As we all know, for today's smartphone industry, high-end, flagship products have become the hottest theme in this market. At the same time, this also means that the market competition pattern of major mobile phone manufacturers is no longer limited to simple "heap configuration" and "cost performance", but must make unique, difficult to imitate cutting-edge technology and signature functional features.
Obviously, to achieve this, manufacturers really spend a lot of time, manpower and material resources, and sustainable and evolutionary self-developed technology is an indispensable key factor.
After we pay attention to the patent applications of related companies and the progress of self-developed technologies, we find that OPPO seems to have become a "sudden" force in recent years.
Unknowingly, OPPO has become a "patent manufacturer"
According to data released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), from 2019 to 2022, OPPO has ranked in the top ten in the international PCT patent application ranking for four consecutive years and ranked second in the number of patent applications by Chinese enterprises for four consecutive years.
According to the data released by the State Intellectual Property Office, from 2018 to 2021, the number of patent authorizations of OPPO among all domestic enterprises has also always ranked in the top three.
This is not over, public data in Europe and the United States shows that OPPO's patent applications in Europe ranked 17th in the world in 2022, and in the United States, the number of patents applied by OPPO in 2022 also entered the annual TOP50 of all companies.
What is this concept? To put it simply, in just a few years that the outside world may not realize, OPPO has begun their global patent layout.
In fact, according to relevant data released by OPPO, as of March 31, 2023, its global patent applications have exceeded 90,000 and the number of global patent authorizations has exceeded 46,000. Among them, the number of invention patent applications exceeded 82,000, and invention patent applications accounted for more than 90% of all patent applications.
Not using consumers as guinea pigs, OPPO has its own insistence
Of course, simply comparing the "number of patents" does not fully represent the scientific research level of a manufacturer, nor does it necessarily reflect the technical competitiveness in the actual product.
But when we look at the self-developed technologies and functions that OPPO has developed in its own consumer electronic products in recent years, we will find that they are even more impressive and "different" than the number of OPPO's patents.
On the one hand, OPPO is quite "clear" in the direction of self-developed technology, basically focusing on several prominent areas such as 5G, video, AI, imaging, fast charging, and display. For example, the "Super N28" multi-antenna technology that many European and Canadian mobile phones now have, such as the self-developed Mariana X image NPU chip, and the Find X6 series just released some time ago, which can expand the dynamic range of photos to eight times the previous "super light and shadow image engine" and "photonic matrix technology", are all OPPO self-developed technology models that have been successfully implemented in recent years.
But on the other hand, looking at these OPPO's own technologies, it is not difficult to find that while the direction is "specialized", OPPO tends to be more inclined to "one-step" from the beginning, and make industry-leading indicators on the mass production results of the first generation of self-developed technologies, rather than "starting from scratch" and then slowly iterating.
And a typical example here is "Mariana X". As we all know, in recent years, many mobile phone manufacturers have launched their own self-developed image chips. But counting these chips will find that most of them are just simple "pure ISPs" with no independent cache and no support for AI computing at the beginning, and they are relatively simple in architecture.
But OPPO is not, they have come up with a multi-function image NPU with built-in "ISP + NPU + memory controller + independent cache" from the beginning, and even in order to achieve such a complex design, they have specifically found TSMC to use a 6nm process for production.
For example, in the R & D and manufacturing strategy of folding screen mobile phones, although some manufacturers choose to launch mass production products early in 2019, in the face of consumers' complaints about the reliability of these early models, while selling, while improving. However, OPPO's method is to first only use early technology internally for various explorations and trial production, until the accumulation of industry-leading hinge design, in 2022 to launch the first folding screen model Find N, and became a hit.
Of course, from the perspective of common sense, launching "self-developed products" early, even if the technology is not perfect and the user experience is not good, can always bring advantages in market publicity. On the one hand, this is because consumers tend to have a higher tolerance for the company's self-developed technology, on the other hand, consumers who pay attention to relevant information will obviously pay more than the people who actually pay for "crabs", so even if the new technology is not easy to use, its positive publicity effect can overshadow negative user reviews.
But even so, OPPO still chose to "hold" the immature technology in its own laboratory, and only presented more perfect results to consumers. From this point of view, OPPO not only attaches importance to the "quantity" of self-developed technology, but also shows considerable proportionality in business strategy.
Actively participating in patent licensing, OPPO advocates "technology for good"
Presumably, many friends know that enterprises have spent huge costs on technology self-research, and the most fundamental purpose is to enhance the market competitiveness of products and promote the improvement of their own industry status. However, for the field of consumer electronics, sometimes "self-respect" is not necessarily the most responsible way to truly benefit the industry and consumers.
At this point, OPPO can be said to think very clearly. For example, as early as March 2020, they joined the IoT patent licensing platform Avanci, through which they licensed global 3G and 4G wireless communication standard essential patents to the IoT and Internet of Vehicles markets.
In May 2021, OPPO also joined the HEVC Advance patent pool. This also means that OPPO's self-developed HEVC/H.265 standard essential patents will automatically enter the scope of the patent pool, which is convenient for other manufacturers to obtain all patent licenses at one time.
Not to mention, as the earliest manufacturer in the mobile phone industry to carry out the "self-developed fast charging" technology layout, OPPO has so far opened the relevant patent licenses of VOOC flash charging to more than 40 enterprises, and since 2021, OPPO has further expanded the relevant technology to more scenarios including home, office, vehicle, and public places through the "flash charging ecological partner program".
To be honest, if you follow OPPO's developer activities in recent years, you must remember that "technology for good" is a concept that they have often emphasized in formal settings in recent years. From the product level, it refers to OPPO's hope to use its own technology to bring consumers a more comfortable and reassuring life experience; But from the perspective of brand concept, why is this not a kind of "self-made" of OPPO for its own technology research and development direction and the use of self-developed technology?
It is clear that OPPO is carving out their own future at their unique pace.
[Some pictures in this article come from the Internet]