Mobile Phone Manufacturers Gather In The IOT Camp To Open A New Ecological Campaign Of 5G

After several rounds of previews, oppo finally released its relatively complete IOT ecological "family bucket": smart watch, smart TV, smart headset and smart phone.

Based on this, Huawei, Xiaomi and oppo, the domestic mobile phone manufacturers in the head, have officially entered the IOT camp and started the battle for 5g interconnection and integration ecology. Although the deployment of vivo has not yet been completed, according to the previous introduction, its layout will focus on watches, glasses and other fields. Recently, vivo's watch products have been put on the market.

Looking back at the deployment process of the head manufacturers for the Internet of things, Apple was the first to start, while Xiaomi grasped the opportunity and continued this advantage all the way in China. In this year's complex external environment, Xiaomi still stands firmly in the top five of global TV market in the second quarter.

Its core logic is to seize the entrance of future ecology. In the 5g era, more intelligent terminal products can be connected to the network independently, and mobile phones are no longer a single channel to connect people's lives. Therefore, for technology hardware manufacturers, the richer the terminal ecology can cover, the more new growth space can be extended based on this.

Jia Mo, an analyst with canalys, analyzed to the 21st century economic reporter that in the era of IOT, the importance of TV has increased. He even thinks that Xiaomi will be more mature in the strategic control of TV products than other categories, which enables Xiaomi to seize the wind through TV products and usher in the "second spring".

With the help of IOS system, Apple has also locked a large number of users. With these pearls in front, building IOT ecology has become an inevitable choice for traditional mobile phone manufacturers.

So the next question may be, who can create an ecosystem that is more in line with the era of the integration of all things?

Pure mobile phone factory no longer

At the oppo future technology conference 2019 in early 2019, Chen Mingyong, the company's founder and CEO, made a final conclusion: oppo has long been more than a mobile phone company, and smart phones are only the carrier of oppo's service users. In the future, not only oppo, but also the whole industry will not have mobile phone enterprises in a pure sense.

This is undoubtedly based on the current situation of the industry at that time and looking for new business development direction in 5g era.

Xiaomi group is a living example. As of the second quarter of 2020, nearly 30% of the company's revenue comes from "IOT and consumer products". Although the production and transportation rhythm of related products has been slowed down due to the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the decline rate of the company's IOT related revenue is not as large as that of smart phones.

According to the announcement, in the second quarter of 2020, the number of IOT devices (excluding smart phones and notebook computers) connected to the company's IOT platform reached 271.0 million, a year-on-year increase of 38.3%; the related revenue was RMB 15.3 billion, with a year-on-year growth of 2.1%. The slowdown in growth was affected by the epidemic.

Jia Mo analyzed to the reporter that under the influence of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, after a long period of stability, the PC industry has obtained the first significant growth in history; the same is true of television. The home economy has greatly increased the demand for playing games, and accessing TV through ps5 and other game machines has become the demand trend during this period.

"Therefore, TV is not without any demand. The growing demand for screens has always existed. OLEDs and transparent screens may become the factors driving TV replacement. It's just that compared with mobile phones, TV does have a longer change cycle. " Although it seems that the total demand for TV products in some regions of the world is declining, overall, TV is not a lost category, he added.

This is part of the reason why millet can enter the market quickly. Jia Mo pointed out that the multi category strategy is the development trend of the future retail industry, and the essence of mobile phone manufacturers is to do retail channels, so Xiaomi has obvious first mover advantages.

"Xiaomi's rapid access to channels in overseas markets is not only due to low-cost mobile phones, but also leads to low channel profits; the profit of multi category IOT strategy is higher, which leads to the advantages of Xiaomi's IOT products for channels and revenue." He further said that in theory, the IOT strategy should have been used as an auxiliary mobile phone, but in the case of Xiaomi, it has achieved the result that 1 + 1 is greater than 2, and the importance of TV category in the era of IOT is growing day by day.

This was once seen as the driving force for the next future growth of the whole industry after the mobile phone industry has entered the stock age.

However, Liu Bo, vice president of oppo and President of China, pointed out in an interview with reporters after the press conference that oppo's mobile phone business still has a lot of room for growth, and the global business is expected to grow by more than 20% this year.

He pointed out that the core reason why oppo is involved in television business is that it is difficult for a single mobile phone product to bring revolutionary experience to users. "When you want to make leapfrog progress, you must think about the ecology of the integration of all things, and bring new experience through the linkage between products."

The inevitability of entering the TV Red Sea

We all know that the TV industry has reached the "Red Sea" stage: the domestic market scale continues to be stable, and it is difficult to have a substantial growth rate; as the cost of upstream components rises, the selling prices of traditional TV manufacturers are falling one after another - this is not a good sign.

But "heterotopia" is also emerging from the mobile phone field. According to the research of trendforce, the demand for TV products in North America increased by 20% and the delivery schedule of TV brand factories was delayed due to the epidemic situation in the first half of the year. Driven by the effect of the third quarter peak season, the shipment volume of TV products reached a record high of 62.05 million units in a single season, with a quarterly increase of 38.8% and an annual increase of 12.9%.

According to the statistics of the agency, as of the third quarter of 2020, Xiaomi ranked fifth among the world's top five brands in terms of TV delivery, and its annual growth rate of 22.9% exceeded that of LG and Hisense. In addition, according to the data of Ovi cloud, Xiaomi TV shipment in the second quarter of 2020 ranked first in mainland China for six consecutive quarters.

Liu Yushi, senior analyst of cinno research, told the 21st century economic report that Xiaomi TV, with its excellent brand and sales ability, and the low-cost advantage of OEM partners, quickly occupied the low-end market, which has been short of first-line and second-line TV brands for a long time, and has made remarkable achievements in overseas emerging markets. After gaining a firm foothold, it is smooth again

According to the market demand, we will enter the high-end market.

"But as time goes by, this business model can't be used for reference by other mobile phone brands. On the one hand, due to well-known international reasons, the situation of emerging markets represented by India has changed significantly; on the other hand, the domestic market is facing consumption upgrading, so new entrants generally choose to start from a higher starting point. " He continued.

This is consistent with the current strategic choice of Huawei and oppo. Liu Yushi further analyzed that Huawei and oppo, the latecomers, chose to enter the middle and high-end market with thousands to tens of thousands of yuan, and Xiaomi also chose this level of market as a new target after years of low-end operation

Standard.

"In recent years, due to the promotion of the industrial chain, TV has begun to face consumption upgrading, and the sales volume of medium and high-end markets is expected to grow rapidly, which is also conducive to new manufacturers' rapid market share. Traditional domestic TV manufacturers are also actively layout this market, but they are bound to form fierce competition with new entrants. If they fail to win, they may lose the opportunity to enter the high-end market and lose their initiative in the increasingly fierce competition in the low-end market. " He concluded.

It's not easy to get into the TV market. Although oppo's newly released TV products use the high-end chips of MediaTek, and the screens also come from manufacturers who also produce mobile phone screens. In fact, this continues the consistent supply chain ecology of mobile phone manufacturers, but it is more difficult to build software and multi terminal ecology.

Liu Bo told the 21st century economic reporter that the core experience of TV products lies in the image quality and sound quality. Oppo has accumulated a certain amount of technology in blue light products before.

He said frankly that although there are certain levels of overlap between TV and mobile phone products, they are separated like mountains after all. "From the perspective of gap, for example, TV system, I think we are good at TV Android; in terms of screen, it seems that suppliers and products are similar, but the specific business is still different." Liu Bo further analyzed that oppo has the ability to understand hardware products, and after years of development, oppo has accumulated in some chip, memory and other industrial chain links.

"We separate oppo's IOT team from the mobile phone development team, and we need to establish a professional team for this category and root in products. At present, the IOT development team has nearly 1000 people, which means that we must have a long-term investment. " He said.

Liu Yushi told reporters that since mobile phone head manufacturers generally have a large scale and stable number of loyal fans, they usually choose the medium and high-end market that is in line with their mobile phone product positioning in the early stage of TV, and persuade customers to buy with less difficulty, which does not mean that they need to start from the low end at the expense of profits.

At the same time, mobile phone manufacturers have strong supply chain management and control capabilities, and several leading manufacturers have launched cross-border products for many times. TV products themselves are not complex. Although there will be a process of aggregation of ecology, it is actually difficult for mobile phone manufacturers to construct ecological environment.

Pan Xuefei, research manager of IDC China, believes that smart TV needs to make structural adjustment on the traditional pulling force to improve operation efficiency in order to seek "breaking the situation". The emerging stimulus needs to further guide the consumer demand through the diversification of scenarios and functions, and finally form the content entertainment scene as the core and aiot scenario as the accelerator to jointly drive the replacement cycle and market development.

In the pre research process for 5g era, intelligent voice assistant, software platform and IOT development ecology have become the key capabilities that mobile phone manufacturers are generally deploying. This will also become the core of the future test of mobile phone manufacturers' integration and absorption ecology.

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