Baidu's mobile phone dream reappears, but its ambition is in AI

"Confirmed, Xiaodu phone is coming." On May 9, Jing Kun, CEO of Xiaodu Technology, confirmed in his circle of friends that Xiaodu is going to release a mobile phone, which is another new species + brand new, named "Xiaodu Qinghe".

Recently, Baidu has also applied to register the "Xiaodu Qinghe" trademark. The international classification involves scientific instruments, and the current trademark status is awaiting substantive review. It is reported that Xiaodu Technology currently has three divisions: Xiaodu, Tiantian and Xiaodu Qinghe. The mobile phone will be the first product of Xiaodu Qinghe.

As for whether it will be connected to Wenxin Yiyan, the relevant person in charge of Xiaodu denied it in an interview with the media. In fact, Baidu's entry into the mobile phone field is "unexpected but reasonable". As early as 2012, it had cooperated with mobile phone manufacturers and briefly entered the mobile phone track.

Testing the waters of mobile phones, a rekindled dream

In 2012, the market share of traditional mobile phone giants Nokia and Motorola in China shrank significantly, with Nokia at 5.81% and Motorola at 3.32%. At that time, Samsung ranked first in China with a share of 15.48%, Lenovo ranked second with a share of 13.1%, and Huawei ranked third with a share of 12.52%.

This year, domestic mobile phones have risen, and brands such as Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo have launched their own smart phone products, such as Huawei Ascend P1, Xiaomi 2, Meizu MX, etc.

On June 4, 2012, Baidu Cloud OS was born. It is a third-party smartphone system developed based on Android 4.0 and above. It can be adapted to more than 150 mainstream mobile phone models at the time, including Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, etc. The number of users once exceeded 10 million+.

According to IDC, global smartphone shipments exceeded 1 billion units for the first time in 2013, reaching 1.004 billion units, a year-on-year increase of 38.4%, accounting for 55% of the total mobile phone shipments. Among them, my country's mobile phone production reached 1.46 billion units, an increase of 23.2%, accounting for 81.1% of global shipments.

As "Made in China" enters the world stage, Baidu is naturally unwilling to give up this opportunity. In the same year, Xu Guoxiang, former global marketing director of Huawei Terminal, founded Bajia Mobile to compete with Xiaomi. In November, Baidu made a strategic investment in it, deeply integrated Baidu Cloud OS, and accelerated the "software + hardware + channel" integrated strategy.

The data report "Flash Wizard 2014 Flash Market Insights" shows that Baidu Cloud OS ranks second only to CM in the third-party ROM resource rankings, far exceeding MIUI, Xinfeng ROM, LeWa and others.

On April 15, 2014, Bajia Mobile, Baidu Cloud OS and iQiyi jointly launched the Bajia (100+) V6 iQiyi video phone, which is equipped with Baidu Cloud OS V6 operating system and built-in optimized iQiyi APP.

However, the sales of Baijia mobile phones have never been made public, probably because the sales are not good. This was also verified in 2015. At the beginning of the year, a user said in Tieba that Baijia mobile phones had gone bankrupt. Xu Guoxiang also admitted that Baijia mobile phones had suspended their mobile phone business and it was uncertain when they would return to the mobile phone market.

In March of the same year, Baidu Cloud OS also announced its withdrawal, "due to the company's business adjustments, it decided to suspend updates and maintenance." Baidu's mobile phone dream was stranded, and it later focused on artificial intelligence. At the 2016 Baidu World Conference, it first showed the artificial intelligence results to the outside world - "Baidu Brain".

After several years of development, in 2020, Baidu's smart life business group (i.e. Xiaodu Technology) completed the signing of an independent financing agreement, becoming the main force in Baidu's layout of smart hardware. The responsibility of making mobile phones naturally fell on the shoulders of Xiaodu Technology.

What is Baidu's intention in dancing with swords?

Jing Kun once said that Xiaodu Technology is developing an open artificial intelligence operating system, and Xiaodu Assistant (DuerOS) is still the core differentiated content of Xiaodu Technology. Xiaodu Technology will not deviate from the Xiaodu Assistant system to make other hardware.

From this, it can be inferred that Xiaodu Technology will continue to manufacture mobile phones based on this core system, and it can even be said that it is creating a new species to meet its own needs.

First of all, Xiaodu's whole-house smart ecosystem needs a mobile phone. At present, combining Baidu's AI technology with Xiaodu's IoT smart home technology, with Xiaodu assistant DuerOS as the core, Xiaodu has provided core products and scenario solutions covering the whole house, entering 40 million households. In multiple scenarios such as whole-house security, smart audio and video, home entertainment, and smart fitness, a number of hardware products such as smart speakers, smart learning tablets, and fitness mirrors have been released. The connection of all products is inseparable from the key terminal of mobile phones, which happens to be the missing link of Xiaodu.

It is reported that Xiaodu has more than 100 offline stores and is currently planning to open 500 offline stores within this year. As of March this year, Xiaodu Assistant can control more than 200 million IoT smart home devices in more than 70 categories.

As one of the main entrances to smart homes, mobile phones are of great importance to Xiaodu. After entering the mobile phone industry, Baidu can not only regain its original dream, but also ease its own entrance pressure in the AI ​​era. It is an attempt at a new channel.

Secondly, Baidu needs a remote control to build cars. If we count from the layout of autonomous driving in 2013, Baidu has been deeply engaged in smart cars for eight years. In 2017, it even announced its entry into the car manufacturing track and defined it as a "car robot". In March 2021, Baidu and Geely jointly established Jidu Auto, and the process of car manufacturing is accelerating.

The core of Baidu's car manufacturing is "intelligence", which fully empowers car companies with core technologies such as artificial intelligence, Apollo autonomous driving, Xiaodu in-car, and Baidu Maps, in order to achieve "software-defined cars". In this process, mobile phones can play the role of remote controls, fully controlling smart cars and even achieving keyless operation. This is also the reason why car manufacturers and mobile phone manufacturers are testing each other.

In July 2022, Geely acquired Meizu and became its actual controller; in August of the same year, NIO established NIO Mobile Technology Co., Ltd. to enter the smartphone market, and the R&D team has a large number of personnel from mobile phone brands such as Huawei, Meitu, and Xiaomi. On the other hand, among mobile phone manufacturers, Xiaomi has been making cars for two years, while Huawei, which does not make cars, frequently provides technical solutions, and OPPO focuses on the car-machine interaction experience. Faced with this new trend of cars, Internet giants naturally do not want to miss it, and mobile phones and cars have become mutually beneficial.

It is worth noting that from the name of "Xiaodu Qinghe", Xiaodu is likely to launch a mobile phone exclusively for teenagers. In 2021, Xiaodu officially entered the education smart hardware track after launching its first learning tablet. IDC data shows that from the fourth quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022, the cumulative shipments of China's learning tablet market were nearly 4 million units, an increase of 18% over the same period last year. Among them, Xiaodu ranked first.

Data shows that the market size of educational smart hardware is expected to reach 84 billion in 2025. As a smart device for the new generation of young people to learn, mobile phones have naturally become the basic equipment for the digital transformation of education. Baidu's entry into the mobile phone business from the education track can not only reduce the cost of trial and error, but also find a new breakthrough for its educational smart hardware market.

Can build, but not big

It is not difficult to infer from Baidu's starting point of making mobile phones that although Baidu has the technical strength to make mobile phones, it will not directly compete with existing domestic mobile phone brands, but will build channel bridges internally and use them for its own benefit.

In addition, from the perspective of the entire mobile phone market, Baidu has not been given a window or opportunity to make a breakthrough.

According to the latest research from Canalys, global smartphone shipments fell 13% to 269.8 million units in the first quarter of 2023. At the same time, global tablet shipments in the first quarter of 2023 were 31.7 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 17.7%, the lowest shipment since the outbreak of the epidemic in the first quarter of 2020.

The domestic market is also sluggish. In the first quarter of 2023, China's smartphone market shipments were approximately 65.44 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 11.8%, continuing the trend of a year-on-year decline of more than 10% in shipments every quarter since 2022.

Under such circumstances, the domestic mobile phone market has been dominated by mainstream manufacturers such as Huawei, OPPO, and Apple, and the replacement cycle has continued to lengthen. According to Counterpoint Research, the replacement cycle will be as long as 43 months in 2022, the highest level in history.

Consumers who only change their phones every three years or more are more inclined to choose brands they are familiar with and trust, so it is unrealistic for Baidu to get a share of the mobile phone market. Fortunately, Baidu seems to have such awareness.

A relevant person in charge of Xiaodu Technology told the media: "Xiaodu defines this product as a 'new species'. In our planning, it has a specific target group and service audience. Xiaodu has always been quite challenging and has always been good at entering a new track from a niche field."

This statement also reveals that Xiaodu mobile phones are not for all consumers. "Entering new tracks from niche areas" indirectly confirms the possibility of deploying mobile phone business in the field of education. Moreover, it cannot be ignored that the keyword of Baidu's mobile phone manufacturing is "AI". Every smart hardware product of Xiaodu is the embodiment of the implementation of AI technology. Although this mobile phone does not yet have the ability of Wenxin Yiyan, it has extended its applicable scenarios.

On February 9, Xiaodu officially announced that it would integrate the comprehensive capabilities of Baidu Wenxin Yiyan to create an artificial intelligence model "Xiaodu Lingji" for smart device scenarios and apply it to all products. Currently, the Xiaodu Lingji large model is in internal testing. When the time is right, whether it will be directly applied to smartphones is a matter of imagination.

In the mobile phone market, Baidu may not have any new stories, but in the smart track, mobile phones may bring new changes.

The pictures in this article are all from the Internet

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.