OPPO has made a lot of personnel adjustments recently.
On April 9, OPPO announced that Liu Bo, President of the Emerging Mobile Terminal Division, will serve as President of China and will be fully responsible for the operation and brand building of the Chinese market. On April 20, OPPO’s post-80s marketing president Shen Yiren resigned, and Liu Lie served as global marketing president and concurrently as China CMO, fully responsible for OPPO’s marketing work.
Recently, OPPO announced that OnePlus CEO Liu Zuohu will return to OPPO and serve as its chief product experience officer. In addition, there are rumors that Li Zonglin, general manager of MediaTek’s wireless communications department, has resigned and joined OPPO’s mobile phone chip department.
Does the frequent personnel adjustments prove that OPPO is aware of the shortcomings of its own brand in marketing and products, and is trying to change the current embarrassing situation.
OPPO is repaying its past "debts"
OPPO's shipments have been declining and began to decline in 2018. Among them, shipments in the domestic market dropped by 20.4% year-on-year in 2019. Although global shipments have rebounded since 2019, Xiaomi's overseas market share has been overtaken by Xiaomi in the fourth quarter of 2018. This year, it can only rely on domestic sales to a large extent. .
However, this year’s epidemic has seriously affected the sales of mobile phones. Originally, stimulated by 5G mobile phones, the overall shipments of the mobile phone industry will definitely increase. However, not only has there been no increase, but there has also been a sharp decline. Condition.
According to global mobile phone shipments in the first quarter of 2020 announced by IDC, the top five in the world are Samsung, Huawei, Apple, Xiaomi and VIVO. 5. OPPO has been reduced to the list of “others”.
Judging from this year’s JD.com 618 mobile phone category sales rankings, Apple, Huawei and Xiaomi still dominate the list.
Judging from the list, OPPO does not rank at the top. Anyone familiar with the domestic mobile phone market knows that as early as the arrival of the 4G era, "Huami OV" replaced "China Cool Alliance" and became the Among the domestic mobile phone giants, these four companies captured 85% of the domestic mobile phone market last year.
OPPO’s decline is not unrelated to its excessive marketing. In 2016, as soon as the national-level advertising slogan "Charge in 5 minutes, talk for 2 hours" was launched, it ushered in huge results. The sales of OPPO R9 that year were close to 20 million units, and it successfully defeated Xiaomi and became the largest shipment in China that year. Top mobile phone brands.
A large amount of sponsorship and overwhelming advertising gave OPPO a brief moment of glory. But gradually the "high price, low allocation" began to take root in people's hearts.
Maybe OPPO has begun to pay attention to this issue. In 2019, it cut off the R series that was responsible for sales. OPPO ushered in the era of Reno, but the product positioning of Reno has always been very vague, not as good as R The series is so simple and crude. The first generation product had a pop-up front camera, but in the third generation, it switched to a hole-punch screen. Sometimes it focuses on thinness and lightness, sometimes it focuses on video stabilization. In short, it is unclear what the main selling point of this model is. .
The mid-range Reno is slowly sorting out its positioning, but the high-end seems to be not so smooth. OPPO was too confident in the pricing of its 5G product layout at the beginning of the year, mainly in terms of pricing. As for high-end products, the price of the Find It was a step too far, and there was an embarrassing situation where it was well-received but not popular.
In recent years, it has been exploring a new transformation path, beginning to clarify its own product line, unique flash charging technology, various screen innovations in the full-screen era, and creating Sub-brand offensive line and so on. However, despite its many auras, it has never gotten rid of the title of "high price, low configuration", and has never been able to take the lead online.
The current pressure on OPPO’s market share is not small. OPPO has always focused on offline channels, but now the pricing of Huawei products leaves a large gross profit margin for offline channels, so it is not Few dealers have begun to resell Huawei, which has greater profit margins. The top priority for OPPO is to maintain its offline advantage.
Looking for a breakthrough
OPPO’s sales decline is not an accident.
For some time, OPPO and VIVO have been nicknamed "blue and green factories" by the outside world. They were once the kings of offline marketing and entertainment sponsorship. With its beautiful appearance, it has attracted a large number of young fans, which is the main reason for its rapid rise.
Although there are many fans, the "IQ tax" that only focuses on beautiful appearance is decreasing, and more and more people are beginning to pay attention to interiority and personality. In the 5G era, OPPO will face great challenges, and how to improve itself internally is also its primary consideration.
That’s it, OPPO began to seek changes. There have been frequent personnel adjustments in the past six months. You must know that a team that often wins battles does not need to change its generals.
The news that "Patrick Lau will return to OPPO as Chief Product Experience Officer and concurrently serve as CEO of OnePlus" detonated the Internet. In the early years, OnePlus may have been popularized, but now I believe that there is no need to elaborate too much. In recent years, OnePlus’ performance has been obvious. Although it is not the leader in China, it can be said to be prosperous abroad. , Although Liu Zuohu was born in OPPO, OnePlus and OPPO have not followed the same route. Liu Zuohu has a keen eye for product strength and control of details. OPPO’s recall of Liu Zuohu this time must be to make a major change in its products.
For OPPO and even the entire O&G Group, Liu Zuohu’s joining can help control products and expand overseas markets. But the question is whether OnePlus, which is tainted with OPPO's atmosphere, can still be recognized by the original audience, and whether the two completely different routes of OPPO and OnePlus can adapt to each other. These are the problems that Liu Zuohu will face next.
In addition, the United States has escalated sanctions on Huawei, mainly targeting Huawei's semiconductor chips, causing Huawei to fall into a bottleneck in terms of chips. The Huawei incident has aroused the vigilance of many mobile phone manufacturers. According to reports, OPPO has become a chip research and development team.
In November last year, OPPO mentioned the "Mariana Plan" in an internal document. This year, OPPO's special assistant to the CEO published an internal article "Some Thoughts on Building Core Technology" ", one of the three major plans mentioned in the article is the "Mariana Plan".
I have to say that OPPO is very good at naming names and is very good at playing tricks. The Mariana Trench is currently the deepest known trench in the world, and it is also the most hostile environment on earth. area. It can be seen from this that the road to researching chips is extremely difficult.
For this reason, OPPO is also recruiting. Xiaomi hired former MediaTek CEO and operating officer Zhu Shangzu as a consultant, and MediaTek general Li Zonglin was poached to join the OPPO chip department.
"In terms of mobile phone baseband chips, the global market capacity will not allow there to be so many companies such as Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, HiSilicon, MTK, Xiaomi, etc. There will definitely be winners. There must be some left behind.
From a technical point of view, late entrants often have to pay tuition fees to early entrants, not to mention it is difficult to say whether the investment will be rewarded accordingly. From a talent perspective, chip R&D talents are currently extremely scarce and cannot support so many companies. " Chang Junfeng, Secretary General of Shenzhen Semiconductor Association said.
For major mobile phone manufacturers, if they want to survive, they must maintain their current market position. Otherwise, with OPPO’s price and configuration , There is really no competitive advantage in appearance. In the mobile phone market, technology is the core advantage.
Can the transformation be successful?
The reason why OPPO has repeatedly encountered obstacles in its transformation is that it is strategically young, but its tactics are too old-fashioned. Although it is full of expectations for the future, it is reluctant to let go of the past. Don’t be high-priced and low-profile, but your body is still very honest. 2020 is a very special year for the mobile phone industry. 2020 is the first year of 5G mobile phones. The innovation of domestic mobile phone manufacturers can predict that the mobile phone industry will undergo great changes after 2020.
The battle for 5G mobile phone users is a war without smoke.
Compared with Huawei next door, which has the halo of domestic public opinion and relies on operator business technology, Xiaomi has a complete IoT ecological chain with extremely high gross profit Internet revenue to make up for. There is still a lot of content. After all, OPPO’s marketing legend is difficult to repeat.
Xiaomi has been developing an IoT strategy since 2013. This strategy has helped Xiaomi achieve rapid revenue growth. Growth. In 2019, Xiaomi updated its strategy, emphasizing the Internet of Everything to the Intelligent Internet of Everything, accelerating the connection between AI and IoT, and allowing users to gain a more intelligent technological experience on the basis of realizing the Internet of Everything. In fact, strong market demand and technology have given rise to this. Nowadays, AI IoT is entering the fast lane of development.
But OPPO is just like a latecomer to the chip market, always being late to the game and not striving to be the first to take advantage. Instead, OPPO has just announced the formal establishment of an emerging mobile terminal business unit to enter the IoT industry in January this year. However, it is still unknown whether OPPO can take advantage of the IoT. /p>
Compared with OPPO in the 3G and 4G era, OPPO in the 5G era appears to be more urgent. OPPO’s strategic adjustment intention this time is very obvious, and OPPO’s research and development that weakens marketing will be its proposition. Composition. Without marketing, OPPO can only rely on its true skills.
If it cannot beat Huawei and Apple, this may be the fate of OPPO’s mobile phones in China. In this sea of ????blood, the only thing left is probably a bloody battle.