In recent weeks, the news about Geely's acquisition of Meizu has been further spread and has been fermented for a long time. Geely's Jixing Times bought 79.09% equity of Meizu and became its actual controller.
In February of this year, Weilai Automobile was also exposed that it was preparing to build a mobile phone team. Yin Shuijun, the former president of Meitu mobile phone, took the lead in taking charge of Weilai mobile phone business. Soon after, Li Bin showed his determination to make mobile phones to the boss of Weilai Automobile.
One company has completed the acquisition and the other is still under investigation. Although the progress is different, both car companies obviously want to put their cars and mobile phones under the same intelligent system.
Why are car companies staring at mobile phones? Perhaps, a sentence said by Qin, the co-founder of Weilai, can be partially explained. He said: In the past, car companies were more than just products and channels;
In the future, car companies will compare who has more contact with users.
In recent years, this methodology has been gradually recognized by more and more automobile companies. According to Qin's logic, it seems that car companies make mobile phones, which is the beginning of a new story in the automobile industry, but in fact, this step is also due to the rules of the game.
The competition about grabbing users' contacts has already started across fields. Mobile phones, cars and televisions are all vying for users' contacts. Some of these companies have done it, such as Xiaomi and Huawei.
It has been asserted that in the near future, once traditional car companies lose their user contacts, they may become foundries. The actions of Geely and Weilai can be seen as occupying the position in advance and starting the competition.
However, many car companies have clearly voted against entering the mobile phone industry. These include the Great Wall, which says "there is no paradise without mobile phones", Chery, which says "the car cake is already very big", and Nezha Automobile, which says "making mobile phones is a pit".
On the question of whether to build a mobile phone, the automobile circle is dividing into radical and conservative factions.
No. 1
[Apple and Android are not long-term friends]
Li Bin said that Weilai's original intention to study mobile phones was very simple-because Apple is very close to the automobile industry. For example, Weilai's second-generation platform car comes standard with UWB (ultra-wideband, a wireless carrier communication technology), and Apple has no open interface, which leads to Weilai's failure to achieve the desired user experience.
In addition to the Apple system, the Android system, which is recognized by the industry as highly open, has also been criticized by people in the industry. Liu, Huawei's China Media Affairs Minister, told us that Huawei's car system is smoother than Android's car, because Android has reservations about car companies.
Huawei's Harmonyos in-vehicle system in M5.
These two cases show that in the short term, even if it is not to realize the great vision of the Internet of Everything,
In order to solve some practical problems, it is also necessary for car companies to make mobile phones.
From a longer-term perspective, many car companies also believe that they cannot "entrust" system vendors such as Apple for a long time.
At the Apple WWDC22 Global Developers Conference on June 7, Apple launched a new generation of CarPlay in-vehicle interactive system. With the new generation of CarPlay, Apple can easily and smoothly migrate users' Internet usage habits from mobile phones to cars. At this point, it has been more competitive than many competitors' car systems.
Apple also said that 98% of cars in the United States can use CarPlay, and 79% of American consumers said they would only buy cars that support CarPlay. The extremely high market share shows the aggressiveness of Apple CarPlay in the automobile market.
Some netizens joked that Apple doesn't make cars, but wants to turn all cars into Apple cars.
In the past, Apple gradually built a network ecology, so that the mobile phone was no longer for dialing phone numbers, but became a carrier, a carrier loaded with various apps. It was Apple that completed the decentralization of mobile phones.
Now cars can also be made into docks, and there is more room for cars.
The more contacts a user has, the more likely he is to have.
It is obviously not acceptable for all car companies to let Apple's achievements in the mobile phone era continue to cars.
BMW, which was the first to support the iPhone NFC car keys, did not want to hand over all the smart cockpits, which has a lot to do with BMW's positive attitude towards electrification transformation and confidence in the latest iDrive8 system. Toyota, a car engine that is "in name only" in the market, also announced last year that it will launch a brand-new aromatic car operating system within five years.
This is actually one step away from making a mobile phone.
If it is just a shell, the technology is highly integrated and the manufacturing industry is highly developed. The threshold for making mobile phones and cars is not high. Car companies have precedents in the mobile phone industry. For example, BYD has the business of OEM mobile phones, which accounts for a large part of the company's income.
Someone asked, Apple can't entrust it, but can domestic enterprises finally entrust it? At least Liu thinks that Huawei's system is more open than Apple and Android.
However, Chen Hong, chairman of SAIC, has made it clear that they are unwilling to entrust their "soul" to others.
second
[If you want to go against it, you have to go against it]
Sony and Honda jointly build cars, Xiaomi builds cars, Huawei empowers car companies, OPPO issues car patents, and the news of Apple building cars is looming. When mobile phone manufacturers began to invest a lot of money and energy in building cars, car companies took out part of the cost to build mobile phones, which was regarded as a counter by many people.
Is it necessary to counter it?
In the eyes of many people in the industry, in fact, on the track of smart electric vehicles, mobile phone companies are more dominant than the automobile industry.
Digitalization, intelligence and a large number of user data are the disadvantages of traditional car companies. And a mobile phone brand like Xiaomi, which has entered the automobile industry with a high degree of intelligence, is a great threat.
In the TV industry, Xiaomi succeeded once.
20 14 cable TV programs continued to decline. As a tool, the importance of TV viewing function is declining, and traditional TV is becoming less and less competitive. Just this year, Xiaomi launched the first Xiaomi TV and officially entered the AIoT (Artificial Intelligence Internet of Things) battlefield.
millet tv
Like Apple's decentralization of mobile phones, Xiaomi has also made the TV set a carrier with a smart heart and achieved decentralization on the TV set.
Unlike traditional batteries, which rely on sales price difference for profit, Xiaomi relies on future value-added services for profit. Therefore, the pricing space of Xiaomi TV is very huge. The profit model of the traditional TV industry has also been subverted.
Now it's the bus's turn.
Turning cars into carriers, Tesla led the whole industry to some extent. The central control panel is the link of the car and the entrance of data.
Some people say that car companies can't turn a deaf ear to the dominant mobile phone manufacturers if they don't want to take the old road of traditional TV manufacturers being carved up.
Mobile phones are data traffic and network ecology. Therefore, car companies have also begun to build mobile phones.
The way to master the smart entrance is to open the ecological channel in the opposite direction.
At least, some car companies with a large number of fans have the ability to stir each other's back garden.
For example, Wei Lai. Weilai established NIO Life at the beginning of brand establishment. After several years' development, NIO Life's influence in Weilai car owners should not be underestimated.
Compared with mobile phones, the unit price of cars is very high, which is often decided by the whole family. Users' trust in their own car brands will be much higher than that of their own mobile phone brands. Because of a car, it is possible for the whole family to change their mobile phones into car brands.
third place
[The road is new and bumpy]
Mobile phone manufacturers can find a hundred reasons to go this way. But for conservatives, there are many reasons not to make mobile phones.
Wei Jianjun, chairman of the Great Wall, made it clear at the internal meeting that "the Great Wall focuses on making cars, not making mobile phones, not going to heaven".
Indeed, the development strategy of the Great Wall has always been "focus", and it rarely engages in business other than automobiles like some other car companies.
Although empiricism is not always reliable, the focus strategy has really made Great Wall become the first SUV manufacturer in China. After Xiaomi entered the TV industry, we can still see "old brands" such as Hisense and TCL that adhere to the focus strategy.
It still occupies an important position in the new market situation.
Time-honored brands still occupy an important market position.
Outside the Great Wall, Yin Tongyue, chairman of Chery Automobile, also made it clear in an interview with the media that Chery can't make mobile phones. "The car is already a big cake."
Zhang Yong, co-founder of Nezha Auto, even bluntly said, "I don't quite agree that mobile phones limit the experience of car users. If this is the case, it is more important to know the car, not to engage in mobile phones. "
Zhang Yong also added that,
Enterprises that are still on the food and clothing line will continue to focus on their main business in the next few years.
It is undeniable that brand-new brands will face "many pits" when they enter the mobile phone market. Including the cost disadvantage of supply chain, the need for batch support of R&D, and the need for market investment persuaded by consumers. Any one of them may cause car companies to fall into the pit.
For example, mass support is a great challenge for Wei. It may be more likely to mobilize Weilai car owners to buy, but there is not enough reason for non-Weilai car owners to buy for the time being. & lta class="hidden" href="htt