Author | Furong
Nio is also going to build a mobile phone, and it will be launched within one year.
Just yesterday (November 27), NIO founder Li Bin responded to the progress of making mobile phones. He said: "There is no need for users who want to change their phones within one year. If they are now Android users, there is no need for other phones."
It is said that NIO's mobile phones are mainly positioned as high-end brands above 7,000 yuan, adopt non-curved screen design, and like Apple phones, they will only update one series of versions every year.
Image source: Internet
In fact, NIO has been preparing for mobile phone business for some time. Moreover, in February this year, it was reported that NIO had decided to build mobile phones and had established a mobile phone department, which was located in Qianhai, Shenzhen. In July, Li Bin also responded: NIO's mobile phone manufacturing is being advanced.
So, why does NIO build a mobile phone? What exactly is it to do?
First of all, we can understand "smart cars" in this way, which is about equal to "smart phones" plus "four wheels".
So, in order to realize the intelligence of the car, NIO's smart cars need to be compatible and supporting smartphones such as Android, , Huawei , and Apple from the perspective of the car's software and hardware. Instead of cooperating with others and letting others earn money from selling mobile phones, it is better to do one more step by yourself and make your own mobile phones, and you will earn money from the terminal mobile phones.
The second reason is that whether it is NIO or NIO mobile phones, they are all products of their own home, and data sharing, product research and development and debugging are more convenient, which can improve the travel experience of NIO car owners. More importantly, NIO’s ultimate goal is to fill its own automobile industry chain and build its own ecosystem.
Regarding this point, Li Bin said that NIO mobile phones will be "the mobile phone with the best matching degree with NIO", and NIO mobile phones and NIO will collide with NIO to create more "smart gameplay".
Someone asked, what is the point of building an automotive ecosystem? Think about it, when a customer uses his own brand for everything, first of all, can he make more money from the product? Second, will we better "flee" in the future?
The third reason is that for NIO, making mobile phones is purely a dimensional reduction blow.
For example, Musk once said that if Google and Apple remove Twitter from their app store, he will produce his own smartphone.
Image source: Internet
As we all know, building smart car costs tens of billions and tens of billions of dollars. Now, when building mobile phones, from materials to parts to technology, the cost is far below this.
Moreover, today's smartphones are very easy to manufacture. Just purchase the parts of the mobile phone from the supply chain, then find an OEM factory to assemble and piece together, then choose the Android of the open source system as the operating system of the mobile phone, and finally perform simple debugging of software and hardware, which completes the manufacturing of a mobile phone.
can be seen that it is not a matter of minutes to build a smart car and then a smartphone.
So, who will pay for the NIO mobile phone?
Smartphones are now basically owned by one or even several, so people only buy them for the purpose of changing their phones. So the consumer population is no longer as large as before.
So, most of the people who pay for this should be NIO owners and quasi-NIO owners, and of course there will be a small number of people who are curious about it.
Although NIO mobile phones are benchmarked against Apple, in terms of mobile phone brands, Huawei, Xiaomi, Apple... are not the main players who have been struggling in the mobile phone industry for many years? The competition is really fierce, and it is still difficult to become a leader in one step.
To be honest, if NIO wants to "make blood" by selling mobile phones, even if this area is profitable, it will not be of much significance to the overall income; but if it is based on the perspective of filling the industrial chain and building an automobile ecosystem, it is still somewhat strategic.
