China Mobile's Grand Prix pushes its brand mobile phone to face multiple risks

At the 2012 China Mobile Global Developers Conference, Li Yuegao, president of China Mobile, said that the move to launch its own-brand mobile phones has shaken the mobile phone industry. If the telecommunication operator with the largest number of subscribers in the world is to enter the Internet mobile phone, its partners are bound to be greatly affected.

China Mobile's position to do its own brand mobile phone China Mobile brand mobile phone? Even a veteran mobile phone player will shake his head in the face of such a problem because he has never heard of it, let alone where to buy it. However, in the future - perhaps for a short time, people will be able to see the "mobile card" mobile phone. Li Yue made it clear last Wednesday that China Mobile will be a terminal of its own brand, but will not directly compete with existing terminal manufacturers.

In fact, as early as last November, China Mobile established a terminal company, which is regarded as a major step in the field of its layout terminal. In the evolution of the Chinese mobile phone industry, Haier, Konka, and Changhong were the first home appliance companies, followed by telecommunications equipment manufacturers such as ZTE and Huawei, followed by Internet companies such as Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Shanda, all of which set off a wave of mobile phones. Telecom operators pushed their own mobile phone brand or "great girl sedan chair" - the first time. Prior to this, operators generally adopted a pattern tailored to professional mobile phone manufacturers, that is, marked with corporate LOGO and built-in applications, but mobile phone brands have not changed.

This time, China Mobile’s attitude is more determined. Li Yue used retailers Gome and Wal-Mart as examples to explain the motives for mobile branding: “The United States is also selling Gome’s brand products while selling other people’s household electrical appliances. Wal-Mart’s products may account for Wal-Mart’s products while selling other people’s products. About 25% of sales resources, so China Mobile is sure to be China Mobile's own brand of terminals and accessories."

觊觎 The mobile Internet market is mainly due to the fact that China Mobile has launched a lot of customized mobile phones, and recently it has cooperated with Nokia, the former cell phone overlord. On the day of its hosting of the Mobile Internet Conference, China Mobile announced the Lumia 920T jointly with Nokia. The analysis of the industry, custom machine has been enough to highlight China Mobile's brand, push the brand mobile phone must have a deeper reason.

First of all, at present, the biggest limitation for China Mobile is undoubtedly the vendor's indecision on the TD system, because before the uncertainty of users and 4G, rashly adding some products that can only be sold in China will undoubtedly greatly increase the cost of the company. Private-owned mobile phones can solve this problem.

Secondly, mobile terminals are the closest link in the industry chain to consumers. If operators do own-brand mobile phones, they can obviously strengthen their own brands and conduct business promotion. At the turn of 3G and 4G, operators launched their own brand mobile phones, which can flatten the industrial chain and increase operators' control over the industry chain.

However, compared with these reasons, the main purpose of mobile intervention in the mobile phone market is obviously not to profit from the hardware - it is unrealistic for a company with a language and data business as an absolute source of income to become another Apple company. Its ultimate goal is to seize the mobile Internet channel. Because Li Yue said, “We will use our brand to do something that can add value.” Moreover, he said this scene is at the Mobile Internet Conference, which also means that China Mobile wants to further seize the mobile Internet. Entrance.

The mobile Internet portal has long been the object of competition among manufacturers: Baidu, Tencent have purchased the Brush Company, Qihoo 360 has launched special machines, and Baidu and Shanda have also launched Internet mobile phones. The purpose of these companies is through the terminal. Come grab the entrance to the mobile internet.

As one of the top three operators in China, China Mobile can build its own applications through its own-brand mobile phones, acquire users through mobile phones at a lower cost, and then expand its own mobile Internet eco-chain to form a virtuous circle and guarantee operators not only Only become a "dumb pipe", so the transformation into a mobile Internet company.

It is not easy for operators to make mobile phones. "China Mobile's advantage lies in the long-term customization of mobile phone experience and capabilities, as well as its own credibility and as a monopoly of state-owned enterprise operators." Speaking of China Mobile's advantages in launching its own-brand mobile phones, e-commerce experts Cai Yongjin Indicated. Chen Mingyu, an analyst at Speed ​​Way Research Institute, also mentioned that China Mobile has the advantage of having a huge network of outlets and abundant customer resources, which are enough to occupy the market in the short term.

However, making a mobile phone is not easy. In fact, China Mobile has taken a lesson from the past. In 2009, China Mobile launched the OPhone mobile operating system and its platform, using open-source Linux as the system kernel, learning from and compatible with the Android platform, Lenovo and then Dopod (now HTC) have introduced mobile phones using OPhone operating system. However, up until now, OPhone has not had any outstanding performance in the market.

If OPhone is a platform, it is not the same as a real mobile phone. So, the experience of Netease may learn from it. As early as the beginning of this year, NetEase had made a project to build a mobile phone and deployed employees from inside to set up a special project team. However, in July, the project team was dissolved and NetEase's mobile phone program ended without any problems. Sources said that the reason for the project's abortion was "a pessimistic conclusion after researching the outlook of the mobile phone business." From this point of view, it is not an easy task to “get out of the way” to make a branded mobile phone.

And, directly involved in the mobile phone market. It is definitely not good news for China Mobile’s current partners—especially those currently operating poorly. Recently, China Mobile announced that from January to October this year, China Mobile’s TD mobile phone sales have reached 41.59 million, and annual sales of TD terminals are expected to reach 55 million. Previously, due to the relatively backward model, China Mobile’s dominant TD standard has always lagged behind China Telecom’s CDMA2000 and China Unicom’s WCDMA in terms of terminal richness. With the rise of TD, the overall share of operators' customized machines in the market is also rising. However, the operator's model of "incrementally does not make money" is also spreading - Lenovo exposes a loss in the mobile phone business. Yu Feng, deputy president of Yulong Coolpad, said that "money is earning a lot of hardship"... In this situation, the mobile pushes its own Branded mobile phones may directly hurt the enthusiasm of custom partners, and thus affect the supply of their terminals and the support of their partners.

At the same time, in the mobile Internet market that China Mobile most wants to access, whether or not the self-owned mobile phones really have a driving effect. At present, there are still big doubts. Because although it has been involved in the mobile Internet for many years, China Mobile has not yet come up with a comparable killer product. China Mobile has done mobile microblogging but has not formed a climate; it has launched instant messaging tools such as fetion and flying chat, and Fetion users are gradually losing. In 2009, China Mobile Shanda released MM App Store, and currently there are no third parties such as App Store. Channel fire. In this state, will these applications be built into mobile phones and will users use them? The usual situation is that when the user first gets the phone, he will uninstall the application he does not like. Of course, terminal manufacturers can pre-install applications and users can not uninstall, but omnipotent users can choose to brush machine, mobile Internet portal has returned to the Brush Company, and then went to the Internet company.

From this point of view, although China Mobile’s determination to launch its own-brand mobile phone is not small, in the face of numerous difficulties, China Mobile’s efforts are likely to become useless.