Text | Jingyu
Once upon a time, many consumers first thought of brands such as Sennheiser, Iron Triangle, and AKG when purchasing headphones. As a veteran acoustic plant, they generally have decades of historical accumulation and technical precipitation.
Once upon a time, Bose and Sony's head-mounted Bluetooth noise-canceling headphones were still the artifacts of hipsters when they went out on the street, often appearing in public places such as buses and subways.
With the growing popularity of TWS headphones in the past two years, Apple's AirPods and Huami OV brand TWS headphones have become more and more existential and have become the choice of more and more consumers.
"Ghostcraft 119", who worked as an engineer at the acoustic company JBL, is a well-known technology UP master on the B station, with 120 million hits on the whole platform, and he began to evaluate acoustic equipment such as headphones, speakers and music players in 2018. In the past two years, TWS wireless headphones have appeared more and more frequently in his evaluation.
In this year's review, he said, "The market for introductory headphones has almost been replaced by true wireless headphones (TWS headphones), and few manufacturers have launched entry-level in-ear headphones." ”
At present, this substitution has become a trend. In this process, major mobile phone manufacturers have gradually become the main force of the TWS headset market, while traditional acoustic companies such as Sennheiser, AKG, and Baia Power have gradually been marginalized, and even Jabra, Plantronics and other manufacturers who originally specialized in Bluetooth headsets have also been reduced to supporting roles.
According to the TWS true wireless headset market report released by the research institute Counterpoint in the second quarter of 2021, the market share of Apple, Xiaomi, Samsung, JBL and JLab ranked among the top five in the world, with market shares of 23%, 10%, 5%, 3% and 3% respectively.
"Professional acoustic companies are about to be killed by TWS, and professional TWS companies are about to be killed by mobile phone brands." Yu Lei, former vice president of Gionee Group, said.
01 TWS headphones grow wildly
TWS is the abbreviation of true Wireless Stereo in English, that is, the meaning of true wireless stereo, and its real entry into the public eye began with Apple.
At the end of 2016, Apple released the first generation of AirPods and the iPhone 7, which eliminated the 3.5mm headphone jack. This practice was criticized by digital enthusiasts at the time as "to promote the bundling of AirPods", and because of the high price (initial price of 1299 yuan), easy to lose, etc. it was ridiculed by netizens.
But that didn't stop AirPods from selling well and making them a big success. After the order was opened, the first supply was quickly sold out, and consumers had to wait until 2017.
The successful demonstration effect of AirPods soon attracted major mobile phone manufacturers to join, and the introduction of lower-priced TWS headphones to sink the market penetration. Since then, the TWS headset market has continued to expand and gradually become the mainstream of the market.
From the historical data, data from the China Electronic Audio Association shows that the output value of wired headphones before 2017 is still significantly ahead of wireless headphones, and after 2017, the data of the two has achieved "upside down", the output value of wired headphones has been shrinking, and the output value of wireless headphones has grown rapidly.
TWS headphones in the global market have also achieved a rapid explosion in sales. According to market agency Counterpoint Research, from 2016 to 2020, global TWS headphone shipments soared 25 times in five years, and global shipments reached 300 million units in 2020.
Apple took the lead, Android mobile phone manufacturers followed, mobile phone manufacturers in just a few years to create a hundred billion market, and to achieve the replacement of traditional wired headphones, such an industrial change speed is really amazing.
Looking back, the old acoustic manufacturers represented by Sennheiser, Iron Triangle, AKG, and Baia Power have long been loved by consumers: Beats' first-generation recording engineer, Sennheiser HD800 and AKG K3003 and other star products set off a climax of wired headphones around 2010.
The back wave of the Yangtze River pushes the front wave, and the crazy growth of TWS headphones has seriously squeezed the living space of traditional headphone manufacturers. At the end of 2016, HARMAN International, an acoustic group with AKG and JBL brands, was acquired by mobile phone manufacturer Samsung; in May 2021, the consumer business unit of Sennheiser, the first of the four HiFi brands, was finally acquired by Swiss hearing aid giant Sonova.
As a global traditional audio giant, Sennheiser's global headphone market share was as high as 14.1% in 2012, ranking first in the world, with decades of history and acoustic research experience. However, its transformation to the TWS market is too slow, and it has not been able to squeeze into the mainstream market, and it has been difficult to adapt to the current changes in consumer audio product consumption habits and needs.
02 The industry threshold has been greatly reduced
Wireless Bluetooth headsets actually appeared as early as the Nokia era more than a decade ago, and they are not completely new.
The release of Apple's AirPods has pushed the wireless Bluetooth headset market to a new climax, and also made TWS headsets the mainstream of the wireless Bluetooth headset market. According to IDC statistics, TWS headphones in the Chinese market account for 66% of wireless headphone equipment in 2020.
However, the biggest winner in the TWS market explosion dividend is not a professional TWS manufacturer, but a mobile phone manufacturer.
According to the previous Reportpoint report, the overall pattern of the TWS market has been laid - mobile phone manufacturers have become the dominant players in the TWS market, although some professional TWS manufacturers can still maintain a certain market share, but the status is relatively weak. TWS vendors such as QCY, Wanderer, and Jabra have a market share of between 2% and 3%.
The reason is that, on the one hand, TWS headsets and mobile phones have the characteristics of strong binding, mobile phones and TWS headsets of the same brand often have a better linkage experience, and consumers are more inclined to buy The same brand of Internet of Things products, forming a "multi-piece set" and "family bucket".
Take AirPods as an example, open the AirPods, iPhone will immediately pop up pop-up window, the connection status of the headset, the power will appear in the form of cards, no need for Bluetooth settings and other tedious operations, click on the connection to wear and listen to the song. Take off the headset to pause, put it on again to resume playback, and with the click-double-tap operation gesture, this experience cannot be obtained with third-party TWS headphones.
Android mobile phone manufacturers also intend to improve the linkage experience between mobile phones and TWS headphones to attract more consumers. Following Apple, Android mobile phone manufacturers have also cancelled the 3.5mm headphone interface, and added wake-up language assistants, sound quality selection, call noise reduction and other functions for their own TWS headphones, forming a differentiation with third-party TWS.
On the other hand, under objective conditions, mobile phone manufacturers can quickly layout and occupy the market thanks to the continuous improvement of the TWS supply chain, so that the industry threshold has been greatly reduced, so that they can overtake in curves.
Just as the production of iPhones in China has cultivated the Chinese mobile phone industry chain, AirPods has also led to the development of COMPONENTS and industrial chains such as MEMS microphones, PWMICs, distance sensing chips, touch chips, audio chips, and Bluetooth chips.
The master chip solution has an important impact on the TWS product experience, and it has gradually matured. With the landing of Huawei, Qualcomm, Hengxuan and Loda and other solutions, TWS headphones have been significantly improved such as poor connection and short battery life, and the product experience is gradually close to AirPods, so the TWS headphones in the Android mobile phone camp have also begun to grow rapidly.
It should be pointed out that although the market share of professional third-party TWS headset manufacturers is not high and they have not become the dominant players, they have also enjoyed the dividends of the TWS market outbreak. On the one hand, this is due to the rapid growth of the entire TWS headphone market, on the other hand, it comes from the increase in product prices.
Wanderer's revenue in 2019 and 2020 increased by 40% year-on-year, and net profit increased by more than 100% year-on-year, also benefiting from the rapid growth of the TWS headset market, and the market value once rose by more than 21 billion yuan.
03 Will mobile phone manufacturers always win?
Mobile phone manufacturers have become the dominant players in the TWS market, so can they continue to maintain victory and consolidate results?
From the perspective of market changes, the growth momentum of TWS headphones has weakened significantly. According to data from Agency Counterpoint Research, the growth rate of global TWS headset shipments in 2021 has dropped to 24%, a new low in recent years.
At the end of March this year, Nikkei Asia broke the news that Apple plans to reduce its AirPods headphone orders in the second quarter of this year, and is expected to reduce the number of airPods headphones by more than 10 million units for the whole year. Subsequently, Tianfeng International analyst Guo Mingxi tweeted on April 5 that AirPods orders in the second and third quarters of 2022 have been cut by more than 30%. He thinks "this could be a wake-up call for AirPods." These signals indicate that the short-term direction of the market is not optimistic.
At present, the global smartphone ownership is about 5.6 billion units, if you calculate the penetration rate of TWS according to the number of smartphones, the current penetration rate of Apple TWS headphones is 42.1%, and the penetration rate of Android TWS headphones is only 3.48%, there is still a lot of room. However, as in most growth industries, the process of continuous market penetration is not continuous growth, but ups and downs, ups and downs, twists and turns, and adjustments in the short term may be difficult to avoid.
So how to break the bottleneck of market penetration and achieve breakthrough development? Juchao believes that this ultimately depends on the continuous innovation and progress of technology.
In 2016, the first generation of AirPods was able to obtain consumer recognition at a price of 1299 yuan, opening up a 100-billion-level market, thanks to a series of technical improvements by Apple, including a stable connection, a low-power W1 chip, and a charging case that can provide 24-hour battery life.
Android mobile phone manufacturers that adopt a follow-up strategy can occupy the market at lower prices, thanks to the maturity of low-cost master chip solutions such as Huawei, Qualcomm, Hengxuan and Loda.
In response to the current situation, technological innovation and progress are also expected to play a key role.
In response to the demand of the sinking market with low penetration of TWS headphones, the price is still an important factor influencing consumers' purchasing decisions. The price of Apple's AirPods even exceeds that of many smartphones, and the audience of its products is bound to be limited.
A positive example is the Indian brand boAt. Relying on highly cost-effective goods (priced at 28 yuan to 240 yuan), boAt became the dark horse of the TWS headset industry last year, achieving the first market share in the Indian market and the global market share close to Jabra.
The other path is consumption upgrading, opening up premium space by increasing the added value of technology. For more durable tool-based products, only eye-catching and attractive new selling points can provoke consumers' desire to buy, including stronger noise reduction technology, more lossless audio transmission technology and so on.
For traditional headphone manufacturers and professional TWS headphone manufacturers, the relative downturn in the current TWS headphone market may be a time point for polishing products and achieving overtaking. How to transform the rich acoustic experience of the past into a more competitive product is the challenge they collectively have to face.
But in any case, the characteristics of strong binding between TWS headphones and mobile phones determine that TWS headphones of mobile phone manufacturers have a unique interconnection experience. In order to greatly surpass the mobile phone brand in terms of overall product experience and product strength, other players have to pay several times the effort to achieve it.