The acquisition of Meizu, Geely to make up for the shortcomings of the car machine opportunity to come?

Recently, it has been reported that Meizu has been acquired by Geely and is completing the closing stage. In response to this matter, Meizu officials did not comment.

Someone said: "Meizu is going to turn over?" "There are also people who say;" The car builders are actually going to sell mobile phones. "But the general melon eaters don't seem surprised by this."

In fact, as early as January this year, some media reported that Geely Group's mobile phone company was in contact with mobile phone manufacturer Meizu to negotiate an acquisition. At the same time, the transaction is in the due diligence stage, and the price is not clear.

At that time, Geely said: "We do not comment on market rumors, the high-end mobile phone research and development business of the Star Era is progressing in an orderly manner, and we hope to create an open and integrated ecological partnership." Meizu responded: "Thank you for your concern for Meizu technology." ”

Both sides seem to be fighting guerrillas, but whether this layer of paper can contain the fire has once again triggered public discussion with this hot search.

The problem of the car machine has always plagued Geely

In fact, Geely's mobile phone is not to become the king of the mobile phone industry, but hopes to solve the problem of Geely Automobile's own car machine system through mobile phones.

Speaking of Geely Car Machine System, we have to mention YiJiatong, an automotive intelligent technology company founded in 2016 by Li Shufu and Shen Ziyu, the current chairman of Geely Group and vice chairman of the board of directors of the Chinese-funded Education Research Institute, whose main business focuses on core technology products such as on-board chips, intelligent cockpits, intelligent driving, high-precision maps, big data and Internet of Vehicles cloud platform. Yijiatong and Geely can be said to be deeply bound in terms of business, and its GKUI system has been installed in more than 40 models of Geely, with more than 2.5 million users using the GKUI system.

With such a huge user scale, GKUI has not been able to lay a good user base. The earliest exposure to the problem of Geely's car machine chip is actually the Star Yue model launched in 2019. According to Geely's announcement at that time, Xingyue would be equipped with the latest GKUI19 car machine system at that time, and the CPU was Geely's self-developed E01 chip. The performance of this chip is introduced: E01 chip supports 8-core heterogeneous operations, more than 100 billion operations per second, can operate in an environment of -40 ~ 85 ° C, compared with the previous generation of chips, E01 has 5 times the core computing power, boot speed increased by 33%, multimedia loading speed of 55%, navigation loading speed increased by 67%.

Such a strong performance is naturally very exciting, but after the actual purchase of the car, the owners found that the Hoshikoshi car system is far less smooth than expected.

At that time, there were a large number of car owner complaints on the car quality network, including the main model used by Geely Xingyue for GKUI1.2.0, which was not the latest GKUI19 car machine system officially advertised, and the GKUI1.2.0 hardware was very old and backward, and the most important CPU chip was actually a product ARM Cortex-A9 ten years ago, with a main frequency of only 792Mz. Only for the problem of car and machine catening, the proportion of complaints has reached 60%. Similar problems arose with the Jiaji models of the same period.

By April 2021, Geely launched the Extreme Kr 001, and since its listing, it has successively exposed bugs. According to the owner of the car, driving for 3 minutes, running 51 kilometers, the average speed of up to 874 km / h, the car runs so fast energy consumption is 0.

According to incomplete statistics, since the delivery of The Kr 001, there have been many types of problems, including the electric door can not identify obstacles, the App Bluetooth key connection is unstable, the car system is stuck, the rear seat is not smooth and there is a different sound and so on.

No wonder netizens have complained one after another: "Newton has to say a word of admiration", and some netizens bluntly said that Extreme Kr 001 is a "semi-finished product"

And what's more, the E01 chip in Yijiatong is also a quad-core chip developed by MediaTek in 2015, and the CPU frequency is only 1ghz, and it is difficult to put this chip from 2017 to 2021.

In addition to these models, Geely's subsidiaries include Xingrui, Binrui, Haoyue, Boyue, Borui, and even Lynk & Co 01, 02, 03, 05, can find a large number of complaints about the car machine caton, black screen. A large number of Geely models equipped with old chips and systems cannot be upgraded by OTA in subsequent uses, which will further exacerbate the bad feeling of the user experience. Geely, on the other hand, has been responding positively and effectively to this matter.

But Geely also seems to be aware of the problems of Yijiatong, so upgrading the car chip has become an urgent problem to be solved.

In order to regain the hegemony of the automotive industry, Li Shufu is ready to start by building mobile phones. After all, mobile phones are the smart devices with the most Internet attributes at present.

Last year, Geely officially announced that xingji times technology co., ltd. came to build mobile phones, invested 10 billion yuan, pulled the former president of ZTE, and frantically recruited people from OPPO, Xiaomi and other mobile phone manufacturers, threatening to challenge Apple.

It was also at this time that Ji Li seemed to aim at Meizu.

Can "marriage" bring a win-win situation?

Talking about Meizu, from the Meizu M8 in his pocket wherever lei jun went, to the Meizu 7 pro that installed MediaTek, which was tragically waterloo, only eight years made Meizu go from glory to decline. Caton, endurance diabetes avalanche, fever, quality control and a series of problems so that its sales in the Chinese market in recent years continued to decline, according to relevant information, Meizu mobile phone sales from 22 million units in 2016, all the way down to 2020 sales of about 400,000 units, according to the data released by BCI, from December 28, 2020 to January 31, 2021, Meizu's market share is only 0.1%, basically less than half of the peak period.

Meizu's living space is constantly squeezed by the head brand at the same time, but also the supply chain and funds have no right to speak, once there is no financial support, it is difficult to feed a huge technical team.

At the same time, Meizu's intellectual property rights and mature technical team are valued by Geely.

First of all, in terms of intellectual property rights, according to the relevant data disclosed by Meizu a few years ago, Meizu patent applications have reached 3358, of which 2490 invention patents, including mBack interaction, one-size-fits-all antenna, and Super mCharge fast charging technology based on charge pump technology; the world's first integrated true non-porous all-wireless mobile phone Meizu zero created in early 2019, which has gathered more than 100 patent application results.

From a technical point of view, Meizu makes up for Geely's shortcomings, that is, the Flyme system. Flyme is an operating system launched by Meizu based on Android to provide users with excellent interactive experience and intimate online services. Five versions have been updated by 2021. As the industry's leading custom Android system, Flyme has been recognized as one of the best mobile operating systems with powerful and comprehensive functions, humanized operation methods and simple and elegant interface style.

Some analysts believe that once Geely acquires Meizu, it will bring certain funds to Meizu. Geely's acquisition of Proton Lotus proved this.

For Geely, Meizu, as a veteran mobile phone manufacturer, has successful experience on Flyme - Meizu can not only help Geely make the system, but also optimize the system to be stable enough.

As far as geely's current layout in various fields is concerned, only the most important car and machine business is in trouble, which is obviously inconsistent with the rapid transformation of Geely's development. Nowadays, mobile phones, as intelligent control terminals, are not only communication devices, social tools, personal wallets, transportation cards, controllers and other tools, but the carrier of big data collection and a new medium in the field of smart cars, so the important "territory" of mobile phones, Geely must "spell" as soon as possible. This is also where Geely's ambition to "acquire" Meizu lies.

Although neither Geely nor Meizu has responded positively to the "acquisition". But Meizu needs a chance to survive, and Geely needs to make up for its shortcomings in the field of smart cars.