It seems that Meizu's acquisition rumors have ushered in the final chapter. Recently, several information sources reported that Meizu has been acquired by Geely and is now in the delivery stage. For this news, the two sides expressed "no comment" with a high degree of tacit understanding. Although Meizu and Geely did not disclose any details about the acquisition, their marriage has long been nothing new. As early as the beginning of this year, the media broke the news that Geely was already negotiating the acquisition with Meizu and had reached a preliminary agreement.
However, when countless clues gathered together to prove the authenticity of the acquisition, it was still confusing: it was a car company that finally saved Meizu?
For Meizu, relying on Geely can obviously get more abundant financial support, which can be regarded as the optimal solution in the dilemma. But for Geely, what is the significance of acquiring Meizu?
Cross border mobile phone? It doesn't seem logical.
According to the financial report released by Geely not long ago, Geely achieved an operating revenue of 101.61 billion yuan in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 10%; Excluding share based payment, the net profit reached 6.06 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9.4%. More importantly, Geely's new "blue action" finally achieved initial results: the annual sales of new energy electrification models reached 100126, up 47% year-on-year.
Geely, whose new energy business has entered a period of rapid growth, has no reason to follow up the Red Sea market of smart phones at this time.
Another possibility is that the acquisition of Meizu is based on the consideration of "vehicle machine integration". Last September, Li Shufu founded Hubei Xingji times Technology Co., Ltd. and said that the move was to build an ecosystem and make smart cars more competitive. However, if the purpose is to improve the interconnection ability of vehicles and machines, it seems unnecessary to acquire a manufacturer outside the system.
The reason behind this acquisition may not be the illusory prospect of establishing the Internet of all things, but Meizu's ability to solve Geely's current problems.
But on the other hand, what can Geely bring to Meizu?
Geely can't save Meizu
Meizu may not be a success in the smart phone industry, but he really impressed the industry.
In 2009, Meizu, which started with MP3 business, launched its first smartphone M8. At that time, the official version of Android had not been released, and most smartphone manufacturers chose windows CE is a mobile phone system, but Meizu did not follow the trend and use the original system. Instead, Meizu redeveloped a set of UI based on Windows CE. This set of customized UI soon attracted the first batch of fans for Meizu and became the basis of its rise in the future.
Meizu relies on customized UI to gain a firm foothold in the domestic market, but it always depends on mature solutions in the industrial chain in terms of hardware. In other words, the company advocating "small and beautiful" did not intend to go deep into the hardware field from the beginning, but such a strategy seems destined to be unable to occupy an ecological position in today's smartphone market.
The once "small factory in Zhuhai" has faded out of the mainstream now
In the past two years, domestic mobile phone manufacturers have begun to emphasize "competition for internal power", which essentially tests the ability of hardware innovation. On the one hand, the 5g switch tide has ended, and China has returned to the reincarnation of the Red Sea market again. On the other hand, within the framework of Android, various companies have already brought the characteristics of customized UI to the extreme, and even began to tend to homogenize competition at the software level.
The so-called "hardware innovation cycle" of mobile phone manufacturers in the past 33 years is not worth mentioning. The so-called "hardware innovation cycle" of mobile phone manufacturers in China will not be a long one month.
Therefore, the current domestic manufacturers will spare no effort to lead the hardware innovation. For example, the power chip track. Manufacturers including vivo, Xiaomi and oppo have successively released NPU / ISP chips. This centralized entry into long-cycle and high input technology also reflects the change of the trend of the domestic market, that is, the hardware innovation led by the supply chain in the past can no longer provide an incremental market.
So after Geely's acquisition of Meizu, can Meizu change this situation in a short time?
The answer is almost impossible. Innovation at the hardware level is a long process. For example, the UTG glass cover plate on mate XS2 released by Huawei not long ago. Huawei sent a technical team to Kaisheng technology for joint research and development two years ago, which involves the collaborative innovation of the industrial chain.
However, for Meizu, which focuses on appearance design and system polishing, both the accumulation of hardware R & D and the industrial chain innovation alliance seem too far away from the company. No matter how much resources Geely invests in it, Meizu is difficult to return to the ranks of top manufacturers.
However, Meizu's insistence on customized UI is very suitable for today's automotive industry.
Develop Android? It has to be a mobile phone company
In order to meet the high standards of safety and reliability of the vehicle machine system, most domestic vehicle enterprises choose the self-developed vehicle machine system. Most of these so-called self-developed car machine systems carry out limited customized development based on the Android operating system, and generally only modify the applications of the operating system.
Manufacturers choose android as the kernel for two reasons: on the one hand, the domestic Android application ecology is relatively complete, on the other hand, android as the kernel has unique advantages in some aspects.
From the perspective of architecture, Hal (hardware abstraction layer) of Android encapsulates the Linux kernel driver and divides the support for hardware into two layers, one in user space and the other in kernel space. Hal runs in user space and Linux kernel driver runs in kernel space.
Mainstream vehicle system architecture, picture source: CSDN Library
When the Hal concept appears in cars, it means that a single hardware is no longer exclusive to a function. For example, a forward-looking camera may have been monopolized by the AEB / ACC system in the past. But now, any on-board function has the right to call this camera. The advantage of this concept is very obvious. If you add independent hardware for each function according to the distributed architecture of today's new energy vehicles, it will inevitably lead to hardware redundancy and soaring cost. However, based on Android kernel, you can connect all hardware resources with applications.
But this also puts forward new requirements for car companies. They must go deep into the bottom of Android system and rewrite the description of car hardware abstraction layer.
So what's the difference between car Android and mobile Android? Exactly the same.
"Car Android is not a branch or parallel development version of Android. It uses the same code base and is located in the same storage area as Android on mobile phones and tablets." In Google's developer manual, this describes the concept of car Android.
For the development of Android system, mobile phone manufacturers obviously have more say.
"Under certain circumstances, such as the upgrading of camera applications, some company UI teams will even rewrite all Hal layers." An employee revealed to Hu olfactory that domestic mobile phone manufacturers are very willing to work hard on the optimization of Android system.
Meizu as one of the best, its experience in Android development may be what Geely values.
In addition, in order to form a differentiated experience, car enterprises will still pay attention to the adjustment of UI and the supplement of on-board applications in the development of car machine system, which is what Meizu is good at.
In the Chinese market, customized UI is a topic that can never be bypassed. The lack of Android native system functions and the "too concise" interface design limit it everywhere in the local competition. Everyone hopes to use the customized UI to make up for this weakness and solve the original problems of Android system.
Meizu is one of the most representative domestic manufacturers. From parallel windows to game mode, and then to custom icons, these familiar small functions are basically the earliest concepts put into practice by Meizu. Such sophisticated development ability is also applicable to on-board applications.
An Android application development engineer said, "the development of these on-board applications is not difficult, but the workload is large, and the subsequent debugging work is also very time-consuming." But he also believes that these are not a problem for mobile phone manufacturers, because they have a huge development team as support.
Truth · everything can OTA
When it comes to Meizu, there is another characteristic of this company that makes a deep impression: solving all problems with Ota.
The so-called Ota is a technology that realizes the remote management of mobile terminal equipment and SIM card data through the air interface of mobile communication. Every "system version upgrade" of your mobile phone is a kind of Ota. All smart phone manufacturers will upgrade the key functions of the mobile phone through this technology.
In the months after the release of the new machine, Meizu can always supplement the functions that are not supported at the factory through Ota.
For example, Meizu was pushing flyme9 not long ago In version 2.3A, some users found in the update log that the new version of flyme system has added system FM function for Meizu 18 / 18S, which means that users can choose whether to reduce the frequency of mobile phone SOC. Although this is a helpless move in the face of the power consumption jump of Xiaolong 8 series chips, it also confirms the user's impression of Meizu:
"Everything can be OTA".
This evaluation is more of a joke, but also reflects Meizu's application ability of OTA technology. Is this ability meaningful for auto enterprises?
Tesla began to explore the whole vehicle OTA as early as 2012. After 10 years of development, Tesla can not only send the software upgrade to the on-board communication unit in the vehicle through OTA, update the map, application program and other software in the on-board infotainment system, but also directly transmit the software supplement program to the relevant electronic control unit (ECU) to realize reliable function upgrade.
Compared with Tesla's entire vehicle OTA, in the domestic market, car enterprises still focus on SOTA (software), and the scope of upgrading is mostly limited to the application software upgrading of central control large screen and digital instrument. Tesla's vehicle OTA capability is not the envy of many domestic manufacturers.
In order to ensure the reliability of vehicle OTA, Tesla cooperates with red bend under Harman. The OTA platform provided by red bend is used for communication between vehicle and cloud, and Harman and Tesla allow both parties to replace codes rather than files. However, when it comes to vehicle software upgrade, Tesla still relies on its internally developed API interface.
An Conghui, the chairman of Geely, said that the polar krypton OTA will be updated five times in 2022
For domestic auto enterprises, their software and hardware technology is not enough to support the implementation of vehicle Ota. Therefore, Geely's acquisition of Meizu may be able to supplement its OTA technology, which is of great significance to Geely at present.
Since the release of gkui, this Geely self-developed vehicle system has caused many car owners' roast about its stability. Unexplained reboots and system jams always exist, but in fact, these problems can be improved and upgraded through FOTA technology.
Of course, this is only an ideal idea. An insider told Hu olfactory that compared with OTA technology in the mobile phone industry, the technical threshold of automobile OTA, especially FOTA, is much higher. "You must have an in-depth understanding of computing hardware and be familiar with various on-board computing topologies, so as to realize the upgrade at the ECU level."
More importantly, since November 2020, the State Administration of market supervision has issued several notices to strengthen the supervision of automobile OTA technology recall, which also limits the application of automobile enterprises to automobile OTA to a certain extent.
Write at the end
Li Shufu once said, "the mobile phone business is of far-reaching significance to the whole Geely Automobile Industry. The better development of mobile phones will lead to the better development of car machines; the better development of car machines will promote the continuous improvement of the level of intelligent cockpit, so as to help the continuous improvement of the competitiveness of intelligent electric vehicles."
This statement seems to reveal that Geely is indeed ready to enter the mobile phone market, and will at least develop the mobile phone business into an important part of the "Geely ecology" to realize the mutual empowerment of cars and mobile phones. On this basis, Geely may really help Meizu return to the mainstream market.
But today, mobile phones have largely become personal "digital organs". Will users change their habits because they adapt to the ecology of electric vehicles? I'm afraid it's a big question mark.
However, in any case, the marriage between Meizu and Geely is still worth looking forward to. On the one hand, it is a mobile phone manufacturer that adheres to the principle of "small and beautiful" and on the other hand, it is a powerful traditional car enterprise. Such a combination joins hands in the electric vehicle market, leaving enough imagination space for people.