Text |Jin Wei.
At the beginning of 2024, the mobile phone circle will usher in a wave of new phone releases.
In the past ten days, OnePlus Ace 3, Honor X50 GT, Honor Magic 6 series and other series have been released, jointly setting off a new year's circle war.
On January 8th, OPPO held a new product launch conference and officially released the Find X7 series of global flagships, with a starting price of 3999 yuan, joining the mobile phone war.
OPPO spent nearly half of the more than two-hour press conference talking about the layout and advantages of its latest products in AI. According to OPPO, Find X7 is the world's first mobile phone to apply a 7 billion parameter large language model on the device side, and has passed the advanced deployment of device-cloud collaboration. In addition, the Find X7 series is equipped with OPPO's self-developed tidal architecture, which realizes ultra-dynamic scheduling of heterogeneous computing units by researching performance deep into the bottom layer of the chip.
Liu Zuohu, chief product officer of OPPO, said at the press conference: "Find X7 not only has super pro images, but also super pro in terms of performance, AI experience, screen display, and international travel experience. It can be seen that the image, tidal architecture, and large model are the selling points of OPPO's new machine.
2023 is a year of "life and death" for mobile phone manufacturers, due to the lack of transformative innovation, mainstream mobile phone brands are fighting in various subdivisions in order to compete for the stock market, from fighting performance, volume memory, ratio image, folding, satellite communication, and then to volume large model ......
The Find series is an important high-end product line of OPPO, which has been around for ten years.
In recent years, the mobile phone market has declined, high-end mobile phones have grown against the trend, under the stock competition, mobile phone manufacturers have spared no effort to invest resources to launch a charge to the high-end market, find series mobile phones are an important bargaining chip for OPPO's high-end, and AI models are trendy high-end machines.
Liu Zuohu said at the press conference that OPPO has concentrated internal resources to set up an AI center, and "mobile phone companies will be useless if they don't lay out large models."
However, in terms of large models, OPPO is not under pressure, because OPPO is not the only mobile phone manufacturer with large models, vivo and Xiaomi have already entered the game.
At the vivo developer conference on November 1, 2023, vivo released its self-developed AI "blue heart" large model and large model matrix, and at the same time open-sourced 7 billion blue heart large model 7B, becoming the first mobile phone manufacturer in China to open source large models.
In October 2023, at the Xiaomi Surging OS and Xiaomi 14 series new product launch conference, Xiaomi officially announced that it would implant the AI large model into the system; In the same month, Zhao Ming, CEO of Honor, also said that the upcoming Magic6 series of mobile phones will support self-developed 7 billion device-side AI large models.
Previously, in July 2023, Huawei released the industry-oriented Pangu model 3 at the developer conference0, the highest version is up to 100 billion parameters, and it is officially announced that the new generation of intelligent operating system HarmonyOS 4 has been connected to the Pangu model.
Large models have invariably become an important choice for major mobile phone manufacturers to enter the high-end track, but back to reality, mainstream manufacturers still mainly choose Qualcomm and MediaTek, the two major chip manufacturers, and it is difficult to say which one has more prominent advantages and launches more differentiated applications.
In May 2023, OPPO announced that it would no longer make chips, and there are no self-developed chips at present. The newly released OPPO Find X7 is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 9300 processor, and the Find X7 Ultra is powered by Qualcomm's third-generation Snapdragon 8 processor. OPPO has launched its self-developed Tidal architecture, hoping to bring a better experience to the processor.
Liu Zuohu emphasized that OPPO does not make chips, but retains the previous architecture team, and the self-developed tidal architecture this time is from the Zheku team. "From a technical point of view, it doesn't mean that everyone can do the same thing with the same chip, deploying the model to the device side is a very core technology, and how the algorithm is adapted and deployed with GPU and NPU is essentially differentiated. ”
For"Is the Oppo Find X7 Ultra confident that it will win this year's images? "Liu Zuohu said, there must be, you see who can win against us this year, I can blow this cow here first. "
This is the first flag set by OPPO's chief product officer Liu Zuohu in 2024, and for the high-end mobile phone market, Liu Zuohu believes that "the product is good enough, and the sales volume will not be wrong." ”
In recent years, it has been a consensus that manufacturers that have done better at the high-end level have more market stability and long-term growth, and OPPO once focused on betting on folding screens on the high-end road.
At the end of August 2023, OPPO released the Find N3 Flip, unfortunately, Huawei released the Mate 60 Pro in September, triggering a rush for Huawei mobile phones across the network, and in October, OPPO released the third-generation folding screen flagship Find N3, and then, Huawei released the folding screen mobile phone Mate X5.
Two new machine releases were successively struck by Huawei, and OPPO won the title of "Wang Feng of the Circle".
In 2023, China's mobile phone market will usher in the biggest variable: the return of Huawei mobile phones. With the Mate 60 and the foldable Mate X5, Huawei fired the first shot of the return of the king and quickly occupied the high-end market.
With the rise of Huawei's high-end phones, the pattern of Apple + "OV Rongmi", which has occupied the Chinese mobile phone market for many years, has been broken together. However, Apple, Xiaomi and other mobile phone manufacturers have made great efforts to seize the stock smartphone market, especially the Xiaomi 14, which has been a great success and has gained a bright increase in the high-end price market.
According to Counterpoint Research**, both Huawei and Xiaomi have slightly increased their market share in the global premium smartphone market (wholesale price of $600) in 2023, while OPPO's share has remained unchanged.
The mobile phone stock market, if you don't advance, you will retreat, especially the high-end smartphone market as a whole is shrinking, and the growth of competing products means that OPPO is declining.
In the first quarter of 2023, OPPO finished with 19The market share of 6% returned to the first place in the domestic mobile phone market again, of which folding mobile phones made a lot of contributions to OPPO, but the good times did not last long, and the market position in the second quarter was shaken.
IDC data shows that in the second quarter of 2023, OPPO's market share in domestic mobile phones will increase from 196% fell to 177%。In the third quarter, OPPO's market share not only continued to decline to 162%, and the ranking of shipments also dropped from first to second.
Recently, citing data from domestic institutions, in the fourth quarter of 2023, Apple, Xiaomi, Huawei, Honor, OPPO, and vivo are the top six mobile phone manufacturers in terms of sales, among them, Xiaomi, Huawei, and Honor all showed a year-on-year growth trend, while OPPO (including OnePlus and Realme) had 10.44 million activations and a market share of 139%, down 151%, a significant decrease.
In other words, in 2023, OPPO's market share will fall three times in a row, showing a situation of "opening high and going low".
OPPO's market share is declining, and the efforts of competitors are the direct cause, and OPPO has not been able to successfully cope with the market squeeze of competing products.
In the first quarter of 2023, OPPO's folding screen sales increased by more than 300% year-on-year, ranking first in China's folding screen mobile phone market, among which OPPO Find N2 Flip won the first place in the sales of vertical folding screen single products.
But with Huawei's efforts in the field of folding, OPPO's city has fallen. According to BCI's latest release of the brand share of China's folding screen mobile phone market in Q4 2023, Huawei has a monopoly on half of the market share, reaching 5123%, followed by Honor and Samsung with a market share of 1554% and 1523%；And OPPO ranks fourth with a market share of 1148%。
For a long time, OPPO has been deeply involved in the sinking market for a long time, and has set up stores in third- and fourth-tier cities by expanding franchises, and has established a huge offline sales system, which has helped OPPO eat up the market dividends.
Nowadays, competitors are in full swing, and OPPO products in the low-end market are facing more competition, while in the high-end mobile phone market, OPPO's transformation is still in progress, and the high-end image has not yet stood firm, whether it is compared with Huawei, Apple, or compared with Xiaomi, there is still a big gap.
Therefore, it is not surprising that OPPO will encounter market share turmoil. Nowadays, the mobile phone industry has ushered in a new reshuffle, and the originally scorching mobile phone war has become more competitive. For mobile phone manufacturers, 2024 is still a year of fierce competition.
The status of the folding field has been lost, relying on large models, can OPPO turn things around?
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