Near the end of 2022, an internal speech by OPPO founder Chen Mingyong leaked out. Regarding the matter of self-developed chips, Chen Mingyong said: must do it, and it must be done well .
I have to admit that in the face of suppression from the United States, the domestic semiconductor industry has not heard such desperate and desperate voices for a long time.
Just a few days ago, a big V in the domestic chip industry broke the news that OPPO's self-developed mobile phone chip will be tape-out in the third quarter of 2023, using TSMC's 4nm process technology , and plug-in MediaTek 's 5G baseband chip . Related products are expected to be available in the first half of 2024.
You must know that TSMC’s 4nm process technology is an advanced process that is often used only in high-end chips. OPPO’s first self-developed chip is made of 4nm. You can imagine OPPO’s positioning of this chip and the huge effort it has put into it.
Therefore, outsiders speculate that the first mobile phone equipped with OPPO’s self-developed chip will most likely not be cheap, and the price may even be more than 3,000 yuan.
It is worth noting that just three days before the media broke the news, on December 27, the OPPO chip R&D center project land was delisted, located in Dongguan Binhai Bay New District 's Jiaoyiwan Peninsula has a total area of 387 acres and a total investment of 4.5 billion yuan. The plan includes: chip R&D center, chip experimental testing center, semiconductor equipment research center, 5G terminal R&D center, AI R&D center, etc.
Obviously, OPPO’s attitude towards chip research and development also implements OPPO’s persistence in long-termism.
data shows that since 2021, among the 22 projects invested by OPPO, there are 9 chip companies, covering optoelectronic 3D, radio frequency, analog circuits, laser chip and other semiconductor fields.
If investment projects are not yet intuitive, the most obvious one is R&D expenditures.
In 2018, OPPO’s R&D expenses were less than 4 billion yuan, which jumped to 10 billion a year later. At the end of 2019, Chen Mingyong said that OPPO would invest 50 billion yuan in technology research and development in the next three years, averaging 16.666 billion yuan per year, several times more than in 2018. Among them, Chen Mingyong Mingyong specifically mentioned that " we need to build the underlying hardware core technology as well as software engineering and system capabilities."
In 2020, several top engineers in the semiconductor industry will join OPPO, including former MediaTek COO Zhu Shangzu.
In return for OPPO’s emphasis on R&D investment, in 2021, OPPO’s number of patent applications was second only to Huawei in the country. By the end of this year, OPPO already has hundreds of chip-related patent reserves.
At this time, many people will have questions, why does OPPO make its own chips?
According to the predictions of the market statistics agency IDC, the global smartphone market shipments are likely to fall by 9.1% throughout 2022. The mobile phone market is showing a shrinking trend that is visible to the naked eye. Among the many unfavorable factors currently plaguing the smartphone industry, the first one is the homogenization of products .
Each mobile phone manufacturer uses the same processor platform, camera CMOS, software system, and screen assembly. It is just because of differences in brands and profits that each has its own choices. Luo Yonghao has a very vivid metaphor for this situation. He said: Mobile phone manufacturers are all "solution integrators" and are "provided by the supply chain." In China, except for Huawei, they are all "assembly factories."
Obviously, long-term dependence on industrial solutions and supply chains, as well as simple "use-ism", can easily make the mobile phone market fall into homogeneous competition.
Moreover, homogeneity is also an important obstacle for domestic mobile phones to move towards the high-end market. In OPPO’s understanding, using core technologies to drive mobile phone products to break through the shackles of the high-end market has become a possible option.
It is worth noting that OPPO has entered a relatively critical time window. Compared with its competitors, OPPO’s annual growth rate in 2022 is not optimistic, and the decline is even greater than that of its peers.
Especially in the high-end market, OPPO has yet to successfully break through the phenomenon-level products, and the market volume is not as good as that of the vivo X90 series next door. The latter has helped vivo secure the top spot in the domestic price range of 3500-5000 yuan with its 24% market share .
The V2 chip developed by vivo is obviously indestructible, replicating Huawei's successful experience in relying on self-developed chips to break through in the high-end market.
Currently, for OPPO, such successful experience is obviously very necessary to learn from.
Finally, with OPPO’s example, other mobile phone manufacturers’ self-developed SoCs are likely to come out within one or two years. In the next three to five years, we are likely to see a spurt of self-developed mobile phone SoCs, and domestic mobile phones will show an increasingly unique and distinctive development trend.
