【Tidal Business Review/Original】
April 11 may be a big moment for Vivo this year.
Its first folding screen, the X Fold, unveiled the mystery on this day. However, even from the new product launch, vivo has been more than three years late from Huawei's first folding screen product, Mate X.
From the perspective of technical parameters, although the X Fold is only the first folding screen product under vivo, the technical declaration of "opening the folding screen 2.0 era" before the new product launch shouted quite a bit of confidence.
Figure/vivo official micro
Vivo is so high-profile, I am afraid that it also wants to use the folding screen as a new technology outlet to quickly open the high-end mobile phone market that is being redefined under the background of shrinking mobile phone shipments year after year.
From 2019 to 2022, in this short period of time, Huawei always seems to be on the cusp of the storm. Corresponding to vivo, the performance is amazing, new machines are frequent, and advertising is still overwhelming, as if everything is going smoothly, but why is it slow to change the technical outlet of the mobile phone pattern only in the folding screen?
And what kind of vivo strategy reflected behind this "slowness" may be an intriguing question.
01 2022, "Decisive Battle" folding screen?
For vivo, in the field of folding screens, it is a full-fledged latecomer.
In 2018, unicorn Royole first released the soft pie - a smartphone equipped with a fully flexible display, its biggest feature is that the screen can withstand more than 200,000 repeated bends, and the angle covers from 0 degrees to 180 degrees.
But for small players in the mobile phone track such as Royole, new products are more influential in the industry, and what really pushes the folding screen to the market level still depends on the strength of the big guys: Huawei and Samsung.
In 2019, Samsung and Huawei successively released the Galaxy Fold and Mate X, although the price of the two phones in the conference was as high as $1980 and $2600 respectively, but once it was sold, it was still instantly killed.
In the case of folding screen mobile phones so sought after, coupled with the cost of layers of channels and scalpers, any of the two mobile phones that wanted to fall into the bag that year, spending nearly 20,000 customers were large.
Photo/ Samsung official micro
Huawei Samsung earns a lot of money, and clear-eyed people will always see a question: Why can the price of folding screen mobile phones soar to the sky and still sell out of stock?
The answer may be only two words: timing.
As a folding screen mobile phone that was officially launched on a large scale in 2019, it is in the most "glue and lag" stage of the smart phone replacement.
On the one hand, the straight-panel smart machine has been aesthetically fatigued, and the simplicity of one-handed operation and the size of the screen present an irreconcilable functional contradiction.
On the other hand, the obvious lengthening of the smartphone replacement cycle and the continuous decline in shipments have made mobile phone manufacturers urgently need to find new directions to boost performance.
The emergence of folding screens for the mobile phone industry, as if "savior".
First of all, the high technical barriers of folding screens can redefine the player pattern within the track. In the era of the straight-panel smart machine, due to the long development period, although the technology of each family has high and low and different, but at the marketing level after packaging, the end customer is obviously not interested in identifying the technical principles between the similar mobile phone function points, and the definition is worth the money to meet the customer's subjective "easy to use" standard.
However, since the first year of entering the folding screen in 2019, there have been only a few manufacturers in the world who can produce folding screen mobile phones, and the more important thing is that the folding screen mobile phone market is both in the explosive period and in the technical verification period.
Take the hinge design link of the folding screen as an example, there are Huawei's dual suspension shaft linkage waterdrop hinge, Samsung's U-shaped hinge, oppo's Seiko quasi-vertebral water drop hinge and glory's suspended water drop hinge.
As for who can laugh last, I am afraid that it will take longer for the market to verify.
Secondly, the folding machine can provide mobile phone manufacturers with more free pricing and profit margins. Since Huawei and Samsung listed folding screen mobile phones, the price of the high-end machine market has been repeatedly redefined.
Photo/ Huawei official micro
According to the data, in the new folding machine released by various manufacturers from 2020 to 2021, the price of Huawei Mate X2, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3, and Motorola Razer 5G all exceeded 12,000 yuan, while the stand-alone machines of Xiaomi and Royole are also approaching the 10,000 yuan mark, which is almost unimaginable in the era of straight-board smart machines.
Of course, with more full competition in the market, the price of folding machines has been maintained at a high level and a certain degree of downward exploration has become the consensus of the industry.
According to agency predictions, after the price of Samsung Galaxy Z Flip3 reaches about 7600, the new strength players are bound to make a big fuss around the single machine price of 7000 yuan. However, compared with the Red Sea competition in the low-end pricing range, the folding screen mobile phone market is more valuable for brands.
According to Sainuo's analysis report, China's mobile phone sales in 2021 are 312 million units, in the context of the decline in smartphone shipments year after year, the data is a new low since 2016, but the shipment of folding screen mobile phones has increased against the trend, with 1.1 million units shipped throughout the year, an increase of 187% year-on-year in 2020!
In the Ai media data forecast, China's folding screen mobile phone market in the 2021-2025 time range, shipments will surge from 1.8 million units to 13.8 million units, the highest annual growth rate will reach 75%!
It can be said that it is the emergence of folding screens that provides the opportunity to reshape the entire high-end machine track pattern. However, in this market that is about to explode, vivo, as one of the top players on the track, can only launch its first folding screen mobile phone vivo X Fold in April 2022, and this commercial rhythm has to make people wonder:
Vivo, what have you been doing all these years?
02 Where did vivo go?
As we all know, on the smartphone track, the inflection point appeared in 2016.
Taking 2016 as the boundary, China's smart phone brands have experienced stages from scratch, from small to large, from 3g to 4G in the previous few years, and the mobile phone market has also become stronger year by year with the development of smart phones. Between 2014 and 2016, when the 4G wave came, Shipments of smartphones in China soared from 445 million units to a historic peak of 560 million units, compared with 26 million units in 2010, according to Sainuo data.
But after 2016, the situation became complicated. In the past five years, China's smartphone shipments have decreased year after year, coupled with the environmental factors of the new normal economy and the capacity supply problems caused by the repeated epidemics, by 2021, China's smartphone shipments have fallen to 312 million units, shrinking nearly 43% from the peak.
Figure/vivo official micro
With the industry winter approaching, it is equally important to keep the strategy and open up new markets. In fact, vivo is exactly what it does.
In China, a friend of beijing's ov regional agent once told the tidal business review author in 2019 that the group of people behind the entire ov system believes that the downward trend of the domestic mobile phone market will continue at least until about 2022, so the overall operation idea of the group is basically biased towards controlling costs and investing cautiously.
Therefore, for a long time in the past, vivo's main playing style lies in local innovation, marketing power, relying on high exposure rate and high new rate to consolidate its market position and performance. At the level of the model, vivo focuses on creating entertainment labels such as sound, video, photography, and appearance that vivo has been running through various models, that is to say, even if it seems that vivo has adopted the tactics of the machine sea to seek to cover as many consumer groups as possible, but in the continuation of the value of the product itself, vivo still relies on the cost performance of its own products and the user stickiness provided by fashion entertainment. Simply put, it is the lack of new user demand insights and product strength growth points.
According to 2021 data, vivo's brand repurchase rate is as high as more than 20%, which is among the best among domestic brands, and in the keywords given by the people who choose to repurchase, cost-effective, fashionable, young, and beautiful pai are important reasons for their choice of vivo.
With a relatively cautious and effective strategic route, vivo has successfully got rid of the survival dilemma of the brand in the case of the downturn in the domestic mobile phone market, and it can be regarded as landing.
In foreign countries, vivo is completely different when it develops its commercial territory. When the inflection point of domestic mobile phone shipments came, manufacturers including vivo all set their sights on our neighboring region - Southeast Asia.
According to the data, the pan-Southeast Asian region, including India, carries a population of more than 2 billion, of which the population of India is as high as 1.36 billion, the population of other Southeast Asian countries is 650 million, and in the age ratio of the population, the proportion of India's population under the age of 35 is as high as 62.2%, while in other countries in Southeast Asia, this figure is 58.2%, compared with 46.1% in China.
At the same time as the demand for smart phone consumption is high, the political and economic stability of the entire Southeast Asian region is stable, and the stable purchasing power that can be provided is huge, and a huge cake is placed in front of vivo, and no one can be indifferent.
Figure/vivo official micro
In 2016, after nearly two years of preparation, Vivo began to carry out a full range of commercial landing actions in Southeast Asia. During that time, Vivo could spend 200 million yuan in Mumbai just to grab the naming rights of IPL, or it could spend three times more than rival Samsung in Bangalore for the external wall advertising space of a residential house; it could build a component factory in Thailand within a few months; or in Indonesia, it could let a Chinese regional manager who only knows a little bit of the local language push its new products with dozens of locals.
Relying on persistence and madness, Vivo has gained a firm foothold in Southeast Asia. According to the data, Vivo has been in the top three ranks in the entire Southeast Asian smartphone market share for a long time, and has formed a joint force to balance Samsung's resistance to the enemy situation with friendly oppo.
However, when the industry "vacuum" suddenly appeared and the folding screen mobile phone turned out, how to flexibly adjust the strategy has become a problem that cannot be avoided in front of vivo.
03 Good food is not afraid of late? I'm afraid I'll have to make a good meal first
For a long time, among the powerful players in the domestic mobile phone track, Huawei is the most advanced. Whether it is the Mate series, which focuses on high-end business, or the P series that is closer to the younger generation, it has always been the leading model in the domestic and even international markets that confronts Apple head-on.
However, under the protracted chip supply cut, Huawei's market share of high-end machines in 2021 plummeted to only 6%, and the market share of the entire Android high-end machine also shrank from 44.6% to 36.5%.
Obviously, the numbers do not lie, Huawei suddenly left a vacuum in the high-end machine market, almost completely filled by Apple, and vivo and other domestic head players almost do not have any ability to receive the market.
Another fact that worries Vivo is that according to the data of the huge engine, in the case of not considering the price reduction of high-end machine users, more than 60% of users choose Apple in the high-end machine category, and 15% of users will choose Huawei, leaving only about 20% of the market space for high-end machines such as Vivo.
Coincidentally, in a network survey of users holding vivo, the proportion of their intention to overlap for Brands such as Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Samsung was as high as 49.2%, 33.6%, 32.5%, 28.9%, and 18.9%, respectively.
This also means that if vivo users need to change machines and upgrade, vivo, whose brand loyalty is not tough enough, can only watch its former users throw themselves into the arms of other brands.
In fact, the occurrence of such a result is also due to vivo's own strategic choice.
For a long time, vivo's brand positioning is mainly concentrated in the middle of the upper and lower than the absolute high-end of the vast space, in the mobile phone market boom period, this flexible brand positioning with the machine sea tactics can indeed touch a large number of customers with vague own needs and considerable consumption capacity.
For such a strong audience with a non-belief orientation, strengthening product memory points is undoubtedly the most operational and effective means of customer acquisition.
Figure/vivo official micro
Under this logic, vivo's input costs are largely concentrated in taking pictures, video algorithms, cameras, displays, audio quality, etc., with the delivery of massive advertisements, occupying the user's mind from the sensory point of view for the first time, and then completing the sale of products.
Judging from the results, efficiency is indeed the most prominent feature of vivo's business model, but it is precisely because of the efficiency problem that it takes into account, and to some extent ignores some of the underlying basic problems and the courage to "revolutionary innovation".
The development of the mobile phone track to today, the choice of raw material technology, the research and development of the underlying foundation, the polishing of the native system, the development of interconnection protocols and even the responsibility of maintaining the software and hardware ecology are all levels that a mobile phone manufacturer should take into account.
In contrast, Vivo's research and development results can not be described as advanced, and some are even original in the industry.
However, a trick to eat all over the sky may bring benefits to mobile phone manufacturers in the past period of time, but in the long run, especially when there is an unexpected event like Huawei that players are withdrawn from the market, opportunities and responsibilities are bound to push vivos to the forefront, whether they can catch it, and ultimately rely on their own hard power.
Vivo X Fold in the conference lasted nearly an hour and a half before announcing the market price, although the price of 8999 continued its consistent idea of elastic coverage of the market, but from the folding screen performance and design point of view, "three years to grind a sword" vivo is also considered careful.
"Vivo this product is quite sincere, the price can be accepted, but I can't wait to change other people's folding screen mobile phones." Wait until the next time you change the machine. Selina, a former loyal fan of vivo, said.
In the turbulent business market, stepping on the right timing can easily occupy the minds of consumers and achieve market success. It's just that the choice of strategy is never a simple problem of one-line thinking, it is more like a multi-line game. There is no right or wrong, and there is never an eternal victor.
This is true of vivo, and it is also true of business.
*The inscription is derived from vivo official micro
Original production of "Tidal Business Review", please do not reprint without permission.