In order to protect the top five, OPPO and Glory are madly fighting for their lives

Author 丨 New Entropy with God

When the iPhone once again launches cost-effective mobile phones, the competition in the smartphone market is becoming fierce.

The iPhone 16e, a new member of the Apple family who joined the Apple family on February 20, has a starting price of 4499 yuan at the Bank of China, which is less than 4000 yuan after being added to the ongoing national subsidy discount. It has opened the price door for mainstream flagship machines in the Android camp in China.

Counterpoint, a market research firm focusing on the communications technology industry, released monthly mobile phone sales report data showing that smartphone sales in China fell by 3.2% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2024, making it the only quarter of the year to experience a year-on-year decline.

Ethan Qi, deputy director of Counterpoint, commented: The smartphone market rebounded in the first three quarters of this year, achieving year-on-year growth in each quarter. However, growth began to slow in the fourth quarter as consumers became cautious in spending behavior. rdquo;

The market recovery that has begun at the end of 2023 has entered into technical adjustment in less than a year. The industry pattern that has stabilized earlier will inevitably become variable again.

Previously, in the 2024 Q3 domestic smartphone list released by IDC, the glory of shipments dropped by more than 20%, and OPPO failed to squeeze into the top five. In the 2024 Q4 shipment list released by third-party organization Canalys, Glory fell directly from second place in the previous year to sixth place. OPPO retained fifth place entirely based on its peers, but the gap with fourth place was opened by nearly 2 million units.

Although the comparison results of data under different statistical standards are slightly different, the consensus can be found that both OPPO and Glory in the domestic market are showing signs of falling behind. For the fifth place after Huawei, Xiaomi, Apple, and vivo, there is a need to seize this life-saving straw.

With the stimulus of the national subsidy policy in 2025 and the update iteration of AI mobile phones, it is not yet possible to confirm whether this round of replacement cycle can be continued. However, the situation of the top six in the domestic market competing for hegemony has been drawn into a split between four and two. Who can OPPO or Glory? Stabilize the list of the five permanent members?

Apple Waterloo

Apple’s mobile phone encounters Waterloo in Greater China, which is almost something the industry cannot imagine before 2024.

Although it is contrary to its defeat in the East, Apple has told a near-perfect AI story in global capital markets over the past year, and its share price peaked at the end of last year.

Who is the one who has eaten Apple’s share in the domestic mobile phone market? One part is Huawei, which brings its own technology and ecology and returns the king; the other part is Xiaomi OVs who rely on the folding screen category to hit the high-end.

In addition to the bottleneck in hardware innovation, the iPhone 16 series has been overtaken by the Android camp is the lack of AI functions in the National Bank version. In fact, the new machine equipped with self-developed Apple Intelligence has a significant effect on driving sales overseas. If domestic Apple phones want to make up for this regret, they will probably have to wait until this year’s cooperation with Alibaba’s Tongyi Thousand Model Team comes into effect.

There is no lack of learning from the past kings, and they are indeed targeted drugs that work very quickly. After OPPO exposed a shipment crisis in the third quarter of last year, it decisively aligned itself with Apple on its blockbuster flagship Find X8 series at the end of the year, barely leaving its glory behind.

Not only did the design not hesitate to make face-to-face, but at the Find X8 series launch conference in late October, OPPO chief product officer Liu Zuohu said bluntly: To put it bluntly, we just want to transform Apple users and give them another choice.” rdquo;

As the X8 became the highest-selling product in the history of the Find series, OPPO reproduced the fruity flavor into the Reno 13 series, which was positioned as a mid-to-low end, and also applied for registration of the OPhone trademark in response to ridicule on the Internet.

Coincidentally, the X200 Pro mini released by its old rival vivo during the same period also has a strong Apple style. Later, it also applied for registration of the VPhone trademark without concealing its intention of paying tribute. Xiaomi next door, after iterating its self-developed system to surging OS2, has also accelerated its interoperability with Apple devices, with the intention of diverting users who have been accustomed to Apple’s entire family for many years.

The glory of being among the ranks of OPPO still adheres to the tradition of mentioning Apple when promoting new machines. Zhao Ming, then CEO of Glory, proposed more than once that Glory wanted to change the situation that Apple dominated the high-end market. He also said that the concept of iPhone Smart Island originated from glory.

The low-cost version of Android is a new AI experience that allows Apple to give up more than 10% of the domestic market share in a year, but it is far from the position lost by both OPPO and Glory. There are only three winners in the domestic mobile phone market in 2024: Huawei, Xiaomi and vivo.

However, even though Apple intends to cultivate emerging markets such as India and Southeast Asia, Greater China, the world’s third largest market, cannot be laid flat. Launching cheaper models and extensively seeking domestic AI model solution providers all imply the possibility that Apple will stage a comeback drama like Huawei in the future.

OPPO and Glory, which have not received Apple’s recession dividends, need to be more fully prepared for that day.

Sub-brand war

Both of them are blue and green factories in the BBK series. Vivo and OPPO will emerge from the situation of ice and fire in 2024.

Unlike the latter, which struggled to hover at low levels, vivo has been at the forefront of the industry for many consecutive quarters, and finally reached the top of China with 49.3 million units shipped and a market share of 17%. Statistics show that its sub-brand iQOO alone accounts for 4.68% of the overall market share. In contrast, OPPO’s two sub-brands, OnePlus and Realme, only achieved 1.60% and 1.22% market shares respectively.

What is commendable is that vivo’s main brand and iQOO have successfully clarified the differences in product positioning, highlighting and strengthening the portrait photography capabilities that female users care more about, and the game experience and cost performance ratio that young male groups prefer, almost in parallel between two major categories. In the direction of categories, it covers the price range of all categories, high, middle and low-end levels.

This is obviously a lesson learned from Xiaomi. The low-price shackles set on the red rice series are now difficult to break the upper limit even if the latter becomes independent.

Another negative example is the situation where OPPO is fighting separately with its own Yijia and Realme. Both sub-brands are independently started by core executives in the name of leaving, but at the same time they share the supply chain resources accumulated by OPPO over the years.

Liu Zuohu, founder of OnePlus, is good at geek design and overseas marketing, so he started opening the door in the United States. Many classic elements of OPPO Find5 can also be found on the first-generation OnePlus mobile phone. However, in the process of transferring exports to domestic sales, there is inevitably a direct conflict with the main brand. For example, in 2019, when the OnePlus 7 Pro reached its peak and was selling well in China, OPPO quietly failed to update its flagship product line.

Since then, when the global market fell, Yijia chose to return to OPPO in order to improve resource efficiency. Liu Zuohu also re-appointed as chief product officer, responsible for all high-end flagship series. However, now that the main brand has no longer focused solely on the offline channel model in the past, Yijia, which only focuses on online, will still have a certain degree of conflict with the former. On the contrary, it is realme who returns from overseas to China and adheres to the original intention of being cost-effective, which shows a complementary relationship.

Xiaomi’s sub-brand strategy has successfully relieved the burden of cost-effective positioning, and the main brand can go all out to hit the high-end. Huawei, which followed suit, immediately established Glory. After several twists and turns, it became OPPO’s current brother in trouble.

Facing overseas suppression at that time, Glory made full use of the chip inventory and channel resources received from Huawei after independence. After passing through the difficult reorganization stage, he once sprinted to the second position in the country, but showed signs of fatigue at the pre-listing barrier.

Perhaps, in the next domestic smartphone battlefield, resisting pressure alone and dispersing internal friction will not be able to defeat the synthetic combat strategy of multiple brands to jointly occupy the minds of multiple major audiences.

Cross-border life and death game

The mobile phone market is decisive outside mobile phones, which is a cliché in the domestic mobile phone industry. From smart homes to IoT Internet of Everything, then from PC tablets to wearable devices, the latest foothold has shifted to AI and cars.

These include both the foresight of mobile phone manufacturers to actively seek innovation and change, and the hidden worry that the industry’s ceiling will be lowered to pressure.

As early as the 10th anniversary of the iPhone’s release, former iPhone co-designer Tony Fadell once said that the next generation of iPhone is not a mobile phone at all. Lei Jun, who has now taught the car circle a lesson, was still backing out at that time: I told them that I would make mobile phones again, and the battle for my mobile phones is not over yet. They said, think about the smart ecosystem. Will cars and mobile phones be the same thing?& rdquo;

Among the six companies that are still dividing up 90% of China’s smartphone market as the top six, only Huawei and Xiaomi have successfully built cars across borders. After failing to build a car, Apple took the direction of XR and bet on helmets and glasses products. However, Apple Vision Pro may not usher in a real sense due to restrictions in the distribution area, coupled with multiple factors such as price and application.

The remaining OV and Glory are slightly inferior in the battle between intelligent ecosystems and next-generation computing platforms. Glory has inherited Huawei’s resources and gained a place in the PC field. Last year, it entered the AI PC track. However, the traditional PC industry landscape has not shown signs of disruption. Vivo has laid out the fields of MR and humanoid robots, but there is still some time before the product is implemented.

OPPO’s cross-border direction did not follow the hot spots of concern in the market, but instead chose the big health industry with more long-term considerations. As early as the beginning of 2021, OPPO started to establish a health laboratory and formed a team of experts in the fields of health algorithms, sensors, data science, biomedicine and other fields. In 2022, OPPO released the OHealth H1 home smart health monitor that can access and manage multiple sign monitoring data.

However, these bold moves to break the circle have slowed down as the main mobile phone business strategically shrank.

In recent years, OPPO founder Chen Mingyong has not only carried out drastic channel reforms, but also shut down ZEKU, a self-developed chip company that invested a lot of money. When reducing costs and increasing efficiency has become the main tone of the entire group, the big health industry, which requires more patience, can only temporarily hibernate.

No matter how the carrier and product form of intelligent hardware change, it is always a user-centered software experience throughout mobile phones, cars, helmets, personal computers, humanoid robots, and even various health management instruments. This is also why folding-screen mobile phones have begun to recede after only about a year in the hot market. The novelty of hardware needs to be continued and supported by the richness and improvement of the software ecosystem, otherwise they will only become an early adopter product for niche scenarios.

The fifth battle between OPPO and Glory will continue to chase each other on the main track of smartphones. However, if you want to overtake in corners and create greater glory, you must not forget to always look up and look in a further direction.