Author | Cloud
"Besides NIO owners, who else would buy it?"
"Is it unreasonable for a brand that has just entered the mobile phone industry to sell for 6,899 yuan?"
"Is it meaningful to customize a mobile phone specifically for a car?"
As a car brand that continues to lose money and has not yet shown any signs of profitability, NIO’s mobile phone production is not news, but it has never been optimistic.
On September 21, after the official launch of NIO Phone, founder Li Bin was once again labeled as "not doing his job properly". He mentioned in an interview after the press conference that NIO’s mobile phone business team has as many as 500 people and invests 500 million yuan annually. The outside world’s skepticism about NIO’s business has reached its peak.
But NIO’s phone was robbed crazy by the owner. According to NIO co-founder and president Qin Lihong at the press conference,At present, the NIO mobile phone has been sold out without three-party channels, and the order is scheduled for December.
At least in the small circle of less than 400,000 NIO owners, the popularity of NIO Phone is not inferior to this year’s iPhone 15 series.
Obviously, making a mobile phone is another decision made by NIO after insisting on changing the battery and insisting on being a community. The outside world cannot understand it, and the car owner loves it.
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At the industry level, the "necessity" of car companies to make mobile phones has also been verified to a certain extent. Just before the Huawei conference that just topped the chart, Tan Benhong, chairperson and CEO of Avita Technology, also said on Weibo "spoiler" that Huawei and Avita jointly created Mate 60 Pro Avita Special Edition "is advancing rapidly".
Although Avita is a new car brand cooperated by Huawei, Ningde Times, and Changan Automobile, and "driver interconnection" is also Huawei’s strength, the trend of "making mobile phones for cars" has obviously been set off by NIO.
Zhang Junyi, a former managing partner of NIO Capital and a managing partner of Oliver Wyman, said:
"Li Bin’s work is good from a strategic perspective, but the matching of timing and funding is a matter of opinion, just like insisting on the power exchange model, the heavy operation of user companies, and the lack of investment in research and development. There are also many controversies, but the management of NIO still insists on doing it, and the user feedback is also very good."
What NIO and Li Bin do is often referred to as "business religion" – products and services are strongly bound, users are recruited with ideas, and users spontaneously expand.And is making a mobile phone a part of the realization of "doctrine" and the self-improvement of users, or is it a real and valuable enterprise decision?
The answer to this question lies in the hands of NIO’s owners.
NIO owner: You can buy it, it’s not too expensive
The biggest doubt about NIO’s mobile phones is that mobile phones are an industry where the annual shipments of mainstream brands are tens of millions, and the total number of NIO users is less than 400,000, of which 60% use iPhone – an ecological closed but complete product that is difficult to replace.
As a consultant in the new energy industry who owns Tesla, NIO, Ideal, Polaris, Volkswagen, and many other brands of electric vehicle products, and has worked in four car companies, Yiran was invited to participate in the NIO conference on September 21 and was one of the first contacts of NIO Phone.
At the same time, he is also one iPhone 60% of users, "For many users who already hold iPhone and Android, it may be easier to accept NIO phones, but I have only owned one phone for many years, and I am not willing to spend too much time managing the phone. So the process of NIO Phone becoming the second machine also needs to be adapted."
The reason why NIO’s NIO Phone is called the "Deluxe Edition Car Key" is because it enhances the experience unlike ordinary mobile phones, mainly focusing on the "UWB chip" and "SkyOS Tianshu" operating system standard on its new generation models.
Owners who use NIO Phone can unlock the vehicle more conveniently, stably and safely than other mobile phones, accurately locate the heating and ventilation massage control of each seat, and realize functions such as mobile phone doppelganger and application relay on the car. In addition, NIO also sets a separate vehicle control physical button for NIO Phone, which can call out the car control interface with one click.
Although most of the above features can be implemented by apps, using a NIO Phone is faster and smoother.
Although Yiran praised these features that NIO Phone can provide, he also made it clear that the biggest challenge for NIO to do mobile phone business lies in"Changing users’ past habits."…
For example, in actual use, the NIO App has not even solved the problem of dual end point login. If "dual users" log in to the brand account on the NIO Phone, the account of their original device will be offline, which is not friendly for users who have just started using dual phones.
For core community users who know NIO as well as Yiran, buying a NIO Phone is almost a "painless decision."
It can be seen in the NIO App that the user needs 4,900 yuan to make NIO’s intelligent assistant "NOMI" have a movable entity, another in-car AR product set "N-Box Enhanced Entertainment Host" is worth 4,600 yuan, and the "Moon Theme" kit of the "Blackened" Logo is priced at 4,500 yuan…
In the product series of this "high-end brand", the mobile phone priced at 6,499 yuan is a highly technical and cost-effective product.
A few years ago, when Luo Yonghao was still making mobile phones, he once expressed the opinion that "domestic mobile phones are all assembled except Huawei". Li Bin also said similar words at the press conference, but was pointed out by some users who paid attention to the "machine circle". It is also an indisputable fact that the vast majority of mobile phone brands follow the R & D rhythm of core component manufacturers such as Qualcomm and MediaTek to release products.
Zhang Junyi said that most mobile phone companies do not control the whole process by themselves, but the expectations of NIO users for NIO Phone are a "NIO phone", not a "NIO joint Android phone", although the first generation of mobile phones may not be sound and complete, but also reflects some of Li Bin’s ideas in user experience and technological innovation.
As a "super atypical NIO owner" – due to frequent business trips, the annual driving mileage of NIO is only more than 100 kilometers. Zhang Junyi has a stronger sense of the owner’s rights and ecological experience provided by NIO. "I believe that many people will choose NIO Phone based on ecology." Similarly, when Huawei and Porsche designed a joint name, many users who purchased related products were not Porsche owners, but they were also inspired by brand power to place orders.
In his opinion, as a portable social tool, the current pricing of NIO Phone is not "thrilling", and the mobile phone can also be used as a wearable device – such as the bracelet mentioned by management at the press conference, and the central existence of AR glasses that have been "in the car", "this is an ecosystem".
Due to the high-end brand positioning, many of NIO’s core users, like Yiran and Zhang Junyi, see things more from an "ecological" perspective and are less sensitive to price. Therefore, they have a smoother acceptance of NIO Phone.
But for the "silent majority" and some "swing users", "wait and see" is normal. Holding a Huawei Mate 40 Pro, the big reason (pseudonym) for the NIO brand has always maintained a "distant" relationship:
Does not care about the brand conference, the information update mainly from the owner group Fellow (service specialist), but recognized the service value of NIO, two years ago purchased the most top NIO models – plus "worry-free service" and "worry-free insurance" NIO ES8, priced at more than 600,000 yuan, when his other option is not yet domestic BMW X5, priced at about 700,000 yuan.
Da Zai is a representative of another type of car owner of NIO. They are "early adopter pioneer users" in second-tier cities, but they are not as strongly bound to the brand as NIO core users and are keen to recommend NIO to people around them. One of his friends was recommended by him to buy the NIO ES6, but in the end, because he was not used to the tram, he was persuaded to return to the oil car by battery life anxiety. Da Zai said:
"I feel okay with the car, the power change is very good, and I’m not worried about NIO going out of business, but I won’t recommend it to my friends again. As for the phone, I’ll consider it."
NIO is also "performance maximization through business collaboration", will Li Bin become the next Jia Yueting?
When it comes to NIO’s mobile phone layout, Zhang Junyi and Yiran both mentioned "ecology" and "security".
At present, there are three models of "Driver Connect".
One is the "Huawei Smart Choice" model:
Huawei does not directly build cars, but enters the "light asset" in charge of car design, research and development, and manages production to a certain extent. The Huawei Wenjie brand is a product of this model. The Wenjie model directly adopts the "Hongmeng" car machine, which can be highly interconnected with Huawei mobile phones. Avita, which belongs to the "HI (Huawei Inside) model", can also obtain similar capabilities and will launch a customized version of the mobile phone.
The second is the "Geely-Star Meizu" mode:
Geely Group through the acquisition of Meizu brand, using its mobile phone research and development capabilities to upgrade the car machine to empower, according to user and media feedback, the former car machine system has been greatly improved after Meizu intervention, Meizu mobile phone and Geely’s Lynk and Krypton brand interaction, has also approached the level of Huawei Hongmeng system.
The third is the "Driver in One" mode pioneered by NIO:
The mobile phone is completely led by the car OEM, and the brand is also consistent, so that the mobile phone can be customized to meet the needs of the intelligent car. It is foreseeable that if Xiaomi succeeds in building a car, MIUI will also realize the deep interaction between the car and the mobile phone. As the author of "Musk the Martian", Yiran said that Tesla is also likely to promote its own mobile phone business. At that time, Musk will further open up the content platform (X), portable smart end point and smart car end point, as well as the software ecosystem of Unicom.
But before these players who have landed or "seem reliable", LeTV was the first to come up with a "performance maximization through business collaboration" plan, and at the same time promote various smart end points and car manufacturing businesses. Therefore, after NIO’s decision to make mobile phones came out, there have been voices linking Li Bin with Jia Yueting, who has never returned to China.
But Li Bin himself obviously does not agree with such a judgment. After the press conference, he not only mentioned that the threshold for mobile phones is "not that high", but also regarded mobile phones as an easier business than cars. In short, NIO’s mobile phone is "high and low".
According to Yiran, NIO has discussed cooperation with some mainstream mobile phone manufacturers. But both sides have very important considerations for user experience, data security and channel interests, and it is difficult to coordinate. In the end, NIO decided to do it himself.
Specifically, at the executive level, NIO recruited Meitu Mobile Phone President Yin Shuijun and a group of executives under his command, and established a mobile phone team of about 500 people, investing 500 million yuan annually to share R & D resources with the car and machine.
In his opinion, the higher the brand positioning, the more stringent the user’s requirements for data security and user privacy will be, but a smooth experience requires data to get through, so NIO must be the safest to do it by itself."Of course, NIO’s mobile phone user scale is only a few tens of thousands of people, this business is destined to lose money, equal to the user experience blood transfusion."
Zhang Junyi, who had in-depth communication with Li Bin in the early days of NIO’s startup, mentioned that even though there are not many users of the brand at present, Li Bin, as an entrepreneur who studied sociology, "has an ideal social practice" – he hopes to use good service to attract customers, so that existing customers can influence and attract new customers. "This is the original intention of NIO that has not changed. They are dedicated to doing good for users, impressing users with sincerity and care, and forming a positive energy community."
It is worth mentioning that, despite the extensive discussion on the NIO Phone, the press conference on September 21 was not dedicated to this "water testing" product, but a conference that comprehensively introduced the research results of NIO technology and was named "NIO IN".
Hoping to promote the inherent and R & D strength of the NIO brand to users, NIO’s self-developed lidar main control chip "Yang Jian" was also launched, which is another product of NIO’s "From 0 to 1".
It is understood that there are many voices inside and outside NIO suggesting that brands should communicate and tell stories at the technical level to "justify" the high R & D expenses in the financial report – they are spent on self-developed motors, batteries, chips and many other core components. If successful, it will build a deeper moat for the brand and help NIO cope with the "knockout" of the new energy market in the next decade.
Conclusion: After mobile phones, car companies have to sell cars
NIO is the target of many new car brands.
Geely’s polar krypton brand almost replicates NIO in marketing and user operation, and also uses a lot of NIO talents; other brands cannot avoid NIO’s methodology when doing community and service; China’s power exchange system, starting from NIO, currently SAIC, BYD and other large groups are also trying to join.
But for the time being, no car company will fully apply the "NIO solution", and the reason is also very simple:
As an independent car company, it has been in business for ten years and has sold nearly 400,000 cars, but there is no sign of profitability, and there are often "religious brand communication" that "I don’t understand it outside the circle, but I love it inside the circle". Public opinion is polarized.
Compared with the ideal, NIO’s sales are climbing too slowly. The "throne" that used to be the "highest-end new energy brand" is almost untenable after the launch of BYD’s "Look Up" brand. The service system that once made NIO proud has also deteriorated in the process of further user growth.
Li Bin mentioned several times before and after the press conference that although business expansion is within control, NIO’s organizational and management capabilities do have shortcomings that need to be filled.
A NIO internal staff responsible for technology-related work said that for the mobile phone business, he held a "unclear and uncertain" state, and he was noncommittal about Li Bin’s decision to invest heavily in mobile phones because it was too far from his work.
He Xiaopeng once asked someone to give Li Bin a message, advising him to invest cautiously and spend cautiously. The former "learned from the pain" after the pricing turmoil of G9, revolutionized the organizational structure, reduced the price of the product, and the sales volume recovered immediately. Only then did the advantages of intelligent driving technology that had been heavily invested in really begin to take effect.
However, people who are familiar with Li Bin and care about NIO often highly appreciate the founder’s strategic vision, which is in sharp contrast to the lack of understanding from the outside world and the unattractive figures on the financial report.
Perhaps, the distance from strategy to tactics, from thinking to landing, is the distance between the vision of the NIO brand and the reality of making money back. The NIO Phone will not crush NIO, but it will not make NIO "one step to the sky."
Qin Lihong once said that NIO’s current heavy investment is "paying tuition fees", but in China, "getting grades" is sometimes more important than "having a process". In addition to "ecology", another consensus between Yiran and Zhang Junyi is:
Selling more cars is the most important thing for NIO.
