Cheng Gang, President of iQOO Global Market: The return of Huawei mobile phones is a good thing, and the market has been picking up
Source of this article: Times Finance Author: Wang Ting
The scene of the press conference Source: Times Finance
On the evening of November 7, iQOO held the first offline new product launch conference of this year in Guangzhou, and released the iQOO 12 series mobile phones, with a price starting at 3999 yuan.
The iQOO 12 series is equipped with the third-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform and the self-developed e-sports chip Q1, focusing on upgrading game visual effects and imaging capabilities.
After the press conference, Luo Feng, vice president of iQOO products, was interviewed by Times Finance and other media. He revealed that iQOO has two teams, namely the chip technology team and the game technology team, the former is jointly built with vivo, with more than 300 people, and the game technology team mainly serves iQOO, with nearly 100 people.
Cheng Gang, President of iQOO Global Marketing, expressed his confidence in the mobile phone market and the iQOO 12 series, "We can confidently tell you that the stock volume will definitely increase compared with the previous generation, and as for how much it has increased, you can look back and see the market results." ”
Cheng Gang, President of IQOO Global Market Source: iQOO
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) report, in the third quarter of 2023, China's smartphone market shipped about 67.05 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 6.3%, but with the launch of a number of explosive new products since August, China's smartphone market has picked up, and the attention of all sectors of society to smartphones is significantly higher than in the first half of the year, and consumer demand has improved.
The chip technology team has more than 300 people
iQOO is a sub-brand of vivo, which was announced in February 2019 and has been nearly five years ago, and the core selling point of the product has always been gaming performance.
According to the information of the press conference, the first self-developed e-sports chip Q1 launched by iQOO this time achieves ultra-high resolution and ultra-high frame rate concurrency, and cooperates with the self-developed e-sports engine to provide the highest 2K resolution display effect for more than 35 head games and 144 frames for more than 100 games.
Luo Feng revealed that the core algorithms and IPs in the self-developed e-sports chip Q1 are all self-developed, and the core point of breakthrough lies in ultra-high image quality and continuous super-resolution.
He said that iQOO has two teams, namely the chip technology team and the game technology team. The iQOO game technology team starts from consumer needs and future trends, studies how the future technology route will evolve, and does a lot of rehearsals in advance.
Luo Feng explained that in order to achieve super-resolution and super-frame, the frame rate must be particularly stable, and the power consumption problem cannot be avoided, and the algorithm and hardware must be matched to maximize the energy efficiency ratio.
Luo Feng, Vice President of iQOO Products Source: iQOO
"There may be some (third-party) algorithms that can run on the SOC platform, but the power consumption is completely uncontrollable, either the image quality and frame rate have gone up, but they can't be stabilized, or the image quality can't rise at all, which is the core difference. ”
According to Luo Feng, the idea of iQOO is to grasp the needs of consumers, find the right algorithm, and then match the hardware architecture. Once iQOO finds that there is a good algorithm that can improve performance and can have more efficient performance, it will definitely optimize and adjust it at the chip level through the combination of software and hardware.
He bluntly said that the early investment in the self-developed chip Q1 is relatively large, and it will continue to iterate and evolve in the future. In the future technical direction, iQOO will take chips and algorithms as the core force to do a thorough and good job.
"iQOO positioning will not change"
"In the past, iQOO did not meet the needs of users particularly well in terms of design and image, but the iQOO 12 series has met... The performance track is very volatile, which shows that users have a strong demand for extreme performance. ”
This time, in addition to the self-developed e-sports chip, imaging capabilities are also the core selling point of the iQOO 12 series, iQOO Global Marketing President Cheng Gang made a key analysis at the press conference, he introduced, iQOO 12 series is equipped with a new customized 1/1.3-inch 50 million pixel light-chasing main camera and flagship-level 3X periscope telephoto, with three cameras and five focal lengths.
He analyzed that image is a common demand of users, taking pictures is a high-frequency use scenario of mobile phones, and many cool customers who often play games will also ask iQOO to do a better job of taking pictures. The iQOO 12 series image capabilities come from vivo, but the difference is that many iQOO users will run at night, ride at night, and camp, and demand higher frequencies in sports and low-light scenes, so they need to do better in these aspects.
Cheng Gang said that the improvement of iQOO mobile phone imaging capabilities and the change of appearance design do not mean that it will be transformed, "iQOO's positioning will not change, we are still making a top-performance, smooth and easy-to-use mobile phone for users who love e-sports and games." ”
Recently, vivo released the Blue Heart model, including a 1 billion model mainly for device-side scenarios. During the interview, Luo Feng also talked about the blue heart model.
"(vivo end-side large model) capabilities must be gradually implemented on the iQOO flagship model, which is an inevitable trend, but the landing process is step by step, depending on the design of specific functions, how to interact more efficiently, and which functions do bring efficiency improvement in the actual application scenarios of consumers, rather than trouble. ”
Luo Feng believes that the device-side large model may have a fundamental impact on the interaction mode of mobile phones, and voice may become the mainstream interaction mode in the future, which has a huge opportunity behind it.
There are no specific KPIs for business goals
Cheng Gang expressed confidence in iQOO's follow-up market performance.
He mentioned that since the second quarter of this year, the overall economic environment has shown signs of recovery, which may bring favorable changes to all walks of life, and the mobile phone industry is no exception. Therefore, he believes that next year the smartphone industry still has a chance to grow on the basis of this year.
Compared with the first half of the year, iQOO's market share has fluctuated, and in Cheng Gang's view, market share does not represent all, IQOO is more concerned about user satisfaction, word of mouth, etc., as well as the satisfaction of upstream and downstream suppliers, sellers and other partners.
"As for future business goals, we don't have specific KPIs. ”
Cheng Gang said bluntly that this does not mean that iQOO takes a step by step, iQOO has its own development plan, including product design and manufacturing, price, share targets, etc., he will look at sales data every day, and also care about market share, but this is not the only indicator of his work effectiveness.
In his opinion, iQOO has come to this year, and its share in the overall smartphone market is still very small, but in the field of expertise, in a specific user group, the share is not bad, and it has initially gained a firm foothold, "iQOO has only been established for 5 years until March next year, and now it has only been established for more than 4 years, and we have accumulated nearly 40 million users in the Chinese market." ”
Cheng Gang said that there is still a long way to go, and iQOO will go step by step at its own pace.
It is worth mentioning that the return of Huawei's 5G mobile phone has stirred up the Chinese smartphone market, Cheng Gang said in an interview that this is a good thing for the industry, which can bring more vitality and innovation, and will not have a greater impact on the sales of the iQOO market, because there is a large difference between the two target customer groups.