【Tidal Business Review/Text】
As an office "fashionista", Wendy has added a new fashion item for himself - folding mobile phones.
"No girl can refuse a small and stylish folding phone, I was thrilled for a long time, and finally bought one." Lifting his folding phone, Wendy's eyes were full of love.
But a few words from a colleague quickly poured cold water on Wendy, "This appearance is the same as the previous flip phone, the current folding screen mobile phone technology is not fully mature, there are creases for a long time, the maintenance is troublesome, the price is high, and many APP have not yet adapted, the folding screen mobile phone is purely a new electronic toy." ”
In 2013, Samsung first proposed the concept of a foldable mobile phone, and no one thought that a screen could have a change in form. Until 2019, Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X were released and listed one after another, which not only opened the wave of innovation of mobile phone screen technology, but also brought new topics and opportunities to the mobile phone market that has lacked "novelty" for a long time.
Since 2021, Xiaomi, OPPO, Honor, and VIVO have successively brought their own "folding works" to consumers. At the beginning of this year, the news that Apple obtained a patent for folding screen technology also triggered market speculation about Apple's folding screen products.
Whether it is Samsung, Huawei, which has been laid out early, or the "Rongmi OV" of the latecomer, or the "ready" Apple, the folding screen seems to have become a new trend in future mobile phones.
According to Counterpoint's latest research, the global smartphone market remained under pressure in the fourth quarter of 2022, with shipments down 18% year-over-year, the lowest level since 2013, despite a 1% month-over-month increase in shipments to 303.9 million units.
For mobile phone manufacturers who urgently need "freshness" to stir up consumers' desire to buy, can folding screens really become their "life-sustaining medicine"?
01 From clap cover to full screen, the mobile phone industry needs "new stories"
If fashion is a reincarnation, then so is mobile phones. For example, from the perspective of industrial design alone, it is difficult not to recall the flip phone that has been eliminated by the times.
In 1999, the first real flip phone - Motorola 328C, weighing only 95 grams, completely changed the image of people's impression of "big brick" mobile phones, and then dual-screen, color screen, large screen and other screen upgrades were applied one by one on the flip phone.
Fifteen years ago, flip phones were arguably one of the most fashionable products of the time. In the years since, the mobile phone industry has also ushered in a hundred flowers, the style of mobile phones is not only limited to clamshell or straight board, sliding cover, full keyboard, rotating screen mobile phones are also popular on the market. At that time, there were many mobile phone brands on the market, Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry, Gionee, BBK, OPPO... It is not only mobile phone styles that bloom, but also mobile phone brands.
As we gradually move towards the information age of the Internet of Everything, the value of mobile phones has also changed from a simple human communication tool to an information bearer, and consumers have begun to pursue larger screen display and more convenient control. As a result, touch full-screen mobile phones began to "take off".
There is a sentence in "The Three-Body Problem": "I destroy you, it has nothing to do with you", just like the items that have been popular in every era in the mobile phone market, "destruction" and "new life" always alternate.
It's just that in this era of accelerating the iteration of consumer demand, the mobile phone industry seems to have collectively fallen into a "involution" of creativity and freshness, and the "agglomeration" of technology and production capacity has also made mobile phone consumer brands more and more concentrated.
In the face of "squeeze toothpaste" innovation and increasingly similar products, we can't help but ask, where did the "new story" of the mobile phone industry go?
02 Mobile phone manufacturers who can't tell new stories can only rely on "folding"?
After the mobile phone form changed from dynamic to static, our imagination of mobile phones seems to be limited to the straight board, and obviously, mobile phone manufacturers are also the same.
Users pay attention to mobile phones mainly in photography, screen refresh rate, battery life, performance, and body design, and these points have also become a "short encounter" place for mobile phone manufacturers.
From the early years of charging life, chips, memory, to puzzle photography and even the thickness of the fuselage, mobile phone manufacturers this kind of pile to the extreme after the inner roll, can only be said to be "squeeze toothpaste" innovation, consumers have long been accustomed to it, it is difficult to stimulate their replacement demand. Behind this is the fatigue of breakthrough technological innovation in the mobile phone industry.
In 2022, the label of "folding" has successfully attracted the attention of the whole country again, and even become the wind vane of the industry.
As early as 2018, "Royole Technology", a technology manufacturer in Shenzhen that mainly researches flexible display panels, has released the world's first folding screen mobile phone FlexPai. Because it is not a mobile phone manufacturer, the company's popularity is relatively small, so the market response at that time was not large, but it also marked that the folding screen mobile phone achieved a leap from 0 to 1.
The real sense of opening the market is the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Fold in 2019, so that the folding screen mobile phone is seen by more people and attracted by this novel sense of technology.
It seems that the era of folding screen mobile phones has arrived.
Major mobile phone manufacturers have high hopes for this new track. In addition to Samsung, in 2019, Huawei led domestic mobile phone manufacturers to launch the first folding screen mobile phone, Huawei Mate X. In 2021, Xiaomi and OPPO have successively released self-developed folding screen mobile phones MIX Fold and Find N, trying to seize the domestic market first. Honor and VIVO followed closely behind, entering the game with new products Magic V and X Fold in the first half of 2022. Even the "former overlord" Motorola revealed in July 2022 that the new generation of Motorola folding screen is on the way.
According to IDC statistics, in the fourth quarter of 2022, China's single-quarter shipments of folding screen products exceeded 1.1 million units, and the annual shipment volume was nearly 3.3 million units, a year-on-year increase of 118%. According to the DSCC report, shipments of folding screen mobile phones will increase by 30% in 2023 and are expected to bring the next wave of replacement.
Folding screen mobile phones not only bring new opportunities to the market, but also provide new opportunities for "Rongmi OV" to enter the high-end market for the low-end market.
Although I got a ticket to the high-end game, it may not be easy to gain a foothold. Canalys data shows that foldable phones shipped 14.2 million units in 2022, of which Samsung shipped nearly 12 million units. Huawei ranked second, with shipments of less than 2 million units, while OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi and Honor shipped less than 1 million units in 2022.
Today, in the folding screen mobile phone market, Samsung still occupies an unshakable high position, even Huawei, which entered the game almost at the same time, can only look back. For Rongmi OV, the high-end market is an opportunity and a "difficult" hard bone.
Since the birth of the first Apple mobile phone in 2007, smart phones have developed to the 16th year, and major mobile phone manufacturers have also rolled themselves into the homogenization "quagmire" while volume configuration, especially in recent years, smart phones have not made qualitative breakthroughs, even if it is Apple.
In the mobile phone industry with serious involution and serious homogenization, the folding screen, a rather topical "new product", has undoubtedly brought "life-sustaining medicine" to mobile phone manufacturers who have no new story to tell. It's just that whether this "medicine" can really last life, and how long it can last, the answer seems to be unknown.
03 2023, who is buying folding screen phones?
"Last year's Double 11, just in time for a brand's 'previous generation' folding mobile phone has a large discount, so I placed an order with the mentality of early adopters, but to be honest, in fact, I have paid attention to this form of mobile phone, but the price was too expensive before I was willing to buy."
"I was fortunate to have a folding screen mobile phone for a while, which was very convenient to use, but then I accidentally broke the screen and never used it again. Why not fix it? Because the money for repairing the screen of the phone is enough for me to buy a new phone. ”
"At the beginning, it was very strange, I can't wait to use it every day, split screen to watch videos, split screen chat, split screen work... Very interesting! But after a while, it still returned to computers, tablets, what equipment to do. Folding the screen is convenient, but working and watching videos, which require eyes to stare at the screen for a long time, must be a computer with a larger screen. ”
"I have experienced it in the store before, but it did not stimulate the idea of changing the camera, because I think that in essence, the folding screen is a little bigger, and there is no substantial change at present, and it is too big, and my hand is not easy to hold."
......
The above is the answer to the folding screen mobile phone that [Tidal Business Review] learned from friends around, and it is not difficult to find out from these feedbacks: high price, expensive maintenance, weak substitution, freshness drive... It is still a "hurdle" that folding screen mobile phones cannot bypass.
The phone makers are reveling about this "great" innovative product, and the attitude of this consumer is not even as excited as when Apple's new phone is released.
The mood is contrasting, and the market has the answer. According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the total shipment of mobile phones in the domestic market in 2022 will accumulate 272 million units. According to data released by international data company IDC, China's folding screen market shipped nearly 3.3 million units for the year, a year-on-year increase of 118%, a higher than expected growth rate. But in fact, the seemingly promising folding screen mobile phone shipments accounted for only 1.2% of the total.
When mobile phone manufacturers are working on folding screens, consumers feel a "general trend" that is not strong, the fundamental reason is that folding screen mobile phones do not make consumers feel the need to change, in the eyes of consumers this is just a new electronic product.
History is always strikingly similar, we go back in time to a few years ago, curved screen mobile phones were once considered the "mainstream" of the future, and how many of its voices are still on the market today? It is also the main high-end when he debuted, but now the price has fallen to 1,000 yuan.
Let's return to the consumer side, according to a data from the ZDC Data Research Center, consumers only pay attention to mobile phones above 5,000 yuan for 10.21%. This also means that today's folding screen mobile phones of more than 10,000 yuan are still the choice of a small number of people. If folding screen mobile phones want to completely open up consumer demand, price exploration will be a necessary means.
This goes back to the core technology of folding screen mobile phones: hinges and flexible OLED panels. Whether the hinge technology passes the test is related to the degree of folding, creases, and more directly determines the service life of the panel. To improve the quality and user experience of mobile phones, it is not only necessary to innovate in folding technology, but also to reduce costs through industrial chain upgrades.
The Huawei and OPPO folding screen mobile phones released in December 2021 have both been priced below 10,000 yuan. CITIC Securities had predicted that with the upgrading of the industrial chain, the mainstream price band of folding screen mobile phones is expected to drop to 5000~8000 yuan in the future. But that figure still exceeds the budgets of mainstream consumers.
In brand marketing practice, price, as an important part of a product, determines the efficiency of value flow between brand and consumers. And the price is determined by the cost, so a relatively mature commercial consumer goods category must experience a bottom-up and top-down "self-revolution". Exchange market scale for supply chain cost reduction, and at the same time reverse through low-cost and low-price products to obtain the market.
But the above value analysis has a basis, that is, the product is excellent and constantly innovative, and the folding screen mobile phone that is in the "product growth correction period" seems to have a long way to go.
Recently, Wendy changed back to the mobile phone he used to use, "At that time, I bought the folding screen out of freshness, but after a long time, many apps cannot be adapted, and the experience is very general, or the previous mobile phone is more convenient." The appearance of the folding screen really impresses me, but it is quite unnecessary to spend 10,000 pieces to buy a 'beautiful waste' to go home. Wendy awkwardly shared.
You see, business is like that.
*The image in this article is from the Internet
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