Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The mobile phone market is like a besieged city, people outside the city desperately want to rush in, people in the city desperately want to rush out. The mobile phone market suffered its coldest winter in a decade in 2022. Huawei, Xiaomi and other mobile phone manufacturers are building cars, while car companies such as Xilai and Geely are building mobile phones. If there is no accident, both Ulai and Geely will be released this year.

Smartphone sales in China fell 13% to 14% in 2022 from a year earlier, the biggest drop since records began with IDC, an international data company. Throughout the year, shipments of about 286 million smartphones in China fell back to less than 300m a decade later.

Why are consumers reluctant to buy mobile phones? Do not blame the environment, the epidemic affects the economy, the purchasing power of ordinary people has declined, and so on. The epidemic has only made matters worse. China's smartphone market began to decline five years ago, which occurred before the outbreak in 2020. Fundamentally, market saturation is the main reason, the product quality is getting better and better, and the replacement cycle is longer. The lack of innovation in mobile phones is another important factor. 5G, the most promising 5G, still lacks killer apps, driving consumers to change; folding screens are still a luxury, the bottom line is still as high as 5000 yuan, and they may not be able to afford to repair them, unable to fundamentally reverse the decline.

Optimistic analysts believe that China's mobile phone market will rebound in the second half of this year. However, judging from the information at the end of the supply chain, manufacturers have not increased their orders or raised their annual targets, at least there will not be much rebound in China's mobile phone market in the first half of this year.

Judging from the two global consumer electronics events of CES and MWC this year, mobile phone manufacturers are still betting on folding screens, and even satellite communications, which are not rigid demand, have become a battleground for military. it can be predicted that the phenomenon of weak innovation will continue, and the recovery of economic and consumer confidence will affect the mobile phone market to a greater extent in the second half of this year.

Can you save Chinese smartphone manufacturers by going out to sea? Not really. The global mobile phone market resonates and enters the lowest point at the same time. Global smartphone shipments fell 11.3% in 2022, the lowest level since 2013, according to IDC. Even if it is better than Apple, it has not been able to withstand it.

Back in 2021, when Xiaomi announced its move into the auto industry, most people couldn't understand why Lei Jun would spend $10 billion on cars over the next 10 years or work for Lei Jun. Nowadays, most people can understand that Xiaomi makes cars not only because it wants to be a pig, but also because the mobile phone chip is stuck, because the mobile phone market is really saturated.

Nokia, HTC. Looking back from the graveyard of mobile phone brands, the earliest wave riders do not necessarily live to the end. Mobile phone manufacturers know this well, and when they enter the automobile industry, they are based on the belief of survival.

With the news that mobile phone sales are at a 10-year freezing point, Xiaomi car designs are suspected to be exposed, or start selling at 260000 yuan. Xilai mobile phones say they will never make money from advertising, and internal tests will begin in the second quarter of this year and are expected to go on sale in the third quarter of this year.

This is not a typical "siege effect".

Why do car companies such as Xilai and Geely want to enter the mobile phone market? The decline in sales can not rebound for a short time, aren't car companies rushing to make money? Businessmen are naturally profit-oriented, but car companies are not competing with Huawei and Xiaomi, but to play with ecology and keep their cars "besieged".

Li Bin, the most eco-friendly CEO of the car company, once said: "if you spend hundreds of thousands of yuan on a car and then a few thousand yuan on a mobile phone, the decision-making process will be shorter. If you buy my mobile phone for a few thousand yuan, can you buy hundreds of thousands more cars? maybe only Apple in the world can do that."

Li Bin wants to sell his mobile phone to his car owners. In order to realize the interconnection of mobile phones and cars, and finally realize the connection of cars and everything, of course, it is also to tell another story to the capital market.

After the capital is in place, there is no threshold for technology, and the car system is also Android; there is no threshold for manufacturing, and the domestic mobile phone industry chain is already very mature; channels can be reused, Huawei can sell cars in stores, and Weilai can also sell mobile phones in stores. In Li Bin's view, everything is natural.

Tesla built mobile phones, Musk launched satellites, and Geely followed suit. The original intention of putting the satellite is to build the infrastructure of car networking, but car companies have found that even if the car is turned into a huge mobile phone, it can meet office, social, entertainment and other needs on the car. but a mobile phone that is always there will be an important entrance. Then why not build your own mobile phones, share your own satellite communications, and build a closed-loop ecology that will never be lost on Earth?

According to public data, as of 2022, Geely had about 3 million online vehicles, Tesla had about 500000 in China, and Lailai had nearly 240000 by August 31, 2022.

Even if all the owners of the three car companies come to buy home-made phones, this volume accounts for only 1.3 per cent of the mobile phone market, which sells 286 million units a year.

Car companies build mobile phones, which can't stir up any splash for the time being. However, with the release of Weilai brand and Geely brand mobile phones this year, the purpose of car companies entering the mobile phone "besieged city" will become more and more obvious.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: IT Times (ID:vittimes), by Sun Yan

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