The black shark suffered a "salary bargaining" storm, and the game mobile phone was dying

Author: | Zeng Guang

Edited by | Dong Yuqing

"President Luo, please send the compensation money, wait for the New Year." On January 10, 2023, under the greeting Weibo of Luo Yuzhou, CEO of Black Shark Technology, a group of "salary-seeking" employees were ushered in.

According to a number of former employees of Black Shark Technology revealed to the city that Black Shark has laid off more than half a year, and the compensation is distributed in installments, January 10 should be the day when the compensation arrives, but many people have only received 2,000 yuan.

As a representative brand of game mobile phones, Black Shark, established in 2017, was once prosperous, with sales of the first product reaching hundreds of thousands of units, occupying more than 70% of the domestic game mobile phone market share at its peak, and is still the first game mobile phone in 2020. But with the decline of the entire gaming mobile phone segment, the former industry boss is now caught in layoffs and wage arrears, and even Xiaomi, which once invested in Black Shark, shouted the slogan that gaming phones are dead.

The dilemma of the Black Shark brand, to a large extent, is also the dilemma of the entire game mobile phone track, many users are not willing to buy a mobile phone in order to play games, the shipment of the market segment has not been up, as Xiaomi Group President Lu Weibing said: "A game mobile phone product launched to sell tens of thousands of units, at most 200,000-300,000 units, it has reached the ceiling." ”

Nowadays, mainstream mobile phone brands have no longer launched "gaming phones", Redmi, IQOO and OnePlus and other brands are moving closer to mainstream consumers, leaving only a few manufacturers such as Red Devil, ROG, and Rescuer are still deep in this field, but shipments are in jeopardy.

The leader of the game mobile phone is deeply in the crisis of "bargaining for wages"

On January 10, the day when Black Shark Technology issued layoff compensation, many departing employees found that part of the compensation that should have arrived today was not paid as scheduled. As early as August last year, the news of Black Shark's layoffs was reported on the Pulse platform, and Jiahang, a former employee of Black Shark, told the city that he was laid off in September, which was already an earlier batch, and the resignation agreement signed at that time was to give two months of compensation salary, a total of more than 40,000 yuan, and agreed to release it in three batches in November, December and January this year.

However, more than a month after Jiahang left the company, when the first compensation was about to be paid in November, it received a call from HR, saying that the compensation would be changed to six installments. "I disagreed at the time, but it was still distributed in 6 installments." Jiahang said.

What Jiahang didn't expect was that he had just received two compensations, and things had taken a new turn. On January 10 this year, which was supposed to be the day when his third compensation was issued, he only received 2,000 yuan, and at the same time received a message saying that the company had encountered huge operating difficulties and that the severance compensation could not be paid in full for the time being.

Compared with Jiahang, the former Black Shark developer Liu Ming suffered worse, he was only laid off in December last year, according to the agreement, the company will pay him more than 80,000 yuan in compensation, January 10 is the time for the first compensation to be issued, and only received 2,000 yuan. After discovering that there was a problem with the compensation, Liu Ming tried to contact Black Shark's HR, CEO and others, but they could not be contacted.

In fact, since August last year, news of Black Shark layoffs has been reported on the Internet. By October, news broke that Tencent's plan to acquire Black Shark was stranded, and Black Shark was cut by 50%. In December, an anonymous netizen revealed that there were only more than 100 people left in the entire company of Black Shark, of which more than 40 were left in the Shanghai team, and at the end of December, they were basically all cut, leaving only peripherals and the Internet. Liu Ming also said that now there are only about a hundred people left in the entire company of Black Shark.

Black Shark, once known as Xiaomi's "godson", is an ecological chain enterprise invested by Xiaomi, and its products are still sold in Xiaomi shopping malls, but it has always been an independent company. According to a former employee of Black Shark, although Black Shark can use Xiaomi's procurement resources, it does not have a management relationship, "Every mobile phone or heat dissipation clip sold in Xiaomi's channel is to pay Xiaomi's share." ”

The fate of the Black Shark largely represents the status quo of the entire game mobile phone track, the once very lively game mobile phone track, now there are few players, a small number of players are either constantly marginalized, or are removing the game mobile phone label on their bodies.

Abandoned gaming phones

"In 2023, you won't need a gaming phone anymore." Just this past December, Lu Weibing announced on Weibo that the Redmi brand will no longer launch an e-sports version of the mobile phone, which is only two years after Redmi launched its first e-sports mobile phone, and after two generations of e-sports version exploration, Xiaomi finally abandoned this subcategory.

After the Weibo was released, it caused a counterattack from the game mobile phone brand Red Devil, saying that "e-sports version of mobile phones≠ e-sports mobile phones, 2023, farewell to e-sports version of mobile phones". But while refuting Lu Weibing, the Red Devils' own official website has now been incorporated into Nubia.

Although brands such as Red Devil, ROG, and Rescuer still adhere to the segment of gaming mobile phones, from the perspective of shipments, "gaming phones are dead" has indeed become an established fact. According to data from the research agency Whale Staff, the overall size of the gaming mobile phone market will be greatly reduced in 2022. Compared with the previous year, the cumulative sales of gaming mobile phones from January to September were about 3.2 million, down nearly 40% year-on-year; Cumulative sales volume was approximately CNY 7.6 billion, down 39% year-on-year.

It is worth noting that the definition of game mobile phones in this data is relatively broad, in addition to Black Shark, Red Devil, ROG and other brands, but also includes Xiaomi, iQOO, OnePlus and other mainstream brand products, if only calculate the narrow sense of game mobile phone shipments, market shipments are even less optimistic.

An industry insider who has been concerned about the mobile phone industry for a long time revealed to the market that the current shipments of the entire game mobile phone segment are very low, and the shipments of Red Devil and ROG in China are about tens of thousands of units per quarter, and the previous shipments of Black Shark are relatively high, but they are also more than 100,000.

Compared with these brands, Redmi, iQOO and OnePlus and other brands focusing on game performance have a much larger shipment scale, these brands do not call themselves game mobile phones, while paying attention to the game experience, more focused on comprehensive experience, the appearance design is not much different from ordinary mobile phones.

For example, vivo's IQOO, which focuses on game performance, has about 3 million units shipped in a quarter, and annual shipments can reach about 10 million. Xiaomi's Redmi brand, its performance flagship K series, is a pillar series of Xiaomi's shipments, the recently released Redmi K60 series exceeded 300,000 units in 5 minutes.

Although the scale of the game mobile phone market is not optimistic, but compared with the helpless Black Shark, most game mobile phone brands are backed by the parent company with a pillar business, which can ensure the basic survival problems, behind the red devil is Nubia and ZTE, behind ROG there is Asus, behind the rescuer there is Lenovo, and the product line in the past half year is still being updated normally.

The once industry leader Black Shark mobile phone, after Tencent's acquisition of stranded and Xiaomi abandoned the game mobile phone, the product line has been stopped for more than half a year, and many products have been out of stock on e-commerce platforms.

In fact, as the flagship mobile game experience becomes more and more perfect, the game mobile phone market is becoming a false proposition, and the increasingly narrow market is difficult to support many players to survive. As early as 2018, Yu Chengdong, executive director of Huawei and CEO of Terminal BG, commented that simple gaming mobile phones are just a hype concept, just like waterproof mobile phones, now all flagship phones are waterproof, and all mobile phones should have game performance.

(Jiahang and Liu Ming are pseudonyms in the text)