According to 36Kr, the head company of the new domestic car-making force, "Weilai", poached Yin Shuijun, the former president of Meitu Mobile Phone, to try to open up its own mobile phone business line. As soon as this news was released, everyone was very surprised: the car-making track is doing well, why should it hit the pebble in the high-barrier industry of mobile phones?
As we all know, mobile phones are an industry that can no longer be rolled, after decades of development, reshuffle, and now have formed a pattern of multiple oligarchs coexisting, in this process, many well-known companies are either bankrupt, or transformed, or acquired, and the market share is concentrated on these "big factories". According to the Counterpoint report, in 2021, Apple, Honor, vivo, OPPO, Xiaomi, Huawei, these head brands have occupied 97% of the domestic smartphone market, leaving only some "scraps of cold burning" left for the rest of the terminal manufacturers.
The field of mobile phones is not only surrounded by wolves, but also faces a market with peak growth. Smartphone shipments have experienced four consecutive years of decline since 2017, and although there is positive growth in 2021, it is still far from the previous high. It can be said that this track is both slowing down in growth and extremely high barriers, and Weilai's choice to enter the mobile phone field at this moment seems to be a bit "reckless".
Do not invest all your energy in the deep ploughing of the electric vehicle market, but instead start to do mobile phones, what is weilai's plan? On a larger scale, it does have some unspeakable secrets. In 2021, the Glasgow Zero Emission Vehicle and Van Declaration was issued at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, and many automakers such as Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and other automakers signed the document, which is called the "Global Ban on Combustion", which means that traditional fuel car giants will also continue to attack the electric vehicle market, these giants are well-funded and resourceful, and have the ability to quickly copy and catch up with the current electric vehicle technology. In the face of such a harsh environment, new forces such as Weilai need to build extremely high technical barriers.
The ultimate form of electric vehicles is smart cars, and for now, the electric vehicles on the market are far from being called smart. Although there has been good progress in the field of power batteries and super fast charging, it is still in the initial stage of ignorance in terms of advanced intelligence and automatic driving. A qualified intelligent car must be able to give the owner a full range of intelligent experience, but also to face the extremely complex driving environment to adapt, but the current intelligent car machine system still has many problems such as caton, single intelligent experience, frequent automatic driving conditions, etc., and it can be said that there is still a long way to go.
The layout of mobile phones by electric vehicle manufacturers can not only achieve functional expansion through the synergy of mobile phones and smart cars, but more importantly, some of the results of mobile phones can be transformed into smart cars, which greatly reduces the time cost of research and development. Therefore, we have seen the new car-making force Weilai choose the way of independent research and development to enter the mobile phone field, and also see that the old car companies like Geely Automobile have entered the field through the acquisition of Meizu, and the acquisition plan can not only make it directly recruit Meizu's technical personnel, but also inject the technical essence of Meizu on the mobile phone end into electric vehicles, improve the fluency of the car machine system, and take many unnecessary detours.
Therefore, electric vehicle manufacturers to do mobile phones, obviously not to share a piece of the Red Sea market in the mobile phone, more for the future of smart cars, they will be such a business into their own territory, both through the mobile phone to enrich the experience of smart cars to achieve car-machine collaboration, but also can be accumulated in the mobile phone side of the ability to translate to smart cars, accumulate their own software and hardware strength in this track.
On a larger scale, the integration of this technology is also the core theme of the next industrial revolution. We all know that human beings have experienced a total of three industrial revolutions so far, and each of them has its representative machines. The representative machine of the first industrial revolution was the steam engine, which solved the free movement of matter; the representative machine of the second industrial revolution was the motor, which solved the free movement of energy; the representative machine of the third industrial revolution was the computer, which solved the free movement of information. Now that we have entered the course of the fourth intelligent industrial revolution, it is difficult to say which kind of machine can represent the fourth industrial revolution, it should essentially be a systematic, highly intelligent, interconnected by a large number of devices, serving the individual fusion intelligence. That is to say, the representative of the fourth industrial revolution is not a specific product, but a set of metaphysical exclusive personal intelligence, which can be embodied in mobile phones, computers, smart cars, refrigerators, and even rice cookers and electric lights. Therefore, we can not only see car manufacturers reverse the development of mobile phones, but also see many mobile phone manufacturers (such as Xiaomi, Apple) to build smart cars, and even enter the lower level of smart chips. Because whoever has a richer product ecology and a more advanced intelligent experience in the future will be able to take more advantage of the arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
From this perspective, the red sea field of automakers entering the mobile phone is not as reckless as it seems on the surface. This is not only a way to build technical barriers to their own products through technical translation, but also a measure to seize a high position in the future intelligent competition, to some extent, mobile phones may just be a cover, they are essentially trying to use the fake of smart phones to repair the truth of this new industrial revolution. In the future, I believe that there will be more car manufacturers like Weilai entering the mobile phone field, even if they do not directly do mobile phones, they will form a variety of in-depth cooperation with mobile phone manufacturers to optimize the intelligent experience of the car machine system.
It is not yet known what kind of mobile phone form and whether it can be successfully developed by the makers of Weilai and Geely, but it is certain that they have chosen a future-oriented accumulation and attempt, compared with those companies that cannot see changes and are stuck in existing products and business models, they will gain more vitality when the next industrial revolution comes.