It has been rumored that Geely Automobile will buy Meizu for nearly four months. I'm afraid the dust will be settled. Recently, some media reported that Meizu has been acquired by Geely and is currently completing the delivery stage. In this regard, Geely said that "it will not comment on market rumors for the time being". Four months ago, the reporter of Caijing confirmed from people familiar with the relevant transaction that Hubei Xingji times technology, a mobile phone company of Geely, was in contact with Meizu to negotiate the acquisition and had entered the stage of due diligence.
In this regard, Geely said "no comment" and Meizu replied "thank you for your concern for Meizu".
According to the past practice, this noncommittal attitude is equivalent to default. Coupled with the information hint in all aspects and the coincidence of the timeline, it can basically verify the authenticity of the rumors.
It's easy to think of Lei Jun who announced the construction of the car at about the same time. Although both sides grasp mobile phones and cars on the one hand, Li Shufu is undoubtedly the "villain" in the car making army, and why did he choose to embark on Lei Jun's "old road" at this time point?
According to the rumors of Geely's acquisition of Meizu, external analysts generally believe that: for Geely, this is an important step to revitalize the whole ecology by seizing the key node of the interconnection of all things; As for Meizu, it can also rely on Geely's powerful resources to regain its rebirth.
It seems that this is a win-win game.
Lei Jun makes cars, Li Shufu makes mobile phones, and they all go the same way
Li Shufu and Lei Jun build cars and mobile phones one by one. They don't have much intersection.
Li Shufu transformed into a car enterprise in an era of no one, no money, no technology and no policy support, and finally realized his "car dream" in the transformation of the times; Lei Jun founded Xiaomi in 2010, selling 7.9 million units a year in two years, ending the era of domestic Shanzhai machines in three years, ranking first in mobile phone shipments in China in four years, and realizing his "mobile phone dream" by stepping on the air outlet.
Their success in their respective fields contributed to their first time in the same box. In 2013, Lei Jun was awarded the honor of "Chinese dream practitioner", and Li Shufu presented the award with the "Chinese dream" tribute cup. In the live photos left, both of them were smiling.
The second striking intersection between Li Shufu and Lei Jun stems from each other's attack on each other's hinterland eight years later.
At Xiaomi's spring new product launch in March 2021, Lei Jun made a high-profile announcement to build a car, with an initial investment of 10 billion yuan and a cumulative investment of 10 billion US dollars in the next 10 years; In September of the same year, Geely Group established Hubei Xingji times Technology Co., Ltd., and Li Shufu announced that he had officially entered the mobile phone field and positioned himself in the high-end field. The headquarters was located in Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone, Hubei Province.
Lei Jun, who made mobile phones, began to build cars. Li Shufu, who made cars, began to build mobile phones. He was still in Wuhan, Lei Jun's headquarters. Two seemingly parallel relationship lines began to compete with each other, attracting various media to report.
Lei Jun thought about Xiaomi's car making three years ago. At the Xiaomi annual conference held in early 2019, Lei Jun announced the launch of the dual engine strategy of "mobile phone + aiot (artificial intelligence internet of things)". As an important terminal in aiot, car building has become the due meaning of Xiaomi's dual engine strategy.
Geely makes mobile phones, and Li Shufu's goal is also very clear. Positioning high-end mobile phones and looking at the global market is intended to realize the close interaction between vehicle and mobile phone software technology, and enable the two products to empower each other and achieve synergy in terms of intelligence.
The layout of Lei Jun and Li Shufu on mobile phones and cars comes from the increasingly close relationship between mobile phones and cars. Nowadays, with the trend of smart Internet connection, smart cars have been regarded as the third generation of smart mobile terminals after PCs and smart phones. To realize the third generation of smart terminals, we have to rely on the help of mobile phones.
As Wang Jian, then chairman of the technical committee of Alibaba group, said at the 10th TC auto Internet Conference in 2017: after many years, no matter how smart the car is claimed, there are still cars that mainly buy a set of mobile phone brackets with 9 yuan and 9 parcels in the car.
Apple began to build cars, while Huawei built cars under the banner of "no car"; Car companies Tesla and Weilai said they wanted to build mobile phones, which is the same. For an enterprise, the importance of having these two closely related businesses at the same time is self-evident, and the earlier the layout, the better. The consequence of waiting to die is to be slaughtered.
Therefore, it is not difficult to see that Lei Jun built a car for cars and Li Shufu built a mobile phone for cars. They seem to run counter to each other, but they actually go the same way.
However, making different choices for the same purpose also means that they have different odds of winning. In the wave of new energy, Lei Jun, who has moved from making mobile phones to making cars, chose a game from limited to wireless. When the bonus period of mobile phones has passed and the growth has peaked, Li Shufu, who has moved from car manufacturing to mobile phone manufacturing, obviously chose a more difficult road.
The outside world has questioned one after another, but how to go this way and how to improve the odds of winning, the acquisition of "madman" Li Shufu is too familiar. No one else, but you.
Huang Zhang refused Lei Jun and went to Li Shufu
For Meizu, when it is dying, being acquired by Geely has become the best destination.
The different trends of Meizu and Xiaomi have also become two new development trends in the mobile phone industry in the current red sea. On the one hand, represented by Xiaomi, it has gained a firm foothold in the industry by being a user's mobile phone. Now it is looking for new fields and developing new increment mobile phone manufacturers; The other side is the mobile phone represented by Meizu, which is a fan in Pianan corner. As the market share is constantly eroded, it is looking for mobile phone manufacturers to continue the life of large companies.
Lei Jun and Huang Zhang, who embarked on different paths, once had a story of a confidant changing into an enemy.
Lei Jun was once a loyal fan of Meizu. In 2009, Huang Zhang manufactured the first touch-screen smartphone Meizu M8 in China. At this time, Lei Jun just retired from the position of CEO of Jinshan. Not long ago, wealth freedom is looking for the next outlet for entrepreneurship.
At that time, Meizu M8 was like a heavy bomb thrown at the domestic mobile phone market. It created a sales miracle of 500 million yuan in five months. Lei Jun was full of praise and often took out Meizu M8 to explain to people at dinner occasions.
He praised Meizu. "There are only two Internet mobile phone companies in the world: one is apple and the other is Meizu." He also admired Huang Zhang's craftsman spirit. "Meizu is a rare company in China that does things with heart."
Like-minded, Lei Jun and Huang Zhang's feelings heated up rapidly. Since then, they have discussed many mobile phone matters in Huang Zhang's office. During this period, it was reported that Lei Jun intended to invest in Meizu, and Huang Zhang also considered inviting Lei Jun as CEO.
Meizu was a family business from the beginning. Huang Zhang naturally maintained a certain vigilance against external investment. When he was uncertain, Lei Jun had decided to become a software company. With Lei Jun's MIUI system, the two sides became enemies.
Huang Zhang repeatedly scolded Lei Jun as a liar in the forum, saying that he cheated many Meizu business secrets under the banner of angel investors. "The overall concept, development process, supplier selection, production and sales plan, core personnel introduction and financial statements" and "even the UI interactive documents of the mobile phone were sent to him for discussion".
Lei Jun's response was: "that's what his family said."
Later, Xiaomi, founded by Lei Jun in Beijing, rose rapidly, while Huang Zhang, who stayed in Zhuhai, went to a dead end step by step in the golden age of mobile phone development because of a series of problems, such as choosing the wrong product strategy, playing games with capital, making enemies with Qualcomm, frequent internal organization and management problems, and Huang Zhang's retreat and exit for several times.
At that time, Huang Zhang gambled on high-end products and cut off the sales engine Meilan series. He himself has a maverick character, retreating several times and going out of the mountain several times, constantly shaking the power pattern within Meizu.
Due to the unclear strategy and Huang Zhang's personal will, a large number of executives such as Yang Tuo, senior vice president, Bai Yongxiang, co-founder, Yang Yan, senior vice president and President of flyme business unit, and Li Nan, vice president of Meizu, the founder of Meilan, left one after another. The consequent airborne team can not be well integrated with the original team. The new and old schools operate separately, with serious differences and constant internal friction, which have accelerated the decline of Meizu. According to the data released by BCI, the market share of Meizu has been eroded to 0.1% by the end of January 2021.
Lei Jun has realized the name of "leibus" step by step, and Huang Zhang, once known as "China jobs", has been unable to return to the sky after taking Meizu through the small and beautiful route, aircraft sea tactics, cost-effective strategy and simplification strategy. It is only a matter of time before Meizu is expelled from the mobile phone market.
In this context, struggling Huang Zhang met Li Shufu who was planning the transformation for Geely.
Although Meizu has completely become a marginal role in terms of market share, it can not be denied that Meizu has a mature mobile phone R & D team, rich mobile phone manufacturing experience, perfect channels and brand awareness accumulated over the years. Its appearance design and flyme OS operating system have also had a great impact on the industry.
Therefore, for Geely, the acquisition of Meizu is the most direct and effective strategy to build mobile phone and automobile interconnection and quickly make its own ecological barrier.
Market competition is cruel. Enterprises without scale will eventually face the choice of "life" or "death". For Meizu, being acquired by Geely is also an opportunity to retain the fire and regain its rebirth.
Li Shufu teamed up with Huang Zhang at the right time
According to leifeng.com (official account: leifeng.com), Geely is anxious about the future, Meizu is struggling in the present, and both need each other to develop new imagination, so they hit it off.
Unlike Dong Mingzhu who built mobile phones for Gree from scratch, Li Shufu chose to exchange money for time in the face of a strange mobile phone field, which is also his consistent style.
In recent years, Geely has actively arranged the future science and technology field, and it has been difficult for the outside world to define it as a car enterprise.
In 2018, Geely strategic investment aerospace technology company "spacetime Daoyu" became the first vehicle enterprise in China to independently develop low orbit satellites, and entered the stage of mass production in September last year. In 2020, Wofei Changkong was established to be a flying car and UAV. In January this year, while the news of the acquisition of Meizu came out, Geely announced the establishment of Ruilan automobile in a joint venture with Lifan technology to lay out the layout in power replacement, expand the business scope and aim at the whole battery ecology.
Smart cars, flying cars, low orbit satellites and chip research and development, it is not difficult to see that Li Shufu wants to create an all-round intelligent ecosystem. Today, getting involved in the field of mobile phones is intended to seize the key node of the interconnection of all things.
Meizu not only has the genes of high-end mobile phones, but also has certain software capabilities. At the end of 2020, Meizu officially released the high-end smart home brand lipro, and updated the flyme OS system the next year, realizing the control of smart home with voice assistant aicy.
For Geely, its fundamental purpose is vehicle machine cooperation, and Meizu's software ability is just needed at present.
Let's take a look at the practical problems faced by Geely.
With the continuous expansion of business territory, Geely's operating costs began to soar. In 2016, the operating costs were 48.9 billion yuan, which had risen to 88.2 billion yuan by 2020. At the same time, the total revenue showed an obvious downward trend and began to show negative growth in 2019. The net profit also decreased from RMB 12.6 billion in 2018 to RMB 5.5 billion in 2020.
As for the field of new energy vehicles announced in 2015, Li Shufu's original plan was to realize that the sales of new energy vehicles accounted for more than 90% of the total sales by 2020, but the actual data accounted for less than 5%, far lower than his own expectation and far lower than the industry average of 12%.
Facing the worries about the future, Li Shufu has found a new stimulating point for Geely, that is, mobile phones, with the purpose of revitalizing the intelligent ecology and driving a new growth curve.
Looking back on the development context of "mobile + aiot" of Xiaomi in recent years, we can find that Xiaomi is seeking its own secondary growth by exploring the ecological industry.
In 2018, Xiaomi was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and sounded the bell. In the prospectus, Xiaomi defined its position as "Xiaomi is an Internet company with mobile phones, smart hardware and IOT (Internet of things) platform as the core." At that time, aiot strategy was determined as the core development strategy of Xiaomi in the next 5-10 years.
In Xiaomi's latest financial report for 2021, Xiaomi's total revenue in 2021 was 328.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 33.5%. Smartphone business still accounts for the majority of the annual revenue with 63.6%, and IOT and consumer products account for 25.9% of the total revenue.
For Lei Jun, the commercialization of Xiaomi mobile phone has been very successful, but with the dividend peaking, mobile phone manufacturers are becoming more and more mature, which means that the supply chain behind it is also gradually converging. With the gradual loss of differentiated competitive advantage, it is only a matter of time to go downhill.
Therefore, on March 30 last year, Lei Jun announced tragically at Xiaomi's new product launch that "this is my last venture, and I will bet all on it to fight for Xiaomi." For Lei Jun, it was helpless and his personal heroism to choose to join the car making army at this time.
The mobile phone industry and the automobile industry are moving from parallel to intersection, showing the future trend of the whole industry. Li Shufu, Huang Zhang and Lei Jun, who have attracted much attention because of the acquisition, are smart people who choose to follow the trend of the times.
At first, Huang Zhang refused Lei Jun because the mobile phone market was still a blue ocean and had a choice; Now Geely buys Meizu and Li Shufu joins hands with Huang Zhang for fear that he will have no choice soon.
This seemingly "win-win" good chess has just dropped a child. Due to the large number of competitors opposite and strong enough, we need to see what the future chess game will be like.