Voice of Panda Science From chip building to car building, mobile phone manufacturers have all fought together

From chip building to car building, mobile phone manufacturers have all fought together

From chip building to car building, mobile phone manufacturers have all fought together The market situation has changed over the past eleven years. By 2021, the top five in China’s smartphone market have all been replaced by OPPO, vivo, Apple, Xiaomi and Honor. Among them, “Mi OV” is also the third and fourth in the…

From chip building to car building, mobile phone manufacturers have all fought together

The market situation has changed over the past eleven years. By 2021, the top five in China’s smartphone market have all been replaced by OPPO, vivo, Apple, Xiaomi and Honor. Among them, “Mi OV” is also the third and fourth in the world. Fourth and fifth. How to stabilize the basic market in the mobile phone field through “high-end” and catch up with the “ever victorious army” in the high-end machine – Apple, is a difficult problem for mobile phone manufacturers.
From core building to car building, mobile phone manufacturers have all fought together

Image source @Visual China

Text | City Boundary, Author丨Lin Xiaxi, Editor丨Li Shuguang

2010 was a pivotal year for China’s smartphone market.

In June of this year, Jobs released the epoch-making iPhone 4, which officially set off a wave of smart phones. In December, Huawei decided not to focus on the operator’s customized phones, but to establish its own brand and improve the strategic position of the mobile phone business.

However, the top mobile phone brands in China that year were Nokia, Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson and Motorola.

But the rise of smartphones is unstoppable, and Chinese smartphone brands are taking center stage one after another.

In 2011, Motorola, the “king” of the feature phone era, was acquired by Google, and Nokia’s market share also declined rapidly. In August, OPPO’s first full-keyboard smartphone X903 was launched, officially entering the smartphone field. In November, vivo released its first smartphone V1. In December, the 1999 yuan Xiaomi Mi Phone 1 went on sale, and three hours later, the number of pre-orders on the official website reached 100,000 units.

Since then, the Chinese smartphone market has experienced explosive growth and a series of violent reshuffles.

In the process, Huawei has written a story of a sudden emergence in the mobile phone industry with its huge R&D investment over the years. For the first time in the second quarter of 2020, it surpassed Samsung in shipments of 55.8 million units and became the world’s number one.

But under U.S. sanctions, the story was paused at its peak. Chips became an inescapable problem for Huawei’s mobile phones, and its shipments quickly dropped out of the top five.

The market situation has changed over the past eleven years. By 2021, the top five in China’s smartphone market have all been replaced by OPPO, vivo, Apple, Xiaomi and Honor. Among them, “Mi OV” is also the third and fourth in the world. Fourth and fifth.

If this is regarded as the process of domestic mobile phone manufacturers from 0 to 1, then it is even more difficult to go from 1 to 10 after that.

How to stabilize the basic market in the mobile phone field through “high-end” and catch up with the “ever victorious army” in the high-end machine – Apple, is a difficult problem for mobile phone manufacturers.

What is even more troublesome for domestic mobile phone manufacturers is that today, when the mobile phone market has changed from incremental to stock competition, finding new growth points, or simply entering a new industry with more potential, has become an urgent and realistic choice.

In this way, “core making”, “folding screen” and “car making” have become the three most important keywords for mobile phone manufacturers in the past year.

01 From car-making to core-making, mobile phone manufacturers have all worked together in the past year

Mobile phone manufacturers may have never been so busy as in 2021-making chips, launching folding screen mobile phones, and building cars, none of which is easy.

From March to December 2021, Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo successively released self-developed chips – Surging C1, V1, Mariana X.

Among them, Xiaomi’s Surging C1 and vivo’s V1 are self-developed image signal processing chips (hereinafter referred to as “ISP”), and OPPO’s Mariana X is a neural network processor dedicated to imaging (hereinafter referred to as “NPU”).

Compared with complex core making, mobile phone manufacturers are more consistent in launching folding screen mobile phones.

In 2021, Xiaomi’s folding screen Mix Fold took the lead, pulling the price to within 10,000 yuan, but the mobile phone is the narrowest, longest, thickest, and heaviest, and subsequent user evaluations are too poor.

OPPO’s Find N “killed the Quartet” at a price of 7,699 yuan, becoming the cheapest and smallest horizontally foldable mobile phone.图片来源@视觉中国

Although the Huawei P50 Pocket released before Christmas Eve is relatively balanced overall, the high price and the absence of 5G still discourage many users.

The Honor Magic V released at the latest did not use the UTG glass screen expected by the outside world, but it relied on Zhao Ming to drop the phone twice on the spot and became a hot search.

The only vivo that has not yet joined the “team”, it is reported that it will take action in early 2022, but there is still no official announcement.

In addition to “tossing” on mobile phones, the larger layout of mobile phone manufacturers in 2021 will naturally include their entry into electric vehicles.

At the Xiaomi conference in March 2021, Lei Jun said that he would put all his achievements and reputation in life to build a car for Mi Fan. Half a year later, Xiaomi Automobile Entity Company was established, with its headquarters in Beijing and its factory in Yizhuang, with a registered capital of 10 billion yuan. It is expected to achieve mass production in the first half of 2024.

Huawei clearly stated that it “does not build cars”, but will help car companies build cars. After the failure of Celis, the AITO M5 has become a smart electric vehicle that Huawei has participated in more deeply and fully, representing Huawei’s capabilities in automotive systems and multiple modules.

CEO Chen Mingyong once said in 2019 that he would not enter the automotive industry at present, but if the entire automotive industry fails to make cars well in the next ten years, OPPO may enter the automotive industry.

But OPPO obviously can’t wait 10 years. In February 2021, OPPO announced a set of automotive patents, all related to autonomous driving technology. In May, it submitted a trademark application for “OCar”, and the outside world has speculated that it has entered the game. In November 2021, it was reported by Indian media that OPPO plans to launch its first pure electric vehicle locally, which is expected to be released in late 2023 or early 2024.

As for vivo, it was rumored that Duan Yongping took the lead and OPPO and vivo jointly built a car, but it was denied by the three parties.

Until December 2021, there was also a report from the Indian media showing that vivo had submitted a trademark application related to electric vehicles, including electric vehicles, electric motorcycles, driverless cars and electric bicycles.

Behind this desperate effort is the year-on-year decline in domestic smartphone shipments for four consecutive years since 2017—from 522 million units in 2016 to 296 million units in 2020, a decrease of 43.31%.

Although relying on the 5G replacement wave, shipments in 2021 finally showed a year-on-year growth, but the fact that the smartphone market has shifted to stock competition is already very obvious.

Therefore, mobile phone manufacturers try to increase prices and profits through the “high-end” route to offset the impact of declining sales, but “high-end” is not easy.

600 US dollars is regarded as the dividing line of high-end mobile phones, equivalent to about 4,000 yuan.

A few years after domestic mobile phone manufacturers shouted the slogan of “high-end”, according to the latest data released by the authoritative market research institution Counterpoint Research, in the second quarter of 2021, Apple’s market share in the global mid-to-high-end smartphone market is as high as 57%, Samsung’s 17%, Huawei dropped from 17% in the same period last year to 6%, OPPO and Xiaomi have 6% and 5% market shares respectively.

Obviously, in addition to Huawei’s “success” at its peak, among Chinese mobile phone manufacturers, Xiaomi and OV still have a long way to go.

02 The high-end road is difficult to walk

Today, when the global mobile phone industry chain is becoming more and more mature and the homogeneity of mobile phones is becoming more and more serious, through the two paths of manufacturing chips and launching folding screen mobile phones, it has become the only way for domestic mobile phone manufacturers to break through the predicament of high-end production.

But these two paths each have their own difficulties.

Since 2021, the chips launched by various mobile phone manufacturers are basically only ISP chips and NPU chips that serve pictures and imaging functions. They are different from the Kirin 9000 that Huawei once built. It is an integrated Soc chip.

If the Soc chip is compared to a complete building, the ISP chip or NPU chip is just a room in the house, responsible for a certain function.

Why not do Soc chips and mostly choose ISP chips?

The reason is that the Soc chip is too difficult and time-consuming and expensive, and it is difficult to achieve it overnight. Today, when mobile phone shooting has become one of the most perceptible functions of users, by improving the computing power of chips in the sub-segment field of photography, the image quality can be further improved, and it has become a more cost-effective, feasible and practical way of thinking.

The task of the ISP chip is to optimize the computing power of pictures and images.

From the perspective of the industrial chain, relevant domestic enterprises have accumulated a certain strength in ISP chip manufacturing, and formed IP that can be reused, which can shorten the design cycle and improve the success rate of chip design, and also reduce the “chip making” of mobile phone manufacturers. ” difficulty.

In addition, Lin Zhi, an analyst at Wit Display, told the market that under the background of lack of cores, core-making belongs to a national movement. The Beijing Stock Exchange and the Science and Technology Innovation Board have provided an exit for investors in the chip industry, which has improved the realization of the market. ability, reducing investment risk.

Switching from ISP chips to core manufacturing is obviously a more secure way, but it also creates an embarrassing situation in which domestic mobile phone manufacturers still cannot compete with mobile phone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung that have the ability to manufacture SoC chips in the short term.

n contrast, the launch of folding screen mobile phones is a more direct move by mobile phone manufacturers on the road to high-end, but there are still a series of problems.

Price is the most obvious. Stress and various foldable materials directly increase the price of folding screen mobile phones – the latest folding screen mobile phones on the market, the starting price is from 7699 yuan to 14999 yuan, the average price is more than 10,000 yuan, while the straight board Smartphones range from thousand yuan to ten thousand yuan.

In terms of weight, the special form of “folding” directly leads to the “overweight” of mobile phones – the “weight” of mainstream candy bar phones is basically controlled between 150-200g, and the folding screen mobile phones are generally around 300g, and the thickness is also 2.5 times that of candy bar phones. About times, when you are holding a phone, someone may ask you why you have two mobile phones?

Of course, users are generally worried about the risk of breakage and damage to the internal screen. The market survey found that the price of the internal screen repair displayed on the official website is 4800 yuan for OPPO Find N, the current discount price of Huawei Mate X2 is 3999, and the price of Honor Magic V The discounted price is 3,579 yuan, and the Xiaomi Mix Fold is 3,600 yuan.

The current official price of Xiaomi MIX Fold has dropped from 9,999 yuan to 6,999 yuan, which is equivalent to more than half the price of a mobile phone to repair a screen.

In addition, there are problems such as screen creases and application software incompatibility, but the biggest problem is that there is no actual application scenario that is really “needed”.

Every important change in the form of mobile phones in the past is actually closely related to technological updates.

The evolution from the big brother in the 1980s to the thin and light PHS in the 1990s is the transition from the 1G to the 2G era. The communication technology tends to mature, and the mobile phone manufacturing process is also developing rapidly. In the 3G era of the 21st century, with the speed of the Internet With the improvement, the rapid transmission of audio and pictures can be realized, and mobile phones are more often used for entertainment, the keyboard gradually disappears, and the screen gradually becomes larger; after that, the screen display technology continues to improve, and concepts such as “full screen” and “under-screen camera” appear one after another.

Now the 5G era is coming, but the specific application of 5G is still quite controversial. What new sparks can this new form of folding screen generate with the high-speed transmission of 5G? Naturally, there is currently no use scenario that convinces most people. Mobile phone manufacturers are promoting At times, they can only “open their minds” or guide them to the “business machine”.

Analyst Lin Zhi believes that there are many reasons for getting together to launch folding screen mobile phones this year: in the market, Samsung has launched a vertical folding screen mobile phone after the original horizontal screen folding mobile phone. From 14,999 yuan to 7,599 yuan, the market has opened up with millions of sales, and domestic mobile phone manufacturers have seen hope.

In terms of supply chain, there have been breakthroughs from the immature and expensive state in the past few years. The number of suppliers of two important components such as folding screens and hinges has increased, and cover components have been localized, opening up opportunities for large-scale promotion of the market. possibility.

At present, mobile phone manufacturers have the layout of folding screen mobile phones from 7,000 yuan to nearly 20,000 yuan, or are testing the acceptance of domestic consumers for this form of mobile phone.

The future of the market is still unknown, but according to the panel supply chain research company DSCC, the shipment of folding screen mobile phones in 2021 will be less than 10 million units, while Canalys predicts that the global smartphone market shipments will reach 14 million in 2021. 100 million units – The proportion of folding screen mobile phones is only about 0.7%, which can be said to be very small.

It is not realistic to rely on the unfinished folding screen mobile phone to support the high-end banner in the short term.

03 Building a car is “playing real”

Compared with the rally-like “core building” and the foldable phone with little effect in the short term, car building has become the theoretically optimal path for mobile phone manufacturers to open the ceiling.

To a certain extent, with global shipments declining, mobile phone manufacturers have realized that it is almost impossible to reverse the market trend by themselves. Before the emergence of revolutionary new technologies, while maintaining the “basic market” of the mobile phone industry through high-endization, it has become a more wise choice to find the next trillion-level market.

Electric vehicles are an ideal entry point.

A research report by Cinda Securities shows that in 2019, the scale of China’s auto and aftermarket market will reach about 10 trillion yuan, while that of mobile phones is less than 1 trillion yuan.

At present, pure electric vehicles only account for 4% of the car market, and it is still in its infancy, and it is not too late to enter the game.

2024 is the mass production time announced by Xiaomi, and 2025 is the time when the legendary Apple car may be mass-produced.

Other mobile phone manufacturers who want to build complete vehicles will be very passive after this time point. If they enter the game as a solution provider like Huawei, they must produce results as early as possible.

Prior to this, most mobile phone manufacturers had already formulated a strategy for deploying IoT, which penetrated into various scenarios in users’ lives through various terminal devices, which has become a new goal pursued by mobile phone manufacturers.

If the car can also become one of many terminal devices, it can not only bind more high customer unit price users, but also obtain richer and more detailed data of such users.

If you have the motivation to build a car, you must also have the ability to build a car.

Domestic smartphone shipments increased from around 95 million in 2011 to around 390 million at the peak in 2018. Behind the rise in volume and price, the number of leading mobile phone manufacturers is relatively fixed, which naturally makes a lot of money.

At the end of 2020, Xiaomi Group had 54.752 billion yuan in monetary funds on its books, ranking 45th among more than 4,600 A-share listed companies – second only to insurance giant China Life and edible oil giant Arowana.

When Xiaomi developed the Surging S1 chip by itself, Lei Jun’s psychological expectations for the chip project were “10 years” and “10 years” this time it was announced that it would invest 10 billion US dollars to build a car.

Compared with traditional automobiles, which take hardware production as the primary consideration, in the era of electric vehicles, in addition to the three-electrical system of hardware, software and ecology have also become important existences, and this part is what mobile phone manufacturers are good at. Electric cars are also called “mobile phones on four wheels”.

 

(Huang Renxun)

Nvidia founder Jen-Hsun Huang once said in an interview: “The business model of automakers will fundamentally change. By 2025, many auto companies are likely to sell cars at prices close to cost and provide value to users mainly through software. .”

On the way for mobile phone manufacturers to build cars, some car companies have already realized that the commonality of car phones and mobile phones is an important opportunity for building an ecosystem, so “flanking from the back” and attacking the mobile phone field has also become a kind of new strategy.

Rumors of Tesla making mobile phones have long been rampant. In the concept machine rumored on the Internet, Tesla’s mobile phone can not only be charged with solar energy, use “Starlink technology” to surf the Internet for free, but also can seamlessly connect with Tesla electric vehicles. .

However, the news and renderings that have been released are not official, and may only be the result of netizens’ wide-open brains, and mobile phone industry analysts believe that most of these technologies are unrealistic.

In contrast, Geely Auto has made more specific moves to make mobile phones.

In September 2021, Geely Auto announced its entry into the mobile phone field and established Xingji Times, with Li Shufu personally serving as chairman. Since then, the mobile phone business has become the focus of its plan to invest 10 billion yuan.

Li Shufu, who is a cross-border mobile phone maker, has great ambitions. As soon as he entered the game, he announced that he would build a global high-end mobile phone project. Currently, he has applied for four trademarks of “comer”, “portable large screen”, “UPON” and “UPUPHONE”. OPPO and other mobile phone companies are poaching people with high salaries and forming their own R&D teams.

The latest news is that Geely may acquire the Meizu mobile phone business, and its subsidiary Xingji Times is in contact with Meizu to discuss the acquisition, but the price has not yet been determined.

Going hand in hand on the two roads of making mobile phones and building cars means that there will be more and more opponents of mobile phone manufacturers.

If “making a core” is an ambush, then “folding screen” is more like a test, which is a passive move by mobile phone manufacturers hoping to keep the “mobile phone territory” through high-end technology.

In contrast, “building a car” is an active attack to seek greater growth space and eliminate anxiety through “self-revolution”.

https://www.tmtpost.com/6001801.html

作者: wanfeng

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