This article is from the WeChat public account: Ginkgo Technology (ID: yinxingcj), author: zero zero, original title: "OPPO and its overseas protégés", the title picture comes from: Visual China
Although the Internet is no longer the mainstream narrative, there has never been a shortage of entrepreneurial players in this rapid development for more than two decades, especially those who have left large factories and embarked on the road of entrepreneurship.
They have even formed different jianghu factions - Ali, Baidu, Tencent, Jinshan, Netease, Sohu and so on.
For example, Didi Chengwei, Mushroom Street Chen Qi, Singbar Chen Hua are from Ali, and you can even say that He Xiaopeng, the head of Xiaopeng Automobile, is also a person who came out of Ali. Look at Xiao Wenjie and Facue founder Guo Lie from Tencent, Xiaomi Lei Jun and Storm Video Feng Xin are Jinshan systems, and YY Voice Li Xueling and Momo's Tang Yan are NetEase protégés.
Of course, not only them, but many more. These people who came out of big factories through entrepreneurship have all brought great influence in the industry, and some are still fighting on the front line.
But there is a group that is very special, their initial focus is usually overseas, they have made a name for themselves in overseas markets, and then they have returned to China, stirring up the domestic market, and unlocking another posture of entrepreneurship.
Their names are not unfamiliar, including Jitu Li Jie, OnePlus Liu Zuohu, OnePlus Pei Yu and realme Li Bingzhong, but they also have a more familiar common name - OPPO series.
And their entrepreneurial trajectory is inseparable from the development of OPPO, or the entrepreneurial history of these people is the epitome of OPPO's development history.
gene
Compared with the younger generation of Pei Yu born in 1989, Liu Zuohu, Li Jie and Li Bingzhong are old OPPO people, and they even joined the company during the Duan Yongping era.
Duan Yongping has four famous disciples, Jin Zhijiang, founder of Little Genius, Chen Mingyong, founder of OPPO, Shen Wei, founder of vivo, and Huang Zheng, founder of Pinduoduo.
Li Jie is the fifth, and his biggest feature is that he has a mouth that can speak well.
After graduating from Beijing University of Science and Technology in 1994, he acted as an agent for BBK, and because of his good performance, Duan Yongping noticed him, and Duan Yongping took him as a "closed disciple" and took him with him for training. Until 2008, Chen Mingyong took OPPO to transform into a mobile phone, and Li Jie was promoted to OPPO as the "best seedling" and became the general manager of OPPO Suwan region.
To this day, no one inside OPPO will question Li Jie's sales ability.
After joining OPPO, the team he led has been the champion of sales contribution for many years, even if OPPO fell into crisis in 2011 due to the transition of feature machines to smartphones, a few steps late, he was also the person who sold OPPO the most. When Chen Mingyong commended Li Jie at the annual meeting that year, his eyes were red, and he immediately decided to set up the "Li Jie Award" as a recognition for outstanding sales contributions.
Liu Zuohu, who comes from a technical background, entered BBK later than Li Jie, but went to OPPO earlier than Li Jie.
After Duan Yongping split BBK into three in 1999, Liu was assigned by Duan Yongping to OPPO's R&D department, responsible for DVD development and production, because the technology highlighted his transition from main engineer to development supervisor, and then promoted to the position of director of the development department.
The Blu-ray player launched by OPPO in 2006 is his famous work. As soon as it was listed, it was Wang Fried, which sold well at home and abroad, even Zhou Hongyi, Ding Lei, Wang Xiaochuan, and even Leonardo, the male protagonist of "Titanic", were its fans.
After OPPO made mobile phones, he took over OPPO's mobile phone marketing system and led the launch of Find5, N1 and other models. For OPPO, Liu Zuohu's technical ability and marketing ability are unquestionable.
Like Liu Zuohu, Li Bingzhong is also a technical school. After graduating from the millennium, he joined BBK and once achieved the position of general manager of BBK Audition Electronics.
In 2010, the DVD market went downhill rapidly, and Li Bingzhong was sent to the OPPO mobile phone department, responsible for coordinating and organizing the overall research and development of OPPO mobile phones. At OPPO, Li Bingzhong's "big brother" status is equally unshakable.
And they infect the bones of OPPO, nothing else, it is overseas genes. At the beginning of its establishment, OPPO's positioning in the hearts of Duan Yongping and Chen Mingyong was an international brand.
OPPO was founded in 2004, in fact, it has been designing since 2000, and they know that the BBK brand cannot go global, and it needs a new brand to go overseas.
In order to design the name of this new product, they asked Europeans to design and do phonetic pronunciation tests in more than 100 countries and regions around the world, and finally selected OPPO: the most appropriate pronunciation without any bad semantics.
So when making DVDs, OPPO Blu-ray player is mainly exported. In 2008, OPPO launched its first mobile phone, followed by the following year, and began its overseas journey with Thailand as a starting point.
entrepreneurship
Along with OPPO's overseas conquests, as OPPO executives, they are involved.
The reason why OPPO Blu-ray player can become one of the most sought after models of high-end audio-visual enthusiasts in the United States and defeat Japan's Denon and Sony is inseparable from Liu Zuohu's overseas marketing and management.
Li Jie went to Indonesia in 2013 to develop the market for OPPO, the year OPPO in Indonesia share was 0, a year later he achieved a share of 7%, by 2015 OPPO ranked second in the Indonesian mobile phone market, with a market share of up to 20%.
It was also in the year that Li Jie went to Indonesia, Li Bingzhong became the head of OPPO's overseas business, and in the next 5 years under the leadership of Li Bingzhong, OPPO developed from Thailand, India, Myanmar, Indonesia and other countries to cover more than 30 new markets such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, etc., becoming the most successful mobile phone brand in China going abroad.
He even personally took charge of the India team in 2015 and released the OPPO F series based on the needs of young people's selfies in India, helping OPPO win the honor of second place in the offline market. He is evaluated by the outside world as an executive of a Chinese mobile phone company who best understands overseas markets and user needs.
The rich overseas experience and genes that OPPO brought to them have been written into their own entrepreneurial chapter.
The first to leave were Liu Zuohu and Pei Yu, Liu Zuohu's subordinates, at the end of 2013, Liu Zuohu left OPPO to start a business to establish OnePlus Technology, and took with him his most effective assistant in overseas markets, Pei Yu.
That period of work experience in North America made Liu Zuohu attach importance to overseas market strategy when he started his business.
OnePlus Technology Innovation in China, the focus is overseas, the initial positioning is a global brand, Liu Zuohu's plan is that the startup resources are limited, first open the main foreign market, and then in turn open the more competitive domestic market.
As a result, OnePlus not only sells in 17 countries at the same time, but also sets up offices in Singapore and London, achieving 60% of sales from overseas in two years, and quickly gathering praise for overseas popularity.
In 2016, a major pinnacle of American dramas "House of Cards" appeared in OnePlus, and the CEO of Amazon India did not hesitate to fly to Hong Kong with VP to meet Liu Zuohu in order to obtain the exclusive agency rights of OnePlus.
Almost at the same time, Li Jie announced at the OPPO Indonesia press conference that he would remove the burden of OPPO Indonesia's CEO and leave OPPO to be a courier company, J&T Express.
And J&T Express also has a well-known name, J&T Express.
His own disciple entrepreneurship, Duan Yongping naturally said, real money to Jitu investment, but he later said that he did not like the business model of logistics, and did not recommend others to invest, for Jitu, it is friendly support.
But Li Jie still surprised Duan Yongping, Jitu ran very fast overseas, and in two years, it became the second largest company in the Southeast Asian market and the first in the Indonesian express delivery industry in terms of single-day tickets.
In 2019, Li Jie decided to kill back to China, obtained a license through the shell Longbang Express that year, and entered the domestic market in March of the next year, not only playing the routine of price war, but also spending 6.8 billion yuan to acquire the domestic express business of Best Express last year, not to mention menacing, causing Yunda, Yuantong, Shentong, etc. to issue a "blocking order" to Jitu.
Lee Bingzhong left OPPO in 2018 and became realme. OPPO's parent company, Guangdong Dong Jia Communications Technology Co., Ltd., gave him an investment, and he will choose the place in India, the user group is set as young people, and the main sales are online models, and the price is 1,000 yuan and below.
After winning the mountain of India, Li Bingzhong attacked Southeast Asia non-stop, and won the e-commerce platforms of Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and other countries in a few months.
Relying on price advantages, asset-light operation models and overseas expansion, realme squeezed into the 7th position in global mobile phone sales in one year.
When Li Jie returned to China with the extreme rabbit, Li Bingzhong also held a meeting with the core team, named: China starts again. He also wants to kill back home.
"Pawns"
The same OPPO department, Li Jie, Li Bingzhong, Liu Zuohu are all emphasizing their "independence", but in fact, their rise overseas is inseparable from OPPO's calculation and foundation, or rather, they were and even today are more like OPPO's "pawns" in planning the market.
When Li Jie opened up territory for OPPO in Indonesia, he felt that the local logistics and transportation efficiency was extremely low, and it was not an easy task to quickly deliver mobile phones to consumers.
The original intention of J&T, the predecessor of J&T, was to solve the logistics and transportation problems of OPPO mobile phones in Indonesia, so one of the most critical tasks of J&T in the early stage was to be responsible for the distribution of OPPO mobile phones throughout Indonesia.
Of course, it is also thanks to OPPO's network in Indonesia that Jitu has been able to develop rapidly and continue to expand out of Indonesia.
Even after entering the domestic market, to a certain extent, with the help of OPPO and his fellow brother Huang Zheng Pinduoduo, Li Jie copied the Southeast Asian model in China, he was to convert China's OPPO dealers into domestic franchisees of Jitu, and according to relevant media reports, more than 90% of the early orders of Jitu came from Pinduoduo.
OnePlus, realme and OPPO are all affiliated with the Oujia Group, and the actual controller of the group is Chen Mingyong.
After Liu Zuohu established OnePlus, many people believed that OnePlus and OPPO were two skins of the same company. In 2016, the mobile phone market fell into the dilemma of supply chain resource shortage, one plus a year shipments of about 3 million, according to the "Finance" report, the tail goods of one plus x series mobile phones were finally cleaned up by OPPO, and the cleaning method was that OPPO launched an A30 mobile phone.
And realme is very concerned about associating it with OPPO, and realme has moved away when OPPO was still in the Tairan Building.
In Li Bingzhong's public remarks, he has always described the creation of realme as his last chance in the second half of his life. He said that if you fail, you will retire two years early, and if you succeed, you will retire two years later, and you will retire anyway, and you will do it with a mortal mentality.
However, according to media reports, at the beginning of the establishment of realme, Li Bingzhong can choose employees at will in the original OPPO team, as long as employees are willing, they can join realme, the familiar "charge 5 minutes, talk for 2 hours" series TVC main operator Xu Qi, is the realme who joined at that time, and realme can rise rapidly overseas, but also inseparable from OPPO's industrial design capabilities, software research and development capabilities and supply chain integration capabilities.
The time point that realme stands alone is even more "ingenious".
In 2014, Lei Jun took Xiaomi to India, and Liu Zuohu and OnePlus also announced their entry into the Indian market almost at the same time. But OnePlus made a mid-to-high-end flagship machine, and the killer feature used by Xiaomi at that time was the famous cost-effective red rice.
In the mid-to-high-end market, OnePlus did eat meat from Samsung and Apple, but the problem was that the mid-to-high-end flagship was not very popular in the Indian market at that time, even the original Huawei could take only 3% of the share, Apple was not even as good as Huawei, the share was only 1%.
OPPO may not have expected the growth of Xiaomi, although India was known as the world's second most potential second largest smartphone market, India's per capita income was only one-third of China's, and per capita income directly determined the level of consumption, which also led to OPPO, OnePlus, Huawei and even Apple having to face the lack of purchasing power in the Indian market.
So by 2017, Xiaomi had become the king of sales in the Indian mobile phone market, and Lei Jun announced that he would build a third smartphone factory in India.
Then in 2018, Li Bingzhong took realme to India to fight with Xiaomi's Redmi series. This is more like OnePlus can't win the low-end market, and realme is needed to fill that gap.
Liu Zuohu's return is also traceable.
He returned with OnePlus in 2020, when OPPO made organizational restructuring adjustments, announced Liu Zuohu's return to OPPO, and became the senior vice president of Oujia Holdings and the head of the company's product line.
Since 2018, OPPO's sales in the domestic market have declined, and in 2019, the domestic market sales fell from the second to the fifth, and the decline is gradually showing. The return of Liu Zuohu and OnePlus, many people in the industry believe that the merger of the two swords forms a force that is consistent with the outside world. By this month, OnePlus has fully entered OPPO's offline channels to achieve full integration.
Pei Yu's departure can also explain some problems. When Liu Zuohu returned, Pei Yu left OnePlus, and someone once broke the news on the Internet that he left because he was unwilling to merge with OPPO, or became a sub-brand of OPPO.
He said, "When I was 20 to 30, I was always doing other people's things, but I knew that 30 to 40 years old had to do my own thing." After leaving, he founded the NOTHING brand, released headphones overseas, and last year acquired Andy Rubin's smartphone brand Essential.
Pei Yu does not want to be a "pawn", but he still has the inertia of OPPO entrepreneurship: do overseas first.
In July this year, the NOTHING brand he founded released its first mobile phone, Nothing Phone1, which is mainly sold in Europe and India, excluding China. In idle fish, this mobile phone was once fried to more than 5,000 yuan.
Some people say that Pei Yu is following the path taken by Liu Zuohu. Because Pei Yu said that now it is focused on overseas, the Chinese market, sooner or later will come back.
Internal troubles
But this bite of rice in the domestic market is not so easy to eat.
Chinese entrepreneurs can succeed in replicating China's experience overseas because many areas in Southeast Asia are slower than China's, they follow the path that Chinese entrepreneurs have taken, and when overseas entrepreneurs want to copy their overseas success to the Chinese market, it is obviously outdated.
Even with the OPPO series, J&T, Realme, and OnePlus all perform little.
Li Jie once said that Jitu would hit the listing in mid-2022, but now it is almost the end of the year, and there is no IPO movement.
On the one hand, Jitu's valuation has approached 130 billion yuan, making it the second logistics company with a valuation of more than 100 billion yuan besides Cainiao Network.
But on the other hand, in the middle of the year, the news that Jiangsu Jitu outlets ran away in arrears rushed to the hot search, causing the low-key Li Jie to appear at a customer exchange meeting held in Wuhan soon after to calm customer emotions.
According to the data of the National Post Bureau, in the public satisfaction ranking of Q1 express delivery services this year, Jitu Express is at the bottom.
Realme's brand power is also difficult to establish.
The outside world has positioned it as cost-effective, but Li Bingzhong has always emphasized that he does not make cost-effective mobile phones, and he even said that cost-effectiveness will never become the starting point of Relame.
But domestic consumers can't even distinguish between realme and Xiaomi's redmi. Not long ago, Counterpoint data showed that in Q3 this year, realme's market share was only 2.5%, a sharp drop of 43.1% compared with the same period last year, and on the black cat complaint platform, realme mobile phones are one of the mobile phone brands with a high complaint rate.
And what about OnePlus? Before returning to OPPO, the domestic market has been not doing well. In 2017, in order to seize resources, it signed a three-year strategic underwriting agreement with JD.com, at that time, the sales of mobile phone categories accounted for more than 50% of JD.com, but the three companies that Liu Qiangdong paid special attention to in the mobile phone industry were Xiaomi, Hammer and LeTV, and did not put one plus in his eyes.
One Plus launched the OnePlus 10 Pro at the beginning of this year, this mobile phone is regarded as a proud work created by Liu Zuohu after his return, but it has attracted a lot of complaints from old fans of One Plus: three points of configuration, seven points of polishing, and the remaining ninety points are directly rotten.
Someone even asked Liu Zuohu a question about his soul: Why hasn't OnePlus made a hit product until now?
In addition to the frustration of the domestic market, in any case, the entrepreneurial path of these people is still desirable, and their success in overseas markets is worthy of recognition.
When the Chinese market becomes the Red Sea, overseas markets such as Southeast Asia after China's development are indeed virgin places suitable for entrepreneurship, and their rise overseas has proved the feasibility to a certain extent, but in the face of fierce competition at home, it is always necessary to find a sustainable way to play.
It is impossible to burn money, in the Chinese market, the era of burning money is king has long passed, and now burning money cannot burn growth, nor can it not do without its own moat, fierce competition, and many players.
Without bright spots, it is the biggest groove, and without a moat, it is the biggest weakness. Perhaps only by holding on to the big tree of OPPO can we gain a foothold in the domestic market.
This article is from the WeChat public account: Ginkgo Technology (ID: yinxingcj), author: zero zero qi
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