The dust has settled on the rumors about Geely ’s acquisition of Meizu .
On July 4, 2022, Hubei Xingji Times Technology Co., Ltd. officially announced that it holds a 79.09% controlling stake in Meizu Technology and has obtained sole control of Meizu Technology.
On September 28, 2021, Hubei Xingji Times Technology Co., Ltd., founded by Geely founder Li Shufu, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone , officially announcing its entry into the mobile phone field.
Why did Geely acquire Meizu? What to do after acquiring Meizu? Why does Geely consider entering the mobile phone field?
With these questions in mind, I chatted for an hour yesterday with the new chairman of Meizu and the vice chairman of Xingji Times, Shen Ziyu.
In this one-hour high-density conversation, Shen Ziyu talked about a lot of exclusive content that was not mentioned in the cooperation press conference between the two parties.
If you want to make a mobile phone, there is no more suitable acquisition target than Meizu.
Although in the early days of the development of smartphones in China, Meizu has always been one of the most popular domestic mobile phone brands, and has also made a number of excellent products worthy of being recorded in the history of domestic smartphones. products, but in recent years, Meizu has always had a very low sense of presence. The update rhythm of
mobile phones cannot keep up with the times, and the market share has also fallen again and again, less than 1%.
When Shen Ziyu was asked why Geely chose to acquire Meizu, he gave this answer:
We believe that we are latecomers in making mobile phones. Although we can hire many outstanding talents and gather them together to quickly form combat effectiveness, we lack history. Accumulation, at the same time we are in awe of the mobile phone industry. Although we are in the automobile business, cars are very complex, and mobile phones are also very complex, but now we still lack accumulation, experience, and a successful and mature system for a complete mobile phone product line.
Meizu naturally has a complete system and process there. The most important thing is that Meizu's profitability was pretty good last year. This is also the main reason why we decided to acquire Meizu. As a company, its nature and assets are very good.
In fact, after announcing its entry into the mobile phone field and before acquiring Meizu Technology, Xingji Times already had nearly 1,000 employees. It took about a year to gather many well-known experts and technicians in the industry. This is Extremely efficient team building speed.
According to the information obtained by Huxiu from external channels. Currently, there are many employees from major domestic mobile phone manufacturers in the team of Xingji Times. Xingji Times also asked Byte about the price of Smartisan’s team, but Byte offered a very high price, and after being replaced by Byte After the acquisition, there was a serious loss of Hammer Mobile team members, and not many actually worked in Byte.
Therefore, for Xingji Era, if you want to absorb talents in the mobile phone field and independently control Meizu, it is the most efficient way.
The Meizu brand is retained, and Xingji Times specializes in high-end
Even though it has recruited experienced mobile phone industry talents, the competition in the domestic mobile phone market is cruel, which is obvious to both outsiders and insiders. The market volume of
has gradually shrunk due to the decrease in the frequency of seasonal changes among consumers, and the homogeneity of mobile phone products has become extremely serious. The high-end attempts of various domestic mobile phone manufacturers have mostly made little noise, and the marketing value of flagship products is obviously greater than The commercial value of actual sales and profit. In an environment like
, the high-end road in the Star Age era will not be particularly easy.
But it seems that Shen Ziyu didn't think so. After gaining independent control of Meizu, he decided to use this strategy:
We will basically focus on Meizu's main product line between 3,000 and 6,000, and mainly on Star Age between 6,000 and 9,000. The product.
In other words, Meizu’s brand will be retained and it will continue to release new phones in the future, but the price positioning will be placed in the mainstream range of domestic brands. In Xingji Era, it will create a new brand and create a new flagship The price of the model will be over 6,000 yuan.
Exploring high-end is something that domestic mobile phone manufacturers have been trying to do in recent years. However, so far, there are still not many domestic mobile phone products that break the 6,000 yuan price range. In fact, it is not that domestic mobile phone brands don’t want to, but it is too difficult.
High-end mobile phones worth about 5,000 yuan can already use the latest hardware that is updated at the current market pace. Whether it is screen, processor, or camera, they can all reach "flagship level", but higher-end models are priced more expensive. For the current domestic manufacturers, it seems that there are only two paths.
is similar to ensuring high-end configuration while putting more effort into the camera, and using high-end cooperative brands to increase positioning and premium.
is similar to Huawei 's earliest cooperation with Leica , or the current cooperation between Xiaomi and Leica, or the current cooperation between vivo and Zeiss, OPPO and Hasselblad . However, brand cooperation does not add much to the product. Manufacturers still need to use self-research to truly find differences in the imaging quality or photography functions of the camera that can be clearly perceived by users. One way for
is to innovate in form and make folding screens. The extremely high cost and selling price of early folding screens raised consumers' price expectations for this type of mobile phones. Therefore, when domestic mobile phone manufacturers launch new folding screen phones, they can achieve a balance in all aspects, with prices around eight to nine thousand. There are also consumers willing to pay. But in essence, when consumers buy domestic folding screens, most of them are looking for high cost performance and do not really recognize the high-end sense of the brand.
But it seems that Shen Ziyu is extremely confident in making high-end mobile phones:
We initially thought that there was no way to enter this track, because this track is very red ocean, but there is one track that can be entered, and that is 6000 Mobile phones costing more than 1 yuan. 6,000 yuan to 9,000 yuan. In this track, there are only two competitors in the world: apple and Samsung . In China, there may be only one Apple now.
Everyone will say, are you crazy? 6,000, 7,000, 8,000, 9,000. Chairman Shufu once said an interesting thing. He said that we can sell cars for more than one million, why can't we sell mobile phones for one million? Ten thousand yuan, this joke actually represents a kind of courage, so we will do it boldly.
Why is Geely’s mobile phone worth more than 6,000?
As for how to make high-end mobile phones in the Star Age era truly have a high-end feel, Shen Ziyu sees it this way:
So how can we make a breakthrough in the mobile phone field? There is a core point, design is the core competitiveness that can be focused on, and Apple’s design is very beautiful. The main reasons are that we are engineers leading products, rather than designing brand-led products. Just like a mobile phone, if the LOGO is covered up, almost no one will know which mobile phone it is, and there will be no brand logo or design mark.
Xingji’s mobile phones, as well as future Meizu mobile phones, will definitely have a very good sense of design on the back, and they will have great advantages in materials, which is what we are good at. Because the application of materials and engineering applications in automobiles is far greater than that in mobile phones, design and brand are one of the crucial factors for our success.
Second, chips, software, including low-orbit satellites bring a different experience, as well as glasses, we can bring a multi-terminal integrated experience, I think these are what we should do.
The design of mobile phones has different opinions. Similar to cars, no car or mobile phone design will please everyone. But the layout of chips and software will indeed become a very critical breakthrough point for Meizu and Xingji Era in the future.
Anyone who is familiar with the development process of Chinese smartphones knows that when it comes to system-level integration and innovation, apart from Hammer, it is Meizu. Meizu’s team has enough ability to build a good system that is both aesthetically and interactively excellent. , but in the past few years, due to corporate development, it has been mediocre. Xingji Times’ investment has given the Meizu team enough capital.
The layout of the chip happens to be Shen Ziyu’s strength.
In the Geely Group, there is such a company called Xinqing Technology, which successfully taped out a 7nm car-grade chip last year and has now successfully put it on the market.
Although the 7nm process is not considered advanced for the consumer electronics field currently led by mobile phones, the successful chip research and development experience of the companies in the group is extremely important for the Meizu and Xingji era.
Shen Ziyu said:
We will definitely develop AP by ourselves. At present, we have not said it to the outside world.
On the 7nm chip project, we gathered more than 400 engineers and spent more than 30 months working on it since 2018. At the end of October last year, we successfully taped out TSMC's 7nm EUV extreme ultraviolet light in one go. This AP is also very complex. We have made CPU 100K, GPU close to a T, and then we also have four A76 large cores and four A55 small cores, including support for DDR5.
So why make a mobile phone? Because we discovered a problem, the consumer electronics industry will always deal with the most advanced manufacturing processes because it iterates relatively quickly. We hope that by making mobile phones, we can accelerate the core R&D capabilities of SoC at the same time.
Currently, Xingji Era is already in the process of working on 4nm. We plan to tape out in the second half of 2024.
Now OPPO and VIVO are doing it, Xiaomi is doing it, Huawei is doing it, not to mention car phones, if you can successfully stream 7nm SoC, we should count it as one, because you can autonomously stream chips on 7nm and succeed, including lighting, the quality and functions are very good There are actually not many companies.
So we are very confident that in the future, our Xingji era mobile phones, probably products in 2025, will definitely use our own AP.
Indeed, the importance of self-developed chips to high-end mobile phones is gradually being valued by domestic mobile phone manufacturers. With the success of
Apple mobile phones, everyone initially focused on innovation in form and interaction. Gradually, some people began to recognize that the developer ecosystem of the App Store is Apple’s highest barrier. Now, the exclusive functions brought by self-developed chips are Make the experience difference between Apple phones and other Android phones. The flexibility brought by self-developed chips has also become the most important cornerstone for building Apple's hardware and software ecosystem.
Looking back at China, a large part of Huawei's previous success in the field of smartphones also comes from its huge investment in self-developed chips.
But for other domestic manufacturers, self-developed chips are a hot potato. Less experience and high cost of trial and error. It is difficult for self-developed chips that have been successfully developed to compete with mature suppliers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek . If the self-developed chips are replaced, the consumer perception will not be obvious.
Some domestic mobile phone manufacturers have previously announced that they will invest tens of billions in research and development, but Shen Ziyu believes that this matter is not that complicated. How much it costs actually depends on experience and capabilities:
The cost of advanced process chips, in fact In many cases, the cost is not as high as tens of billions. Why is the cost high? Many companies will blame it on the difficulty of doing it. Why is this thing so difficult to do? Because it is difficult to guarantee one-time success, why is it so difficult to guarantee one-time success? Because your understanding of the architecture and the design of the architecture are not enough to ensure the final quality. Why Xinqing Technology was able to successfully tape out the tape in one go, while many other companies were unable to do it in one go, and had to do it three or four times, is precisely because there are many problems that need to be solved in the early architecture design.
Xinqing Technology originally recruited talents from all over the world to do this. We have the best architects, etc. We gathered talents from all over the world to do this. We are very refined, so we can succeed in one go. If you can do a good job in architecture and front-end design, your tape-out success rate will be greatly improved, so the final comprehensive cost will not be very high.
is like Tesla FSD. The entire FSD investment requires 900,000 vehicles. For and Tesla , it only takes one year. The core problem is not how much investment is required. In fact, the investment is relatively OK, otherwise Apple would not Do it yourself, the main core question is whether you are sure you can do it right the first time.
But for all domestic smartphone manufacturers, self-developed chips are a difficult and correct path.
And this path, both in terms of financial resources and experience, is more promising for Geely's Xingji Era and Meizu, which is now included in this system, than other domestic brands.
Do not make mobile phones just to sell mobile phones.
After talking to Shen Ziyu about the above content, I personally feel that although the new chairman of Meizu Technology born in the 1980s has given a "correct and firm path", he may be facing the media. Not wanting to show weakness, he seemed to be too optimistic about making mobile phones and entering the mobile phone industry.
On the other hand, in the official document provided by Xingji Times, a lot of content about AR eyes was mentioned. It seems that this company wants a lot more.
Shen Ziyu said:
Smart Glasses We started to invest in research before the Star Age. First, we believe that we are latecomers in the field of mobile phones, and mobile phones are mature product systems. In this matter, we, as Latecomers can only work hard to make up for their shortcomings and quickly catch up with those who are ahead. At the same time, we must explore terminals that can replace mobile phones.
We think there is a good chance that glasses will replace mobile phones. Because smart glasses are worn on people, they do not require an action to take the phone out of the pocket to look at it, so they have inherent advantages in this regard. Of course, we are still facing big problems with mobile phones now, because when they are worn on people, their appearance, weight, heat generation, battery life, including the efficiency, virtual reality integration, and interaction all need to be explored.
For us, this is a huge opportunity, because only by completely subverting human-computer interaction can your technology be completely subverted. If everything revolves around touch and two-finger swiping, it will be like that in this circle. You can see that each mobile phone manufacturer uses different cameras, but the entire human-computer interaction has the same logic and structure, including multi-touch and swipe. It is difficult to make a big subversion on this.
Since we are latecomers, we definitely need to use subversive ideas to explore this matter. One is glasses. Glasses bring more brand-new interactions to users. We think this is a great opportunity, including our concepts and we believe that the technical architecture It is based on the premise of advanced human-computer interaction. If any technical architecture is separated from the human-computer architecture, any architecture will be wasteful and meaningless. We have spent about two years in reserve for
glasses, and we have made great breakthroughs, including weight, cruising range, color, human-computer interaction system, and the operating system is self-developed by us.
If Shen Ziyu were asked to summarize the layout of Xingji Era, the concept he gave is a very simple word: mobility.
In other words, before getting independent control of Meizu, the company Shen Ziyu was responsible for made AR eyes, car intelligence business, and made chips. But when people focus all their attention on taking over Meizu in Xingji Era, what will happen? When it comes to what kind of mobile phone to build, if you look back and look from a distance, you will find that Shen Ziyu's goal is not just to build mobile phones for the sake of selling mobile phones. Instead, we will build a complete set of interconnected intelligent systems around mobile terminals. The
chip is the underlying foundation, the mobile phone is the terminal closest to the user, the car is the necessary terminal for users to travel, and glasses are the future exploration. Each business has strong correlation and reusability at the business level.
Shen Ziyu gave me a very direct example:
4nm A year after the mobile phone chip came out, the 4nm automotive chip came out. It may be a different TSMC process technology .
In the future, we will learn from Apple’s strategy on M1 and use different combinations of the same chip to build different product layouts. We will definitely go in this direction.
Mobile phone manufacturers are all building cars. The above-mentioned vision of interconnection from mobile phones to smart cars has actually been mentioned by domestic mobile phone manufacturers. However, these mobile phone manufacturers, no matter how successful their mobile phone business is, they still have to go through manufacturing chips and cars. These two mountains.
But these are difficult things for Shen Ziyu’s company. Precisely because these businesses are in the Geely Group’s ecosystem, the company has made enough profits from its automobile business to solve the most difficult part of car manufacturing in the entire channel. The independent control of Meizu has made up a relatively simple part of the entire business line.
As for Shen Ziyu, a young leader born in the 1980s, he is gradually breaking down the business barriers of automobile companies in the intelligent transformation. What is left for him is a difficult but clear and bright future.
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