In the face of long slopes and thick snow, vivo leads the industry with innovation

In 2021, the global smartphone market has rebounded under the slogan of "universal 5G", but the decline in sales for two consecutive years has increased the pressure on manufacturers. The performance "excess" brought about by the upgrade of mobile phone configuration and the increase in product homogeneity have led to the extension of the replacement interval of consumers.

2013-2024 smartphone shipments (source: counterpoint).

Stimulating consumption simply by lowering the price of a single product is tantamount to fishing for the best of the world. During the e-commerce festival, some brand new machines even had a discount of 500-600 yuan, which made the first users cry out, which not only reduced the profitability of the product, but also reduced the brand loyalty of users.

For the first-class sales strategy, vivo kept a distance from it as much as possible, but focused on "burying the head in the cause, market results", this core value concept, can it reflect the value in the red sea?

1. Blue Technology is the cornerstone of building a high-end market, and the layout of multiple product lines is in full bloom.

Hardware stacking is only the foundation, and the implementation of technical achievements invested for many years to create differentiated advantages can establish real core competitiveness. During this year's VDC, vivo released the "blue technology" technology brand, including the blue heart model, blue crystal chip technology stack, blue river operating system, blue ocean battery life system and vivo image strength, etc., vivo X100 series and future flagship products will have solid technology backing, bringing a comprehensive use experience.

Taking imaging as an example, as early as 2020, vivo launched a strategic cooperation with Zeiss, a major international imaging manufacturer, to build a "joint imaging laboratory" to provide consumers with the most advanced product experience by combining cutting-edge optical technology with smartphone innovation. At present, vivo has set up five imaging R&D centers around the world, with a R&D team of more than 1,000 people. In addition, vivo has also set up an internal "Image Cognition Department", which is responsible for insighting and defining the user's "real image aesthetics", and then the technology and product departments work together to turn this aesthetic into products that consumers can perceive.

Battery life is the actual experience that users are very concerned about, vivo's blue ocean battery life system mainly opens the source, throttles, and increases efficiency, and the industry's first carbon element recombination technology, the first laser etching technology and the pole piece reshaping technology can make the battery capacity larger, charge faster, light and thin, and prolong the use time without increasing the weight and thickness of the mobile phone, which is more durable and reliable.

The vivo X100 series has a new self-developed chip V3 built-in, which has powerful computing power to support 4K image shooting, and can flexibly switch the deployment mode of the algorithm, and optimizes coordination and high-speed collaboration with the Dimensity 9300 flagship platform, fully ensuring the smoothness and switching experience of complex human-computer interaction functions in various user scenarios.

Vivo's self-developed blue ocean battery was also launched in the X100 series, with an equivalent 5000mAh ultra-large capacity and large battery, with a standby time of up to 10 days; The Dimensity 9300 chip, jointly developed by V and MediaTek, can not only release surging performance, but also be interconnected with the V3 chip with two cores, gradually realizing the true underlying software and hardware integration design, bringing users a better performance experience.

The vivo X100 series, which integrates many R&D achievements in one machine, also handed over a full score: the first sales of the machine exceeded 1 billion yuan in 6 hours after the first sale, breaking the sales record of all new phones in vivo's history, and once again becoming a popular flagship.

While the vivo X series is making steady progress on the high-end road, the products of vivo's S series and Y series, which are positioned in the mid-range market, are also iterating in an orderly manner, the former maintains a stable production frequency of two generations a year, in addition to continuing the excellent image and texture design, the more comprehensive configuration greatly expands the user portrait, and the sales volume has increased by 143%; The latter is trying its best to meet the needs of the general public, and the cumulative sales volume has exceeded 300 million in 12 years.

In the field of folding screens, due to the generally high unit price of products, the user group is relatively narrow, mainly concentrated in first-tier, new first-tier and second-tier cities, and mainly business people over 30 years old. These users usually have certain consumption levels and need a larger screen area to meet the needs of mobile office and entertainment. Therefore, the vivo X Fold2 and X Flip folding screens are also optimized for the needs of business people in terms of design, providing a lot of hardware and software designs that serve productivity.

If the X series and S series are more inclined to take image configuration as the core selling point, the digital flagship series, NEO series, and Z series of the sub-brand iQOO are moving forward on the track of performance. The iQOO 12 is the first to be equipped with the third-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform, and the full-stack self-developed gaming chip Q1 can further improve the game picture quality, frame rate performance, and effectively reduce heat generation, which is also the differentiating advantage of iQOO compared with common performance phones on the market.

vivo's 2023 "finale" is the iQOO Neo9 series released on December 28, which continues the route of hard-core performance and high cost performance, and the price of the Pro version equipped with the Dimensity 9300 flagship chip is pressed to below 3000 yuan, which is very competitive in the mid-range market.

As early as 2020, vivo made clear the general direction of "R&D priority", and was committed to starting from the four long tracks of "image", "design", "system" and "performance". The blue technology brand released in 2023 will set its sights on more cutting-edge technology fields, lead the development pattern of the industry with the first-mover advantage of the industry, and help partners improve together and walk out of a "high-end road" of vivo.

With a multi-brand layout and boutique strategy, vivo's products have also won the favor of consumers in more price segments, and innovative technologies such as image chip V3 and e-sports chip Q1 have empowered mobile phones.

2. Take the lead in deploying AI blue heart large models to empower application scenarios.

Compared with Internet companies that have entered the AI model earlier, the implementation of the AI model on the mobile phone side does not seem to be fast. Due to the lack of SoC computing power (and insufficient memory), the large model operation process can only rely entirely on the cloud, which not only makes the transmission cost sky-high, but also faces the risk of data privacy leakage.

In the third quarter of 2023, Qualcomm and MediaTek have released the most flagship SoC mobile platforms, and their computing power is enough to support billions of AI large models to run independently on the device side, and larger scales can also be coordinated with the help of "device-cloud collaboration", which also lays a solid foundation for the landing of AI large models on the terminal side.

Soon, vivo, which has been deeply involved in the field of AI large models for a long time, officially released its self-developed general large model matrix - Blue Heart Large Model in VDC, covering a total of 5 large models with three parameter magnitudes of 100 million, 10 billion and 100 billion, focusing on the five advantages of "large and complete, strong algorithm, true security, self-evolution, and wide open source".

These 5 models are not entirely for mobile phones and other terminal services, the 7 billion blue heart model 7b is a dual-purpose model for mobile phones, which performs very well in language understanding, text creation and other scenarios, which can help understand the needs and complete text creation: 1 billion blue heart model 1b is a professional text model built for end-side scenarios, with localized text summarization, summarization and other capabilities, and the processing process is accurate and safe.

The 7b and 1b parameter-level large models are mainly implemented on the device side, which not only saves a huge amount of data transmission costs, but also ensures that user data is not on the cloud, eliminating the concern of privacy. Not only that, the 7B parameter-level large model is also open source for the whole industry, and the development kit BlueKit is more convenient for more small and medium-sized developers to develop and use.

At present, the computing power of the terminal SOC is not enough to fully support the large model with higher parameters, and it needs to use cloud computing, and the 70 billion blue heart large model 70B is the main model for cloud services, which performs well in scenarios such as role-playing and knowledge quizzes, and as of October, its comprehensive ability ranks first in China in the three major lists of Superclue, C-Eval, and CMMLU.

For complex tasks in extreme scenarios, vivo has also launched two 100 billion parameter models, 130 billion and 175 billion large models, which bring a more extreme intelligent experience with a richer amount of knowledge, and they can complete more complex logical reasoning and task orchestration, and the scale has reached the same level as the current popular generative AI large models on the Internet.

Based on the above large model, vivo also brought two self-developed natural language dialogue robots - Blue Heart Qianxun and Blue Heart Small V, bringing an intuitive human-computer interaction experience. This kind of functionality that allows users to actually use it is complemented by optimizations that act on the underlying layer of the system, truly infiltrating AI into every bit of the experience.

Less than half a month after the end of VDC, vivoX100 equipped with a blue heart model was released, AI album search, generation and other simple functions can be completed on the end side, and complex functions such as text creation and literary summary are then used by the cloud to show strong reasoning ability, so that consumers can feel the portability and practicality of the end side large model.

Many mobile phone manufacturers in the industry have begun to develop large models of device-side AI, but vivo has also opened up a new track in the field of AI: using AI to enable OS systems. After six years of exploration, with the blessing of large model capabilities, it expands the input capability, supports the recognition of voice, text, gestures, sign language, brainwaves, etc., and the Rust language is portable to ensure security, and a smoother architecture design can also effectively improve the resource efficiency of computing, storage and display.

In today's sluggish mobile phone market, mobile phone manufacturers urgently need to create new markets with breakthrough technologies, and AI models can greatly change the interaction mode of mobile phones. As a pioneer in this field, vivo will take the lead in breaking the sluggish market situation and "conquering" consumers with hard power.

3 Establish in-depth cooperation with ** chain vivo's technology will eventually "bear fruit".

As of 2023, vivo has established cooperative relations with nearly 400 first-chain partners, covering display, photography, electronics, structure, semiconductors and other fields. In the field of semiconductors, vivo has cooperated with all the first-chain partners for more than ten years, and a large proportion of innovative technologies are jointly developed by the two teams.

Through joint R&D, production and manufacturing with foundries, vivo is able to achieve flexibility and efficiency improvement in production while ensuring product quality. By sharing market information and demand**, we can also provide vivo with sufficient supply and adjust it at any time according to demand.

At present, vivo's main business scope is deployed in the frontier fields of many personal consumer electronics products and services such as 5G communication, artificial intelligence, industrial design, and imaging technology. However, Hu Baishan, executive vice president, chief operating officer of vivo, and president of vivo** Research Institute, also said that vivo will also cut into more industries in the future.

It is revealed that vivo will launch MR mass production products within 3 years, and humanoid robots will be launched in the future, and their technologies are "ready-made": the blue heart model can help the robot think, MR can make the robot have a strong spatial perception ability, with the "cause" planted by innovative research and development, vivo only needs to supplement some basic technology to make the product "result" and create more market opportunities.

4 Summary.

In this era of rapid development, we expect more companies to devote themselves to R&D and innovation, contribute to the prosperity and development of the entire industry, and the mobile phone market in 2024 will come out of the "cold winter" and return to growth.