In the past 500 days, Honor CEO Zhao Ming often hangs on his lips as " kill yourself " .
After the release of the Honor high-end model Magic4, Zhao Ming will take time to dive in major forums every day to view users' criticisms and opinions. For him, this is a rare moment to take a breath and calm down to study the product.
In the past 2021, Glory and Zhao Minggang experienced a survival war, "the strings are too tight, it is gritted back teeth to carry the past."
Crossing the darkest moment when the market share plummeted to 3%, Honor completed the V-curve counterattack. According to a report by consulting agency Counterpoint, in the fourth quarter of 2021, the market for 17% of the market in the Glory Chinese market, rising to the second place, the First place in the Android camp, second only to Apple.
The hour hand is set back to November 17, 2020. Huawei, which was shackled by chip supply cuts, officially announced the sale of 100% of The Glory's shares on that day, and the acquirers included the Shenzhen State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and more than 30 channel partners, and Honor officially separated from Huawei.
Eight days later, at the Bantian headquarters in Shenzhen, Huawei held a farewell party for glory. "The autumn wind sends cold apricot leaves yellow, the iron tree will eventually blossom, and those who can't defeat you will eventually make you stronger." After Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said his last sentence emotionally, Zhao Ming couldn't help but burst into tears.
Photo: Xiao Li
In 1998, Zhao Ming entered Huawei after graduating from graduate school. In 2015, he was recalled as President of Honor as Vice President of Western Europe. Huawei people who have been doing it for more than 20 years say that they have to leave, and Zhao Ming certainly does not give up.
However, in front of Glory and Zhao Ming is a matter of life and death, he has no time to be sad, and must return to his role: "Become a competitor of Huawei, and even shout to bring down Huawei." ”
Independent for more than 500 days, Honor is trying to grow into what Ren Zhengfei expected to see: returning to the second place in the Chinese market, robbing Huawei's users in the high-end market, and becoming a competitor of the former "big brother" Huawei.
"After the release of the Magic4 Standard Edition, more than 60% of the users who purchased the machine came from Apple and Huawei." Zhao Ming said in an interview with China Entrepreneur.
Huawei once controlled half of China's high-end smartphone market. Therefore, on the first day of independence, the outside world has expectations for Glory to "recover Huawei's lost land". In January 2021, after the debut of independence, Zhao Ming also showed the positioning of glory: "impact the high-end, build a top flagship", "in the high-end market, glory and Apple finally have a war". After the release of Glory Magic4, Zhao Ming believed that "this battle has already started."
However, even if he was resurrected with blood, Zhao Ming always held a trembling mentality. "Only by knowing reverence can we survive." Zhao Ming stressed, "The more you march forward, the more you must be careful, otherwise when you feel the most comfortable, it may be the time when great danger comes." Too many businesses fall quickly at their peak without too long reaction times. What's more, at the moment when the epidemic continues and the international situation is chaotic, we must be more careful to deal with it. ”
A tree of its own
Everything has to start all over again.
"Leaving huawei as a big tree, all the infrastructure must be built by ourselves. For example, the cash flow of the operation needs to find a bank loan, the desks, chairs, benches must be bought by themselves, and the office must be decorated by itself. Recalling the hardships of the first time of independence, Zhao Ming sighed to "Chinese Entrepreneur".
More importantly, the chip system that honor mobile phones rely on also had to be replaced. "All the system planning we originally did was useless, the chip ecological environment was changed, the original supply was gone, and the chip platforms we relied on were all switched." Zhao Ming said, "Glory is a startup with 8,000 people. ”
With a team of 8,000 people, Zhao Ming and New Glory launched a "rush march" mode of assault warfare in 2021.
Source: Respondents
"In January 2021, Honor was fully independent and officially operational, and after we had just moved to a new working environment, many offices were like Chase shops, sitting one by one, and the office conditions were very difficult. Because there were many people, the room was very hot, just put a basin of ice in front of the fan to cool down, and everyone basically worked until after 11 o'clock every night. Zhao Ming recalled.
But the dormant pain still came.
April 2021 is the darkest hour of glory. The monthly shipment of Honor mobile phones in the Chinese market plummeted from six or seven million units to hundreds of thousands of units, and the supply of channel retailers every month was pitifully small, and Glory's market share in China was once only 3%. Before the entity list incident, Honor was the second largest mobile phone brand in China, with a market share of 16.7%.
At that time, some channel providers expressed to "Chinese Entrepreneur" that Glory was out of stock to varying degrees: "Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo are fighting fiercely, and Glory wants to fight back, not only to have people, positions, but also bullets." "However, the channel providers have not abandoned, but have built thousands of new experience stores and special areas for glory."
Surviving the darkness of the dormant period, it turns out that the glorious "rush march" model has achieved certain results. From the independent access to the chip data, to the launch of the Honor 50 series, a total of 211 days, the product then became the champion of Android mobile phone sales for five consecutive months. In addition, with the help of Magic3, Honor has opened up the link of high-end flagship machines from research and development, manufacturing to market sales, and has entered the high-end folding screen market by magicV.
Although Glory has completed the path of other manufacturers for several years in one year and temporarily stabilized his position, he will not have much memories of the past, but will motivate the team to break through the original boundaries and ceilings and always look forward. Because he knows that without Huawei, he will be glorified to become a big tree.
The right but tough road
Before independence, glory, born in 2013, was a sub-brand launched by Huawei to counter Internet mobile phone brands such as Xiaomi, facing young people and adhering to the low-end price, while the main brand of China was mainly engaged in the high-end flagship machine market, and the two had worked together to win nearly half of the domestic market share.
It is said that it is better to cool off with one's back to the tree, and that the glory after independence must face everything outside alone.
"One of the biggest differences between brand entrepreneurship within Huawei and starting a business as an independent company today is how you choose the right but difficult path amid all kinds of temptations and all kinds of noise." Zhao Ming told Chinese Entrepreneurs.
Independence gives Zhao Ming greater autonomy in decision-making, but it also means greater decision-making risks. Therefore, before Making a decision, Zhao Ming must continue to verify and corroborate in various ways to ensure that there are no mistakes in strategic decision-making.
"It turns out that you have a mistake in decision-making, and there is always a strong backing and a big tree to shield you from the wind and rain, and it will not bring too serious consequences." But today, when decisions affect the development of the entire company, each decision will have a positive or negative impact on the company for a long time to come, if a generation of products, a generation of technical systems decision-making mistakes, it may not change for a year or two. ”
Source: Medium Attempt Library
After becoming independent from Huawei, Glory carries Huawei's genes and cultural heritage, but Zhao Ming also hopes to create characteristics exclusive to Glory.
In the Huawei system, Honor is considered a brand with Internet attributes, and online is an important sales channel. After becoming independent, Glory began to build its own omni-channel system, and at present, the proportion of Honor's offline sales accounts for more than 70%, and the number of special areas, counters and authorized experience stores has exceeded 30,000. In the manufacturing process, Glory independently built its own intelligent factory in Pingshan, Shenzhen, and built its own intelligent production system.
At the same time, Honor also built its own operating system, and built a hardware ecosystem such as smart screens and tablets. In addition, Honor has released its own products in the two major categories of high-end flagships and folding screens, and has started a stage with brands such as Huawei.
In fact, 2021 is the most tight year for Honor's research and development resources, and almost all products need to switch to new chip platforms such as Qualcomm and MediaTek. However, even in such a situation, Zhao Ming still decided to layout the folding screen.
"When everyone examines Honor's products, first of all, they still have to compare with Huawei, even if Honor and Huawei are completely two companies, Honor has its own different technical systems and routes." Zhao Ming said frankly, "Users will look at glory with a more critical eye, which is a good spur for us." Honor must come up with technological innovations and experiences that go beyond the existing technology in the industry in order to be recognized by others. ”
To some extent, without the support of Huawei's big tree, although there is no sense of stability, it also means greater decision-making autonomy and business space, and Glory is no longer just a low-end mobile phone brand below 4,000 yuan.
Run to Huawei Apple
On the day of glory independence, one of the strategies formulated by Zhao Ming was to impact the high-end.
"We have inherited Huawei's excellent assets, and the glory is standing on the shoulders of giants." Zhao Ming once said in an interview with China Entrepreneur that Huawei's top technical engineer team and imaging solution experts in the past have joined glory, "and even many colleagues have participated in the lowest level planning of chips, which are the core capabilities of glory, including the upstream supply chain has been restored, and the supply of high-end chips has been guaranteed, so we are very confident and have the strength to create the most high-end products." ”
But in fact, before independence, the outside world's brand perception of Huawei and Honor was very different. Zhao Ming revealed that in fact, many technologies are shared by both parties, but often Huawei leads the glory in scientific and technological innovation, because this is also a matter of positioning the two brands. At the time of the release of the Honor Magic3, Zhao Ming made the high-end strategy public, and said that "we will go to Apple and Huawei next."
However, after Huawei lost nearly 40% of its domestic market share due to chip supply cuts, major domestic mobile phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo have played the slogan of impacting high-end flagships. In addition, on the basis of the original price, Apple is still exploring, and the original high-end market of Huawei and Apple are becoming apples.
Counterpoint data shows that in the Chinese mobile phone market in 2021, the iPhone occupies 63.5% of the price range above $600. This also means that after Huawei was sanctioned by the United States in May 2019, domestic brands fought to the death in the high-end market and wanted to take away Huawei's high-end lost land, but in the past three years, Apple has become the biggest winner.
Honor's old rival Xiaomi launched the 10 series in February 2020 to officially impact the high-end market, two years later, the proportion of Xiaomi high-end models rose from about 7% in 2020 to about 13% in 2021, and the average selling price increased by 13.3% year-on-year to 1143 yuan in the fourth quarter of 2021, but compared with Apple's $786 (about 5257 yuan), the gap is still very large.
Can the return of glory add a touch of chance to the high-end battle of domestic brands? Is the high-end battle with Apple really started as Zhao Ming said?
Zhao Ming told "Chinese Entrepreneurs" that it is necessary to benchmark Apple from the dimension of consumer experience, rather than marketing methods, the more marketing shouts, the more miserable it will fall in the end, because when consumers get mobile phones, excessive marketing will be reversed, "The rise of high-end mobile phones is by no means overnight, we have enough patience to adhere to the innovation at the bottom and the continuous construction of core capabilities."
"Honor never thinks that the high-end market is naturally ours, but to demand higher standards to meet the expectations of consumers." Since you have Huawei's genes and the foundation for technological development, you should meet huawei's standards. Zhao Ming was very sober.
The domestic mobile phone market has entered the stock market, the frequency of user replacement is getting lower and lower, at the same time, the competition is becoming more and more homogeneous, and the differentiation in the high-end market is not obvious. In Zhao Ming's view, the only way out is to innovate and understand consumer pain points through the underlying technology, and to attract consumers to change machines through better products, such as some features that he cannot refuse.
In the eyes of dealers, Honor has a great opportunity to catch up with Apple. Wu Gang is a Huawei 364 customer (a list of dealers who work directly with Huawei) and an agent of Honor. He told "Chinese Entrepreneur": "Doing domestic high-end machines has always been the dream of the Chinese people. With the original Huawei users ushering in a wave of replacement machines, in addition to some choosing Apple, those who do not like Apple may choose glory. ”
Green Dragon Crescent Moon Knife
With the increasing homogenization of the mobile phone market, the competition of manufacturers has been extended from the front end to the back-end self-developed chips.
Zhao Ming once specialized in the third generation of mobile communication algorithms, from the bottom of the chip to do algorithms, he claims to be very aware of the difficulty of self-developed chips, especially SoCs (System Chips).
"Chip is a complex system and engineering, for Glory, we will choose a chip solution according to their own needs whether to develop or cooperate or use a third-party solution, but from the current time, Qualcomm will be a strategic partner of our SoC."
In order to truly solve consumer pain points and achieve technological innovation and breakthroughs, Zhao Ming's solution is to go deep into the front end of the industrial chain and jointly innovate with the supply chain.
"Qualcomm's chip is the 'Green Dragon Crescent Knife', and not everyone can play it." Zhao Ming believes that "the hardware platform determines the lower limit of a product, but the ability of comprehensive application can fully demonstrate the upper limit of the hardware platform, and the glorious solution is to do the best in the comprehensive solution of the mobile phone." Whether it is for the design and scheduling of GPUs, NGUs, or the entire process of ISP, Honor can do the finest slices to adjust. ”
Zhao Ming believes that Glory should reverse the entire industry through the understanding of the mobile phone industry and the understanding of consumer pain points, which in turn forces Glory to continue to run forward, make a better main machine, and break the problem of the mobile phone industry, which is the key to winning the competition in the future Glory.
Regarding Geely, Weilai and more car companies have also announced the creation of mobile phones, Zhao Ming said that Glory never worries about competitors, if it can bring some new cognition or new thinking to the industry is a good thing. But although the mobile phone is small, it is also a system engineering, and the complexity is not smaller than that of the car.
"It's not too difficult to build a mobile phone, and there are even many OEM manufacturers who can help, but it is really necessary to invest a lot of energy to get high-end users to recognize the systematic experience in all aspects." It is a good thing to welcome car companies into this field and industry, and to prove the charm and value of this industry. ”
The survival of the fearful is Zhao Ming's attitude towards things, the market and consumers. But he also describes himself as an optimist, and when stressed, he often adjusts himself just by going from upstairs to downstairs. Facing the future, Zhao Ming believes that "there is no worst environment, only the worst response."