Huawei bid farewell to the low-end bureau, and Xiaomi was stunned.

Ke Jinjiao Finance of the Original Keji

Original starting | Jinjiao Finance (ID: F-Jinjiao)

Author | Ke Ji’s Ke

On April 15th, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei BG, announced that Huawei P series was officially upgraded to "Huawei Pura".

According to the information previously reported, Huawei Pura70 series will be divided into Pura 70, Pura 70 Pro, Pura 70 Pro+ and Pura 70 Ultra, and will be released before the end of this month.

From P8 to P10, Huawei further took images as the main feature of P series. Now, P series is renamed Pura series, which continues to strengthen its focus on imaging technology. Yu Chengdong said: "In 2012, we launched Huawei P series mobile phones. The development history of Huawei P series is not only the development history of mobile images, but also the evolution history of scientific aesthetics."

For the whole mobile phone industry, this is not simply a high-end mobile phone released by Huawei, because the upcoming Huawei Pura70 series is likely to be the first mobile phone to experience pure blood HarmonyOS. Imitating Apple’s pure blood HarmonyOS, it will directly bid farewell to the history of domestic mobile phone brands blindly stacking materials in the high-end market.

Xiaomi, who has been longing for the brand to soar before, is in danger.

Huawei finally got together the lineup.

Since the return of Huawei Mate 60 last year, Huawei’s product rhythm has returned to normal. With the strong listing of Pura series, it means that Huawei has basically assembled its own mobile phone lineup.

Huawei’s mobile phone product line mainly includes Changxiang series, Nova series, P series and Mate series. Among them: the enjoyment series is entry-level, focusing on cost performance; Nova series belongs to the mid-range, focusing on fashion design and camera function; P series and Mate series are high-end, focusing on young users and business users respectively. The former focuses on images and fashion, while the latter is more business-oriented. Upgrade from P series to Pura series, or make up the last link of Huawei’s product line, and further enhance Huawei’s competitiveness in the high-end market.

It can be said that from the bright side, Huawei’s mobile phone business has completed a comprehensive recovery, and there are heavy products bring up the rear in every important track.

But for friends, this is not good news. The previous Huawei Mate 60 series has occupied the minds of consumers in the high-end market and established the prototype of "far ahead".

QuestMobile’s Insight Report on Smart Terminal Market in China in 2024 shows that in terms of competition pattern, the main players in the smart phone market in China remain stable, and Huawei continues to lead the domestic market. Among them, in 2023, the cumulative activation of Huawei Mate 60 and Mate 60 Pro reached 17.33 million units.

The upcoming Pura series will undoubtedly give Huawei "double insurance" in the high-end market. In this regard, Guo Ming, an analyst of Tianfeng International Securities, once published a report saying that if the current strong demand for replenishment of mobile phone inventory can last until the first half of 2024, the shipment of Pura series is expected to increase by 230% to 13-15 million units in 2024.

The shipment of 13 million-15 million units is probably the annual shipment of iPhone 15 series last year, which means that Huawei not only left behind a number of domestic friends, but also further threatened Apple’s position, leading Apple CEO Cook to come to China frequently in recent years, trying to stabilize the situation.

At the same time, Huawei has made a breakthrough in promoting the localization of the industrial chain, which means that Huawei’s strong performance will not be a flash in the pan, and it will not be "stuck in the neck" at a critical moment, but has long-term competitiveness. In addition to the Howe sensor being adopted by Huawei, domestic listed companies such as Shenzhen O-film Tech Co.,lt and Huichuangda also have long-term cooperation with Huawei in the field of smart phones. Among them, Huichuangda supplied precision connectors for Huawei smartphones, while Shenzhen O-film Tech Co.,lt camera modules entered the Mate 60 series supply chain of Huawei mobile phones, accounting for the vast majority.

Millets can only pile up materials

Huawei Pura series is the first mobile phone that can experience pure blood HarmonyOS, and the blessing of pure blood HarmonyOS means that Huawei has the capital to play Apple in a real sense.

Before Huawei was "stuck in the neck", domestic mobile phone brands such as Huawei once threatened Apple’s position in the high-end market, but more blindly piled up materials at the hardware level to fill the gap at the system level.

With the arrival of pure blood HarmonyOS, it is expected to reverse this situation. This native system is self-developed by Huawei, which reduces the redundant code by 40% compared with before and greatly improves the fluency of the system.

According to the official report of HarmonyOS, more than 4,000 applications have joined HarmonyOS Ecology. Since Huawei announced on January 18th this year that the first batch of more than 200 application vendors have accelerated the development of native applications in HarmonyOS, the number of applications has increased rapidly.

In just two months, the number of ecological applications in HarmonyOS has increased 20 times, reaching more than 4,000.

At the same time, there are many players who have developed HarmonyOS software, Internet of Things and other eco-related business layouts in HarmonyOS. According to the incomplete statistics of the star mines, among the domestic listed companies, these players include 19 enterprises such as iSoftStone, Runhe Software, Xinhai Technology, Tuowei Information, Dongfang Zhongke, Runda Medical, Jieshun Technology and Jinshan Office.

Northeast Securities said in the research report that HarmonyOS’s application and equipment development will incite the 10 billion market. "In terms of application, APP needs to adapt the HarmonyOS operating system and design the meta-service card. We expect that the HarmonyOS migration of the application will generate a market of 20.8 billion yuan; In terms of equipment, it is estimated that in the next five years, open source HarmonyOS Ecology will add 400 million terminal equipment. We assume that the OS unit price of IoT equipment is 8-120 yuan, and it is expected to generate a device operating system market of 32-48 billion yuan in the next five years. "

In contrast, although other domestic mobile phone brands are aware of the importance of the operating system, they have never been completely native and completely cut with the Android system.

For example, Xiaomi launched a brand-new operating system Xiaomi 澎湃 OS in October last year. Although it integrates the self-developed Vela system, it is also a compromise gameplay compatible with Android AOSP. At the critical moment, it still cannot jump out of the path dependence of blind hardware stacking.

In this way, it is bound to increase the cost of mobile phone business and supply chain pressure. Taking Xiaomi as an example, the gross profit margin in 2022-2023 was only 16.99% and 21.21% respectively, which was less than half of Huawei’s. With the gradual landing of Pure Blood HarmonyOS, the gap in gross profit margin may become wider and wider.

Although Lu Weibing, the president of Xiaomi Company, recently made a bold statement at the performance meeting, claiming that Xiaomi’s mobile phone will break through the price range of 6,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan in 2024, judging from the current situation, after the core competitors have jumped out of the routine of blind hardware stacking, it will be difficult to say that it will pose enough threats in the high-end market.

The high-end bureau ushered in a grand finale.

The biggest advantage of iPhone and even the product lines behind it lies in the high adaptation and seamless connection between self-developed systems and hardware devices.

Judging from various signals released by Huawei, the development and application of pure blood HarmonyOS will follow this idea. As Apple and Huawei continue to invest heavily in this route, it is bound to invisibly establish the entry threshold for high-end bureaus: closed native systems+top hardware level in the industry+massive APP and other related content support.

As a result, a number of domestic mobile phone brands missed the high-end bureau in the short term.

Pure Blood HarmonyOS came to the stage itself because of the blockade and suppression of overseas markets. In the case of shrinking overseas markets, Huawei’s move may further stabilize the domestic market and temporarily abandon overseas markets in stages.

According to Counterpoint, a market research organization, in the third quarter of 2023, the share of HarmonyOS operating system in the smart phone market in China reached 13%, an increase of 6 percentage points over the same period of last year. Only in the global market, HarmonyOS’s share is only 3%, while the share of iOS and Android is 16% and 81% respectively.

From the data alone, we can see that it is difficult for Huawei to make a difference in overseas markets. On the one hand, it will take time for Huawei to recover from the chip blockade in the United States. On the other hand, the cooperation between Huawei and Google Android has stopped, which means that Huawei’s mobile phone has almost become a "brick" in the hands of overseas users, and basic services and apps cannot be used normally, which will inevitably reduce the experience of using mobile phones.

In this way, Huawei and HarmonyOS can only rely on the "internal circulation" system to break the game, while friends still have a considerable part of overseas business to maintain. According to the latest report of Canalys, a market research organization a few days ago, in 2023, the global smartphone shipments were 1.14 billion units, with Apple and Samsung competing for hegemony, ranking first and second, followed by Xiaomi, OPPO and Voice, three China brands.

In the fierce competition in the mobile phone market at home and abroad, two-line parallelism has consumed a lot of energy of mobile phone manufacturers. Under the circumstance that "reducing costs and increasing efficiency" has become the main theme of major companies, it is difficult to invest a lot of manpower and material resources to develop and promote a completely independent and closed operating system in a short period of time, and Android still dominates overseas, so it is almost impossible to complete subversion in a short period of time in combination with software ecology.

References:

Wall Street saw "Huawei P70, breaking news! 》

Lei Technology "Huawei P70 rushed to the hot search! The appearance recognition is extremely high, and the new machine emperor is ready to come out? 》

Jinjiao Finance and Economics "HarmonyOS Found a New Backer"

Producer: Lu Hua

Original title: "Huawei bid farewell to the low-end bureau, Xiaomi is stunned"

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