Image source @ Visual China
The text | moldy
In the smart phone market in 2022, some brands are continuing to attack the city and vow to impact the high-end machine market again, while some brands are tossing and turning at night, and it is difficult to sleep.
On the evening of July 17, 2017, the Zhuhai Grand Theater located on YehuDao, Lovers Road, Zhuhai City, was particularly lively, and the discussion outside the theater was incessant, and many Meizu friends who were waiting for admission were very excited, waiting for the arrival of Meizu's annual flagship Meizu Pro 7.
It was also this conference that gradually opened the prelude to Meizu's return to the niche and farewell to the "mass market".
Before the official start of the press conference, according to the past practice, Meizu will invite guests to perform a performance, and the opening guest of this conference, the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, plays the song "Grassland Moonlight".
This melodious piece of music seems to take people to the grassland where the evening wind has just blown, and the moon generously sprinkles every ray of moonlight on the tender grass. At the same time, the music also reminds us of the bits and pieces in the development process of Meizu, including the Meizu M8 that surprised the audience as soon as it was released, the Meizu MX4 series that was questioned by some users, and the relatively mediocre Meizu MX6. Every product launched by Meizu, whether it succeeds or fails, is a signal to prove its existence.
It has been more than a year since the Meizu 18 series conference, and in early April last year, the Meizu 18 series has been released for more than a month, but as of the time of this article, there is still no market warm-up news about the Meizu 19 series on the Internet. In the official Weibo comment area of Meizu and in the official live broadcast room of Douyin Meizu, from time to time, Meizu friends asked, "What about Meizu 19?" ”
Meizu in the past year seems to be difficult to describe the smooth development, the news of the acquisition by Geely in the market and the initiative to restart Charm Blue, or the evidence of Meizu's business difficulties in 2021. You know, in 2020, Meizu only relies on the two models of meizu 17 series to achieve profitability, and the unpredictable mobile phone market and the supply chain environment affected by the epidemic do not seem to want to give Meizu a chance, at this time Meizu, or will also be like the original hammer mobile phone, standing at the crossroads of brand development.
As for the beginning of the incident, it starts with the Meizu Pro 7.
Meizu Pro 7, a turning point in Meizu's development
Before the release of the Meizu Pro 7 series, Meizu had already begun to adjust the product architecture. In addition to Charm Blue, the MX series, which was originally the most important product line of Meizu mobile phones, has been gradually weakened, and the Pro series has inherited the title of Meizu mobile phone flagship. For a mobile phone brand, the market performance of the main flagship machine will have many impacts on the overall operation of the brand, and the performance of the Meizu Pro 7 series is also the same.
Time to 2015, after the release of Meizu Pro 5, Meizu development situation is very good. Pro5 with the help of the excellent performance of Samsung Exynos 7420 chip, the user reputation is better than many domestic flagship machines equipped with Snapdragon 810. At this time, the sub-brand Charm Blue has been established for a period of time, releasing cost-effective models such as Charm Blue Note and Charm Blue 2, and gradually opening up the market sales of Meizu mobile phones.
It can be said that the market performance of Meizu Pro 5 has established the market position of Meizu brand, and the Meizu blue series is a supplement to Meizu mobile phones, allowing users to have more choices. However, the embarrassing thing is that the brand balance of Meizu and Charm Blue is quickly broken.
On the Meizu Pro 6 series, failed to eat the market dividend of Samsung chips again, Pro 6 and Pro 6s equipped with MediaTek X25 chips that netizens call "a core with ten difficult cores to watch", the two models in addition to the excellent feel and similar to Apple's 3D Touch 3D Press pressure touch function, there are not too many product memory points, but many users complain about poor game performance and short battery life.
In contrast, with "young people's good products" as the brand core, Charm Blue, which is oriented to young people and people who pay attention to cost performance, has developed rapidly, and has opened a number of "concerts" to release new products. It was also this year (2016) that Meizu mobile phone sales reached its peak, setting a sales record of 22 million units, of which a considerable number of sales were contributed by the sub-brand Charm Blue, and the market limelight of Meizu Blue overshadowed the Meizu brand.
After this, the market performance of Meizu Pro 7 series is extremely critical, it must not only carry the responsibility of the high-end breakthrough of Meizu mobile phones, but also strive for more "scores" for Meizu brands in market performance and user reputation. As for the final result, the performance of the Pro 7 series did not meet Meizu's expectations, and the user reputation was even worse than the previous generation of Pro 6 series, and Meizu's series of changes also began.
The price of the Meizu Pro 7 series, which is not recognized by the market, is as high as 4080 yuan, and the price of the Pro 7 MediaTek X30 edition has reached 3380 yuan, which is much higher than the Xiaomi digital series in the same period. From the product design concept to the price, the unrecognized Pro 7 series has affected Meizu's company operation and brand image to a certain extent, and Huang Zhang also said that it is necessary to pursue the responsibility for the definition of Pro 7 products and the problems caused by inventory.
In the year of the release of the Meizu Pro 7 series, Huang Zhang announced that he would re-create a dream mobile phone to welcome meizu's 15th anniversary.
In addition, meizu has undergone continuous changes after the failure of the Meizu Pro 7 series. Meizu mobile phone product line was compressed, Meizu friends can no longer wait for MX7, MX series and Pro series were replaced by subsequent digital series, The Charm Blue brand was also canceled, and the Meizu Three Musketeers (Bai Yongxiang, Yang Yan and Li Nan) also left Meizu.
After meizu 15 series, Meizu's road has gone crooked?
On April 22, 2018, the weather in Wuzhen, Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, was a little hotter than usual, and the maximum temperature reached 30 degrees Celsius, but it could not resist the enthusiasm of Meiyou and many technology digital media, who were waiting for the release of the Meizu 15 series, which Huang Zhang called "a small test of cattle knives".
At the press conference, the person who took the stage to introduce the product was Yang Zhao, who was the chief marketing officer of Meizu at the time. In the past, Meizu friends who were accustomed to listening to Lao Bai (Bai Yongxiang) non-standard Mandarin may begin to miss the past Meizu conference, but the past has become history, Meizu 15 series began, Meizu products and market strategies are changing.
On the product side, the Meizu 15 series released at the end of April just appeared not long ago, and in September ushered in the Meizu 16 series, it seems that the meizu flagship replacement speed is accelerating, in essence, the 15 series is more like a transitional product that fits the 15th anniversary of Meizu and the transformation.
On the market side, the Charm Blue series was cancelled, possibly considering factors such as component inventory, the launch of Meizu X8 and Meizu V9 and other cost-effective models, while offline sales channels are also decreasing, many stores are either closed or switched to other mobile phone brands. As for Meizu in the next few years, the market operation is basically around the digital series.
It is not difficult to understand the Meizu mobile phone system update program that netizens call "everything can be OTA", after all, the models released every year are very limited, in order to maintain market heat and reduce the loss of old users, they can only respond in the form of OTA.
Meizu 15 series began, Meizu once again returned to "small and beautiful", in 2020 only released Meizu 17/17 Pro two models. However, other domestic manufacturers, in the increasingly competitive smartphone market, choose Meizu, which is in a safe corner at a time when it should continue to attract new users, facing practical problems such as reduced market heat and declining sales, which may be the price of their choice to return to the niche.
In the third quarter of 2020, CINNO Research's sales monitoring data showed that Meizu's market share was only 0.3%, and it is speculated that sales in a single quarter have dropped to between 200,000 and 400,000 units, and the annual sales may be between 1 million and 2 million units. Compared with nearly 20 million units sold in 2017, the leap of 20 million to 2 million has only gone through three years.
On the one hand, the product line shrinking Meizu only relies on the digital series to support enough market heat and sales, only canceled the charm blue but failed to come up with the corresponding alternative, in vain contributed to the huge demand of the thousand yuan machine / hundred yuan machine market; on the other hand, the solution to shrink the product line is more like against the trend, Xiaomi independent of red rice to expand the market, Huawei, OPPO and vivo have also developed their own sub-brands, even high-cold Apple, but also launched SE and Mini such as the main market segment models.
In 2021, Meizu also realized the problem that the product line was too thin, and announced the return of Meizu 18X at the same time, releasing a remedy for the 100-yuan machine market, but the actual situation was not optimistic.
Meizu's two new models have eaten the loss of the original compression product line. On Meizu 18X, the use of supply chain male mold, product design and Gree Dasong TOSOT G7 are the same, charm blue 10 although there is a charm blue name, in the design and cost performance but there is no charm blue reality.
It is hard to imagine that Meizu, which has emphasized personality and product design in the past, will use such a compromise scheme on Meizu 18X and Charmlane 10. In fact, at the supply chain end, after compressing the product line, meizu flagship did not become a market hit, but reduced the right to speak in the supply chain because of the decline in shipments.
Meizu 17 series has broken out that the supply chain is reluctant to customize optical image stabilization components for it due to order volume problems. Meizu 18X and CharmLan 10 are also estimated to take into account cost and supply chain problems, and eventually there will be such an embarrassing plan of "non-Meizu".
What will happen to Meizu in 2022?
This year's domestic mobile phone market is different from the past, and it has become more lively than the same period last year. After Winning the debut of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Lenovo's Motorola announced a number of models in late March to reduce prices, which has the potential to impact the market by cost performance.
On the other hand, this year's Nubia is also particularly high-profile, and the more affordable Z40 Pro series has attracted the attention of many users. Motorola and Nubia, which were originally on the edge of the domestic mobile phone market, started the year with a cost-effective strategy to compete for the market, or looked at the mid-range machine market that was ignored after the mainstream domestic mobile phone manufacturers raised prices last year to rush to the high-end, and also wanted to mobilize the enthusiasm of users to buy by virtue of the cost performance.
So can Meizu adopt a similar strategy?
Unlike Motorola and Nubia, Meizu does not have a continuous blood transfusion behind the backers like Lenovo and ZTE, which are superior to Meizu in terms of supply chain and channel management.
At the same time, it is more difficult that this year's market environment may not be as good as last year. The capricious epidemic and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine have brought different degrees of impact on the supply chain and people's consumption, Loop Capital analyst John Donovan quoted related reports, Apple will cut iPhone production, analyst Guo Mingxi also said that domestic Android mobile phone manufacturers are also cutting mobile phone orders.
Some time ago, the topic of "why young people don't change their mobile phones" rushed to the hot search, and many users said that mobile phones have not changed for four years, mainly because mobile phones are becoming more and more expensive, and there is no major innovation in functions. For marginal manufacturers and mainstream manufacturers with backers, there are resources to re-allocate and reduce prices, but Meizu, which is facing survival problems, does not have enough capital, and the same is true for some manufacturers in the same situation.
In 2022 or a new round of reshuffling in the domestic smartphone market, mainstream manufacturers are adjusting their product strategies, and powerful marginal manufacturers have launched a new offensive by users against the blind price increases of some manufacturers last year. As for manufacturers such as Meizu, this year will be a more difficult year.
Previously, the market has been rumored that Geely wants to acquire Meizu, and Weilai has also broken rumors of making mobile phones. Perhaps for mobile phone manufacturers on the edge of the market, being acquired by powerful new energy vehicle companies is not necessarily a bad thing, and it is also important to continue to survive or bring brand ideas to different fields.
epilogue
Thirteen years ago, at a meeting in Zhuhai to attract investment, Lei Jun met Huang Zhang, and the two have since discussed many things about mobile phones in Huang Zhang's office.
As for the future, Xiaomi revolutionized the life of the cottage machine, with cost-effective, MIUI, intelligent interconnection and other concepts and ways to promote the development of the industry, Meizu in the mobile phone design and system UI design has also had a considerable impact on the industry.
However, Xiaomi, which has successfully listed, wants to build a car, and Meizu, which is in a safe corner, is likely to be acquired by car companies. Time is so interesting that we never know what will happen in the next moment.