Original debut | Golden Horn Finance (ID: F-Jinjiao)
Author | Oh my
Edit | Horned Lord
The mobile phone market has completely turned into a red sea.
On April 28, Counterpoint, an international research institution, released a report on the shipment of China's mobile phone market in 2021 and the first quarter of 2022. The report shows that in the first quarter of 2022, the overall shipment volume of China's mobile phone market fell by 14% year-on-year, with a total of 74.2 million units.
The report said that due to multiple external factors such as the economic environment, employment status and the extension of the user replacement cycle, the downward trend of the domestic mobile phone market has not yet bottomed; it is worth noting that the above shipments are almost consistent with the market low tide data at the beginning of the epidemic in 2020, which shows that the current overall market conditions are not optimistic.
From the perspective of specific brand data, Vivo successfully topped the domestic mobile phone market shipment list in the first quarter of this year with a proportion of 19.7%, compared with Apple, which adopted a high-end sinking strategy in recent years, continued to steadily increase its market share, and won the third place with a proportion of 17.9% in this data list.
The most direct impact of the decline in shipments is that the entire industry has become more "volume". All the leading manufacturers want to make a difference in the high-end field where they can obtain higher brand loyalty and product premium.
To this end, the strategies and specific implementation paths adopted by various brands are very different. In the red sea of the mobile phone market, vivo, which ranks first in terms of shipments, can stand out in such fierce competition and achieve the feat of reaching the top again with what kind of playing style?
Under the good situation, vivo recently released the X Fold folding screen new machine + X Note large screen flagship two "royal explosions", and recently released a new X80 series flagship new machine.
Just on April 29, the vivo X80 series ushered in the first sale of the whole network, and handed over a report card in line with the positioning of flagship products.
Specifically, after the launch of the vivo X80 series, it first won the championship of Android mobile phone sales (including pre-sale) on the Jingdong platform and Android mobile phone sales and sales (including pre-sale) in the 3K+ price segment of the Tmall platform; then won the double championship of Kuaishou all-platform mobile phone brand sales (including pre-sale) and Douyin all-platform mobile phone industry single product sales (including pre-sale).
The first sales of the vivo X80 series is undoubtedly the affirmation of the market and users for this generation of flagship new products. In addition to the repeated launch of flagship new products and the success of good market responses, Vivo's repeated big moves on the product line contain the strategic meaning of this rooted mobile phone manufacturer?
Embrace uncertainty
A problem that the whole industry has to face is that the traffic dividend of the mobile phone market is gradually disappearing.
According to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, China's mobile phone market peaked in 2016, with shipments reaching 560 million units, followed by a year-on-year decline. This figure was 491 million, 414 million, 389 million and 308 million in the next four years, and although it picked up slightly in the past 2021, the actual shipment was only 351 million.
The changes in these data point directly to the basic fact that consumer market demand is declining overall, and thus the competition across the industry has intensified.
For opportunists in the industry, this competition is brutal. A group of mobile phone manufacturers that have eaten the traffic growth dividend but failed to seize the opportunity to achieve the bottom transformation have either quietly withdrawn in this wave of competition, or left the market with their former ambitions undignifiedly.
After a round of shuffling, the manufacturers who can still stay in the main arena are already winners. But for this group of winners, the real race is only now unfolding.
In-depth exploration of more reasons behind the changes affecting market shipments, we can see more problems that mobile phone manufacturers need to face up to, including but not limited to the longer user replacement cycle, changes in consumption habits in the post-epidemic era, and the lack of killer innovation on the application side.
Again, these phenomena also point to an essential problem: the current level of innovation in the industry is no longer enough to stimulate the consumer market.
From an economic point of view, innovation is about creating new value for customers, turning unmet needs or potential needs into opportunities, and its purpose is not to maximize profits, but to create customers.
Looking back over the past decade, in the rapid development of the smartphone industry, the threshold of the entire market's expectations for innovation has been raised to an unattainable height. At this height, the slightest change in the external environment will lead to great uncertainty.
Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter said in the "business cycle" theory that a company is often unable to change its external environment, but through the improvement of internal conditions, it can actively adapt to changes in the external environment, make full use of the external environment, and within a certain range, change its own small environment to enhance its own vitality and expand market share.
For mobile phone manufacturers, in order to survive in today's market environment or even go further, the only way out is to actively embrace this uncertainty, self-deconstruct and reorganize from within, and focus the strategic goals of enterprises on innovation at the core technology level.
An obvious phenomenon is that the entire industry has begun to focus on high-end product lines in the past two years. The essence of this high-end strategy of mobile phone manufacturers is to seek to launch better innovative results into the market, stimulate market demand, and solve the current trend of shrinking industry from the root.
However, innovation is not just a slogan, and blindly burning money alone cannot burn the fruits of innovation. From the perspective of the mobile phone industry, this fruit refers to the high-end product line.
In order to achieve high-end breakthroughs and achieve true innovation, enterprises need to have a clear understanding of their own positioning and have their own set of methodologies.
In the 1960s, with the rapid development of the new technological revolution, the American economist Walter Rostow proposed the famous "take-off" six-stage theory. Among them, an important guiding point for the current mobile phone industry is that Rostow mentioned "technological innovation" to the dominance of innovation.
This proposition coincides with vivo's "high-end breakthrough" strategy in recent years. All along, vivo has been practicing the enterprise development methodology of "user-oriented, scientific and technological innovation as the cornerstone, and the pursuit of extreme products".
Take the V1 image chip "officially announced" in August last year as an example, which is the first professional image chip independently developed by vivo. Official information shows that as vivo's first independent research and development of image chips, the development of V1 chips lasted 24 months, and more than 300 people were invested in research and development, which is a specific landing of vivo chip strategy.
According to Hu Baishan, executive vice president of vivo, the landing of the V1 self-developed image chip not only brings about the improvement of intuitive image effects, but also brings users experience and emotional resonance. According to Hu Baishan, Vivo's chip layout will mainly revolve around four long tracks, which are design, image, system and performance.
Faced with the unknown factors of the industry and the uncertainty of the market, Vivo chose to respond with a clear strategic layout.
"As long as we continue to invest resources and lead the industry on the 4 long tracks that have been insightful and clear, our satisfaction with the needs of high-end people will be better and better, and vivo's brand will be recognized by high-end users."
The X70 series of new machines equipped with V1 self-developed image chips won the sales championship of Tmall, JD.com and other e-commerce platforms in the first sale in September last year, of which the pre-sale volume of vivo X70 Pro+ ranked the highest in the 4000+ price segment models in vivo history, further confirming Hu Baishan's judgment.
On April 20 this year, the V1 chip has been upgraded to a V1+ chip, which not only positions professional images, but also takes into account display performance. In the newly released X80 series flagship new machine, the series of fully adapted to the self-developed chip V1+, once again showing that vivo's pursuit of technological innovation is moving forward in an orderly manner.
It is precisely this kind of self-confidence and confidence in actively embracing uncertainty and clarifying the company's own positioning and goals that vivo continues to find a breakthrough gap in the track of technological innovation and high-end exploration, and has enough competitiveness in the increasingly fierce mobile phone market "tearing".
The "Lizi" of high-end breakthrough
The landing of self-developed image chips is only one of the aspects of vivo's pursuit of technological innovation and exploration of high-end breakthrough methodology. On the outskirts of vivo's corporate values, the pursuit of innovation has never wavered.
Shen Wei, founder, president and CEO of Vivo, mentioned in this year's New Year's speech that in the past year, Vivo has written design-driven into values and updated the mission of the enterprise, proposing to create great products for users; in order to increase the exploration and investment in cutting-edge technologies and basic capabilities, the "Vivo Central Research Institute" was established at the beginning of the year.
In addition, in the place where users can't see, vivo is still buried in the cause, and advanced new technology laboratories and research institutes such as user innovation labs, chip labs, analog network labs, and thousand mirrors safety labs have been established one after another.
All of this shows how vivo, as a technology company, practices technological innovation from the corporate culture.
However, to achieve a high-end breakthrough, it is also necessary for enterprises to always implement long-term doctrine, and truly walk through the endless development path of innovation through continuous deep ploughing and self-reflection at the bottom.
As Shen Wei said, "In the past year, Vivo's biggest gain is to take another step in the right direction, but this is far from enough." ”
Fundamentally, behind the grand proposition of high-end breakthrough, it actually contains the understanding of mobile phone manufacturers for user needs, the cognition of corporate positioning and the judgment of the development trend of the entire industry.
Returning to the basic logic of mobile phone manufacturers to explore high-end product lines, the essence is to obtain higher brand loyalty and more ideal product premiums by creating products recognized by users. However, according to the judgment of their respective industries, the path chosen by enterprises to open up this logic is very different.
Techniques such as highly binding brands to consumer sentiment and achieving product premiums through stacking have become a default rule in the industry. For Vivo, who only has the word "duty" engraved on his forehead, he chooses the most direct and simplest method: "dry".
"Our idea is to explore the needs that users are really interested in, create the points that users really want to use, and then continue to make breakthroughs and innovations to attract users and keep them alive."
When talking about the basic logic of vivo's attempt at high-end breakthroughs in recent years, Hu Baishan used simple and simple words to explain the essence of making products: to meet the needs of users.
Implemented to specific products, taking the X Fold folding screen released a few days ago as an example, as a manufacturer that has completed the development of prototypes as early as 2018, vivo has not included the folding screen in the publicity of its product matrix in the past. Even in 2021, when the whole industry rushed to issue new folding screen products and fought a price war, vivo still did not waver.
In this regard, vivo gave the judgment that the folding screen product had not yet reached the level of meeting the needs of high-value user experience at that time. When this corporate culture of duty is organically combined with the strategy of scientific and technological innovation enterprises, the vivo X Fold folding screen mobile phone that achieves both "no crease" and "hinge durability" came into being.
The return brought by such persistence is the high degree of user loyalty and industry reputation of the vivo brand. According to the famous "two-eight principle" in marketing, that is, 80% of the performance of the enterprise comes from 20% of the old customers who frequently patronize, compared with the high cost of customer acquisition, the cost of maintaining the old customers is only one-seventh of the former.
Today, when the mobile phone market has turned into a red sea, vivo has always adhered to the word-of-mouth playing method, which has withstood the test of time and won a group of loyal supporters. In today's high-end product line competition, these invisible assets have become the key gap for vivo to achieve a breakthrough.
In terms of specific playing methods, the judgment given by Vivo is that the high-end mobile phone market currently priced at more than 5,000 yuan is mostly controlled by Apple, so what he has to do is not to benchmark Apple, but to play through other differentiated subdivisions, from the core needs of high-value users to improve product competitiveness.
For example, in order to enhance the mobile phone imaging experience, vivo launched a strategic cooperation with ZEISS, the pioneer, founder and leader of global imaging optics, in December 2020, and established the "VIVO ZEISS Joint Imaging Laboratory".
The goal of this cooperation is to combine the optical technology of ZEISS for many years with the powerful computing power of vivo mobile phones, continue to consolidate the industry position of the "image ceiling" of vivo X series products, and ultimately provide users with the ultimate image shooting and processing experience.
The recently released X80 series is another outstanding achievement of the strategic cooperation between vivo and ZEISS. Through in-depth cooperation with ZEISS, the vivo X80 series has reached the ZEISS T* coating standard, and at the software level, it has achieved more accurate restoration of natural native colors and better portrait shooting.
These upgraded experiences have become an important part of vivo's breakthrough in high-end and meeting the extreme experience needs of high-value users. And all of this is the business choice made by vivo based on the judgment of industry trends and the understanding of user needs, and it is a solid footprint left by vivo on the long road of high-end breakthrough.
"Every major turning point in our business is the result of scientific and technological innovation as the cornerstone, user-oriented, and the pursuit of the ultimate product." I think that's the fundamental reason why we're seizing the big opportunity. ”
At the Boao Forum on April 21, Hu Baishan made a summary of vivo's ability to keep up with the pace of the times and achieve high-end breakthroughs.
The product is the extension of the high-end strategy
In the field of scientific and technological innovation, investment in research and development, imagination and inspiration are indispensable.
When Martin Cooper invented the world's first mobile phone in 1973, inspired by the TV series Star Trek, he said that when he saw Captain Cocker in the show using a wireless phone, he immediately realized that this was what he wanted to invent.
But with inspiration and no action and input, even the best ideas will become utopian. Behind Martin Cooper's development of the world's first mobile phone is the joint efforts of the entire Motorola company's technical support and laboratory team.
Similarly, vivo's long-standing spirit of innovation has been firmly implemented. Taking the latest Academia Sinica as an example, in 2021 vivo set up the Academia Sinica, the goal is to devote more than 36 months of technical planning, focusing on the tracking of new product forms, domestic and foreign industry cutting-edge technology scanning, imaging, chips and other fields of technical layout.
In addition, as early as 2020, vivo's new intelligent manufacturing center was officially completed. For tech companies' manufacturing centers, renewal means more advanced. The design concept of vivo intelligent manufacturing center is to integrate more corporate culture and humanistic elements in addition to efficiency supremacy, with the purpose of injecting more humanistic care into cold industrial manufacturing, so as to implement the important principle of "a good environment can stimulate more creativity".
So, there is only one purpose, that is, to use all resources as much as possible to achieve scientific and technological innovation, and to create the ultimate product that meets the needs of users.
The flagship mobile phone of the X series is the ultimate product line that combines R&D investment, imagination and inspiration, and takes into account innovation and use experience in vivo's eyes.
As a product extension of vivo's high-end strategy, the X series carries all the expectations of this manufacturer for its own development, industry trends and market judgments.
Ten years ago, the birth of vivo X1 became a landmark innovative product in the early stage of vivo's transition from a functional machine to a smart machine, opening a new era of Hi-Fi smartphones, and becoming the world's thinest smartphone at that time with a 6.55mm ultra-thin body, leaving a strong mark for the development of vivo.
Now, ten years later, the vivo X series ushered in a new X80 series flagship new product. Huang Tao, vice president of vivo products, believes that "the vivo X80 series is vivo's redefinition of flagship. ”
From the perspective of specific product performance, the X80 series can indeed support the four heavy characters of "redefining".
In the development process of X series in the past ten years, vivo has been adhering to the spirit of deeply cultivating the underlying technology, making unremitting efforts in the four long tracks of design, imaging, system and performance, and adhering to independent research and development. Through in-depth cooperation with chip companies, we will continuously improve chip research and development and industrial technology coordination capabilities.
In 2021, the vivo X70 series is equipped with self-developed image chip V1, creating a precedent of "dual core".
This year, the X80 series is equipped with the self-developed chip V1+ that leads the second-generation dual-core flagship standard, taking into account the two major functions of image and performance, not only allowing the image function to evolve again, but also using the computing power breakthrough in the field of performance and display.
The in-depth combination of the V1+ self-developed image chip and ZEISS optical technology makes the image expression of the X80 series a big step towards the ultimate experience. In addition to the comprehensive upgrade of optical components, through in-depth cooperation with ZEISS, the vivo X80 series also brings experience upgrades at the software level.
Among them, ZEISS Natural Color 2.0 can restore the natural native colors seen by the human eye with fine and accurate adjustment; on the long track of portraits, vivo X80 series adds ZEISS Cinematic style bokeh on the basis of the built-in ZEISS four portrait style lens packages, creating a portrait shooting effect with a strong cinematic style with a unique oval bokeh spot and a 2.39:1 shooting format.
Hu Baishan believes that the purpose of the strategic cooperation between Vivo and ZEISS is to exert the computing power of the mobile phone platform and convert the industry experience accumulated by ZEISS for decades into mobile phones through "artificial intelligence learning".
As vivo's focus on imaging and performance, the X80 series has reached a new height in the synergy between V1+ image sensor and SoC dual core.
With the compatibility of the self-developed chip V1+, the vivo X80 series realizes the multi-platform dual-core adaptation of the whole model, and its synergy with MediaTek's latest Tianji 9000 is particularly excellent.
As MediaTek's flagship platform, the Tianji 9000 has received widespread attention from the market for its excellent performance and outstanding energy efficiency since its release. As strategic technology partners, Vivo and MediaTek have invested in an elite development team of more than 300 people since last year, and after 350 days of in-depth collaborative development of software and hardware, the V1+ chip and the Tianji 9000 are adjusted and adjusted, releasing the strongest performance of the Tianji 9000.
In addition to the above selling points, the vivo X80 series is also equipped with flagship configurations such as Samsung E5 AMOLED super sensitive screen and dual battery cell 80W wired flash charge as standard.
Different from the industry's common "medium cup, large cup, super large cup" product portfolio strategy, as the flagship model of the X series, vivo X80 and vivo X80 Pro have brought about the configuration upgrade of the "full series of liter cups".
Among them, vivo X80 Pro positions the image flagship, continuing the reputation of the X series professional image flagship; vivo X80 focuses on creating a "performance flagship" image, and the image is also blessed by ZEISS T* optical lens, color and image algorithm. Vivo X80 series meets the differentiated needs of different users while ensuring the "comprehensive and all-round" experience of each product.
As Shen Wei, founder of vivo, said in his New Year's speech at vivo this year, 2022 will be the most challenging year for the smartphone industry, but whether it is good times or bad times, we must not forget the original intention.
"We want everything to return to user-oriented, dare to pursue the ultimate, and continue to create surprises."
From the new flagship machine of the X80 series, this value of implementing the entire enterprise has long been seen. The so-called impact on the high-end is just the product extension of this pursuit of the ultimate and user-oriented spirit.
Vivo's high-end breakthrough, just like the "duty" culture that this mobile phone manufacturer has been implementing, everything is in the natural silent cultivation, and the fruits of success have been picked up with the trend.