来源 | 伯虎财经（bohuFN）
Author | Chen Ping'an
If there is an Internet buzzword to describe Huawei's return, the phrase "I feel like everything is back" would be the most appropriate.
Like the previous Mate 60 series, Huawei did not choose to hold a press conference to warm up. Three days after the official announcement that the P series will be upgraded to the "Pura" series, the Huawei Pura 70 Ultra and Huawei Pura 70 Pro were launched at 10:08 in the Huawei Mall. The starting price of the former is as high as 9999 yuan, and the starting price of the latter is 6499 yuan.
In just one minute, the Pura 70 Ultra and Pura 70 Pro phones have been sold out on official channels.
Unlike the Mate 60 series, the Pura 70, as Huawei's second flagship phone after its return, has been given more expectations. Huawei not only announced the brand upgrade of the P series, but also released a warm-up video on official channels. At the same time, it is also different from the Mate 60 series in terms of price. In the past, the pricing of the P-series phones would be lower than that of the Mate series, but this time the Huawei Pura 70 Pro is priced similarly to the Mate 60, and the Ultra version is even more expensive.
It is not difficult to see that Huawei hopes to regain high-end market share through the dual flagship strategy of the Pura series and the Mate series.
In fact, the domestic mobile phone competition pattern has loosened with the return of Huawei.
According to Counterpoint Research data, in the fourth quarter of 2023, Huawei's market share of mobile phones in China has grown from others in the first quarter to 15.2% in third place. In the first six weeks of this year, Huawei surpassed Apple with a market share of 16.5%, second only to vivo.
Recently, Xu Zhijun, vice chairman and rotating chairman of Huawei, said at the Huawei analyst conference that building a HarmonyOS native system is the most critical thing in 2024, and expects that the Mate 70 series can be sold with a "pureblood" HarmonyOS this year.
Whether it is the solution of key hardware, the creation of an operating system ecosystem, or the unique tonality of its own brand, Huawei has demonstrated its competitiveness above other peers.
So the question is, has the battle for China's high-end mobile phone market that has been shouted by peers for several years come to an end?
01 Huawei has assembled a high-end lineup
In the past few years, the high-end play style of the mainstream mobile phone market has been basically determined. In order to cover enough user groups and price ranges, domestic manufacturers generally use dual flagships and medium cups, large cups, and super large cups to distinguish them.
For example, the Mate series usually focuses on bucket performance and pays attention to an all-rounder. The upgraded P series focuses on one image capability. Yu Chengdong also said in the promotional video, "The development history of Huawei's P series is the history of the development of mobile images, and it is also the history of the evolution of technological aesthetics. We use innovative technology to expand the boundaries of moving image, and to integrate art and culture into it."
The Pura70 has indeed made a refreshing change in this camera war. The rear camera adopts a triangular camera island design, replacing the rectangular camera module design of the previous generation of the P series. At the same time, on the basis of the 1-inch outsole sensor, 1-inch sensor displacement stabilization, F1.6 variable aperture and other technologies, it has brought a new design of the rotating telescopic lens structure. This structure is usually used in cameras, but this is the first time it has been used in smartphones.
Guo Tianxiang, senior analyst at IDC China, said, "This is the first product after the P series brand upgrade, and it is also the first P series product after Huawei's return, which means that Huawei's dual flagship product strategy is officially back, and the brand importance of the Pura series has been on par with the Mate series." ”
In terms of sales, the Pura 70 series also means that Huawei's share in China is more guaranteed: it not only covers people who have more needs for images, but also makes up for the sales problem of the Mate series during the replacement period.
After the release of the Huawei Mate 60 and Mate 60 Pro devices last year, the cumulative number of activations reached 17.33 million units. Tianfeng International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo issued a report saying that Pura series shipments are expected to increase by 230% year-on-year to 13 million-15 million units in 2024, and if demand slows down, it is also expected to increase by 150% to 10 million-12 million units.
In the fourth quarter of last year, after the return of the Mate series, Huawei's share of the global high-end market has come to third, rising to 22.8%, and the corresponding Apple has fallen back to below 60%.
Considering Huawei's strong posture in folding screen mobile phones: in 2023, Huawei's folding screen mobile phone shipments will firmly occupy the first place with a market share of 37.4%, and after the release of the Pura 70 series, Huawei has basically completed the full coverage of the high-end market. This also means that Huawei's dominance in the domestic high-end market will be further strengthened.
02 Pura 70 is in the front, and HarmonyOS is in the back
In the past few years, the high-end narrative of domestic mobile phone brands has always been unable to escape two dimensions, one is the Soc chip, and the other is the system.
As the core competitiveness of the current smart phone, these two are not easy to gnaw. Needless to say, chips have a large investment and a long R&D cycle. It is difficult to see results in the short term, and it is difficult to say results in the long term.
According to a report by 36Kr, some industry insiders dismantle the cost of SoC chips: the price of the photomask required for 4nm is 20 million US dollars, and the cost of purchasing IP patents and R&D personnel is 3-5 times that of the mask, which is about 100 million US dollars.
Except for Huawei's early layout, other players, including Samsung, have not been able to achieve the self-development of key SoC chips in a real sense.
Xiaomi cooperated with Lianxin in 2014 to establish Songuo Electronics, and in 2017, it launched its first chip, the surging S1 chip. But in the subsequent iterations, the surging S2 was taped out 4 times in a year, all of which ended in failure, and Xiaomi's core manufacturing plan was temporarily shelved. OPPO's ZEKU was disbanded in a state of regret, and even if Samsung made up Exynos, it had to use Qualcomm because of performance problems.
Since August last year, Huawei has successively released the Mate 60 series, large folding screen mobile phone Mate X5 and other new machines all using Huawei's self-developed chips, which also means that Huawei has broken through the blockade of force majeure and solved the previous "core shortage" problem.
The problem of the system is another dimension. Whether it is Google's Android or Apple's iOS, the reason why it has reached its current status today is not only the research and development of the operating system itself, but also the contributions of countless developers. And the most important factor that can attract developers is profit.
Normally, even with Huawei's brand power, it is difficult to call on peers to do something that reinvents the wheel. However, after experiencing Huawei's sanctions by the United States, not only has Huawei accumulated a huge brand voice, but also formed a consensus among consumers - it needs to build its own operating system. This is also the birth of the HarmonyOS operating system.
In 2021, HarmonyOS replaced the upcoming EMUI 12 and became the operating system for domestic Huawei mobile phones. At the 2021 Huawei Developer Conference, Zhang Ping'an, CEO of HUAWEI CLOUD, said that Huawei has now integrated more than 173,000 applications around the world with HMS Core open capabilities. This figure is far from GMS.
However, with the return of Huawei and its increasingly important market position, joining the HarmonyOS ecosystem is becoming the choice of more and more developers. At the press conference in January this year, Huawei showed the first list of more than 200 companies participating in the development of HarmonyOS native applications, covering a large number of high-frequency applications in China, such as iQiyi and China Merchants Bank.
At the recent Huawei analyst conference, Xu Zhijun said that he hopes to fully migrate 5,000 applications that are used on smartphones more than 99% of the time to the HarmonyOS native operating system.
With the improvement of the operating system ecosystem, Huawei continues to compete with its competitors.
03 Write at the end
Although Huawei has maintained a sharp offensive momentum since returning to the high-end market, not only domestic manufacturers have received images, but Apple, the biggest beneficiary in the past three years, has also been planted in the domestic market. Apple's sales in China fell 24 percent in the first six weeks of the year, even with frequent promotions in the Chinese market.
However, for Huawei, there are still many challenges.
On the one hand, there is market competition. Although it has promoted a breakthrough in the domestic industrial chain, Huawei's competition at the hardware level is still not optimistic, such as chip capabilities. As domestic counterparts continue to increase their high-end, there is no shortage of flagship mobile phones with sufficient product power and touching prices on the market.
At the same time, AI mobile phones have also become a new trend in the mobile phone industry. Xiaomi, Honor, vivo, OnePlus, Nubia and other brands are vying to release new AI mobile phone products. From high-end to mid-range, from thousand-yuan machines to hundred-yuan machines, the "sinking" speed of AI mobile phones is faster than the outside world expected. Competition is also shifting to new dimensions.
On the other hand, due to the coercion of Android overseas and the blockade of the United States, Huawei can almost only focus on domestic energy. To some extent, this also means that Huawei will be more affected by the single market.
If you want to be your old self, Huawei still needs to work hard.
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