The smart phone era: China's industry position is hard to break through

At the beginning of the 21st century, China's mobile phones were once brilliant. brands such as TCL, KONKA, shouxin, Dongxin, waveguide, and Southern Gaoke once became proud of China, even in the face of TI's millions of USD in license fees, it also failed to block the enthusiasm of China's mobile phone investment in R & D. Unfortunately, with the rise of lianfa's turnkey business model, shanzhai mobile phones have pushed China's mobile phone brands to a slump again.

After years of elimination, shanzhai mobile phones have gradually become unfamiliar, and China's mobile phones have once again emerged with a sound industrial chain, it should be said that the mediainfo turnkey model has also pushed Chinese mobile phones to a new height while destroying Chinese mobile phone brands. Although at the beginning, the fake and shoddy mobile phones have become synonymous, chinese mobile phones have formed a complete industrial chain for solution providers, IDH, integrators, channel brands, and other carriers. On average, over 60 million GSM mobile phones are shipped each month, and their products are sold in emerging markets such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America, g'five, forme, chuanyin, getai and other Chinese brands have emerged in these markets. We believe that China's mobile phone shares in the global GSM market will continue to increase in the next few years.

The biggest contribution of mediatek's turnkey business model to China's mobile phones is not the improvement of the core technical competitiveness, but the gradual improvement of the industrial chain and the rapid development of China's mobile phone engineering strength, at the same time, it has also led to the rise of the Chinese icdesign industry. In the past few years, integrated circuit design companies, such as Zhan Xun, ruidi Ke, gekmicro, and Ai Wei, have accompanied Chinese mobile phones, it also greatly promotes the market competitiveness of Chinese mobile phones, especially GSM mobile phones.

The rise of China's GSM mobile phones proves the progress over the years. It is also related to the fact that many international giants have shifted their business focus to 3G or even 4G mobile phones, while China's mobile phones are facing industry integration, they also have to face 3G trade-offs and industrial upgrades.

In the 3G era, it seems that the 2G development journey of the current year is taking place. Both Chinese brands and overseas brand manufacturers are focusing on improving their R & D strength to pursue product characteristics, local brands such as Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo, and cool have invested heavily in smartphones, while many GSM industry chain manufacturers, including mediatek, have to face the direct impact of smartphones.

It should be said that at present, China's GSM mobile phone industry chain has been very complete, from R & D, production to sales channels, but this industry chain is not in line with the 3G era, unlike GSM sales mainly through retail channels, 3G mobile phones are sold in a bundled manner by carriers. Many mobile phone brands have abandoned the R & D of GSM mobile phones and switched to ODM because their core services are switched to 3G, while accelerating China's growth in GSM mobile phones, how to face smart phones has become a question that every operator has to consider.

The emergence of apple in the 3G era is not so much a victory for the iPhone as a revolution in the apple industry ecosystem. It is different from the use of more single-host GSM mobile phones, the perfect combination of iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and app store has created the ecosystem of Apple products. different ecosystems of different manufacturers will also determine the profit distribution of the company, the factors that determine manufacturers' profit in the future are certainly not the quality and characteristics of mobile phones alone. The role of terminals in the future ecosystem chain will be increasingly reduced. As a pure mobile terminal provider, the profits of industrial ecosystem distribution will surely be lower and lower.

Another major change in the 3G era is the rise of intellectual property rights. Although Nokia, Ericsson and other manufacturers have filed a lawsuit against GSM mobile phones in mainland China, this should be the beginning, patent owners in the smartphone age will also be the winners of the age. In the past few days, HTC paid Android patent fees to Microsoft to kick off the smartphone patent war, with the gradual maturity of the smartphone hardware and operating system, I believe that the technical content of mobile phone R & D will gradually decrease, and the smartphone terminal will copy the history of the GSM mobile phone, however, as the terminal provider industry, the profit margin is very small.

To sum up, as far as a single terminal is concerned, the old man believes that no matter the GSM era or the smart phone era, once the technology is mature, the impact on China's mobile phone industry should not be big, in the future, Chinese mobile phones will certainly become the main provider of terminals in the smart phone era. However, as the core technologies and patents are controlled by overseas manufacturers, the overall gross margin of China's mobile phone industry will not be improved by the arrival of smartphones. If we do not change our current business model, we will be more clear about it, the status of China's mobile phone world factories will not change because of the arrival of the smart phone era, but the gross margin of Chinese mobile phone terminals will not be improved because of the arrival of the smart phone era.

Due to historical accumulation, it is difficult for Chinese mobile phones to catch up with European and American manufacturers in core technologies, especially in the intellectual property field. It is impossible to catch up with Apple, Microsoft, and Google in the industrial ecosystem, the road left for China's mobile phone may only be a revolution in the business model, that is, the combination with China Mobile's Internet industry has made a breakthrough in the business model. As China's most popular and most powerful financial industry, the integration of Chinese mobile phones and the Chinese Internet may be the only feasible breakthrough in the short term. (Old Region)

 

 

Laoyaoba: IC community-semiconductor Dynamics

[Copyright statement]: This article is original to the old man. You are welcome to repost it, but you must specify "Source: Old Man ba" and other relevant information (author's name, etc.) and keep the original article link.