In the pursuit of high-end products at all costs, would you buy the discounted Apple or the Vivo that has increased in price to 5,000 yuan?

In the current Chinese mobile phone market, the four major mobile phone brands have established their own market positions. These are the famous "Huami OV". In 2019, vivo ranked sixth in the global smartphone shipment ranking with 113.7 million units shipped, which is a significant increase compared with its 102 million units shipped last year. Now vivo has also launched its own 5G high-end mobile phone VIVO NEX 3S, and the price has also reached a new high. Many people began to wonder, would you buy a vivo that costs 5,000 yuan?

1. Vivo releases 5G high-end mobile phone

On March 10, the new flagship of vivo NEX 3S 5G was officially released. Based on the NEX 3 5G released half a year ago, it continues the 99.6% ultra-high screen-to-body ratio borderless waterfall screen design, and the internal hardware configuration and operating system are newly upgraded, with stronger strength and more comfortable experience. vivo NEX 3S 5G is upgraded with Snapdragon 865 processor + Snapdragon X55 baseband, LPDDR5 memory, UFS 3.1 storage, Wi-Fi 6 wireless network, and full-function NFC.

Through vivo's self-developed network aggregation/distribution algorithm, it can simultaneously connect to 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi in dual MIMO mode, and intelligently accelerate according to network conditions, increasing download speed by up to 93%. The new generation of Multi-Turbo 3.0 all-round acceleration is also worth paying attention to, especially the core highlight is the VPG process guardian technology, which can intelligently diagnose anomalies of third-party applications, quickly locate problems, and repair them in time. It is said that the automatic repair success rate is 75%, and the freezing rate of large games is reduced by 80%.

In terms of color matching, in addition to deep space streamer and liquid Tianhe, a new succinol has been added. The design inspiration comes from the warm and changeable luster of amber as an organic gem. Through refined design techniques, this unique texture is presented on the body to the greatest extent. The operating system is equipped with the new FuntouchOS 10, which adopts a newly designed UI. In order to better match the borderless waterfall screen of NEX 3S, vivo has also cooperated with German organic visual artist Roman De Giuli to prepare several exclusive dynamic wallpapers.

Seeing these various configurations that can be called black technology, I believe that many people have been aesthetically fatigued by the dazzling configuration wars of major mobile phone manufacturers in recent years. After seeing so many vivo configurations, let's take a look at vivo's prices. The vivo NEX 3S 5G provides two configurations, priced at 4998 yuan for 8GB+256GB and 5298 yuan for 12GB+256GB. Compared with the NEX 3 5G with the same configuration, the prices are reduced by as much as 700 yuan and 900 yuan respectively.

Although the price has been reduced, compared to the cheapest 5G terminal, Redmi K30 5G, the price of vivo still seems a bit too high. We have previously talked about OPPO's high-end path, and now let's analyze vivo again.

2. Would you buy a vivo that costs 5,000 yuan?

Speaking of the origin of vivo, I believe everyone will think of OPPO, which has the same origin as vivo. However, the two manufacturers are now independent. Although independent, their development paths are very similar. Compared with mobile phone brands such as Huawei and Xiaomi that have a very strong Internet personality, OPPO and vivo are much more down-to-earth. Although it may be difficult to see these two blue and green brands around many urban white-collar workers, and even in shopping malls in big cities, the probability of these brands appearing is not high, but once you go to third or fourth-tier cities, you will find that there may be several blue and green stores on the entire street, which makes people sigh at the huge market penetration capabilities of OV.

According to previous statistics, the number of vivo's offline stores has reached 250,000, and there are more than 430 stores focusing on after-sales services. It is this almost sweeping promotion style that has helped vivo successfully seize the minds of the sinking market and gradually gain a foothold in this huge market competition. In the era when Apple is popular, vivo has also been labeled with some labels, such as "factory girl phone" and "high price and low configuration". Of course, with the continuous increase in market share over the years, vivo has actually been trying to find ways to promote changes in consumers' inherent concepts and begin to transform towards independent research and development and cost-effectiveness.

From the perspective of independent research and development, vivo has actually gradually begun to launch independent research and development products with its own advantages. It has opened research and development centers in Beijing, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Dongguan, Silicon Valley, San Diego and other places, and realized a global layout at the research and development level. For example, screen fingerprint, pop-up camera design, TOF depth of field lens, etc. These black technologies have actually laid a very important foundation in helping vivo build differentiated market competitiveness. Many people's perception of vivo has begun to shift from high-priced and low-spec factory phones to advantageous directions such as camera phones. This is the only way for vivo to transform.

From the perspective of cost-effective strategy, vivo has gradually learned to find its own cost-effective advantages in the sinking market. For example, in the Z series, vivo can be said to be working very hard to promote the development of mobile phone cost-effectiveness. Of course, when it launched the Z series, it also launched the NEX series of mobile phones. This category of mobile phones is the main high-end brand. The first one was the vivo NEX released in mid-2018, and the second one was the vivo NEX dual-screen version released by vivo at the end of 2018. In order to go high-end, vivo even launched a separate high-end brand IQOO at all costs. It can be said that while vivo is cost-effective, it is also trying to develop in the high-end direction.

In fact, for a mobile phone manufacturer, high-end development must be the only way for mobile phone giants. Why do you say that? This is because compared with the cost-effective mobile phone market and the mid-range mobile phone market, although these markets have a large user base, they will always label the companies with some unhappy labels, such as "factory girl phones" like vivo, etc. If you want to break such prejudices, you must develop high-end. This has almost become an inevitable path for the development of the mobile phone market. However, except for a few mobile phone brands such as Samsung and Huawei that have achieved a full range of product categories from high-end to mid-range and even cost-effective, most mobile phone brands have not been able to do this.

For vivo, the biggest problem is the matching of consumers' minds and brand power. In fact, any mobile phone brand has been a battle for brand power since the Nokia era. For example, when it comes to Xiaomi, everyone basically thinks of the ultimate cost-effectiveness, and when it comes to Apple, everyone thinks of the black technology of the Jobs era, and so on. These are all ultimate brand power, but vivo's brand power is in a very embarrassing situation. That is, the young people in small towns in the third and fourth tier sinking markets. Compared with business people, vivo is closer to young people and farther away from white-collar workers. This means that vivo's brand power is doomed to be insufficient to support its real move towards the high-end.

Just as when the new vivo NEX 3S 5G was released, a consumer left a message on vivo's official Weibo, "With such a high price, why don't I pay a little more to buy an Apple or directly buy a Huawei?" This actually reflects the embarrassment of vivo's consumer group. Although the small town group has good purchasing power, the truly high-end users and consumption power are still concentrated in the middle and high-income groups. Unless vivo can have the technological belief that Apple had in the past, vivo's road to high-end development is destined to be long.

Would you buy a vivo phone that costs 5,000 yuan?