Lenovo and Intel have a very good relationship, how good is it?

Since Lenovo began to make personal PCs, for more than ten years, Lenovo has only purchased Intel CPUs, and it was not until last year, that is, in 2004, that Lenovo launched the first personal computer equipped with AMD chips.

Lenovo is praised by Intel as its strongest ally in China.

Therefore, Lenovo is entering the field of smart phones, hoping to replicate the success of the personal PC era, that is, it is highly bound to Intel.

Originally, Lenovo planned to take advantage of its good relationship with Intel to get low-cost smartphone chips, and also take the low-end route with the help of supplier advantages.

"Now, the original cost-effective route is no longer working.

Intel's reply was very ambiguous, in fact, it is impossible for them to lower the price to a lower level than the new chip's Yanque series.

If we want to take the cost-effective route, we can only choose the CPU of the new core system, but the cost of operating system development, the cost of other accessories, including the profit margin reserved for dealers in the middle, makes it almost impossible for us to achieve the same price as Xiaomi.

Xiaomi can use its own Android system, and the mobile phone operating system has almost no cost, and because Xinxin has a huge semiconductor industry chain, their cost on core components can be controlled at a very low level.

Coupled with the supply chain system built by Matrix, Xiaomi can be used directly, and it is unrealistic for us to fight a cost-effective war with Xiaomi in this field. "Lenovo executives are very objective in analyzing their weaknesses.

When Yang Yuanqing saw the price behind Yu Dazui appear at Xiaomi's press conference, he knew that their original plan was not destined to succeed.

Samsung and Texas Instruments' SoC will take about half a year, Intel will be even longer, and when Intel delivers the smartphone SoC to Lenovo, Lenovo will develop the operating system and mobile phone based on the SoC, and the fastest will be next year, and the daylily will be cold again and again.

"I think we should adopt the strategy that we discussed internally after attending the new chip conference.

That is, Lenovo's smartphones will be launched based on Yanque and Honghu, and then Lenovo's high-end flagship series will be launched based on Intel's smartphone SoC after Intel's products come out. ”

"It's a huge market, and the question is how do we explain to Intel that we're going to buy chips from Xinxin in large quantities, and will this affect the relationship between us and Intel?"

"That's not a problem! We want to purchase Intel's chips, but the problem is that Intel's smartphone chips are too far behind Xinxin's products from the perspective of cost performance.

We are a business, we need to think about the benefits of the enterprise, we need to consider the interests of shareholders, and Intel will understand. ”

"Last year's cooperation between Lenovo and AMD has made our partnership with Intel have a gap, this time we will choose a new chip, although the follow-up will take Intel's chips in our high-end series, but will this make our relationship further deteriorate?

I know that we have a partnership with Intel, but the problem is that the personal PC market is more important to Lenovo, and we need to rely on Intel in many places.

Smartphones are only increments for Lenovo, and personal PCs are Lenovo's basic disks, we have to seek increments on the premise of keeping the basic disks, rather than giving up the basic disks for the sake of increments.

In the past two years of competition with Xiaomi computers, we have lost too much market share that should have belonged to Lenovo, and Xiaomi's pricing strategy has made Lenovo change its pricing strategy, so that we have lost a large part of our profits.

It even caused collective dissatisfaction with the dealer system, and last year, Lenovo's big dealers in North China switched to HP and Dell.

At this critical moment, the most important thing for Lenovo is to keep its basic disk, and the most important thing is to maintain the relationship between us and Intel. ”

After Xiaomi released the national host,It has had a huge impact on Lenovo's sales,At the beginning, it was individual consumers,18 to 35More than 60% of male consumers in this age group switched from Lenovo to Xiaomi,Consumers who buy a machine for the first time have Xiaomi to choose Xiaomi,Unless there is no way, consider Lenovo。

Later, some government-led enterprises and institutions purchased new office equipment, and successively changed from Lenovo to Xiaomi, if the former is just a disease of ringworm, then the latter is a henchman.

You must know that Lenovo obtains benefits from individual consumers is to share with the huge dealer system, and this cake Lenovo as a company can eat at most 30%, and 70% of it will be distributed to the dealers who have come down at all levels. And the procurement of organs and state-owned enterprises is the bulk of the profits.

If it weren't for the CPU sold by Intel to Lenovo last year to give Huaguo the lowest price, Lenovo's financial report for the whole of last year would have been very ugly.

Yang Yuanqing is very envious of Xiaomi, whether it is at the personal level or at the enterprise level, trade and industry technology has always been the point of criticism of Lenovo, Yang Yuanqing took over Lenovo from Liu's hand, and naturally took over his cause and effect.

Before the birth of Xiaomi, from the Huaguo Academy of Sciences, one of the shareholders behind Lenovo, to the media and then to consumers, Lenovo was more of a loving and responsible mentality, believing that technology-based enterprises of its level need to assume social responsibility and make breakthroughs in technological research and development and technological innovation.

Waiting for the rapid rise of Xiaomi and Xinxin, the Huaguo Academy of Sciences may still have similar ideas, and the media and consumers are not looking forward to any technological breakthroughs from Lenovo.

Even though Lenovo claimed to be jointly developing a computer CPU with Intel last year, it was widely revealed by Lenovo's internal employees on social media, saying that it was to buy the naming rights of joint research and development, in fact, the person who broke the news did not have any evidence, but netizens couldn't stop it.

After losing it, I realized how precious it was, and after losing my expectations, Yang Yuanqing was very envious of Xiaomi, which could have the support and recognition of consumers, and at the same time, he also walked out of his own path in technology research and development.

But he can't do it, with Lenovo's asset-liability ratio is almost impossible to transform, not to mention that the shareholders will not let him transform into any independent research and development, foreign HP and Dell have proven that this model can be successful, why take the more difficult road?

Die-hard supporters of Intel like Lenovo are all out of business considerations, first purchasing Yanque and Honghu chips to launch smartphones, not to mention other mobile phone brands.

Huaguo's consumers are happy, and almost overnight, the market was flooded with advertisements from major brands, claiming that they were about to launch smartphones priced at around 2,000 yuan.

There is only one step left to limit the development of smart phones in China, that is, the communication network, at present, the 3G network is only in the first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and a very small number of second-tier cities have been rolled out, and most areas can not enjoy the 3G network if they buy a smartphone, and the 2G network can browse the text type of page at best.

Second- and third-tier cities have not popularized 3G networks, and it has not stopped the enthusiasm of consumers, and the same mobile phones, even if they just go to Xiaomi stores to use Xiaomi mobile phones to connect to wifi, and then download stand-alone games to play back, it is much more interesting than feature phones.

Not to mention the WeChat app that comes with Xiaomi mobile phones, which quickly became the most popular instant messaging software in just three months.

Xiaomi sold two million mobile phones in three months, and this is because Xiaomi's production capacity is only two million. Users who can grab Xiaomi mobile phones from the official website or offline stores can sell them at a price increase of 200 to 500.

It even led to many college students running to Xiaomi stores to queue up when it was time for the holidays, waiting for Xiaomi to release the goods.

So much so that scalpers lamented that they couldn't rob college students.

There are no restrictions in Xiaomi's offline stores, but people in line can only buy one at a time, and with the number of goods released in each offline store, they can be sold out without queuing up.

Because Xiaomi sells so well, the offline stores are all directly operated, and the number is limited, so the voices of online opening up to join are endless.

"If you want me to say that the most important thing for Xiaomi to do is to open up to joining, now offline stores usually sell 100 units a day, and 500 units on weekends, and users who really support Xiaomi can't grab it at all."

"Has the landlord ever thought about one thing, it's not that Xiaomi doesn't want to sell more, but the production capacity can't keep up?"

"Regardless of whether Xiaomi is not good or deliberately creates the illusion of panic buying, I support the landlord's statement, open to joining, and now there are few and unbalanced offline stores.

Jiangcheng, which has more than a dozen colleges and universities, doesn't have a Xiaomi store, can you believe it? There are five Xiaomi stores in Shenhai, and the first Xiaomi store in Jiangcheng will not open on Jianghan Road until July this year.

It's also too unbalanced. ”

"I have always opened Dell stores before, since the birth of the Xiaomi brand, I have been paying attention to whether they are open to joining, almost every once in a while I will call them to ask, they don't even seem to have the slightest willingness to open to joining.

Xiaomi's marketing strategy and sales methods are very different from other brands. ”

"To have technology is to have confidence, technical advantages allow Xiaomi to compress costs, and take the ultimate cost-effective route in China without worrying about no users.

As much as you can produce, the market can digest for you.

Not to mention that Xiaomi's after-sales service is almost responsive, and a long time does not mean that it does not help you solve the problem. ”

"Speaking of this, it's angry, Xiaomi has three after-sales service centers in Jiangcheng, but none of them have a store."

Xiaomi's extreme pricing strategy made it the absolute king of the entire first half of 2005.

The advantage in the chip industry allows Xiaomi to always be the first to sell the latest smartphone chips of Xinxin, just like Google mobile phones in the future can always use the latest Android system.

Peers in the mobile phone industry are concerned about Xiaomi's hot sales, explosive reputation and the good application of Xinxin smartphone chips.

Internet companies are focusing on Tencent, which is making a strong attack in the field of mobile Internet with the help of Xiaomi.

NetEase's headquarters is in Hangzhou, which is one of the few second-tier cities with a 3G network.

In the conference room on the third floor of the NetEase headquarters building, there is a line chart on the screen, on which there are several applications, etc., the vertical axis is the number of users, and the timeline is from 2001 when Mphone entered China to the present.

Since the beginning of this year, the number of users of WeChat has exploded, and it has opened a significant gap with several other apps.

"Since the concept of smart phones was introduced to China, this is the change in the number of mobile instant messaging software users.

In the era of Mphone1 and Mphone2, whether it is a Matrix smartphone or a smartphone of other brands, the price is as low as 5,000 yuan.

Because of the price factor, the user scale of mobile instant messaging software has been around one million, and the number of users of WeChat is about 500,000, and the market share of NetEase Bubble ranks behind.

Although we are fourth, the gap between us and number one is very small, and we have 200,000 users. In the age of the Internet, this user gap can be reversed in a week or even a day.

But with the release of the Xiaomi phone in March, everything is different, and in just three months, the number of WeChat users exceeded 2.5 million.

As many Xiaomi phones are sold, there are as many WeChat users as there are.

The combination of software and hardware has made WeChat's advantages clear at a glance, and at the same time, Oasis and NewPay are growing rapidly. The person in charge of NetEase Bubble was very helpless when he reported to Ding Lei.

After Tencent sold Weibo to Microsoft, it launched an oasis for the Chinese market, a green app of the same color as WeChat.

These three apps are pre-installed apps for Xiaomi phones, which are expanding rapidly as Xiaomi expands.

NewPay has already completed the cutting, and NewPay in the Huaguo market and the overseas market belong to two companies, among which the shareholders behind Huaguo's NewPay are almost all Huaguo's state-owned capital, except for Zhou Xin.

Therefore, at the moment, Huaguo does not specialize in WeChat payment.

The person in charge continued: "And in the time period when Xiaomi monopolizes the entire 2000 yuan price smartphone market, WeChat's advantage will only get bigger and bigger, and the user gap between them and us will only be widened."

There is no trend of improvement in the short term.

It is unlikely that Xiaomi will accept our request for cooperation and make NetEase Bubble a pre-loaded application of Xiaomi.

Lenovo, TCL, Bird and other domestic mobile phone manufacturers mostly refused, and the few who were willing to talk also seemed to have a very ambiguous attitude, and the opening was the price of the pre-installed machine. Foreign manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola directly refused.

The only foreign manufacturer that said they could talk about it was Sony Ericsson, they said they could talk, but their appetite was greater, and Sony wanted to strategically invest in NetEase. ”

At present, NetEase has launched their masterpiece "Fantasy Westward Journey", and the number of registered users of Fantasy Westward Journey has successfully exceeded 20 million recently, which makes Sony want to intervene.

The person in charge of NetEase Bubble has a headache, Ding Lei also has a headache, in the process of competing with Tencent, he feels that he is not competing with Tencent, but competing with the entire huge system of Xinxin, and the resource support that Tencent can obtain is something NetEase dare not imagine.

The mobile phone instant messaging market was very small before, but NetEase estimates that it will be a very large, larger market than personal PC communication software, and the gap between WeChat and WeChat has not been large, so NetEase has not given up its investment in this area.

NetEase is still thinking about when to exert its efforts to pull WeChat down, but as a result, the dimensionality reduction attack at the hardware level directly makes all other applications become the others part of the statistical caliber.

(End of chapter)