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In May, Zhan Rui ranked among the top five smartphone SoC chip shipments in China for the first time.

Recent market news shows that the domestic offensive of the integrated main chip of Zhanrui electronic consumer terminal has not diminished, and it also highlights the edge that can not be ignored overseas.

It is understood that realme "C series" smartphones equipped with Zhanrui SoC 4G chips have shipped nearly 10 million units overseas. According to the supply chain, the Glory Play 5T, equipped with the Zharetangula T610 chip (4G), ranks second in the weekly sales list of the domestic thousand-yuan machine market in 35 weeks this year.

Zhanrui mobile phone chip was not paid much attention by mainstream smart phone manufacturers. For example, Hisense, the main partner of Zhanrui mobile phone, is less well-known in China. However, since CEO Chu Qing independently took the helm of Zhanrui, the main chip of Zhanrui mobile phone has been suddenly recognized by big manufacturers, and its successful cooperation with glory this year has attracted more and more attention.

In the technical direction of smartphone SoC chips, unlike competing against Qualcomm, MediaTek and Apple with more emphasis on 5G technology, Zhan Rui tends to put equal emphasis on "5G+4G" strategy.

4G chips are adopted by big factories

"the shipments of realme's new C-Series mobile phones have exceeded 10 million." A supply chain source told Wall Street, "[this series of smart] phones use the Zhanrui T610 chip (4G)."

Realme is the shortest-lived smartphone player in the world, achieving global sales of more than 100 million smartphone brands. On September 22nd, people in the supply chain told Wall Street that realme shipments reached 15 million units in the second quarter of this year, making it the sixth largest smartphone manufacturer in the world and the fourth largest in China.

According to statistics from Strategy Analytics in early August, it took Samsung six years, Huawei five years, Apple nearly four years, the fastest growing Xiaomi about 3.5 years, and realme just three years to break 100 million, setting an industry record.

The realme C series was launched in India in September 2018 and is only sold overseas. There is no such product in the domestic market.

The shipments of realme C series phones have exceeded 10 million. There are two core information points in this message:

First of all, in addition to supplying glory, the Zhanrui T610 (4G) has also won an order from the "fastest selling hundreds of millions" mobile phone manufacturer realme; second, the Zhanrui 4G chip is carried on a mobile phone that is less than three months old and has shipped more than 10 million units in overseas markets.

Since then, information from the supply chain and realme further indicates that the, realme C series will be available around July, including France, the UK, Italy, Spain, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Russia.

If it is estimated that the shipments of the new C-series mobile phones have exceeded 10 million in less than 3 months, is the performance good?

This can be used as a reference for Xiaomi's famous popular style Redmi Note 8 series.

Lu Weibing, partner of Xiaomi Group, Senior Vice President of Xiaomi Group, President of China, President of International Department and General Manager of Redmi brand, launched the new Redmi Note 8 series of mobile phones (4G). According to Lu Weibing later revealed, the series of mobile phones within three months, global sales exceeded 10 million.

Realme less than 3 months, the global (excluding China) sales exceeded 10 million, Redmi Note 8 series within three months, the global (including China) sales exceeded 10 million.

This is quite the latter's sales area is less than the former in China, but in about the same time the two shipments are roughly the same, it can be seen that the popularity of the realme C series exceeds the popular Redmi Note 8 series.

Such popularity is not only due to the excellent competitiveness of realme, which has a strong explosive market since 2020, but also inseparable from the performance of Zhanrui 4G chip.

Because in addition to Honor, a smartphone player who has long occupied C position in the smartphone market since 2013, realme, a relatively novice smartphone player, has also become a customer of Zhanrui SoC 4G chips in 2021.

Another supply chain source told Wall Street that Glory Play 5T (4G) ranked second in the domestic 1000-yuan phone market in the 35th week of this year (August 23rd-August 29th), becoming second only to realme V11 (5G) with about 58000 units shipped, surpassing Redmi Note 9 (5G).

As the next generation of Redmi Note 8 (4G) series, the, Redmi Note 9 (5G) series can also be called a popular style, which was released on November 26th, 2020. after 13 days on the market, sales exceeded 1 million units.

Glorious Play 5T (4G) is equipped with Zhanrui 4G T610 chip, according to Glory's official website Mall.

Judging from the market performance, the shipments of the main chips of Zhanrui smart phones have increased rapidly this year.

In August, according to the latest data from market research firm counterpoint, the global smartphone market, Zhanrui Q2amp21 accounted for 8.4%.

In 2018-09, Zhan Rui was classified as "others" in counterpoint statistics, but reached 4% in 2020, which was counted separately, and further increased to 8.4% in the second quarter of 2021.

Chu Qing achieved two great achievements

In February this year, Wall Street heard the news of the cooperation between Zhanrui 4G chip and Glory. Later, according to Wall Street knowledge from the industry, this is regarded as a major achievement in promoting internal governance after Chu Qing independently took the helm of Zhanrui Shuai Banner.

Wall Street learned from the industry that after Chu Qing joined Zhanrui, he made an analysis and countermeasure report on the major internal problems existing in Zhanrui, and made a quite in-depth and accurate analysis of the internal management problems of Zhanrui at that time. And put forward the corresponding rectification measures.

Taking an inventory of Chu Qing's major achievements after joining Zhanrui and being in charge of Shuai Printing, Wall Street noticed that there are two things that are quite representative.

First, on February 26th, 2020, Zhan Rui launched the Tanggula T7705G SoC mobile platform, using TSMC 6nm EUV process. This is Zhan Rui's current consumer terminal 5G mobile chip technology level of the highest representative work.

Although the performance of Zhan Rui's 5G chip is not comparable to that of the industry's flagship 5G chips (such as Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+, MediaTek Skyline 1200, Apple A15 and Heidi Kirin 9000), its T7510 (now renamed Tanggula T740) has been used for commercial use in May 2020, reducing the intergenerational gap between Zhanrui 5G and the mainstream of the industry to about half a year, after an astonishing 10 years (4G Netcom chips were not fully sold until 2019).

Second, a supply cooperation agreement with Glory on 4G chips was reached in February (or earlier). In terms of the practical role of Zhan Rui's integrated mobile chip technology in the market, the significance of cooperation with Glory even exceeds the release of the Tanggula T770.

"Glory's stringent debugging requirements for chip performance have greatly improved the design ability of the sharpening chip." A chip technical engineer told Wall Street, "the original chip customers are limited to their own capabilities, and the improvement of their chip design capabilities is relatively limited." But now there is glory 'oppression' and recognition, Shengrui chip design ability is really on the road. "

While it is not clear when realme will become a similar role to Glory in Zhanrui, the global sales of the realme C-Series, which was launched in July, is a testament to the views of chip technology engineers.

At the current stage, Zhan Rui has adopted a different market strategy from its competitors such as Qualcomm, MediaTek and other "All in 5G". Zhou Chen, executive vice president of Zhanrui and general manager of the consumer electronics division, revealed that Zhanrui will adopt the strategy of "5G+4G" at the recent "UP 2021 online Ecological Summit" held by Zhan Rui.

Although 5G mobile chip has become the absolute protagonist of the market, 4G mobile chip has not failed. From 2019 to 2020, global sales of 4G phones still surpassed those of 5G phones.

It is reported that the price of 4G mobile chip continues to rise. Since the third quarter of this year, MOV (Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo) have all continued to increase the number of chips purchased for 4G smartphones in order to gain a competitive advantage in emerging markets, excluding China.

Current strategy: pay equal attention to 5G+4G

The dilemma of the lack of deep application of 5G technology in the consumer market is dragging down the speed of market penetration of this new technology. Now, this dilemma has also led mobile phone manufacturers to re-examine the position of 4G chips in their business structure.

Due to the rapid improvement of 5G technology, more and more mobile phone manufacturers have launched low-cost 5G mobile phones around the world, which partly eliminates the profit advantage of 5G mobile phones over 4G mobile phones.

The average price of entry-level 5G phones in India has been cut by 40 per cent in the past 12 months, according to the Counterpoint report, which is preferred by MOV, the country's leading mobile phone maker.

According to media reports, MediaTek, Lianyong, Sitronix, Shijia and Tongjia 4G smartphones are expected to make more profits than 5G smartphones in the second half of 2021.

This market feature, for the 5G chip technology level and the industry's strongest players, appears to be relatively weak sharpness, in terms of profits, may not be able to fight a war.

As for the technology focus of Zhanrui's consumer electronics products, according to Zhou Chen, it will adhere to 4G product innovation. "We think that for a long time in the future, the consumer electronics market will still be a situation where 5G and 4G demand coexist."

"5G is one of the greatest scientific and technological revolutions in human history, but given the imbalance in global regional development, it means it will take some time to build and roll out [5G]," Zhou said. From a business point of view, there is always a need for a global basic network, that is, GMS 4G network. For a long time, 4G network will continue to exist as an important basic data network. Therefore, Zhanrui Consumer Electronics decided to adopt the strategy of '5G4G'. "

Under the guidance of this strategy, Zhan Rui launched the new generation of eight-core 4G chip platforms T616 and T606 on September 9. Two new 4G chips are manufactured by 12nm process, and the architecture of GPU and CPU is exactly the same, but the difference is that the main frequency of CPU is different, and the performance of T616 is relatively stronger.

It is worth mentioning that, according to the previous plan, the smart mobile terminal equipped with Zharetangula T7705G SoC mobile chip, which will be launched this year, has entered the stage of mass production and commissioning. "this means that it can be seen in the market soon," Zhou said. "

The smartphone with Tanggula T770 chip being debugged has a running score of more than 400,000 points. This performance is between the 360000 running points of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 768G prototype and the 450000 running points after the official mass production.

Therefore, it can be considered that the technical level of the Tanggula T770 is about the same as that of Qualcomm Snapdragon 768G, which is in the middle level of 5G consumer mobile terminals.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 768G, released on May 11, 2020, is an upgraded version of Snapdragon 765G, but its performance is not as good as that of Standard Haisi Kylin 820. The Snapdragon 768G locates the mid-end consumer integrated mobile chip, which is manufactured by Samsung 7nm EUV process and integrates 5G baseband like the Tanggula T770.

Zhou Chen said that the terminal with Tanggula T770 chip ran more than 400,000 points, "on behalf of (Tanggula T770) platform to achieve the performance of mainstream high-end mobile phones."

Is this view in line with the facts?

If there is no contrast, there will be no persuasion. You can look at another reference: the prototype with Hayth Kirin 980 chip, Anhare ran close to 400000 points (397500 points), while the prototype with Hayth Kirin 820 chip scored 370000 points.

Kirin 980 chip, released on August 31st, 2018, is the world's first commercial mobile phone SoC chip manufactured by TSMC 7nm process.

As the flagship 4G integrated chip released by Huawei three years ago, Kirin 980 still has many fans even today, and is even regarded as the most popular Kirin chip in the past three years. Huawei has become the undisputed top mobile phone manufacturer in the world, and Kirin 980 has made great contributions to this, so the chip can be called a god-like existence.

It can exceed the running score of Kirin 980 an rabbit, indicating that Zhou Chen has not exaggerated the technical performance of Tanggula T770.