Why is the hope of Hammer smartphones reaching the third generation increasingly slim?

On the evening of October 18, Smartisan Technology CEO Luo Yonghao stood on the stage for the fifth time to launch a new mobile phone.

As usual, the more than two-hour press conference was a mixture of product demonstrations, crosstalk, and Luo Yonghao's catchphrase "Do you understand?"

The conference attracted tens of thousands of fans from all over the country. Online, several video websites such as iQiyi, Youku, and Bilibili had a combined total of more than one million people watching the live broadcast.

Luo Yonghao announced that he would make mobile phones in 2012. That year, Xiaomi had just launched its second-generation product and was still a small startup.

In the following four years, Luo Yonghao experienced a lot: he made a ROM, released the T1 mobile phone which was 1,000 yuan more expensive than Xiaomi, spent more than half a year to solve the production capacity problem, won a design award, admitted that he only sold 250,000 T1s in more than a year, launched the thousand-yuan Nut mobile phone, sold a bunch of "emotional" back covers for 69 yuan, the mobile phone foundry went bankrupt, launched the T2 without a power button, and was said to be preparing to sell it to LeTV...

Smartisan M1L

The two new models introduced yesterday look more like iPhones from the front, and the hardware specification descriptions on the official website also use in-house terminology such as "full-blooded version of Qualcomm Snapdragon 821" that was once mocked by Hammer.

Hammer's attention to product details has been continued. For example, in the new system, users can automatically segment words according to the semantics of the selected paragraph, making it easy to select the text you want. This is particularly useful in WeChat. As always, Hammer spent a lot of effort to solve an annoying little detail. For another example, you can specify a finger and put it on the Home button to directly call up the WeChat or Alipay payment code.

There have been many small details like this since 2014, but according to the financial data disclosed by investors, Hammer may not have much further to go as an independent company.

In 2015, Hammer suffered a loss of 460 million yuan. In the first half of 2016, it suffered a loss of 193 million yuan.

In the first six months of this year alone, Smartisan Technology's total assets have shrunk by two-thirds, from 825 million yuan at the end of last year to 296 million yuan on June 30.

The Nut phone that once dropped to 599 yuan, the T2 that was much more refined than the T1, the operating system that was more perfect than the previous one... none of these could save its financial situation.

Smartisan is not the only company in trouble. Xiaomi, which once ranked third in the world in mobile phone sales in 2014 and was valued at $46 billion, has also seen sluggish growth and has been surpassed by Huawei, OPPO, and vivo.

Many less famous Internet mobile phone brands have quietly died. What changes have taken place in the smartphone market?

The "Internet phone" driven by Xiaomi is no longer popular

In 2013, when Luo Yonghao came up with an imperfect mobile phone ROM, it was also the time when Internet mobile phone brands were most sought after.

Xiaomi, which sold 18 million mobile phones a year, is in the limelight. They used e-commerce pre-orders to accurately calculate production, skipped the operator channel, and used Weibo and WeChat marketing to stir up hot topics... All of these have become models for new mobile phone brands to imitate.

But these imitators have closed down or transformed in the past year.

In January 2015, it was reported that 100% Mobile Phone had gone bankrupt.

In October 2015, Ding Xiuhong, the founder of Dakele Mobile, resigned and the parent company Yunchen Technology faced bankruptcy liquidation.

In September 2016, after a year of silence, Xiaolajiao Mobile became 6 new companies after a new round of financing, switching to P2P finance, VR and investment.

In addition to these, there are countless miscellaneous brands such as Dami and Nicai. They all tried to surpass Xiaomi by copying Xiaomi's model, but now they have all disappeared.

Not only these newly created small brands, but also most of the Internet mobile phone sub-brands made by traditional mobile phone manufacturers, except Huawei Honor, are not doing well:

Among the once popular Internet mobile phone brands, except for Huawei's Honor, other brands have not performed very well.

In September last year, Coolpad Dashen was acquired by 360 Technology Co., Ltd.; the biggest news after Lenovo's Lemon released Lemon 3 in January this year was the resignation of its product planner Deng Xu; OnePlus, which purely relies on Internet channels, has closed its offline stores one after another this year and even started to lay off employees; IUNI, invested by Gionee, has changed three CEOs in three years, and since July this year, its official website no longer sells mobile phones, leaving only one after-sales phone number.

Nubia, which is still active in the market, no longer emphasizes that it is an Internet mobile phone brand. At the "Prague S" mobile phone launch conference in January this year, they announced that the ratio of online and offline channels will reach 5:5 this year.

Their role model, Xiaomi, is also struggling

According to IDC data, Xiaomi and Lenovo were squeezed out of the top five in global shipments in the first and second quarters of this year, and their domestic market share also fell from 16% in the second quarter of last year to 9% now.

In the second quarter of this year, Xiaomi's smartphone shipments declined for the first time, reaching only 10.5 million units, a year-on-year drop of 38%.

According to data from the app analysis platform Umeng, the most active Android phones are mostly smartphones released three or four years ago, or thousand-yuan phones.

The top three most active Xiaomi phones are Redmi 1s released in early 2014, Xiaomi Mi 4 released in July 2014, and Xiaomi Mi 2s released in 2012. None of the dozen or so new products released by Xiaomi in the past two years are among the top 30 active Android devices.

Mobile phone sales are becoming increasingly polarized

The 1,500-2,000 yuan price range that is most favored by Internet brands is not so popular now.

D.Phone, a mobile phone store brand active in first- to third-tier cities, recently released its mobile phone sales data for the third quarter of this year. 500-1000 yuan and 2000-2500 yuan became the most popular price ranges. The best-selling models in these price ranges are OPPO R9, vivo X7 and Huawei P9.

Mobile phone manufacturers that are still growing have strong offline channels

The fastest growing mobile phone shipments this year are OPPO and vivo. In the first quarter of this year, OPPO sold 18.5 million mobile phones, an increase of 153% over the same period last year, replacing Lenovo to become the fourth in the world, after Samsung, Apple and Huawei.

According to OPPO's Chief Marketing Officer Liu Lei, the company's sales through online channels such as Tmall and JD.com account for less than 5%, and 95% of its mobile phones are sold offline.

In the past two years, while other manufacturers have been trying to sell mobile phones through the Internet, OPPO and vivo have been setting up offline sales stores in China. Currently, the two companies have 200,000 offline stores across China, covering third-tier to sixth-tier cities.

Market saturation in first- and second-tier cities is the main reason

Almost all Chinese Internet users use smartphones

According to CNNIC data, by June this year, the number of domestic mobile Internet users reached 656 million, accounting for 92.5% of the total number of Internet users in China, and there has been little change in the past year.

In other words, the vast majority of people in China who have access to the Internet are already using smartphones.

Based on the rate at which each person will replace their smartphone in the next 2-3 years, it is impossible for the Chinese smartphone market to maintain the double-digit growth rates of 2013 and 2014.

Consumers are replacing their phones less and less frequently

As smartphone products become more mature, smartphone users around the world are less motivated to upgrade to new phones.

Data from CitiGroup shows that in April 2016, the time it takes for consumers to replace their phones with new ones has increased from 28 months to 29 months. A year ago, the figure was 24-26 months.

The situation is similar in China.

According to statistics from the application data platform Umeng, in September 2014, the month when the iPhone 6 series was released, the small-screen iPhone 6 alone accounted for 0.2% of the total number of iPhone users in China.

In September 2015, after the release of iPhone 6s, the two models accounted for 0.4%.

As for this year’s iPhone 7 series, both models exceeded 0.1% at the end of September.

People who don’t have smartphones have little access to the Internet.

Another important figure comes from the research organization Pew. As of February this year, only 58% of China's 1.374 billion people use smartphones. Among the 573 million people who have not yet used smartphones, excluding the 16.6% of teenagers under the age of 15, the Chinese smartphone market size is still 477 million people.

But these 477 million people have little access to the Internet. They will not see the Hammer press conference last night, or the marketing on Weibo and WeChat. OPPO, vivo, and Huawei, which are exploring this market, rely on offline stores.

It is difficult for mobile phones to make breakthroughs

The Android system is becoming more and more complete, and most mobile phones have the new features they need.

In 2011, the native Android system had a poor user experience and limited functions. Xiaomi's MIUI, which changed the user interface to be more like the iPhone and guaranteed weekly upgrades, successfully attracted users who wanted to change their smartphones at the time.

But it is unlikely that making a ROM can attract enough users as the Android system functions become more and more complete today.

Now, weekly updates like Xiaomi's have become the industry standard. New Android features such as "full-family bucket", split-screen multitasking, smart beauty, and app clones can be added to the system as soon as they emerge.

Without core technology, it is difficult to differentiate hardware

Almost all smartphones today can be summed up in one sentence: a large flat screen. The design of smartphones has not changed significantly since the iPhone became popular.

Just like what Luo Yonghao said at the press conference

At the last press conference, the details discussed included whether there was a seam in the middle frame, whether the glue was suspended, etc. Not many people cared about these details.

Internet mobile phone brands that do not have core technologies have few options for each component. Whether it is the processor, screen, camera, fingerprint recognition and other key components, there are currently only 2-3 options for each.

Taking the processor as an example, the Android phones released this year, Lenovo's Zuk Z2 Pro, Nubia Nubia Z11, OnePlus 3 and Xiaomi Mi 5 all use Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chips.

However, mid-range and low-end smartphones are more likely to use MediaTek chips. The entire market is dominated by Qualcomm.

The truly unique features, such as Samsung's curved screen, Apple's image enhancement and Bluetooth peripherals, are all new technologies developed by themselves. Few companies have such capabilities.

Apart from selling mobile phones, I can’t make money in any other way I can think of.

Low-priced thousand-yuan phones fail to make money from software services

Lin Bin, the founder of Xiaomi, once said that after Xiaomi phones are sold to users, it is only the beginning of the business: "We start with the open source Android operating system, improve the user experience, and after the operating system is accepted by users, we will make mobile phones, and then sell products through the e-commerce model, and finally make money through software and Internet services."

As of July this year, the sales volume of Redmi series mobile phones exceeded 100 million, and the number of MIUI activated users has exceeded 200 million. The number of applications distributed by the Xiaomi App Store in MIUI exceeded 50 billion last year.

Despite such a large number, they still didn't make much money. According to data released by Reuters this year, Xiaomi's annual revenue in 2015 was $12.5 billion, most of which came from selling mobile phones, and service revenue was only $564 million. This is 40% lower than Xiaomi's internal target of $1 billion.

In comparison, mobile phone hardware also failed to meet sales targets in 2015, falling only 20% short of the original plan.

Selling to China is harder than mobile phone manufacturers expected

Since 2014, Chinese mobile phone manufacturers of all sizes have been talking about overseas markets, and India is the first stop. Xiaomi, Lenovo, Meizu, OnePlus, Gionee, Huawei, OPPO, etc., basically all you can think of have gone there.

Take India as an example. In March this year, India’s Modi government announced a 29.44% import tariff on four types of equipment, including batteries and chargers, with the goal of achieving zero imports of electronic products by 2020.

To sell mobile phones in India, joint ventures became the only option. OEMs such as Foxconn and Flextronics cooperated to build factories. After three years of talking about entering India, this matter has just started this year, and the return is even further away. In the end, it became an investment that only a few mobile phone companies of a certain scale could afford.

It is not easy to do business outside of India. In May this year, Xiaomi, which wanted to sell mobile phones in Brazil, withdrew from the market less than a year after entering. Huawei also withdrew from the market. The reason behind this is also the high tax policy of the local government on foreign-funded enterprises.

Last September, Luo Yonghao also announced on Weibo that he would set up a Japanese company and enter the US market, but there has been no follow-up news.

The time when you only need a better software experience and online voice to do mobile business is over.

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.