Original title: Senior Interview | Glorious CEO Zhao Ming: There is no bad environment, only bad response
When people move in, they move back. When people move back, they move in
Article | Xie Lirong
A new storm is brewing in the global mobile phone industry. Mobile phone manufacturers in this storm were involved passively at first, but now they are taking the initiative to attack.
In the third quarter, every link in the consumer electronics manufacturing industry, from the terminal assembly plant to the upstream parts, materials and chips, was free, and there were piles of raw materials and finished products in the warehouse. China is the manufacturing center of the global mobile phone industry, and the global mobile phone industry is a prophet of China.
Smartphones and PCs are the two major terminals for electronic parts shipment. The global annual shipments can reach 1.35 billion and 350 million respectively. At present, the two growth engines mentioned above have entered the "ice age" at the same time. According to the data of IDC, a third-party research institution, the global smartphone shipments in the first two quarters of 2022 are down about 9% year on year, and Xiaomi, vivo and OPPO are down more than 20%. In the second quarter, global PC shipments fell by 15% year on year, the largest drop in the past nine years.
On the other hand, since the first touch screen mobile phone of Apple came out in 2007, marking the boundary of epoch-making innovation of mobile phone hardware, the innovation of mobile phone industry has not seen epoch-making innovation in the following 15 years. In the past two years, folding screen has become a modest new outlet for mobile phone hardware innovation. However, due to screen yield, cost and other factors, this trend is still in the process of brewing and still needs to be established.
The innovation of software ecology is generally regarded as the best breakthrough for mobile phone giants to break through the current state. The innovation of software ecology is also the best way for mobile phone giants to integrate the future trend of the Internet of Things.
People in the storm may rise or fall.
Huawei created a glorious brand in 2013, aiming to compete positively with Xiaomi in the "Internet mobile phone" at that time. In the following years, the glory was steadily developed, and the sales volume of mobile phones once remained about 50% of the total sales volume of Huawei mobile phones. Complete the mission and task at that time.
At the end of 2020, the fate of this young brand has undergone historic changes. After Huawei announced the sale of Glory, it did not hold any shares nor participate in the operation, management and decision-making. The glory was taken over by Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology Co., Ltd. and more than 30 national and provincial mobile phone agents.
One and a half years ago, in the second quarter of this year, according to the data of the market research organization Strategy Analytics, Glory ranked first in China for the first time with a market share of 19%, and vivo, OPPO, Xiaomi and Apple ranked second to fifth. The market continued to shrink in the current quarter, with 67.7 million smartphones shipped in China, down 14% year on year. The momentum is fierce, which is rare in the business world.
Zhao Ming concluded that as a new company, winning market share quickly is just one side of the glory. On the other side, glory is gradually accumulating strategic thickness. In the past year and a half, both sides coexist.
Zhao Ming revealed that since the end of last year, Glory has invested thousands of people to develop the MagicOS operating system. He positioned this team as the "strategic reserve" of Glory. "We will reduce interference with it, and produce MagicOS 7.0 in less than a year," so that the core capabilities of Glory's entire system will have a big leap and improvement. Zhao Ming regards this promotion as the core strategic investment point for glorifying future participation in global market competition. "In the future, we can see that in addition to connectivity, the built security capability and the intelligent capability will have strong vitality."
At this time, the undercurrent surges. In addition to glory, Huawei has released the Mate 50 after two years, and Apple and Huawei have released the new generation iPhone as scheduled. The software and hardware focus are different, and they reach the same goal in different ways.
Glory also announced a new strategy for the overall layout of the European market at this time. Why does glory do these things? What is logic? How to assess risks and benefits? How will Glory block the precious window period of the new technology conversion cycle? On August 31, Zhao Ming, CEO of Glory Company, gave us his thoughts and answers.
Is the current environment underestimated?
"The market is fair to everyone. There is no bad environment, only bad response."
In the Apocalypse of the Japanese Consumer Electronics Crash, Yuanchuan Research Institute concluded that during the economic recession of the past decade, Japanese panel companies cut investment in succession, and then were quickly overtaken by South Koreans. Japanese brands failed all over the line and gave up shrinking from downstream to upstream. This round of recession in Japan has brought an enlightenment: for high-tech companies, the most terrible thing is not technical barriers and fierce competition, but the loss of confidence in the future.
In other words, the cycle transformation of the technology industry is usually accompanied by shuffling and pain, but it means more opportunities.
The last round of large cycle transformation of the mobile phone industry can be traced back to 2009, when the touch screen device quickly replaced the traditional mobile phone, and the touch screen mobile phone operating system quickly shrank from decentralization to Google Android, Apple iOS, and Microsoft WP in the following years, finally forming a situation where Google Android and Apple iOS coexist. A group of Chinese mobile phone companies quickly seized the window of cycle switching, focusing on high-quality and affordable Android phones, and quickly expanded the market, several of which later occupied the top five mobile phones in the world for a long time. A number of old mobile phone companies have been replaced and withdrawn from the stage.
The transformation of the new round of technology cycle was more or less covered by the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world.
In the past two or three years, the competition in the mobile phone market has further intensified, and there are no weak players in the market. Apart from the extreme cases of Huawei being curbed, more than 90% of the global market has been divided by Samsung, Apple, Glory, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo mobile phone companies. Competition takes place within these companies. China is also the most competitive region in the world.
However, the mobile phone market has shown signs of weakness since 2020. On the one hand, it is caused by the global economic shock and recession caused by COVID-19. On the other hand, it cannot be ignored. The global mobile phone market is nearly saturated, which is the natural result of full competition among giants in the last cycle.
The natural result of the last round of competition is a new proposition of the next cycle. What is the breakthrough? What is the path? It is difficult to give an answer to this proposition in a short time. Entanglement and pain follow.
In the past year, mobile phone manufacturers generally faced the inventory problem caused by the market contraction. In theory, if we make full preparations and forecasts, there will be no such large inventory. Are these inventories sufficient to the end? Many people may be more conservative in this process, and more optimistic about today's treatment, which may easily lead to difficulties caused by miscalculation in the next step.
"Find the reason from yourself, and don't attribute all problems to the macro environment. The macro environment is fair to everyone, and never gives people customized difficulties." Zhao Ming concluded, "There is no bad environment, only bad response."
Based on the above experience, Zhao Ming has two core judgments for the next critical period of cycle transition:
First, both the continuous innovation and breakthrough at the hardware level and the creation of ecological service experience at the software level need the cooperation of the industrial chain and the Internet ecological chain. The next competition cycle depends on whose core competence can make a big leap and improvement. The key words are ecology and openness.
Second, China is the most competitive place in the world. If we only look at China to judge the global trend, we will underestimate the future potential.
Based on these two core judgments, Zhao Ming's team came up with two decision plans: first, make cross system ecology in software, and continue to promote high-end strategies in hardware; 2、 Expand the global market, with the European market taking the lead.
Elite strategy, new generation operating system
Break through the three originally distinct ecological barriers: the PC system led by Google Android and Microsoft, and the more fragmented IoT system
At the end of 2020, the Glory team was separated from Huawei, and there were only 8000 people in the team at that time. Zhao Ming revealed a data that now, the total number of employees of Glory is about 13000, and the R&D team has nearly 8000 people. Zhao Ming said that the logic behind is to attach importance to R&D. In the next period of time, R&D investment will continue to increase, and the R&D team will continue to expand.
Among the current 8000 person R&D team, since the end of last year, a team of thousands has been independently developing a new generation of operating system MagicOS 7.0. From the external perspective, this is a normal iterative version of Glory MagicOS. From Zhao Ming's perspective, this is a key battle to determine the future occupation of Glory.
"Now you can only see the most basic part of the underlying capabilities of this operating system, and its future will not end there." Zhao Ming stressed.
In the mobile phone industry, a team of more than 10000 people is hardly a large-scale team. Apple has more than 150000 employees; Samsung has nearly 200000 employees; The total number of employees of Xiaomi Company is 33000; OPPO has 40000 employees in total.
Zhao Ming emphasized the strategy of refined troops. He is very confident in the glorious R&D efficiency and judges that "the glorious R&D efficiency is the highest in the whole industry". This "R&D efficiency" refers to the output of everyone.
Zhao Ming said that in less than a year since the end of last year, the Glory MagicOS 7.0 team has produced a very good result, which inspired him.
The official information released by Glory shows that Glory MagicOS 7.0 is based on the enabling of Magic Live's smart engine, creating a seamless flow of people centered, cross device, cross scene, and personalized smart services for users. As an important interconnection platform, HONOR Connect can support the end-to-end delay of connections as low as 10 milliseconds, and has an effective throughput of 1.2 gigabits per second. It can ensure normal operation even in a network environment where 20% of packets are lost.
At present, one of the basic functions of MagicOS 7.0 official announcement is a cross device function of "keyboard mouse interconnection". With MagicOS 7.0, you can use the same keyboard and mouse to control Glory PC, mobile phone and tablet. For example, you can use the laptop keyboard to type on smart phones and tablets, and you can drag files between different devices.
Zhao Ming said that MagicOS 7.0 supports the interoperability between Android and Microsoft PC OS. Based on MagicOS 7.0, the glorious and open system will be compatible with the global IoT standards, and maximize the synergy with the industry ecology.
Zhao Ming believes that the initial interconnection with Microsoft PC OS is an important step in the iterative evolution of mobile phone operating systems. This means that the Android ecosystem has transcended the previous inter ecosystem connectivity and further moved to cross system interoperability.
Technically, this kind of interworking goes beyond the previous Wifi and Bluetooth interworking mode, and achieves smooth use on the bottom layer. You can simply understand that with this set of bottom layer interworking technology, multiple screens of the computer phone pad can be combined into one screen.
From the perspective of business ecology, compared with the current common "one-to-one" or home ecological interconnection, based on the support of the underlying protocol HONOR Connect, if the imagination space of "keyboard and mouse interconnection" goes smoothly, more cross system and cross brand new interconnection models can be realized in the future, and a new smart interconnection ecology can be generated.
The keyboard mouse interconnection function is not a new concept, Before the glory, Apple and Huawei Hongmeng both released the news accordingly. Horizontal comparison shows that the underlying design logic of the three companies is different.
For Apple, this function was introduced to enable the iPad to be used as the productivity expansion tool of MAC/Macbook. Its core design concept is actually "two as one".
Huawei's Hongmeng system also has the function of multi device collaboration, which includes two forms. One is "multi screen collaboration", which projects the "windows" of multiple devices into the largest "window" to achieve a set of mouse and keyboard operations on multiple devices. The release of Hongmeng 3 has pushed the picture sharing of multiple devices to a higher level. The picture of PAD can be pushed to PC, and the picture of PC can also be cast on PAD. Behind it is the functional design essence of "super terminal", which is ultimately for the ultimate "one in one" service.
The glorious keyboard and mouse interconnection function is the same as that of Apple Huawei. It also uses a set of devices to control the information flow of multiple windows; The difference is that Glory regards the three windows including mobile phones as three connected but relatively independent information communication channels. The advantage is that the physical area of the three windows can be retained. On the other hand, the addition of mobile phones can provide a basis for some new application scenarios in the future.
According to the analysis of technical personnel from leading manufacturers in the mobile phone industry, It is an inevitable trend for Android better together and Microsoft Windows to have deep connection and cooperation at the bottom layer. Previously, mobile phone manufacturers made cross device interconnection at the application layer. The significance of this step of glory is that it is a step closer to the bottom.
Zhou Zhaohui, a senior person in the mobile phone industry, judged that cross end and cross operating systems are not a real problem, because this is an inevitable trend in the future. The capabilities of mobile phones need to be generalized in various scenarios. That generalization must be cross end and cross operating systems, so this is a mandatory action.
He analyzed that the traditional ecosystem follows two logic: one is the App Store model, which allows developers to participate in, and through the creation of content, the platform gains higher value, in which it absorbs a wide range of common application developers; The other is oriented to the IoT industry ecology. Those who do not have the development ability of mobile phone manufacturers and are willing to connect with mobile phones are actually another wave of more professional developers. Mobile phone manufacturers introduce the developer ecology and expand this kind of scenario, which actually plays a very important role in the entry of users into multiple scenarios.
From the perspective of business model, the Internet of Things has not changed the logic of the big system. Namely, brand products and brand surrounding ecology, internal software ecology, IoT expansion ecology and industrial ecology, In terms of business model, the company is actually promoted from a consumer electronics manufacturer of a product to an ecological strategic competition dimension of a technology giant.
Zhou Zhaohui's judgment is that the future trend of smart phones in China is an ecological strategic competition stage from brand products and service ecology, upgrading to developer applications and co creation of partners, Far from being as simple as IoT products, it is a competition of integration and innovation across multiple industry boundaries. In particular, no one can lose the two core battlefields of mobile phones and cars, and mobile phones and home appliances.
An honorable R&D engineer commented that there are not many technical difficulties in the Internet of Things, and the most troublesome thing is to make equipment compatibility, which is a huge workload. There are so many mobile phones and computers, and different systems and chip platforms are different. It is very difficult to ensure that they are compatible with each other, and the workload is very heavy.
"Although the final R&D results are low for developers, the pressure is actually transferred to us," he revealed that the glory R&D team has done a lot of work behind.
Globalization, conservatism and radicalism
On the whole, the glory strategy is positive development and aggressive. Both in China and the global market, investment is increasing
The global market is a competitive place for Chinese mobile phone manufacturers. After years of development, the industry has formed several basic consensus:
First, Chinese mobile phone manufacturers can successfully explore the global mobile phone market through the market and channels, and high-end is the current short board. Of course, weakness is also an opportunity.
Second, about mobile phone product innovation, The strong point of Chinese companies is to be able to make continuous investment and innovation on a long slope and thick snow track, but this cycle will be long and the competitors will be strong, In the past year or two, it is difficult for Huawei to achieve a comprehensive breakthrough in high-end mobile phones.
Third, the Chinese are good at combining multiple component technologies for comprehensive integration in the hardware industry, but are not good at achieving epoch-making innovation in a single technology for the time being. Of course, for most people, this is a small probability event.
The current strategic decisions made based on these basic judgments may be differentiated according to their own conditions. From the current layout of China's mobile phone companies with a wide range of categories, one commonality is certain: Even in the difficult period of market downturn, major companies still insist on investment and technological innovation from different breakthrough points.
Based on this commonness, the specific market rhythm and pace are different.
This is not a good time to accelerate globalization. Not everyone has the same opinion. At present, although the developed markets led by Europe and the United States downgraded the COVID-19 epidemic to a common epidemic, creating recovery conditions for reshaping the economic environment, it is an indisputable fact that the global economy is in a state of weakness and consumer purchasing power is declining. Some people believe that this is a good time to prepare for a rainy day. Others believe that the risk of attack is greater than the benefit.
Relatively speaking, Zhao Ming is a radical, and Glory will focus on developing the European market this year. We will make 2022 the glorious first year of globalization.
In fact, this basic direction of glory has been basically established when Huawei became independent at the end of 2020. In the first half of the year, glory made some moves in the Indian market, but the Indian market has its own characteristics. The unfriendly business environment is a hard wound. Another important feature is that India, although a blue sea market, is not a high net worth benchmark market.
The European and Indian markets are just the opposite. Europe has always been a benchmark market for telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics to go abroad. The so-called benchmark market requires two basic conditions: one is that the market capacity is sufficient and can digest high-end flagship products; the other is that the success of this market can drive the global market and form a banner effect.
This is the market targeted by Glory this year.
Zhao Ming said that after Huawei was sanctioned, the global market share of Glory once returned to zero. The core strategy of Glory is to take the lead through high-end products such as Magic series flagship products, demonstrate the ability of Glory solutions, strengthen high-end brand image awareness, and build a global positive business logic and brand development foundation.
He believed that what Glory should do now is to adhere to its core business logic closed loop and continue to attack the strategic highland of Europe with the full stack full scene solution of the leading industry. If the strategy works, the next few years will be the golden period of Glory's global expansion.
It may be Zhao Ming's confidence to quickly return to the top position in the market within one year and eight months after Huawei's independence. Zhao Ming concluded that if the external environment is divided into "good" and "bad" during this period, the glory is also faced with the "bad" environment full of uncertainty. During this period, the game between the supply chain and the market system is particularly prominent.
The decision-making level requires the market system to actively attack, to gain market share, to win the support and recognition of consumers, and the glorious market team is often optimistic; In the state of intermittent improvement of the market and general trend depression, the supply chain team is in security consideration and naturally conservative.
"In this case, our supply chain system will balance according to the historical situation. When the front is rushing forward, there is a hand behind it, so that it will not get out of control," said Zhao Ming.
When we ask, if there is a fight between the two sides, one will pull, and the other will pull, which side will support? Zhao Ming replied: Sometimes, I am also radical.
Zhao Ming said, "When everyone is conservative, for example, when the market is also conservative and the supply chain system is also conservative, I will be radical. At that time, everyone will pull me together. I will talk about my reasons, and everyone will talk about their reasons. At this time, I will find a balance".
"It is very dangerous for everyone in an organization to become radical and everyone to become conservative".
Many honorable people confirmed to us that the operation system of the whole company is to create a mutual (balanced mechanism). This mechanism has helped Glory avoid many big risks in the past year and eight months.
However, Zhao Ming turned to emphasize that, on the whole, the momentum of glory or positive development and aggressive attack, whether in China or in the global market, is increasing investment.
Before becoming the core decision-maker of Glory, Zhao Ming worked overseas for a long time. His judgment is that today, under this situation, we must adhere to openness and globalization, and the more difficult we encounter, the more we must show the mentality and state of global openness and cooperation, because "someone must always take the first step".
Open systems and open global markets are closely related to the underlying logic in Zhao Ming's strategic system. He told us that glory has three themes in Europe: "openness, cooperation and cooperation", For Google Android, the PC system led by Microsoft, and the more fragmented IoT system, glory may play the role of a binder, handing over capabilities to help break through these three originally distinct ecological barriers.
"To embrace globalization in such a way, I firmly believe that this way is better than each system to create a closed system." Zhao Ming concluded.
Zhao Ming predicted that, In five years, the shipment volume of Glory overseas market will exceed that of China market. Whether this goal can be achieved remains to be considered.
A new round of technology cycle transformation window has opened, which determines the future of technology companies. In addition to the confidence that is more expensive than gold, an open mind and accurate prediction are equally important. Go back to Sohu to see more
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