Meizu wants to be a price butcher, it needs another knife

Meizu launched the MX 4 at 1799 yuan and the MX 4 Pro at 2499 yuan. Its ambition is self-evident. To put it elegantly, it wants to redefine the price of domestic flagships, and to put it bluntly, it wants to be a price butcher. Indeed, compared with the 1999 yuan price that Xiaomi has been sticking to, the 1799 yuan MX 4 that Meizu suddenly launched has a certain deterrent effect. In addition, the 2499 yuan configuration is currently the top-level MX 4 Pro, which is also equipped with 2K screen, fingerprint recognition, Hi-Fi sound quality and other functions that enhance the overall experience. It wants to pry into the 3000 yuan level models originally occupied by Huawei Mate 7, OPPO Find 7, Vivo Xplay3S and other models.

In addition, the discussion about Meizu's intention to be a price butcher is mostly concentrated on the Internet, including the comments of a large number of people running to Lei Jun and Luo Yonghao's Weibo to post 1799 and 2499 yuan, which seems to indicate an illusion. Will the 1999 yuan price barrier built by Xiaomi be broken by Meizu? Meizu's marketing team is also conveying such a message through various channels: my products are better than yours, and my prices are cheaper than yours, so hurry up and go home.

If announcing a shocking price can make you a price butcher, then why did the phone that once wrote the copywriting as "quad-core is not hot, how can it be 799" fail to continue to be sold? Why did the domestic big coke, Momoda and other mobile phones fail to become street machines? Being a price butcher is really not as simple as announcing the price.

When talking about the ancestor of China's mobile phone price butchers, we have to mention Xiaomi 1. In order to vividly represent the image of Xiaomi, I found the PPT from the press conference at that time.

At that time, domestic smartphones were just starting out, and the mainstream market was still occupied by foreign brands. HTC was in its heyday, and Samsung was gradually reaching its peak. Of course, the price of Android smartphones was also at its peak. Facing competitors with similar configurations, Xiaomi's price of 1,999 yuan cut the mainstream price in half.

Now, the Meizu MX 4 is priced at 1,799 yuan, which is a 200 yuan advantage over the Xiaomi 4, OnePlus and other phones with similar configurations that cost 1,999 yuan. This is a big difference from the price deterrence of the first generation of Xiaomi. In addition, the domestic smartphone market is gradually reaching its peak and is no longer in the rapid development period when Xiaomi was born. Consumers have more choices. The 1,799 yuan price touches the nerves of Internet discussants more than the nerves of buyers.

Dialectically speaking, the 1,799 yuan price is more of a success for Meizu itself than a loss for its competitors. Direct evidence is the sales performance of mobile phones on Double Eleven. Meizu jumped to second place, but Xiaomi still ranked first with a huge advantage, with sales of over 1.16 million mobile phones. Although many Internet discussants have strict family views, more actual consumers just need a mobile phone that is good value for money.

The key is that if you want to actually use price to kill your competitors, you must have a sufficient supply of goods. The current situation is that the MX 4 is out of stock on the official website, and you have to spend more than 1,900 yuan on Taobao to buy it in stock. In this case, the so-called price advantage is further reduced.

In addition, whether a manufacturer can become a price butcher depends on its position in the entire industry. This is why phones like the Integrity Phone and the Big Coke Phone failed to create a stir by relying on low prices. Price is an important factor, but it is definitely not the only factor.

In the last quarter, Xiaomi shipped 17.3 million mobile phones, making it the largest mobile phone brand in China. After four years of development, Xiaomi finally became the first. Meizu's shipments have always been kept secret. The only time was when Luo Yonghao questioned that Meizu's annual sales were only one million units last year. Huang Zhang revealed that their monthly shipments were about 300,000 to 400,000 units at that time. Optimistically speaking, Meizu's total shipments last year were less than 5 million. And because Meizu's two models were not fully launched this year, it is expected that there will be no explosive growth in shipments this year.

Therefore, with the five domestic giants in the "China Cool Alliance" in the lead, the two international brands Samsung and Apple still have their influence, and OPPO and Vivo making a fortune quietly, Meizu's position is still relatively backward. It is not realistic to expect to dominate the market with low prices in the first year, and Meizu's current production capacity and channels cannot keep up with the progress of Meizu's price reduction. The result is that consumers have a price in mind, but Meizu has no goods in hand. Not only is the production capacity not up to par, but Meizu's offline channel construction is also difficult to take on. Although it claims to have more than 800 stores, after visiting Meizu stores in many cities, I found that these stores are small in size, not eye-catching enough, and the location selection can hardly be called a prime location.

Learning from history, the destructive effect of Xiaomi's 1,999 yuan pricing is actually a question worthy of discussion. This price actually mainly affects Internet brands such as OnePlus and Huawei Honor. Among the offline channel brands that still occupy the mainstream of the market, not many have followed Xiaomi's changes. To this day, OPPO N3 still dares to set the price at 3,999 yuan. The confidence behind this is that it spends a lot of money every year on TV program sponsorship. In terms of offline channel construction, it maintains its influence on potential consumers and consumers.

To some extent, Xiaomi's success is due to its pricing strategy, but this success is an accumulation process that has led to the current brand effect. From another perspective, the price reduction process of Meizu, which became famous on the Internet, is more like a radical behavior after a slow response to market changes, because from this pricing, Meizu is actually not making much money. The accumulated advantage of price reduction is more meaningful to Meizu itself, which may bring about subsequent sales and market share growth, as well as increased brand awareness, which may lay the foundation for Meizu's subsequent price war.

In summary, if you want to be a price killer, you don’t just need one or two low-pricing strategies to achieve it. In fact, whether the price can become a price killer depends on the continuous release of production capacity, brand, market position and channel potential. This is also the basis for the outside world to worry about the 2,000 yuan domestic mobile phone market when it was rumored that Apple would release a cheap iPhone. After Meizu’s 1,799 and 2,499 prices, there are not many voices on the Internet that worry about the status of Xiaomi, Huawei, OPPO and other companies. The impact caused by price advantages and single-point breakthrough marketing momentum is only temporary, and for the market, it may be a passing breeze.

Moreover, the price adjustment is not a simple action of a single manufacturer. Overall, the Android phone market has entered a low-price era, and the prices of high-end phones will also drop overall, profit margins will be compressed, and the market will begin to mature and reach its peak. Meizu's price cut can be understood as a move in line with this trend. The pricing strategies of other mature manufacturers will not be impulsive, abandoning cash flow and profit margins to gamble. 1799 and 2499 are clever moves, but not killer moves.