Geely cross-border building satellites, entering the high-end mobile phone market... What kind of big move will Li Shufu play in the next game?
Geely Technology Group recently announced that the first set of (important equipment) of its Taizhou Xingkong Zhilian Satellite Super Factory has been completed, and the first trial production satellite is off the assembly line. This also means that Geely’s commercial satellites have officially entered Mass production stage. The trial-production satellite off the assembly line was independently developed by Zhejiang Shikong Daoyu Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Geely Technology Group, and produced by Taizhou Xingkong Zhilian Technology Co., Ltd.
Image source: Shikong Daoyu Technology's official website
The news of Geely’s satellite construction was actually announced in March last year, but at that time many people thought it was “Fake News”, but they did not expect that the Taizhou Xingkong Zhilian Satellite Super Factory was completed and put into use at the beginning of this year just a year later.
It is understood that this satellite factory in Taizhou Bay New Area is the first domestic pulsating modular satellite intelligent assembly and test center, and it is also China’s first satellite mass production factory that deeply integrates aerospace satellite manufacturing and automobile manufacturing capabilities. The future factory will It has an annual production capacity of 500 satellites.
The world's first low-orbit future travel constellation
In May of this year, Li Shufu, chairman of Geely Holding Group, said in an interview that the auto industry is now cross-border integration. In the future, Geely will have flying cars and high-altitude satellite networking. Satellite networking has begun this year.
Li Shufu believes that the linkage between cars and satellite communications, cars and supporting infrastructure on the ground, as well as the human-computer interaction between cars and people, all are turning cars from a traditional means of transporting people and goods into mobile terminals. , Smart terminal, and mobile space, smart space, consumers can feel that the car of the future is completely different from the car of the past.
Judging from the satellites currently being planned by Geely, they are all low-orbit satellites 500-2000 kilometers away from the earth's surface, mainly small satellites used for positioning and communication services. The purpose is to build the world's first low-orbit future travel constellation, build a high-precision space-time-space-ground integrated PPP-RTK network, and provide low-latency, high-precision, and highly reliable centimeter-level precision location information services.
If Geely has its own high-precision positioning satellites, this would be equivalent to setting up a very high technical barrier for its future autonomous driving technology and navigation applications. Provide highly competitive solutions and services for the integrated development of "satellite internet" and "car networking", "automatic driving", "high-precision positioning" and other industries.
Build a car-mobile-satellite ecological chain
The rumors of Geely making mobile phones began to ferment two days ago. Many people find it difficult to understand this. One is that the fierce competition in the domestic mobile phone market has made it difficult for new players to enter the market. On the other hand, the mobile phone needs talents in different fields. It is also difficult to obtain.
However, just one day after the first satellite of Xingkong Zhilian went offline, today (September 28) Hubei Xingji Times Technology Co., Ltd., founded by Li Shufu, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone, and officially announced its entry into the mobile phone field. And surprisingly, Li Shufu's entry into the smartphone business this time is positioned as a high-end smartphone market.
According to the information queried by the company, Star Times was established on September 26, 2021, with a registered capital of 80 million RMB. Its business scope includes Internet game services; mobile terminal equipment manufacturing; mobile communication equipment sales; integrated circuit chips and Product manufacturing, sales, design and services; 5G communication technology services, etc.
In terms of shareholding structure, Li Shufu is the largest shareholder with a subscribed capital of 44 million yuan and a shareholding ratio of 55%. The legal representative of Xingji Times, Shen Ziyu, subscribed for a capital of 24 million yuan, holding 30% of the shares as the second shareholder. At the same time, Shen Ziyu is currently the CEO of Yikatong Technology.
Regarding the incoming mobile phone market, Li Shufu said: "Mobile phones are fast-iterative portable mobile terminals, and are the application carriers for electronic product market verification and software innovation. They can not only allow users to share innovation results as soon as possible, but also transfer part of the safe and reliable results to The application in the car realizes the close interaction between the car machine and the mobile phone software technology. In the future, it has become a major trend to cross-border user ecological chains and build corporate moats in accordance with the law. Mobile phones can be linked to the Internet of Vehicles and satellite Internet to create rich consumption scenarios and strengthen the ecology. Circle, to provide users with a more convenient, smarter, and interconnected multi-screen interactive life experience for users."
As cars become more intelligent, the relationship between mobile phones and cars is indeed getting closer. When buying a car, many iPhone users around me will consider whether the car supports Apple's CarPlay in-vehicle system.
Nowadays, companies with mobile phones as their main business, such as Xiaomi and Apple, have actual car-making plans. The purpose is to create an ecological chain of mobile phone and car-machine coordination, and conform to the current general trend of automobile intelligence. As the largest private car company in China, Geely is doing the opposite. It focuses on the automobile business and cooperates with future satellite communications and mobile phones to build a complete ecosystem around automobiles.
There is excuse for entering the mobile phone market in order to build an ecosystem, but why start with the high-end mobile phone market? Geely’s official statement is that with the rapid iteration of mobile communication technology and the upgrade of personalized consumption, users’ demand for smart phones has become dependent, and the development prospects for more high-end and smarter phones are still promising.
Due to well-known reasons, after Huawei's domestic market share plummeted, the domestic high-end smart phone market previously divided by Apple and Huawei appeared vacant. Looking at the current situation of other domestic mobile phone manufacturers, almost all of them have made efforts in the high-end market in the past year, launching a variety of products with prices above 5000. But to say that brands that have fully taken root in the high-end market have not yet seen clear signs in several leading manufacturers such as OPPO, vivo, and Xiaomi. Therefore, it may be logically reasonable for Geely to make mobile phones from the high-end market?
On the other hand, the news has to be read together. Remember the revelations before the release of iPhone 13? It was originally reported that the iPhone 13 will use the Qualcomm X65 baseband to support satellite communication frequency bands. For a time, satellite communication became a hot section in the stock market. Later, it was reported that Huawei's new machine would also support satellite communication. Although these rumors did not come true in the end, satellite communication is likely to be an important networking method for smart phones in the future.
And Geely itself has a layout in satellite networking, so Li Shufu hopes to take the car as the center and use the satellite Internet as a bridge to elevate the collaboration between mobile phones and vehicles to a new level, and use cross-border to create a more complete User ecological chain.
However, this is just a guess under ideal circumstances. Cross-industry has become an important strategy for major companies to build their own closed-loop ecological chain and build higher ecological barriers. However, it is not an easy task to do as large as satellite networking and as small as mobile phone products. From a global perspective, there are few companies that can have a layout in the three major areas of satellite networking, automobiles, and mobile phones. Can Geely finally complete the feat across three areas? Regardless of the result, this attempt deserves our respect.
