, the recent mediatek flagship chip's strong counterattack on Qualcomm has become a hot topic among consumers, but behind this competition, we see today's flagship chips, whose energy efficiency ratio is almost the same as that of two years ago.
▲Cpu similar performance power consumption comparison (under similar performance, the snapdragon 865 two years ago and today's flagship Tianji 9000 single-core, multi-core power consumption is not much difference), chart source: Geek Bay
Not only does the performance improvement of the chip slow down, but the only performance improvement also needs to sacrifice a lot of power consumption to be able to get it. At the same time, everyone's attention to power consumption has also led to chip technology competition becoming more and more a contest of chip foundry manufacturing processes, rather than competing with the real chip design capabilities of manufacturers.
In addition, the peak performance of mobile phone chips has exceeded the scope that mobile phones can use, and under the blessing of chips that can complete tens of trillions of neural network calculations per second, smart phones are still not "smart" enough.
The performance of the mobile phone chip itself is not weak, but the performance of the mobile phone can be used is very limited. The difficulty of deep coordination and adaptation of software and hardware has become a bottleneck encountered by various mobile phone manufacturers.
The customized self-developed chips that mobile phone manufacturers have pulled out are difficult to bring very intuitive improvements at the user experience level after the actual landing, and it is difficult to become a new selling point that is bought by ordinary consumers.
In the field of mobile phone screens, although in addition to Apple, almost all mainstream mobile phone manufacturers have released or will release their own folding screen mobile phones, but it is undeniable that as far as the current actual situation is concerned, in addition to the difference in appearance design, the actual use experience of each folding screen mobile phone is not much different.
▲Vivo X Fold folding screen mobile phone to be released soon
The lack of software ecology, the lack of irreplaceability and high prices are still several walls between consumers and products.
And it is worth noting that due to the internal structure design of the fuselage and the limitations of the current technical level, the folding screen mobile phone is lagging behind the straight flagship smartphone in terms of performance, heat dissipation, screen quality, screen durability, charging endurance, and portability.
Although the folding screen mobile phone is "not strong in perception" in bringing innovative use experience, the shortcomings are very prominent.
At the moment when mobile phone manufacturers have sworn to impact the high-end market, the folding screen does not seem to have become a powerful innovation point to attract ordinary consumers, but has become a "shield" for mobile phone manufacturers to sell more expensive mobile phones.
In addition, after several rounds of iterations, the under-screen camera technology that has been landing since 2019 has made the screen opening imperceptible to the naked eye, but due to the difficulties in optics and materials science in the short term, it is difficult to substantially improve the camera effect.
In terms of screen resolution and refresh rate, after years of accumulation, domestic manufacturers have generally broken through the problem of patent level in recent years, and the pixel arrangement of high-end screens is very close to Samsung, and it is difficult for ordinary consumers to see the difference with the naked eye. The high refresh rate has also been popularized, from the thousand yuan machine to the ten thousand yuan machine can be achieved.
▲Drill-like arrangement used for domestic screens
It can be seen that after years of rapid iteration, the technical points such as screen resolution, refresh rate, under-screen camera, folding screen and so on have gradually matured, no matter how loud the manufacturers say at the conference, on the user experience side, the perceived improvement has not been great.
This point is more obvious in the mobile phone photography, in just four or five years, smart phones have quickly gone through multi-camera (three cameras, four cameras, five shots), ultra-high pixels, super-large sensors and other technical points, and the photo has gone from "can you see" to "good enough".
Today, manufacturers are more publicizing breakthroughs in the level of camera algorithms, but for many ordinary consumers, most of the time they are "casually shooting", and in this regard, the effect of mobile phone photography has not been much different.
Whether it is the addition of self-developed image chips or AI algorithms, it is more to bring the role of "icing on the cake", rather than to make the camera experience "qualitative change".
An insider of Sunny Optical Technology told me that now mobile phone photography needs to change the underlying technology, such as metalens (microlens) technology can make the camera thinner, but this technology development cycle is long, usually 5-10 years to achieve results.
In terms of charging and operating system, the "qualitative change" of the experience has also become rare. If the charging time is shortened from 2 hours to ten minutes is a qualitative change, then from 15 minutes to 10 minutes is "not strong perception"; in the same way, the operating system of each mobile phone manufacturer has developed from "rough room" to "hardcover room", and each operating system has basically no difference in functionality, but the specific manifestations of function are different.
On the whole, whether it is chip, screen, camera, charging or innovation at the operating system level, it lacks the ability to bring substantial improvement at the experience level, which leads to a decrease in consumers' desire to change machines. It can be said that this is the core problem that mobile phone manufacturers really want to break through under the severe winter.
"Since the difference is not big, and it costs more money, then why should I change it?" A friend who has long been concerned about the digital field of mobile phones told me.
Third, how to break the situation under the harsh winter? Car-making and metacosmization become new variables
Soon, 2022 is already a quarter past, and the first quarter is over. How long will this harsh winter last, and will the smartphone industry gradually pick up with the weather at the turn of spring and summer 2022? In this regard, the industry has given a different view.
In the view of Li Qing, who has experienced many "dynastic changes" in the mobile phone industry, the fatigue of this industry and the reduction of consumers' willingness to buy should be long-term, and he has not yet seen a turnaround or a good solution.
No matter what kind of "fancy promotions" they do on the retail end, the decline in product attractiveness is a hard injury, and consumers are now becoming more and more rational, in the context of the economic downturn, it is not easy to let consumers quickly pay for it.
Compared with Li Qing's pessimism, a mobile phone supply chain person seems to be more positive, he believes that smart terminal devices often have their own life cycle, perhaps the winter to spring of smart phones, is giving birth to a new form of terminals.
As mentioned earlier, many smart phone industry practitioners have "jumped ship" to VR/AR, smart home or smart automotive industry, compared to the development of 15 years of smart phone categories, these emerging terminals are obviously more dynamic.
Through horizontal comparison, it is not difficult to find that Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and other head mobile phone manufacturers are actively laying out smart cars and VR/AR related technologies.
Although Apple's car-making project is facing many challenges, Apple's smart glasses equipped with a strong self-developed M2 chip and can support AR/VR dual modes have undoubtedly become the most important new products in the industry.
The iPhone 4 opened the era of smartphones, and whether Apple's first "meta-universe" product will lead the future meta-universe era gives people plenty of room for imagination.
The Hongmeng smart car completed by Huawei in cooperation with car companies, the first self-developed electric vehicle that Xiaomi is expected to roll off the production line in 2024, and OPPO's AR glasses with a high sense of futuristic technology... No one is going to put their eggs in one basket, and all the smartphone giants are laying out technology ahead of time to try to get a head start in these potential tracks.
Expanding into new areas seems far more interesting than fighting in the fiercely inward smartphone market.
On the other hand, in the face of this severe winter and the structural adjustment of the entire smart phone industry, mobile phone manufacturers are also moving forward in compliance, even if they want to fight to the end in the smart phone market, they must strive to become survivors after "optimization".
At present, almost all domestic mainstream mobile phone manufacturers are shouting the slogan of "benchmarking Apple, impacting high-end", improving the average price of mobile phones, improving revenue capacity, improving profitability, and feeding back technology research and development, so as to make themselves have a more unique competitiveness, which seems to have become a tacit "tacit understanding" of each family.
Of course, this tacit understanding is invariably rushing to a battle of hardcore technology full of gunpowder.
Conclusion: In the harsh winter of 2022, who can laugh to the end?
It can be said that the release of iPhone 4 has opened 15 years of rapid development of smart phones, from the decline of functional machines, the rise of copycat machines, to today's high-end machines have become fragrant, smart phones have become excellent quality and rich in functions, and the smart phone industry seems to have encountered the biggest bottleneck in the life cycle at this time.
Market growth slows, sales volume is sluggish, brain drain is serious, technological innovation is lacking, prices are rising, product attractiveness is insufficient... A series of intricate factors have contributed to this harsh winter in the smartphone industry.
And the mobile phone giants that have risen with the rise of the smartphone wave will face the severe winter that penetrates the whole industry in 2022, who can give a solution, or find a new breakthrough, and laugh until the end, perhaps becoming the leader of the technology industry in the next decade.
(Li Qing is a pseudonym in the text)