[Original article by Ce Zijun]
After Apple launched the smartphone iPhone, the mobile phone industry experienced a major reshuffle, and international giants broke their wings one after another. NOKIA, Moto, HTC were forced to sell themselves, and SONY gradually declined. With ARM at the top of the industrial chain and Android rising, Samsung relies on the entire hardware industry chain, especially technological breakthroughs on OLED screens, making a counterattack all the way, with a great trend of challenging Apple.
However, in 2018, changes in the mobile phone industry are happening quietly again. Tens of millions of iPhones have become the norm. Samsung's Chinese market sales continue to decline. The 7-nanometer Huawei Kirin 980 chip was released, closely following the Apple A12 chip, showing China's strength, and Huawei mobile phone prices have been rising all the way. Honor , Xiaomi , OPPO, and vivo have all increased their efforts to expand the international market, and domestic mobile phone brands are making rapid progress and unstoppable.
These changes were not achieved overnight. Domestic mobile phone brands and supply chains have been continuously invested for many years, accumulated strength and achieved phased results. Below we analyze the current situation of the domestic mobile phone industry from Apple's China supply chain, the trend of domestic hardware domesticization, and the breakthrough of domestic mobile phone brands.
Apple is a company that requires perfection, which is fully reflected in Apple's iPhone products. Due to Apple's strict requirements on suppliers, manufacturers entering Apple's supply chain represent technology and quality.
Apple has world-class resource integration capabilities. The parts of Apple phones come from all over the world, among which the core components come from the United States, Japan, and South Korea, mainly core chips, screens, etc. Most of the other components come from China and are assembled by factories such as Foxconn , Pegatron and others.
In February, Apple updated its supplier list, which is 30 pages long, with the top 200 suppliers, with a total of 778 factories worldwide, accounting for 98% of Apple's annual material, manufacturing and assembly procurement expenditure in 2017. Among them, there are 49 suppliers in Taiwan, China, accounting for 29 suppliers in mainland China, and 7 suppliers in Hong Kong. A total of 85 Chinese suppliers were selected, accounting for as much as 43%. Then there are 42 Japanese suppliers, 41 American suppliers, 11 Korean suppliers, 5 Singapore suppliers, 6 German suppliers, 2 Austria, Finland, Netherlands respectively, and 1 UK, Swiss , Belgium and Saudi Arabia each.
Let’s take a look at the list of Chinese suppliers that have newly joined the Apple supply chain. BOE, OFILM, , Meiyingsen , Changdian Technology, Pengding International, Baicheng Industrial, and Hengmingda are new companies to join the Apple supply chain in mainland China. Ming'an International, Gusong Precision, Jingshuo Technology, Heshuo, Platinum Technology, and Zhishen Technology are from Taiwan, China, and Yingcheng Industrial comes from Hong Kong, China. In Apple's supply chain, Chinese suppliers have grown the fastest.
You may think that the Chinese companies in Apple's supply chain have a huge difference in strength compared to those in the United States, Japan, South Korea and other companies. Yes, this is certain. Let’s introduce the domestic technological breakthrough of core components in the mobile phone industry.
The most core technical component of a mobile phone is main control chip . The main control chip is the brain of the mobile phone, and through software, it controls other hardware in the mobile phone. In the mobile phone industry at this stage, the main manufacturers that can develop main control chips are: , Qualcomm , Huawei, Apple, Samsung, Taiwan , MediaTek , and Spreadtrum .
China's powerful manufacturer Huawei is called technology control by the industry and has a global leadership position in the communications industry. Huawei's subsidiary HiSilicon Semiconductor has broken the patent and technology monopoly of Qualcomm in the United States through years of technological accumulation and has made continuous breakthroughs in the field of high-end mobile phone chips.
Huawei HiSilicon launched a new product this year, Kirin 980 chip, adopts the world-leading seven-nanometer process process in the semiconductor industry. Compared with the previous generation of product Kirin 970 chip, the CPU single-core performance is 75%, the power consumption is reduced by 58%, the GPU performance is 46% higher than the previous generation of products, the energy efficiency is improved by 178%, and the AI computing power is 4 times higher than the previous generation of products.
Kylin 980 chip, built-in world-leading baseband product, performance reaches LTE Cat.21 standard, its peak downlink rate can reach up to 1.4Gbps, and its uplink rate can theoretically reach 200Mbps. The memory controller of the Lin980 chip is the world's first chip that supports LPDDR4X 2133MHz memory, with a bandwidth increase of 13%. In addition, the Kirin 980 chip also has a built-in fourth-generation ISP image signal processor and HiSilicon's Hi1103 Wi-Fi chip. If you want to know more about the Kirin 980 chip, you can read the article I wrote before.
Mobile phone chips produced by MediaTek in Taiwan are mainly used in mid- and low-end mobile phones. Domestic oppo, vivo, Xiaomi, and Meizu all use MediaTek's chip technology, providing consumers with many cost-effective mobile phone products, which is a force that cannot be ignored in the mobile phone chip industry.
Many people may not have heard of China's Spreadtrum, but it is such a company that once accounted for one-quarter of the global mobile processor market, ranking first in the Indian market, and ranked first in the global single product shipment of mobile processors. Among the top ten IC design companies in the world in 2017, China's Huawei HiSilicon Semiconductor and Unigroup Zhanrui ranked seventh and tenth respectively. Unigroup Zhanrui is the company name after the merger of Spreadtrum and Ruidiko .
The domestic mobile phone chip industry, high-end Huawei, mid- and low-end MediaTek and low-end Spreadtrum complement each other.
display screen is also a product with relatively high technical barriers in the mobile phone industry. Currently, low-end display screens use LCD technology, and high-end display screens use oled technology. The future trend is mini LED and micro LED.
The main display manufacturers in the mobile phone industry include JDI and Sharp in Japan, Samsung and LG in South Korea, and BOE Tianma in China. Currently, the global market share of mobile LCD displays is the first in the domestic JD , and the domestic ranks first in the full screen of mobile LCD. The market share of mobile phone oled displays is flat, and South Korea's Samsung is in a monopoly position. However, domestic BOE and Tianma are gradually increasing their investment in OLD display technology, and their products have begun mass production. It is expected that the market share will gradually increase in the next two years, breaking the monopoly position of South Korea's Samsung.
The memory and storage products in mobile phones are absolutely high-tech barrier products. Toshiba in Japan, Magnesium in the United States, Samsung in South Korea and Hyundai control the entire market. However, what is gratifying is that the three major domestic memory manufacturers, Changjiang Storage, Hefei Changxin and Fujian Jinhua, will start trial production this year and achieve mass production next year. It is expected to have an impact on the market in 2020.
With the continuous improvement of the domestic mobile phone supply chain, the improvement of technology and quality, and the technological breakthroughs of core components, domestic mobile phone brands have ushered in the best time for development, Huawei and Honor. Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo. OnePlus , Meizu, Transsion and other mobile phone brands are growing rapidly in the domestic and global mobile phone markets respectively.
Huawei is already the top three mobile phone brands in the world and is gradually replacing Samsung's position in the country. Xiaomi has gradually accelerated its overseas expansion and achieved good results in the first place in the Indian market. OPPO and vivo have achieved good sales results in China respectively and have gradually begun to expand overseas markets. OnePlus mobile phone brand has achieved good results in the high-end market in India. Transsion mobile phones rank first in the African market.
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