The author | Ren Yafei
The source | Packed Lunch Finance (ID:daxiongfan)
The 1215th original article | 17 min read
Not only mobile phone dealers cross-border car manufacturing, car companies also have dignity, Li Shufu made mobile phones, and there is a new story.
On January 22, Caijing reported that it had obtained confirmation from the insiders of the relevant transactions that Xingji Times, a mobile phone company owned by Geely Group, was in contact with Meizu to negotiate the acquisition and was currently in the due diligence stage.
In response to the rumors, Geely responded that "there is no comment on market rumors", and Meizu responded that "thank you for your concern for Meizu Technology, there is no relevant news at present." "The non-committal attitude of both sides has increased the possibility of cooperation.
If the above deal is finally reached, it will undoubtedly become the first major event in the technology circle in 2022. For Meizu, it may break free from the mud, and for Geely, its strategy of advancing towards the era of intelligence is one step closer.
Smart phones are regarded as smart terminals at this stage, and with the development of the new energy automobile industry, smart cars are also regarded as the third generation of intelligent mobile terminals after PCs and mobile phones, which is equivalent to "a super mobile phone with four feet". Therefore, the collaboration and interconnection of vehicles and machines composed of smart phones + smart cars has become a new technology trend.
For car companies, the key value of making mobile phones is that they can obtain massive user data.
As early as September last year, Hubei Xingji Times Technology Co., Ltd., founded by Li Shufu, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone and officially announced its entry into the field of mobile phones. It can be seen that Li Shufu attaches great importance to making mobile phones. After all, Xiaomi, Apple, Huawei and other mobile phone manufacturers have joined the car-making army.
Whether it is Xiaomi's Mijia AIOT Internet of Things ecological chain, or the intelligent Internet of Things ecology that Apple and Huawei are building, mobile phones have become a high-frequency use entrance for everyone, and with the advent of the "Internet of Everything" era, the car-machine collaboration of mobile phones to control cars is obviously not a utopian future.
Why does Li Shufu have to build mobile phones across borders? What might Meizu bring to Geely? How many cards does Li Shufu ultimately want to achieve in his hand for the IOT? What shortcomings do you need to make up for?
01 Seize the new highland of "smart terminals"
Just like cross-border cars, cross-border mobile phones are not new.
As early as 2012, Zhou Hongyi began to explore the cross-border field of mobile phones, and successively reached cooperation with Huawei and Haier, and after investing in Coolpad, launched a variety of mobile phone products. Gree Electric Appliances, the leading enterprise in the field of home appliances, also entered the mobile phone field in 2015, and successively launched the Gree generation, the second generation and the third generation of Dasong mobile phones.
These are two failed crossovers.
Li Shufu's interest in smartphones is no less than that of Dong Mingzhu and Zhou Hongyi.
In 2016, Yijiatong Technology Co., Ltd. was quietly established in Hangzhou. According to the data of enterprise investigation, in the shareholder information of Yijiatong, Ningbo Mingma Investment Partnership (hereinafter referred to as "Ningbo Mingma") occupies 70% of the equity, while Li Shufu occupies 99% of the equity of Ningbo Mingma. This means that after penetrating through layers of equity, the actual controllers of Yijiatong are Li Shufu and Geely.
According to public information, the main business of EGATONG includes core technology products such as in-vehicle chips, intelligent cockpits, intelligent driving, high-precision maps, big data and the Internet of Vehicles cloud platform. In addition, it also focuses on the creation of an open platform for the intelligent network ecosystem.
In 2018, Yijiatong put forward its own intelligent car concept: based on global online cloud services, let mobile phones and car machines be online all the time, through the same account, so that vehicles and mobile phones can recognize each other, data sharing, thousands of people. But to complete this idea, it is necessary to make up for the "puzzle" of the smartphone business. At that time, in the eyes of the outside world, this laid the groundwork for Li Shufu to enter the field of mobile phones.
The mobile phone itself has long been the Red Sea, and what they really want to seize is the technological "highland" of future smart terminals.
As you know, 360 started with search, and then with the rise of the mobile Internet, PC traffic and time were robbed by smartphones, in order to maintain the overall development of the company, Zhou Hongyi had to enter the mobile phone field. The threat gree faces is to compete with the United States' counterparts on "one brother", so it began the road of diversified development after 2015, and the first battle was to build mobile phones. In Dong Mingzhu's view, the mobile phone business has greater significance, preemptively competing for the entrance to the smart home, so that the mobile phone can become a platform for connecting various home appliances and devices and collecting data.
For Geely, it is now facing the dilemma of transforming from fuel vehicles to electric vehicles, from traditional cars to intelligent networked vehicles. Li Shufu hopes to use his mobile phone to connect his own business. At the signing ceremony held in Wuhan, he said bluntly that mobile phones can link the Internet of Vehicles and satellite Internet, create rich consumption scenarios, strengthen the ecosystem, and provide users with a more convenient, intelligent, and multi-screen interactive life experience of the Internet of Everything. In addition, Geely tries to integrate satellite Internet and 5G, connecting mobile terminals, the Internet of Vehicles, and satellite Internet to form a new business ecosystem.
This imagination does not seem surprising, but behind it is Lee's understanding of smart terminals: the smart terminals of the future are not islands, and bridges and highways will be built between islands and islands.
Under this logic, future smartphones, smart cars, smart homes, and smart wearable devices are all interconnected. Then Geely cross-border mobile phones are naturally also in order to coordinate with the automobile business and create an ecological chain of cars and mobile phones. This is similar to the logic of major mobile phone manufacturers to build cars, that is, cars and mobile phones are used as terminals and entrances for consumers' smart lives, and the intersection of the two sides is constantly superimposed.
For Geely, which has no experience in mobile phones, it is too difficult to establish a mobile phone research and development system and supply chain from scratch, just like Xiaomi cross-border car manufacturing, Geely also has two ways: one is to find ODM manufacturers; the other is to directly acquire. Some industry insiders analyzed that despite the limited shipments, Meizu is now more valuable to have a relatively complete mobile phone team. This is exactly what Geely lacks at present, after spending money to buy time, Geely can make up for the professional talents required by the mobile phone industry faster, in order to ensure the rapid launch of Geely mobile phones.
According to the "Finance world" weekly report: "Geely's interest in Meizu is the Flyme OS design and development team and some intellectual property related to human-computer interactive communication. ”
For Meizu, being acquired may not be a bad thing. According to the data released by the market research agency IDC, in the second quarter of 2021, the domestic market can only be mobile phone shipments list, vivo, OPPO, millet, Apple and glory occupy the top 5, accounting for a total market share of 88%, while Meizu, ZTE and other "Others" manufacturers market share is only 12%. At this stage, Meizu is almost powerless to return to heaven.
02 Intelligent second half, Geely's two cards
Smartphones are an important part of Li Shufu's smart car layout, but it is not the only link.
When announcing his entry into the mobile phone field, Li Shufu once said that in the future, it has become a major trend to build a user ecological chain across borders and build a corporate moat according to law. In his conception, first of all, to make mobile phones is to form efficient collaboration with the automobile business; secondly, to open up the interaction between the mobile phone terminal and the car terminal software technology and application ecology; finally, and most critically, it is to create a user ecology and form a corporate moat.
So, from the interconnection ecology that Li Shufu finally wants to achieve, what shortcomings does Geely need to make up for? What role does the mobile phone business play in this?
As you know, networking is the foundation of the development of smart cars, on top of which it can be divided into two general directions: smart cockpit and automatic driving.
First of all, the intelligent cockpit, which is mainly based on the service of the drivers and passengers in the car, the landing speed is fast, the user perception is more direct, and it has become one of the highlights of the car companies to create differentiated competition and attract consumers, and it is also the strongest advantage of the Internet, and the combination with the mobile phone is also higher.
For example, Huawei's advantage in the field of smart cockpit is that it realizes the seamless connection between the cockpit and the mobile phone through the Hongmeng system, which greatly improves the user experience, but also allows car companies to see the "threat". A fact is that the profit source of the car is now shifting from hardware to software, car companies if they do not have their own intelligent cockpit, it is likely to become a "hardware assembly plant" of technology companies, and if you want to take the initiative in your own hands, you must firmly grasp the software and hardware development of the intelligent cockpit in your own hands.
In the field of smart cockpits, from the perspective of product landing, it is roughly divided into 5 aspects.
Hardware use: the trend of large-screen, multi-screen, streaming media rearview mirrors, in-car cameras and other intelligent hardware use; operating system: the more traditional QNX system used for in-car instrumentation, the Android in-vehicle system used in the central control screen, etc.; functions: navigation, voice, entertainment, car control as the core development functions, and supporting mobile app; ecology: relying on bat ecosystem (Alipay Mini Program, Tencent Mini Program, Baidu Mini Program, etc.), smart home ecology; interaction: voice, gestures, Interactive methods such as touch adapt to driving scenarios.
It can be seen that there is a link that cannot be bypassed in creating a smart cockpit, that is, the interconnection with mobile phones. In short, the phone is the key to the car's connection to everything.
As early as 2017, Geely began to lay out smart cockpits, and in August last year, launched an intelligent cockpit system built on the platform of Xingyue L - Geely Galaxy OS. However, in the face of the leader of the domestic intelligent cockpit system, Hongmeng OS system, as well as Baidu Apollo, Ali OS Zebra intelligent interconnection system, Xiaopeng intelligent third space, Weilai ES8, Ford EVOS and other distinctive brands, Geely Galaxy OS is still under pressure.
In addition, including Geely and other car companies are also facing the same problem, many applications are the original mobile phone ecosystem in the success, how to apply these functions to the car scene, the test is not only technology, but also based on user experience product innovation thinking. Just like the car WeChat, for Tencent, this is not even WeChat, but another product.
Another scenario of car intelligence is automatic driving, which is the brain of the future car, and the technical threshold is relatively high compared to the smart cockpit, which is still in a period of change. Intelligent network connection is the core strategy of almost all OEMs, around this field there are mainly 3 types of participants: main engine factories (from the perspective of capabilities, new forces > traditional domestic OEMs> joint venture OEMs), tier 1 Tier1 (such as Desay SV, Huayang Group, Zhongke Kerda, etc.) can provide OEMs with the overall capabilities of the Internet of Vehicles, and tier 2 suppliers Tier2 (Qualcomm, MediaTek, SPI, iFLYTEK, AutoNavi, etc.).
Judging from this year's actions, Li Shufu's transformation of Geely is imminent. For example, in January, it signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tencent to carry out strategic cooperation in the fields of intelligent cockpit, automatic driving, and digital marketing; in October, Geely released the "Jiudalongwan Action" plan, investing 150 billion yuan in research and development in five years, realizing self-development of autonomous driving full-stack in 2025, and launching more than 25 new intelligent new energy products within 5 years.
Up to now, almost no profitability of L4-level autonomous driving in the world has been achieved, and the landing of autonomous driving technology still takes time.
03 The battle for dominance
In the past, auto companies have always been at the top of the industrial chain, and they have the most sense of control and dominance, but now many car companies, including Geely, have to cooperate with Internet companies.
KPMG's 2018 Global Automotive Executive Survey shows that automakers are still hesitant to work with Internet companies. A third of auto executives believe that car companies are the "guardians" of data, however, downstream data such as consumer behavior flows to Internet companies.
At last year's shareholders' meeting, some investors asked "whether SAIC will consider cooperating with third-party companies such as Huawei in autonomous driving", chairman Chen Hong said bluntly: The car is a shell, Huawei's overall solution is the soul, SAIC can not accept cooperation, because the soul can not be in the hands of others.
The soul that Chen Hong refers to is "data." Therefore, whether it is a car company or an Internet company, they all want to try to create an independent ecological chain and grasp the dominant power.
Taking smartphones as an example, around smartphone terminals, a huge business ecology has been built in China, especially in China , where people can already do almost anything with their phones.
With the arrival of smart car terminals, similar things will happen in cars. Market research firm KPMG collected opinions from more than 900 automotive executives in 43 countries around the world in 2018, and data shows that 93% of executives in China believe that data will drive car companies to find new business models.
But the reality is that many car companies and Internet companies are not willing to communicate with each other, and even if they cooperate, they are not willing to share data. The purpose of the secret struggle is to grasp the data in their own hands, because once they join the other party's ecosystem, it is likely to mean the transfer of the right to speak.
A 2015 KPMG report, "Blacksmith or Master: The Automotive Industry at the Crossroads of the Highly Data Age," vividly compared car companies to Internet companies. The report said that in the competition for car network data, car companies and Internet companies are inherently rivals, unless car companies are willing to be "Metal smith" instead of "grid master".
Once the smart car opens the era of the Internet of Everything, the car will become a huge data production machine, the report said. Car companies standing at the crossroads have only two choices, one is to become a pure "blacksmith", leaving the entire battlefield to new players to compete for user data and become a hardware supplier themselves; the second is to evolve into the owner of the ecological chain, in addition to building cars, but also to extend its business model and create services that run through the life cycle of users' vehicles.
The fundamental difference between a "blacksmith" and a "master of the ecological chain" is data. "Only when auto companies have user behavior data can they tailor all aspects of consumers' lives and find a series of key touchpoints for marketing." The business model for maximum profit should be predictive customer analytics, which can push services based on location or based on user behavior. The report said.
If the logic of the mobile phone factory is to attack, the car factory makes mobile phones for defense. But the core goal of both sides is to win the "dominant right", geely automobile, naturally is no exception.
For example, in March 2018, Geely Automobile released the "GKUI" of the Internet of Vehicles system. Shen Ziyu, vice president of Geely Automobile Research Institute, said that GKUI is similar to the "Android" in the car, and Geely Automobile leads the construction of the platform and integrates more application providers to provide services.
Of course, in addition to cooperation with Internet companies, many car companies have also put forward the concept of self-built ecology. Bai Yiyang, an analyst at CMB International Research Department, once analyzed that Xiaomi's transformation from a mobile phone to a smart hardware and IoT giant has cultivated an ecosystem around all smart terminals. With the advancement of the intelligent networking of automobiles, the automobile has entered the vision of the Xiaomi ecosystem. Now in the early stage of the wave of automotive intelligence, intelligent networked vehicles will become a new traffic terminal, which is also the original intention of Xiaomi to create a closed loop of intelligent terminals.
For the manufacture of mobile phones at this time, Li Shufu also has his own understanding, "Mobile phones are rapid iteration of portable mobile terminals, which can not only allow users to share innovative achievements as soon as possible, but also transfer a safe and reliable part of the results to the application of cars, and realize the close interaction between car machines and mobile phone software technology." ”
Building a cross-border ecological interconnection is not an easy task. As early as before Geely, there were countless giants trying to build a smart ecosystem across borders, but after investing hundreds of millions of yuan, they gradually became silent, as a traditional manufacturing system, what splash can Geely set off?
Resources:
1. The Blacksmith or the Master: The Automotive Industry at the Crossroads of the Highly Data Age, KPMG
2. "The Data Battle Behind the Big Screen of the Car", Caixin
3. "Geely intends to make high-end mobile phones, defensive or offensive?" , Finance
4. "Will Li Shufu build a mobile phone and follow the old path of Zhou Hongyi and Dong Mingzhu?" " to travel by line