Why did Jack Ma personally start selling YunOS phones?

With Tencent launching TencentOS and reports that Huawei and Xiaomi plan to launch their own operating systems, the re-entry of Internet and terminal giants into the OS market in 2015 attracted attention from all parties.

On the one hand, as the competition for mobile Internet portals has upgraded from pre-installed APPs to the system integration level; on the other hand, Internet giants have begun to fully cover the "ecological competition" including TVs, automobiles, wearable devices, smart homes, etc.

As for Alibaba, one of the BAT giants, its YunOS has been developed for 5 years and has now reached version 3.0, covering more than 10 million users. The "Button" mobile phone it recently launched in cooperation with Newman is the only smartphone with fingerprint recognition in China under 1,500 yuan (priced at 1,199 yuan).

Newman's "button" phone uses a 5.5-inch 1080p screen, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor, 2GB of memory + 16GB of body storage, a 5-megapixel front camera + a 13-megapixel rear camera, a battery capacity of 3060mAh, supports ultra-fast charging, charging 50% in 30 minutes, and nearly 90% in 1 hour. It has dual-SIM dual 4G (card slot supports Micro card and Nano card) function and can support China Mobile and China Unicom's 4G networks at the same time.

Interestingly, Newman "buttons" are currently only sold in Tmall's "YunOS Official Flagship Store". Recently, a Weibo account revealed the business license information of the Tmall YunOS Official Flagship Store. The legal representative of this store is actually Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, and the registered capital is 10 million yuan, which shows that Alibaba attaches great importance to the YunOS business.

In February this year, Alibaba announced a $590 million investment in Meizu, as an important partner in developing YunOS phones in the domestic market, and the latter's sales target for 2015 is 20 million units. During a meeting with Meizu's chairman and CEO in Hangzhou, Jack Ma said that he hoped Meizu would enter the top three in the domestic smartphone market. In other words, Meizu's annual domestic smartphone shipments in the future will exceed 50 million units.

In addition, in April this year, Alibaba held the YunOS Partner Conference in Shenzhen, aiming to unite China's small and medium-sized mobile phone companies with a production capacity of tens of millions to jointly build the YunOS ecosystem and share Alibaba's "dividends" in mobile operating systems, e-commerce, mobile Internet and overseas market layout.

It is worth noting that recently, foreign media reported that Alibaba is considering acquiring a stake in Micromax, India's largest smartphone manufacturer, with an estimated investment of US$1.2 billion. According to data provided by IDC, Micromax accounted for 18% of the Indian smartphone market in 2014. With the rapid deployment of Alibaba YunOS in the Indian market, the competition among domestic smartphone companies in the Indian market will be fully upgraded, and the Indian and Southeast Asian markets may become the largest overseas markets for Chinese Internet and terminal giants such as BAT, Xiaomi, and Huawei in the field of smart ecology.