Asus surpassing HTC only looks good. What kind of dilemma is Taiwan's mobile phone industry facing?

In the late 1960s, in order to get rid of the oil crisis, Taiwan promoted the "Ten Major Constructions", laying a good foundation for Taiwan's heavy industry and IT industry. In the 1980s, the Taiwan authorities established the Hsinchu Science Park to encourage domestic and foreign manufacturers to invest in high-tech industries, replacing traditional labor-intensive industries with technology-intensive industries that consume less energy, pollute less, and have high added value.

In Taiwan, the world's 15th largest economy, a number of technology companies are supporting Taiwan's development and keeping it abreast of the times. Among them, the best are HTC, Asus, Acer, and MediaTek, which are well-known brands today.

As the momentum of mobile Internet grows stronger, Taiwan's mobile phone industry has become an important force in promoting global mobile smart devices. HTC, the creator of the first Android phone, is known as the evangelist of the contemporary mobile phone landscape. ASUS and Acer have also taken the footsteps of PC giants in the mobile phone market. Products like ASUS ZenFone have grown into products with a certain degree of market recognition. The importance of MediaTek to the smartphone industry is self-evident. The highly cost-effective MTK chip has accelerated the opening of the door for domestic mobile phones to the world of thousand-yuan phones.

Like the fierce competition among domestic mobile phones, Taiwan's mobile phone industry is also experiencing a reshuffle and turmoil. Not long ago, there was news that the total sales of ASUS's ZenFone smartphones reached 20.5 million units, making ASUS surpass HTC and become the number one mobile phone brand in Taiwan. Unfortunately, looking at the current situation, whether it is ASUS or HTC, they are not brands of the same size as Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, or Huawei. ASUS surpassing HTC is nothing more than a news point that not many people pay attention to. Judging from the situation of various local brands, the future of Taiwan's mobile phone industry is still worrying.

HTC: Gradually moving away from its former glory, its mobile phone business will be abandoned

On April 6, 2011, the share price of Taiwan's HTC broke through the NT$1,200 mark, and its market value soared to US$33.5 billion, surpassing Nokia and RIM. Its market value is second only to Apple among mobile phone manufacturers worldwide. Goldman Sachs Securities even predicted that HTC's market value will reach US$100 billion in 2014.

However, no one expected that after 2013, with the development of Samsung Galaxy series and the rise of domestic mobile phones, HTC's market positioning had serious problems. When its product experience was not far behind that of low-end mobile phones such as Xiaomi, it still habitually regarded Samsung, Apple and other manufacturers as its competitors and price targets.

HTC's decline is the result of a collective failure in product design, product marketing, and market positioning. We cannot deny that the HTC One M7 laid a template for the design and manufacturing process of the subsequent Apple iPhone and a number of existing so-called flagship phones, but the lack of innovation from the M8 to the M9, and the controversy over the sales strategy of this year's flagship HTC 10, which is seen by the outside world as the last straw, is also a result of HTC's continuous stupidity.

The most obvious example is the HTC 10 Lifestyle mainland China edition, which took advantage of mainland consumers. Not only did it offer far inferior configurations to the international edition, but it was also priced higher. Although HTC released the Snapdragon 820 version of the HTC10 in mainland China in May, the collapse of word of mouth caused the few remaining fans to defect, which shows the level of HTC's decision-making level.

Of course, many people think that HTC is no longer a mobile phone manufacturer. With the help of the Vive virtual reality helmet, HTC is playing hotly in the booming VR field. Coincidentally, Luo Yonghao, who has just switched to mobile phone manufacturing in China for less than two years, also said recently that the Hammer mobile phone is not selling well and hopes to use VR to alleviate the market difficulties. Obviously, Hammer, which has been making mobile phones for two years, and HTC, which has been making mobile phones for nearly twenty years, have the same idea this time.

Although we don’t know whether the HTC vive, which is priced at 6,888 yuan, is really HTC’s life-saving pill, at least in the mobile phone business, HTC is unlikely to make a comeback.

ASUS: Taiwan's domestic sales volume ranks first, but the starting point of deviation is difficult to correct

Asus, the world's largest PC motherboard manufacturer, and Acer, the world's second largest PC manufacturer, are also making every effort to develop their own mobile phone product lines.

First, let’s briefly talk about Acer, a company that few people know makes mobile phones.

In 2008, Acer acquired Taiwan's well-known smartphone manufacturer E-Tian Information Co., Ltd., and officially entered the smartphone market. A well-known event in history was that Acer and Alibaba planned to launch a mobile phone equipped with Alibaba Cloud OS, but the press conference was stopped by Google. Now, the latest news about Acer mobile phones is concentrated on Microsoft's Windows Phone products, that is, the latest Win10 Mobile terminals. If nothing unexpected happens, there will be nothing else.

In comparison, ASUS is much more reliable in making mobile phones than Acer. After all, ASUS ZenFone has already become the king in the Taiwanese market, which has a total area of ​​about 36,000 square kilometers and a population of over 23 million.

Asus has a distinct layout for ZenFone, which can be seen from its official website, such as the ZenFone that focuses on performance, the ZenFone Zoom that supports 3x optical zoom and focuses on photography, the ZenFone Laser series with a large screen, the ZenFone Selfie, and the ZenFone Max with a large battery. In a sense, the division of Asus' ZenFone product line is like the distinction between office computers, gaming computers, and portable computers in the PC market. It seems reasonable for a manufacturer that started out as a PC manufacturer to do this, but a closer look shows that this is not a long-term strategy for ZenFone to go further.

Taking Apple, whose market performance is definitely more successful than Asus, as a reference, Apple will and will only launch one main flagship every year, considering multiple factors such as performance, photography, and experience. The only choice left for you is the change in screen size in recent years. The same is true for Samsung overseas and Xiaomi in China. Many people look forward to the release of a new iPhone at a specific time every year. This product can give consumers everything they want, instead of worrying about whether to have iPhone Zoom, iPhone Selfie, iPhone Max or the Hawkeye iPhone with 3x optical zoom. It sounds like Apple fans will go crazy. In 2016, they are still obsessively using the strategy of flooding the market with new products that has been played out by Samsung, which also indirectly reflects the brand's lack of confidence.

Making mobile phones is different from making motherboards, graphics cards, and laptops. ASUS, which relies on ROG's belief in "the country of prodigals", has brought the ZenFone to the mobile phone market, but it is far from a high-quality product.

First of all, many users said that the signal performance of the ZenFone 2 series of mobile phones is not ideal, and the official seems to have staged a farce to cover up this problem. After updating the system, the signal display will have two more bars than before, but in fact there is no change; in addition, ZenFone 2, which also shoulders the brand responsibility, has a minimum brightness that is too bright and a maximum brightness that is too low, which has become a flaw in the phone screen; finally, the pre-installed software design of ASUS ZenFone is not user-friendly enough. In the UI interface of Android phones that best reflects the brand competitiveness, ASUS's performance lacks highlights. Perhaps the Taiwanese people really don't know what the experience of MIUI and Flyme is like.

In the current Baidu search index, the Baidu index of ASUS Zenfone is about 300, which is less than one percent of the Baidu index of Xiaomi 5, which is not favored by most people this year.

MediaTek: The lack of recognition for our efforts is a historical reason

Unlike HTC, ASUS and Acer mentioned above, MediaTek, which focuses on mobile phone chip manufacturing, is not doomed to fail due to its own actions.

Everyone must be familiar with MTK. Before the rise of smartphones, MediaTek's "copycat phones" were popular in China and many low-income countries. The king of copycat phones at that time gradually declined in the early 3G era. After several years of technological accumulation and a large amount of capital investment, the technology, chips, and platform solutions became more and more mature. The most beautiful counterattack was when Qualcomm's flagship product Snapdragon 810 encountered a heating crisis. MediaTek rose strongly and took 31.67% of the mobile phone processor market, which was equal to Qualcomm.

But even if it is changed to Helio, the name of MediaTek MTK is still not as high-end as Qualcomm Snapdragon and Samsung Exynos. The strong attack of Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 can be said to have knocked Helio x10 and x20 back to the cheap body of thousand-yuan phones.

Not only that, MediaTek, which was determined to enter the high-end chip market, was also badly betrayed by its teammates Xiaomi and other manufacturers. Last year's Helio x10 was supposed to be MediaTek's counterattack, but its status kept declining in the eyes of mobile phone manufacturers. It was first used by LeTV's Le 1 phone priced at 1,499 yuan, and later by Meizu MX5 priced at 1,799 yuan. After three consecutive jumps, it ended with Redmi Note 2 priced at 799 yuan, completely ruining MediaTek's ambition to enter the high-end market.

Under the regret of the glory, MediaTek is also facing the situation of technical barriers. In the battle of full network access, MediaTek is unable to face Qualcomm directly. Because the CDMA patent is monopolized by Qualcomm, it was not until last year that MediaTek released the MT6753 chip that supports full network access after obtaining authorization from VMware. However, due to technical problems, the main frequency of MT7653 is only 1.3GHz, which is much lower in performance than the 1.7GHz of the same-grade chip MT6752 that does not support full network access.

Is there a future for Taiwanese mobile phones?

Taiwan is an extremely magical place in the technology industry. Even if we only look at the mobile phone industry, it has given birth to companies like Foxconn to protect Apple's iPhone, as well as MediaTek chips that are struggling to break through difficulties, and HTC, Asus, and Acer that are constantly making stupid moves.

The ability of Taiwan's mobile phone industry to radiate markets outside of Taiwan is becoming increasingly limited, so much so that today the competition between HTC and ASUS is limited to Taiwan's home turf. On the contrary, a large number of domestic mobile phone brands that grew up in the mainland seem determined to expand outward.

We no longer need mobile phone brands from Taiwan. The next question is, will Taiwan no longer need Taiwanese mobile phone brands?

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.