In Q1 2022, the total shipments of mobile phones in China totaled 69.346 million, down 29.2% year-on-year From China Academy of Communications

The following is the In Q1 2022, the total shipments of mobile phones in China totaled 69.346 million, down 29.2% year-on-year From China Academy of Communications recommended by recordtrend.com. And this article belongs to the classification: Android, iPhone, Intelligent mobile phone, Mobile devices.

The ups and downs of the industry are the most regrettable. Meizu, which once attracted a large number of fans with its unique product temperament, plans to be acquired by Geely. For it, which has long been reduced to “others” in the market ranking, having a big tree next to it may be a good destination. At about the same time, Luo Yonghao, who once founded hammer technology, announced to quit the social platform and return to the entrepreneurship market, but it was not the mobile phone industry that “owed 600 million” – he once asserted in 2021 that “the era of mobile phones has passed”.

Indeed, the smartphone industry has been cold in recent years, and shipments have continued to decline since 2018. Not only small companies are struggling, but the four members of “rongmi ov” also feel the chill in this midsummer.

According to counterpoint data, compared with the same period in 2021, the sales of smart phones in China have decreased for 10 consecutive weeks since the sixth week of 2022.

At the same time, the extension of the replacement cycle means that the attractiveness of new models to consumers has decreased, which is undoubtedly a cruel blow to mobile phone manufacturers who are struggling to create selling points. How to stand in the cold winter of the industry has become a common problem for domestic manufacturers.

Goodbye, small and beautiful

Meizu’s commitment revealed a fact: in the era of obvious stock decline in the industry, the “small and beautiful” mobile phone long-term merchants have not found much breathing space.

In the ups and downs of the competition, some familiar brands are gradually withdrawing from the stage. IDC data shows that in the first quarter of this year, the top five manufacturers in China’s smart phone market were oppo, glory, vivo, apple and Xiaomi, with a total market share of 86.2%, an increase from 82.6% last year, which means that the Matthew effect of the industry is becoming more prominent and the survival space of niche mobile phones is becoming narrower.

Meizu is still releasing new machines, but its sales have already declined. In 2016, Meizu shipped 22million units, which was its highest year. In 2018, it began to fall precipitously and become “others”. Until today, it has reached the point of “unable to turn back”.

The cruel reality is not just on Meizu. In mid May, it was reported that black shark was abandoned by Tencent.

As the mobile phone brand with the largest market share in the game mobile phone category, black shark also failed to escape the fate of “niche mobile phones”. According to canalys data, from the second quarter of 2018 to the first quarter of 2021, black shark has lagged behind iqoo, redmi K series and realme X Series in the game phone segment, ranking fourth.

The hammer mobile phone, blessed by Luo Yonghao halo, a “generation of online celebrity”, once gained enthusiastic fans with its unique product design, but it also came to an end – after being acquired by ByteDance in 2019, the hammer was incorporated into the internal education hardware team.

After several years of “small and beautiful”, Yijia, who “won’t make do with it”, sold more than 10million units for the first time in 2021. In the face of increasingly fierce competition, Yijia no longer “reserved” and returned to the embrace of oppo’s mother.

The gradual closure of “small and beautiful” mobile phone manufacturers is naturally due to their poor management, but it is also inevitable that the stock market of mobile phones is seriously winded, and the global smart phone industry has entered a “cold wave”.

According to IDC statistics, after reaching a peak of 1.566 billion mobile phones in 2017, the global mobile phone shipment has declined year by year since 2018. In 2020, it was suddenly affected by the epidemic, with a large decline. It increased in 2021, but the industry as a whole is still cold.

The situation has not improved this year. According to canalys, a research organization, in the first quarter of 2022, the global shipment of smart phones was 310million, a year-on-year decrease of 11%.

The Chinese market has not been spared. According to the report of the China Academy of communications technology, the total shipments of mobile phones in the domestic market in the first quarter of this year totaled 69.346 million, a year-on-year decline of 29.2%, and the shipments of domestic brand mobile phones totaled 57.649 million, a year-on-year decrease of more than 30%.

At the same time, there was also news of order cutting in the market. Guomingxuan, a well-known analyst at Tianfeng international, said that China’s major Android mobile phone manufacturers had cut orders by about 170million, accounting for 20% of the original 2022 shipment plan.

Obviously, even if big brands have stronger scale and technical advantages, they are also struggling. The number of users that the mobile phone market can compete for is almost at the top, and players are facing zero sum competition. In the future, the market will also be a pattern in which giants stand, and it is difficult for niche brands to counter attack.

Boring innovation

In April, “why don’t young people want to change their mobile phones” and “how long have you not changed your mobile phones” appeared on hot search. In the vote related to the change cycle, 59% voted for “two to three years”, and 21% chose “one year”, which is basically consistent with the market data.

Strategy analytics, a research organization, said that the average change cycle of Chinese users is 28 months. Ethan Qi, deputy director of research at counterpoint research, directly said that the average change cycle of users has exceeded 31 months, and the mobile phone industry as a whole is micro innovation.

This is the result of many reasons. The economic uncertainty caused by the epidemic has affected consumer income and consumer confidence; The shortage and price rise of raw materials have driven up the price of smart phones and affected consumers’ willingness to buy – strategy analytics report shows that the average selling price of smart phones worldwide exceeded $300 in 2021, reaching the highest price since 2013.

Another factor that is easy to perceive is that the mobile phone industry has fallen into an innovation bottleneck, and consumers “can’t find a reason to change their mobile phones”.

In the era of functional phones, mobile phones have many forms, such as flip, slide, screw and so on. Later, the application of capacitive touch screen unified the screen into a straight board, and the mobile phone found the most suitable screen design. However, the high maturity of industrial design makes it more and more difficult to find innovative points, and the products are becoming homogeneous – performance, screen display effect and imaging effect have become the competitive points of mobile phone manufacturers.

However, hardware configuration updates and performance upgrades are not unlimited.

For smart phones, chips are the “brain”, while Qualcomm chips, which Android phones rely on most, have been frequently roast for “toothpaste squeeze update” in recent years, and the development of performance is constrained by process technology and power consumption control.

Qualcomm snapdragon 888 chip, which was widely used in Android flagship in 2021, was seriously heated and was dubbed “fire dragon”. Xiaolong 8 GEN1 chip launched at the end of 2021 has an eight core kryo CPU, and the process technology has been improved from 5nm to 4nm. However, according to the test results of geekbeach, its CPU single core performance is not as good as Apple’s A13 in 2019, and the heating problem has not been solved.

In terms of images, high pixels, large-size sensors, and multiple camera combinations are used to calculate images, and manufacturers compete to improve their imaging capabilities. However, for most consumers’ “one shot at a time”, mobile phones of all brands do not have a very bad experience. The blessing of independent image chips and AI algorithms is only icing on the cake, which is difficult to achieve qualitative change.

ZTE, which has changed a lot, has bet on the “ultimate form of Zhiban flagship” under screen camera. Although it has been iterated for three generations, the naked eye can only see the existence of the camera under a specific light and angle, but the actual imaging performance is hard to say, which has persuaded consumer groups with self photographing habits.

Despite the frequent press conferences, consumers are still bored. It is precisely because the mobile phone is optimized and improved from hardware to system, which has not brought revolutionary changes in the actual experience. As a newly needed consumer goods, the industrial scale of mobile phones is still huge, but it is not long before the next generation of technological revolution, and the rising space is almost at its peak, so manufacturers have to think about how to save themselves.

Difficult to find a savior

The homogenization is serious, the self-development of core chips is difficult, and there are not many opportunities for trial and error in the fierce market competition. Blindly stacking materials is not a long-term plan, which may explain why Android manufacturers rush forward on the folding screen – under the anxiety of involution, any possible iterative revolution cannot be easily let go.

In 2018, Ruoyu released flexpai, a folding screen mobile phone. Samsung and Huawei entered the market in 2019, officially opening the commercialization of folding screen mobile phones. Since last year, various brands have launched new products, and the folding screen has ushered in a centralized release period.

Thanks to the product optimization and the sharp reduction of the selling price, the sales volume of folding screen ushered in a small explosion. According to the data of the consulting agency DSCC, in the first quarter of 2022, the global total shipment of folding screen smartphones was 2.22 million, up 571% year-on-year, of which Samsung brand ranked first. Even so, compared with the mainstream models with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of single brands, the sales of folding screens can only be regarded as drizzle.

Even after many iterations, the maturity of the folding screen still needs to be improved. For example, the crease still lies in the center of the screen; Due to the folding form, and the hinge occupies a lot of space, the internal space of the folding screen mobile phone is full of land and gold, squeezing the image structure and battery space, which is often inferior to the mainstream models in terms of imaging effect, endurance, heat dissipation and so on.

Folding screen represents the bold attempt of Android manufacturers on future possibilities. As a breakthrough product form, it can bring a certain sense of freshness, but it still needs a long time to verify whether it can assume the role of “savior”.

At the same time, it also represents one of the attempts of Android manufacturers in high-end. At the same time of the decline in mobile phone sales, improving the high-end profit of single machine has become another “savior” that mobile phone manufacturers want to turn to.

According to the data from counterpoint, the total revenue of global smart phones in 2021 was $448billion, and apple ranked first with $196billion, accounting for 44% of the total revenue of all smart phone brands, and grabbed 75% – 80% of the profits of the global mobile phone market with its unparalleled single machine average price.

After Huawei stalled, in the overall ranking of global high-end mobile phones (more than $400) in 2021, apple took the absolute lead with 60%, Samsung took the second place with 17%, and Huawei, Xiaomi and oppo ranked third to fifth with 6%, 5% and 4% respectively. Obviously, the high-end market share given by Huawei was swallowed by apple.

It has become an inevitable trend to rush to the high end. In recent years, domestic manufacturers have made great efforts to take actions such as self-developed chips, folding screens, high-end joint branding, and streamlining product lines. However, the success of high-end products is not achieved by blindly stacking materials. If the status quo of the lack of autonomy of core hardware such as chips and the control of the supply chain by others does not change, the product power of domestic mobile phones will ultimately be difficult to achieve a big breakthrough.

Apple, Samsung and the former Huawei can support the brand premium and sit firmly at the high end, largely because they all have self-developed SOC (system level chip). Apple builds a soft and hard integration by virtue of self-developed core chips and operating systems, and Samsung has autonomy in core components such as chips and screens.

Huawei can compete with apple and Samsung because the self-developed Kirin chip is different from the homogeneous Qualcomm chip. For example, the Kirin 980 chip carried by Huawei P30 in 2019 has matched the performance of Qualcomm’s same generation product Xiaolong 855, and subsequent iterations have also maintained competitiveness at the core chip +5g level.

In contrast, although other domestic flagship has made some breakthroughs in image, screen, charging, appearance design, etc., the core chip is subject to Qualcomm. In the case that the Xiaolong 888 chip is prone to heat due to high power consumption, domestic manufacturers can only try to limit and optimize, but still can not completely solve the problem – when the core components fall off the chain, they have no second choice.

In fact, the autonomy of the core supply chain is to adhere to the power of products. Competing with apple is also to compete with yourself. Only by mastering the lifeline in your own hands and improving product competitiveness and anti risk ability can you go far.

Take a long view. If, as Luo Yonghao judged, the commercialization conditions of next-generation computing platforms such as AR and VR are mature five years later, and the performance requirements are more extreme, then the competitive pressure of mobile phone manufacturers will be heavier in the future. “Savior” is not so easy to find.

epilogue

After entering the stock market, each manufacturer fell into a zero sum game, and the sense of crisis caused unprecedented fierce competition among manufacturers. In the cold winter, there are few opportunities for manufacturers to make mistakes. As the integrator of mature mobile technology, it is difficult to conclude whether the folding screen first laid out can help Android manufacturers break through the high-end.

What is certain is that only by continuously deepening the cultivation of technology, improving product quality and use experience can we persist to the last minute in this cold winter of the industry; There is no small and beautiful space on this road, which can only speak with innovation and product power, and the competition will become more intense in the future.

Read more from a little Finance: canalys: in Q1 2022, the mobile phone market shipment in Chinese Mainland was only 75.6 million units, which topped the list for the first time. Counterpoint research: Q4 China smart phone market report in 2021 banklesstimes: in Q1 2022, Samsung mobile phone sales were 73 million units, with a market share of 23.4%. Counterpoint: in 2021, the average price of global smart phones reached $322, with a year-on-year increase of 10% trendforce: the total production volume of global smart phone brand manufacturers in 2019 Up to 375million counter points: in Q1 2017, the shipment of medium and high-end smartphones increased by 49%. China Academy of information and communications: in April 2022, the shipment of smart phones in China was 17.7 million, a year-on-year decrease of 34% IDC: in Q3 2017, the shipment of smart phones in China was 115million, a year-on-year decrease of 0.1% Ann rabbit: in February 2022, the second flagship of Android phone cost performance ranking was less than 1000 yuan counter point: in 2017, Huawei ranked third with 10% share in the global smartphone shipment ranking Counterpoint: in Q2 2017, the shipment volume of China’s smartphone market increased by 3% year-on-year. It is expected that Huawei, Xiaomi OV’s total global mobile phone shipments will exceed 400million counterpoint: Q1 iPhone accounted for 62% of the sales in the high-end smartphone market in 2022 counterpoint research: Q4 Apple iPhone shipments reached 81.5 million in 2021, surpassing Samsung to become the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer. The civil war of domestic mobile phones: the southern faction comprehensively suppressed the northern faction and almost collapsed

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