The recent OPPO has been hurt. In addition to the small-screen folding Find N3 Flip was "mistakenly injured" by Huawei Mate 60, the "accessory product" OPPO Watch 4 Pro was silent.
However, from the details in the press conference, it can be found that after many major changes, the precarious OPPO IoT business seems to have found a new direction.
For OPPO Watch 4 Pro, in addition to a simple introduction to the appearance, the core selling point is almost all around smart health. Before this, OPPO has also held a series of Watch communication meetings many times, and has repeatedly focused on smart health, and Zeng Zijing, the head of OPPO Health Lab, has also frequently stood on the platform.
Earlier, OPPO released the OHealth H1 home smart health detector, appeared at various medical and health industry conferences, and shouted the slogan of "taking health as a lifelong career".
On the contrary, other businesses in OPPO IoT, such as TVs, smart cameras, smart litter boxes, smart door locks, etc., are basically bad news, and even Li Kaixin, head of the IoT business group, has recently left.
OPPO IoT, which was already one step slower, is now less vibrant. Fortunately, under the general trend of "Healthy China", residents' demand for health is increasing, and OPPO has a huge user base, which can give full play to its traffic advantages, take smart watches as the basic disk, and gradually spread the layout.
But health has never been a low-threshold, low-investment, low-risk industry, OPPO to cut into the IoT ecological construction, what preparations has OPPO made?
Traditional IoT sunset
OPPO's entry into the IoT field began in 2018, which is a latecomer compared with Huawei and Xiaomi. At this year's developer conference, OPPO announced a new strategy based on the era of 5G + integration of all things.
Slogans quickly translated into action. In January 2019, OPPO established the Emerging Mobile Terminal Division to lay out 5G+ and IoT platforms, and launched its first IoT device, the wireless noise canceling headset OPPO Enco Q1, in September of the same year; Since then, according to the fast pace of new products released every 3 months, TWS (true wireless headphones) Enco Free and OPPO Watch have been launched one after another.
After more than a year of testing the waters, in October 2020, OPPO unveiled two smart TVs S1 and R1 at the press conference, announcing that it would officially extend its business to the field of color TVs. This series of actions is regarded by the outside world as a signal to accelerate its layout in the IoT ecosystem.
However, after two years of high investment and rapid development, the IoT business has not brought positive returns to OPPO. It is reported that OPPO's IoT business sector has been in a state of loss, amounting to hundreds of millions.
Aware of the crisis, OPPO upgraded its IoT business unit to an IoT business group in 2021, and at the same time divided its organizational structure into three divisions, namely wearable (watches, bracelets), smart display (TVs) and audio (headphones), which are independent development and self-financing. Since then, the gap between different lines of business has quickly become apparent.
According to Oviyun.com data, OPPO TV has a market share of less than 0.3% in 2022, and some internal employees bluntly said, "I feel that my company is the biggest customer, and the conference room in the previous building was used by the company's (made) TV."
Entering 2023, the grapevine news of the dismantling of the TV business is frequent, but OPPO has always insisted that the TV business is currently operating normally. However, the fact is that the latest product range was launched as early as April 2022. This is obviously out of line with the rhythm of the entire TV industry pushing new ones, giving people a feeling of clearing inventory.
The current situation of OPPO's TV business seems to verify Duan Yongping's judgment that year, "I don't understand why OPPO will produce TVs."
Relying on the huge number of mobile phone users, OPPO's headset and wearable device business is quite stable. According to Canalys data, OPPO's TWS headset has entered the top five in China. Wearable devices are also a must-have SKU for current mobile phone manufacturers, with a high unit price, which is an indispensable part of the ecology.
Just to make the IoT ecosystem bigger, it is definitely not enough to rely on TWS headsets. And the TWS sales of mobile phone manufacturers generally pull each other with mobile phone products, and with the contraction of global mobile phone shipments, the increment of TWS and wearable devices may be difficult to have too high growth.
OPPO, which has been slow to open the IoT situation, has also tried other directions, and in August 2022, it launched a smart litter box co-branded with UBTECH's brand AIRROBO air radish. In addition, OPPO has also released the first smart fully automatic door lock, but these products have not become a real explosion in the market.
In the view of "new knowledge of science and technology", OPPO's five-year IoT journey, in addition to the necessary SKUs, has been in a state of exploration for a long time, looking for differences with Xiaomi, Huawei and other peers, but has never been able to break through and fall to this point. It is worth noting that in the past two years, or smart watches have accumulated a certain user base, OPPO's IoT business has found a new main line and gradually moved closer to the direction of smart health.
Find life in a different direction
OPPO's path to "seeking medical treatment" dates back to early 2021, before the separation of the IoT division. At that time, the relevant team was called "OPPO Health Lab", and the head of Zeng Zijing had led the management of Apple Watch sensor health product design and related services at Apple. According to official sources, the health laboratory is mainly to support the development of OPPO hardware, software, health products and related services.
From a positive point of view, the idea of OPPO's health business should be to take hardware carriers and software applications as the transformation path, which can be understood as multi-service and hardware combination to increase selling points. However, with the bad luck of the IoT business, OPPO's emphasis on the health business is quite reversed.
A clear contrast is that the size of the health business team is about 500 people, while the entire IoT business group has only about 600 employees, and it is also in a storm of layoffs. A more intuitive embodiment is that OPPO Watch, the main product of the IoT business department, is also frequently announced by Zeng Zijing with several product directors.
Through the adjustment of the publicity direction of several products in recent years, it can also be seen that the previous generations are still based on intelligence and communication, and the OPPO Watch 4Pro is basically related to smart health. For example, only one of the six selling points of OPPO Watch 3Pro is health-related, and six of the ten reasons to choose OPPO Watch 4Pro are health-oriented.
Even OPPO's main camp mobile phone products also have the meaning of taking the road of health. For example, the OPPO Find X6 Pro introduces features such as heart rate monitoring and sleep monitoring.
Of course, OPPO officials also said that because wearable devices can provide continuous user data, they are the most important hardware, but they will not be limited to wearable devices, so they are also trying to innovate. For example, the home health device OHealth H1 was launched at the end of last year.
In terms of software, OPPO has developed the Health Research Kit tool suite, which is mainly aimed at health industry practitioners, which can help health researchers and medical institutions provide data support and organizational management.
In September last year, Li Kaixin, then head of IoT, said that OPPO's goal is to achieve intelligent collaboration with the future of big health, including connecting wearable devices, body fat scales, blood pressure monitors, treadmills and other sports and monitoring equipment into OPPO's ecosystem, and then using OPPO's software algorithms to detect and analyze data between multiple terminal devices to give corresponding guidance, and reach cooperation with health sports vertical enterprises and professional medical institutions to achieve full-link smart health from monitoring to treatment.
According to various indications, after the failure of multiple breakthroughs such as TVs, litter boxes, and door locks, smart health and household medical devices are likely to become OPPO's next focus in the IoT ecosystem.
Long-term investment in "medicine" cannot be stopped
The focus and style of different enterprises in the layout of the medical and health track are completely different, which has a lot to do with the characteristics and positioning of the enterprise itself. Compared with traditional medical and pharmaceutical companies, OPPO, an Internet intelligent hardware company, has more obvious advantages and disadvantages in the health field.
Although OPPO's layout of medical and health is almost from scratch, as mentioned above, it has a huge user base and a sound offline experience store channel, which can provide customer resources, technology research and development, brand influence, capital and other aspects of support when developing health business.
In addition, OPPO's approach in the health field is to improve its own health ecology through two basic points of software and hardware, which is more conducive to forming a closed loop than enterprises with a single software and hardware strength.
However, the reality that must also be recognized is that whether it is heart rate measurement, sleep monitoring, or blood oxygen monitoring and other technologies, it is not difficult to develop mature technologies. More professional medical products and services have different requirements for technology and standards, and require strict access review. This will increase the difficulty and cycle of research and development, OPPO is currently better at combining preventive technology with hardware equipment, and lacks more professional experience in medical device research and development and certification.
In fact, peers such as Xiaomi and Huawei have also set their sights on this cake. OPPO only obtained the Class II medical device registration certificate through the ECG algorithm in 2022, nearly two years later than Xiaomi and Huawei. In addition, OPPO still lacks medical device research and development and certification, and the process is obviously lagging behind other peers. Zeng Zijing also said that it will not enter the field of hospital devices or Class III medical devices in the short term, which seems to prove that OPPO cannot break industry barriers in the short term.
At the commercialization level, medical health requires long-term investment. Even if it is not compared with traditional leaders such as Siemens and Philips, OPPO can only be regarded as a junior player in front of its peers, and it is still in the stage of large capital investment and product research and development, and it is more necessary to find the most suitable segment, and invest enough energy and time, and maintain the flexibility and autonomy of the business line.
Otherwise, OPPO's ZEKU may be a lesson in the past. ZEKU, founded in 2019, was suddenly dissolved not long ago, and one of the main reasons was interpreted as that the research and development of chips has been in a state of large capital investment for a long time and does not see a return. The medical and health business is generally in a long-term loss state, which may consume OPPO's cash flow and energy, and how much patience OPPO maintains is still unknown.
Looking at OPPO's layout in IoT, it is not only smart health, but also covers entertainment, production, learning and other aspects with the help of Pantanal's intelligent cross-terminal system and its various terminal devices. This idea of scene division seems to be separate and can form a joint force, but it is only in the vision stage at present, and how much effort is needed to make it shine into reality, which is inevitably a story that is easier said than done.