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

Write an article | Wen Jiehao

Editor | Wu Xianzhi

The sinking road of high-end models has always been burdened with a lot of resistance.

Especially for folding screen products, the high-end market has not yet gained a firm foothold, and sinking is the talk of the night.

Mobile phone players do not seem to think so. In order to jump into the mainstream, the prices of various brands of folding screen models continue to fall, bringing the price to four digits; on the other hand, perhaps to expand sales, in the brand authorized stores in the sinking market, new folding screen products have been quietly placed on the shelves and showcases.

Although the ever-opening stores have become the "lubricant" for the sinking of high-end models, the folding screen products at the top of the product pyramid are still trapped by the insufficient spending power of the sinking market. This experimental exploration has achieved little success in the end.

Trapped in the Fifth Ring Road, Neijiang, Sichuan, the middle point of Chengdu and Chongqing. Locally, the situation of folding screen models of various mobile phone brands is surprisingly consistent-the prototype with obvious creases on the counter has almost become the "only seedling" in various stores.

When Ah Cheng walked into a local vivo official authorized store, the clerk gathered around the counter immediately stopped chatting and walked up to him with a twinkle in his eyes. But after seeing Ah Cheng pick up the folding screen prototype and fiddle with it, the pace of the shop assistant slowed down obviously.

"this is a new folding screen, 9999 times, and it's not in stock at the moment." Perhaps it is that "experiential" users have long been accustomed to or even bored, the shop assistant will fold the price, inventory of the two major dissuasion points, trying to reduce the potential cost of communication. It is not difficult to see that in this store, the final conversion rate of users who come to experience the folding screen does not seem to be high.

The situation is similar in other local stores, where the folding screen models are almost out of stock, except that Xiaomi has a top version of the MIX Fold2-on the face of it, the folding screen is so sold locally that it is out of stock, but it is more likely that local stores are not paying attention to the folding screen at all.

For authorized stores in the sinking market, brand policies often affect their sales network. Since the sinking market is mainly connected to price-sensitive users, folding screens do not seem to be pleasant at the distribution level-even around a new first-tier city, many stores do not have folding screens in stock and need to transfer goods from other stores.

However, compared with the high-line cities full of stores, the sinking market does not have many "siblings" to transfer goods, and if one store is out of stock, it is likely to be out of stock as a whole. As a result, users who want to buy a folding screen in the sinking market often have to book in advance and wait a week or two.

On the other hand, the self-employed shopkeepers who sink the market mostly take the goods from the mobile phone channel merchants and rarely go through the official channels. As far as it is concerned, taking a folding screen with high price and low demand is tantamount to making its own cocoon, and there is no need to increase the pressure on itself in an environment where offline sales of mobile phones are not as expected.

After repeated questioning, the vivo clerk told Ah Cheng that she had sold only five folding screen models in the past month, compared with nearly three figures for walking machines priced from 2000 to 3000. According to a clerk at the local Glory official authorized store, the store booked a total of about a dozen units when the Magic Vs went on sale, which is almost the peak of the model's local offline sales, and it often takes several days to sell one.

And this has also created a different caliber of shop assistants in high and low-line cities when users ask about preferential policies.

In a new first-tier city, Rongmi OV's official authorized stores are biting the price to death-you can give away small gifts and a free film change service, but you just can't touch the bottom line. Although the contract machine in the mobile business hall is subsidized, the premise of the subsidy is the upgrade of the package. According to its standard, the subsidy for the 150-pound 300-pound 600-stall package is about 1000, 2000, 2000, 4000 yuan, considering that the contract period of 2-3 years can not be reduced, it is not so much a subsidy as an increase.

By contrast, the clerk in the fourth-tier city obviously loosened the caliber of the folding screen and gave a concession of about 100 yuan at the price level. "the manufacturer will not give you a penny discount, which is given to you by our own store. We do sales for impulse and get the target bonus, and we sell a folding screen for 50 yuan, which is a discount to you."

The same contrast is also reflected in the appearance of users. A shop assistant in Shanghai told Photon Planet that a considerable number of customers came to the store for folding screens, including business people and technology enthusiasts. Although they may not be able to close a deal in the end, they basically know something about folding screen phones.

According to the clerk in the fourth-tier city, the most common user he meets is to come in and buy a mobile phone, notice the folding screen, experience it by the way, feel new, consult the price, and then be persuaded by the price immediately. "A lot of customers don't know anything about folding screen phones and think they are tablets when they see them."

In addition, a computer accessories manufacturer in a small town in Chongqing once told Photon Planet that the mainstream PC hardware specifications in the local market remained at the 900th series released by Nvidia in 2014, four generations behind the latest 40-series graphics cards.

Thus it can be seen that in the sinking market, users obviously do not have as high business office demand as high-line cities. Based on the situation of population outflow, the town does not have a group of young people who fiddle with hardware and pursue "technological romance" in high-line cities. even if there are, they are mainly students with weak spending power, so it is difficult to form a wide range of demand.

If we say that the folding screen within the Fifth Ring Road is the "two-way rush" of the high-end brand and the upgrading of user needs, then outside the Fifth Ring Road, the tone of the story is the "deviation" from each other.

Just because the users of the folding screen business in the small town have poor soil, it does not mean that the small town cannot do the folding screen business.

The mobile phone dealer is always black and currently has a communications store in a county-level city in Jiangxi province. At its peak, he once relied on the tactic of "encircling points" to set up a number of stores around a local commercial street and moved closer to the small boss. But in recent years, the business is less and less visible to the naked eye, coupled with the recurrence of the epidemic, the store has become his last stronghold.

"in the past, he was able to do amateur business, but now even the elderly can buy online with pinduoduo. Just selling new phones will die sooner or later. Only by covering accessories, maintenance, and second-hand can they barely survive." Old Black sighed.

In his view, folding screen phones also follow the "high open low" path. Adhering to the logic that scarcity is precious, in the early days of the birth of the folding screen, the market briefly broke out a rush to increase prices, and mobile phones with a price of 10,000 yuan were once fried to tens of thousands of yuan by scalpers. It was at that time that Old Hei noticed the folding screen and started the resale business with his peers.

But at present, the market has already returned to normal, and Old Black's business is also forced to face transformation. "first, the folding screen is no different from ordinary mobile phones, so no one is fired; second, brand channel control is becoming more and more stringent. Even stores require users to activate on the spot in order to prevent goods from escaping. As long as it is activated, the resale price immediately loses 1000 of the original price." In this context, the old black folding screen business, from the original price increase resale, gradually become second-hand sales.

The second-hand market has always belonged to Apple. Based on the advantages of iOS, user mind and so on, even at present, the series of models such as iPhone12 and iPhone11 launched a few years ago, and even the earlier iPhoneXR, still have good vitality in the idle market.

By contrast, the Android camp is deserted, the valuation system is not as stable as Apple, and few users will pay for it unless big concessions are made at the price level. But with the emergence of folding screens, this situation is being reversed.

Old Hei told Photon Planet that as the current discount of second-hand folding screen phones is very strong, in addition to the aforementioned activation loss of 1000, phones with use marks have a discount rate of 3 to 40 percent, and the prices of some older models are even lower. "to a hand loss of 3000, like phones that have been in normal use for a period of time, slightly scratched and creased at an average level, our recycling quotation is basically a 50% discount."

Compared with the high price of the new machine, the "discount" second-hand folding screen seems to better pry open the door to the mainstream.

According to Lao Hei, many users who consult him about the folding screen do not have too high requirements for specific configuration and functions, and basically only care about the novel experience of the "folding screen" itself.

"A female customer once took a vertical folding phone from me on the grounds that it was small and could be used as a make-up mirror. What many people want is not how good the phone is, but whether others will take a second look at it when playing cards and parties take the phone out of their trouser pockets."

But even so, the local sales of second-hand folding screen phones in his store are not good. In January this year, Lao Hei received seven folding screen phones from various channels, and only two were sold to local customers, one of whom was a regular customer. The other five, through Xianyu, went to Beijing (two), Zhengzhou, Chengdu and Ordos respectively.

Even at this stage, the price of the "sinking" second-hand folding screen is also a certain distance from the sinking market, but compared with the new machine separated by the "gap", the second-hand folding screen still seems to be able to continue to infiltrate downward.

In the end, the folding screen made for the high end is at odds with the sinking market, so that in the process of investigation, we can't help but fall into the self-doubt of "worrying about new words."

But the strange thing is that the folding screen phones, which are not part of the sinking market in the setting, are infiltrating downward through second-hand discounts, even feeding a group of small-town mobile phone vendors-in addition to the aforementioned old black, Hong Jie from Black Dragon Family Suihua has set up a live broadcast to sell second-hand folding screens on the short video platform, which also has good sales.

And this makes people doubt the underlying logic of the folding screen. For a long time, the folding screen has always existed as a new story of brand ascent. In order to comply with the context of the story, mobile phone players continue to add code at the configuration level, trying to align their folding screen models with the flagship of the high-end straight board, and connect them with high-end people through scenes such as business offices.

However, in terms of sinking and idle markets, folding screens do not seem to need to do business at the top of the pyramid. At present, although various brands have rolled up the folding screen to less than 10,000 yuan, the price of 7,000 to 8,000 is obviously not up to the expectation of "parity folding" in the consumer market.

Although it is contrary to the high-end trend, but for the folding screen, rather than its configuration full, selling high-end stories, it is better to reduce the price and simply sell "novelty". After all, only by "sinking" can we "float".

This article is from the official account of Wechat: photon Planet (ID:TMTweb). By Wen Jiehao.

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