Recently, Honor and Xiaomi were very happy about the 5G frequency band, inventory, and photos in smartphones. The writers on both sides also shouted flags for their “masters” and stood up to cheer.
As the saying goes, too much is lost. And it will inevitably cause certain negative effects on both sides in the public opinion and in the market, and even allow them to make certain impulsive behaviors. Of course, the mutual conflict between the two parties and who is right is not the focus of our discussion today, but the glory (including Huawei) and Who is Xiaomi’s biggest enemy?
Industry insiders who are familiar with Glory and Xiaomi know that Xiaomi is the earliest Internet mobile phone brand in the Chinese mobile phone market, and by this, it has become famous in the Chinese mobile phone market and even subverted and ended the competition of the Chinese mobile phone market at the time. Ways and patterns. As the earliest emulated Xiaomi, Huawei’s independent Internet mobile phone brand, in the early competition, often with Xiaomi in technical, market, marketing and other aspects of each other for marketing needs.
Since then, Honor (including Huawei) and Xiaomi have formed a beam and continue to this day. Regarding the mutual history between Glory and Xiaomi, we don’t need to repeat them here. Those who are interested can check it out by themselves. Our focus is on the present.
The war between Glory and Xiaomi is long over but not over yet
In fact, the battle between glory and Xiaomi has shown signs of ending since 2016. Because from the third quarter of 2016, Honor Mobile has ranked first in domestic Internet mobile phone sales for nine consecutive quarters. Among them, the number of sales of 39.66 million units and sales of 57.8 billion yuan continued to be the Internet in January to September 2018. Mobile phone sales and sales doubled. Since 2017, although the period has been repeated, but by the end of 2017, Honor has beaten Xiaomi in terms of sales and shipments throughout the year.
According to the third-party market research firm Sino at the time, the mobile phone sales data for 2017 in the Chinese market released by Glory, Glory surpassed Xiaomi with 54.5 million units sold and 78.9 billion yuan in sales, making it the top Internet mobile phone in China. According to Sino data, Xiaomi, the second-ranked company, sold 50.94 million units and sold 63.7 billion yuan. In terms of sales, Honor has opened a considerable distance from the second Xiaomi with a balance of 15.2 billion yuan, and the sales volume differs by 3.56 million units.
For this reason, in the following year, the 2018 Honor Note 10 conference, Honor President Zhao Ming said that since 2017, Honor became the first domestic Internet mobile phone brand, and the competition with Xiaomi has ended.
In addition to the overtaking of shipments and sales as the main mark, Glory will focus on overseas markets from 2018 (mainly Southeast Asian market) Xiaomi will shift its focus to the strategy of turning the turmoil in the Indian market in 2017. The battle between Honor and Xiaomi in the Chinese mobile phone market also heralds the end.
As of 2018, it is also the statistics of Sino. The annual shipments of Honor mobile phones were 54.27 million units, an increase of 13% year-on-year. The difference is 6.31 million units; in terms of sales, the Honor mobile phone is 78.29 billion yuan, the Xiaomi mobile phone is 65.93 billion yuan, and the difference between the two parties is 12.36 billion yuan. Honor continues to lead Xiaomi with an overwhelming advantage.
But something subtle has changed here. In order to illustrate these subtle changes, we may wish to introduce IDC’s statistics on China’s smartphone market sales and sales in 2018.
According to statistics from IDC, in 2018, Honor mobile phone shipments in China were 54.42 million units, a year-on-year increase of 13% and market share of 13.7%; Xiaomi mobile phone shipments were 51.99 million units, a year-on-year decline of 6%. The market The share is 13.1%; in terms of sales, Honor Mobile is US $ 11.051 billion, an increase of 19% year-on-year, and the revenue share is 8.7%; Xiaomi mobile phone is US $ 9.319 billion, an increase of 14% year-on-year, and its revenue share is 7.3%.
I don’t know what the industry thinks about the statistics of the two organizations mentioned above? What we see is that although Honor has continued to grow in shipments and revenue, and continues to widen the gap with Xiaomi, the revenue gap between the two sides has narrowed instead. And this is the same as Xiaomi’s listing in 2018, which once shifted the focus of the mobile phone business from simply pursuing sales to increasing ASP of mobile phonesRelatedly, this year, Xiaomi’s shipments in 2018 fell according to IDC, but its revenue has increased significantly, and the glory of Sinoe’s 2018 revenue has been leading Xiaomi’s. In the case of leading shipment growth, it has narrowed It is obvious.
It ’s important to know that 2018 is the year when Honor has made the strongest effort in the Chinese market. Various black technologies such as “Turbo” have been flowing one after another, which has impressed the industry and is not connected. In terms of volume and revenue, especially the comparison between revenue and Xiaomi, the performance of Honor is obviously questionable, especially the glory placed on the strategic level of Huawei’s entire mobile phone business.
So how did Honor and Xiaomi perform last year, just in 2019? As of now, complete statistics on the shipments and revenue of Honor and Xiaomi in the Chinese mobile phone market in 2019 have not yet been released, so we can only explain them with some statistics as of the third quarter of last year.
From the mobile big data service provider Aurora’s “2019 Q3 Smartphone Market Insight Report” shows that In the third quarter of last year, Honor’s brand retention rate in the Chinese smartphone market was 10.9%, and Xiaomi was 9.0 In terms of sales volume, Glory is 11.7%, and Xiaomi is 10.6%. In terms of brand ownership, Glory is 1.9% ahead of Xiaomi, and its sales share is 1.1% ahead of Xiaomi. In the previous 2018, Honor led Xiaomi by 0.6 percentage points in the share of shipments.
Although after nearly a year of hard work, Honor has further widened the gap with Xiaomi in terms of shipments, it is 1.1% ahead of the market share, and it is placed on Huawei and Honor to add 32.2% of the share < span class = "text-remarks" label = "Remarks"> (21.6 percentage points above Xiaomi) , as a supposed contribution directly to the glory of Xiaomi is really minimal. Of course, this is also related to the volume of Huawei’s brand in the Chinese market last year because of non-market factors, which drowned the glory.
Let’s look at the market retention rate again. According to the popular interpretation of mobile big data service provider Aurora, the retention rate is the ratio of the number of users who meet the valid user conditions in a unit of time to the actual number of users, that is, the proportion of existing users, which is the market share accumulated over the years. As for the mobile phone retention rate, the retention rate of a certain mobile phone manufacturer includes all models of the manufacturer, which reflects the current actual use on the market and is also the basis and key indicators for future market expansion.
As mentioned above, after completing the overtake of Xiaomi ’s shipments and revenue from 2017, nearly two years later, glory does not seem to hurt Xiaomi ’s foundation, and the difference in retention rates between the two parties is only 1.9 percentage points. It is also put on Huawei and Glory to add up to 28.7%, which is higher than Xiaomi’s 19.7 percentage points, and Glory plays a negligible role. So this also explains very well that after Honor announced in 2018 that Xiaomi was no longer its opponent, it was close to 2 years, and then they quarreled with Xiaomi again.
Here we think that the reason why Glory is so. The external environment makes the entire Huawei mobile phone business inevitably focus on the Chinese market. In the future, Glory should assume greater responsibility, at least on the benchmark Xiaomi or in In terms of shipments, either a major breakthrough in revenue can be achieved; the second is to reduce the competitive pressure of the Huawei brand, which should not be the pressure of glory, but also the Huawei brand. It seems that the performance was acceptable last year. In fact, the pressure is great. Otherwise, how can you break the rule of not taking part in the DxO mobile phone camera evaluation when taking photos with Xiaomi, even at the expense of a controversial one-point gap, “sacrifice” The ranking of the Mate 30 Pro, one of the flagship flagships of the Huawei brand, will also squeeze Xiaomi CC9 Pro.
But then the question is, is Xiaomi still the greatest enemy of glory? Asking the same question, is glory still Xiaomi’s biggest enemy? In other words, how much space do you have from each other? How much can I grab? This is probably the problem that both of them calm down and think about.
Over time, OV is the silent killer
In fact, during the fight between Glory and Xiaomi, the market has quietly changed. The most typical performance is that OV, which once dominated the offline channel, started to develop the online market from the second half of 2018, and at the beginning of last year, it continued to increase the number of offline brands by returning from overseas markets. For example, the sub-brand IQOO released by vivo early last year is targeted at the online market with the Z series; OPPO has launched online efforts by launching the new Reno brand and the Realme brand that has been brought back to the main online market from the Indian market.
As of the third quarter of last year, according to Counterpoint Market Monitor data, Only in the Chinese smartphone online market, vivo’s market share has reached 10% and OPPO is 5%. Although there is still a gap with Glory and Xiaomi, when the Chinese smartphone market has entered the stock competition, even the 1% market share taken by the opponent will feel tremendous pressure from existing manufacturers in this field.
Taking Xiaomi as an example, its online market share in the third quarter was 14%, which was a serious decline compared to its share of more than 20% at the beginning of the year. The reason is that Counterpoint analysis believes that Xiaomi will focus on promoting Redmi K20 / K20 Pro and Xiaomi C in the third quarter.The average retail price of C9 series products is 2,000 yuan or even more than 3,000 yuan, which is higher than its previous hot-selling model Red Rice 7 / Note7 series (Average retail price Less than 1,500 yuan) is much higher. Although Xiaomi’s online promotion and discount efforts remained strong in the third quarter, it was affected by the market decline and the cost-effective product series from competitors. (such as the OPPO A series, Vivo Y series, Realme X series, etc.) , Xiaomi’s market share fell.
It is precisely because of OV’s expansion of the online market that the competition between Honor and Xiaomi has changed in the past year.
According to the huge number of statistics, in the past year of 2019, the mobile phone manufacturer’s replacement brand in measuring the competitiveness of the stock market has flowed to (outflow and inflow) Looking at the Honor mobile phone, except for its own Huawei and foreign brands, vivo has surpassed Xiaomi’s 9.0% outflow ratio with 10.4% and OPPO with 9.3%. It has become the largest outflow brand of the Honor mobile phone brand. It needs to be explained that Combined with the inflow brand, compared to 9.5% of vivo’s inflow of its own brand, it is a negative number. That is to say, just looking at the competition between glory and vivo, in the past year, in the competition of their existing users, glory is more important than gain.
Looking at Xiaomi again, it is also a huge amount of statistics. Despite the glory of (remove Huawei and foreign brands) is still Xiaomi’s largest outflow brand , Accounting for 11.7%, but the proportion of flows to vivo and OPPO also reached 9.9% and 8.8%. What is less glorious is that in comparison with OV flowing into its own brand, Xiaomi is negativeHowever, OV is robbing existing users of the Xiaomi brand.
Here is a brief summary. For Honor, in 2019, competition with OV will have a net inflow ratio of 0.4%; competition with Xiaomi will have a net inflow ratio of 2.4%; for Xiaomi, with In the competition of OV, the net inflow ratio was -5.6%, and in the competition with Glory, the net inflow ratio was -3.9%.
From this point of view, no matter from the perspective of Xiaomi’s stop loss or glory expansion, OV is their common enemy.
After all, for the glory, for many years, especially since replacing Xiaomi as the first Internet mobile phone brand in China in 2017, no matter from the retention rate or the proportion of shipments, the glory is in a stagnant state. Up, and in view of the continuous plunge of Xiaomi’s mobile phones, I believe that it has approached the bottom, that is, the glory of targeting and capturing Xiaomi’s market share will become uneconomical from an economic point of view, or it will be slower. Smaller meters in the market still have a large bottoming base, and from the above statistics, glory still has a lot of room for improvement in its ability to compete with OV to acquire users. “> (Last year it was only 0.4% positive, which was 1/6 of the users who acquired Xiaomi’s stock) .
More importantly, in the competition of similar mobile phone products, the pricing range of OV is closer to Glory. If Glory shifts its focus to OV, it will develop effective marketing and marketing strategies to acquire existing users. The income will increase accordingly. And not like competing with Xiaomi, but also to fight against it in price.
Compared to glory, Xiaomi’s top priority is stop loss. It is also the above statistics. The loss of existing users caused by OV to Xiaomi has exceeded the glory, and in the name of cost-effectiveness, it continues to drive down the price of Xiaomi. This is even more lethal for the listed Xiaomi.
Slots or real power, is OV Taoguang’s misfortune?
As mentioned above, stealing existing users from Xiaomi and making it difficult for Glory to take advantage, what does OV rely on?
The industry has mixed opinions on the rise of OV. Some say it depends on channels, some say it depends on marketing, and some think it is innovation. Here is just a brief description of our views. There is no doubt that the channel itself is an inherent advantage of OV. When the Internet mobile phone brand became popular, OV did not follow the trend, and finally ushered in the dawn. Mobile phone sales returned to the traditional channels and went hand in hand with Internet sales.
Some people may say here that OV has a foresight on the market and is the result of strategic determination. There are factors in this regard, but not all. After all, the huge channels cannot be abandoned overnight, but the wind direction of the Chinese market is changing too fast. Perhaps OV is still thinking, it may be difficult to give up, and the wind direction has changed again. This particular market factor is bound to happen. It’s also important!
As for marketing (such as advertising bombing, entertainment marketing) , as long as you have enough money, the effect is always there, only the market changes There are differences in effects. Of course, if done, it will do more with less. OV still has advantages in this regard, and the industry is familiar with OV, and more is still relying on this. However, it suddenly surprised the industry with “innovation” in 2018. After all, the label that started marketing is too deep.
In fact, for the so-called “innovation” display of OV in 2018, we have done analysis before and concluded that because Huawei relies on the rise of innovation at the high end and quickly complements the shortcomings in marketing, it has always been good at marketing OV must find new marketing points.
However, innovation is really different from marketing. Strong capital investment is only the foundation. What it needs is accumulated technology and really hard core technical support. Although OV also has so-called innovations, it has not left a deep impression on the industry and the market through the characteristics and experience of the product. At least, there has never been a hard-core technology that previously “charged for 5 minutes and talked for two hours” (In fact, the marketing is very strong) . Have you ever heard of the unique OPPO mobile phone camera and vivo ’s Hi-Fi selling point?
Of course, we are not here to deny the innovation of OV, but since the main innovation is to have some unique or distinctive product features and experiences, what is the actual situation? At least we feel very flat about OV phones.
The market is always the best test. As a result, I played the innovation card for one year in 2018.Instead of failing to shake Huawei in the high-end market, the sales volume fell throughout the year. In the end, I still found that the threshold for value for money was lower, so like Xiaomi, I shifted my focus to low-value Indian and Southeast Asian markets. As for the domestic market, through the brand’s “vest”, on the one hand, it focuses on cost-effectiveness, and on the other hand, it uses the name of “innovation” to implement “high prices and low allocations”, but this time it adopted a strategy of keeping its eyes on the dark. Why do you see it?
Take 5G mobile phones regarded as a new opportunity by domestic mobile phone manufacturers as an example. The price of 5G mobile phones launched by OV is basically the same as that of Honor V30, which is about 1,000 yuan different from Huawei Mate 30 series. Xiaomi’s mutual 5G frequency band, in fact, OV’s 5G mobile phone has the same shortcomings as Xiaomi. However, the industry seems to only know that Redmi K30 5G version does not support N79 band (because of each other’s interaction) , in fact, the price is much higher than Redmi K30 5G The same is true of the OV version, but it has been ignored by the industry and people. What is the reason?
Silent is golden! Glory and Xiaomi slap them, and they will never participate, just sell them! It was in this silence that vivo released a new machine with the help of a friend. Last year,In the third quarter, it once won the first sales of 5G mobile phones in China, and the lowest price of these 5G mobile phones is 3798 yuan. (IQOO Pro 5G) And 5698 yuan (NEX3) . Even if it is listed on the Huawei Mate30 5G and Pro versions, it still occupies the second largest shipment of China’s 5G mobile phone market with a 17.7% market share. (but it has fallen sharply before Up) . And Xiaomi, which has a higher 5G configuration, (mainly Xiaomi 9Pro 5G version) ranked third with only 10.4%.
On the mobile phone camera function that the market and users pay attention to, OV also adopts “silence”. When Honor and Xiaomi exchanged pixel and DxO phone camera evaluation rankings, in fact, OPPO has already participated in this ranking very low-key, that is, the OPPO Reno 5G version (OPPO Reno 10x Zoom) , but only ranked 6th, and was “cold-treated” by OPPO, but in the domestic media, I always see articles such as his picture taken with a friend ’s flagship photo, What’s the intention?
To sum up, we believe that OV ’s strategy of keeping its eyes low is the biggest enemy of Honor Mobile and Xiaomi. In the future, Honor and Xiaomi should be targeted at OV in terms of products and marketing. What we are worried about is whether this strategy of OV’s seemingly obscure strategy is based on real strength, or does it cleverly cover up its slots? Because different foundations determine its blessings for the Chinese smartphone industry, market and users.