According to the 2022 China Mobile Internet Development Report” by the People's Daily Online Research Institute, there are five major trends in China's mobile Internet development: industrial application of the Metaverse, anti-monopoly to maintain a healthy market environment, the universalization of mobile internet, 5G industry application, digital village and e-government construction.
The main topic of the 2022 Mobile Internet Bluebook revolves around how to promote digital transformation and drive production through the integrated development of the internet and the real economy. The transformed lifestyle and governance will then push forward China’s digital economy, digital society and e-government construction. The current topic analysed the future development trends and also provides a comprehensive summary of the characteristics and conditions of mobile internet development in 2021.
In the past two years, Huawei’s chip supply cut-off has impacted its market share significantly. As shown in the data released earlier by IDC, there is no sign of Huawei in the 2021 Top Five Global Smartphone Supplier’s Market whereas only Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, OPPO and Vivo formed the top 5.
Besides the decline in global market share, according to the data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), China’s smartphone market shipments in 2021 is roughly around 3.5 billion units, despite a YoY growth of 13.9%, there’s still no sign of Huawei in the top five smartphone shipments, but only Xiaomi, Vivo, OPPO, Apple and Honor, however, the good news is China domestic high-end smartphone still remained the top of the development. It shows that based on the impact of chip supply, Huawei’s decline in the market share has opened up development space for other smartphone enterprises.
The main driving force of China’s terminal sales market is 5G mobile phones, there are a total of 270 million 5G mobile phone shipments in 2021, a relative increase of 63.5%, which takes up 75.9% of mobile phone shipments in the same period. At the same time, the high-performance specification of 5G mobile phones, such as high-pixel cameras, high-resolution, and large-screen development trends are getting popular.
Due to the impact of the market share, Huawei has opened up a whole new competition, the much talked about Huawei operating system - HarmonyOS. It is a set of panoramic operating systems in the future IoT era to solve the fragmentation of hardware devices system deployment, it can locate mobile phones and link smart IoT devices, and solve all IoT hardware device’s problems. Currently, there are more than 1,800 hardware partners supporting 4,000 ecological devices, and the number of global developers of Huawei’s HMS application ecosystem has reached 5.1 million, they have also gathered more than 173,000 global applications with HMS Core open capabilities, soon it will be able to work with the server operating system OpenEuler, and achieve ecological interoperability to obtain wider connection, and the unified system will be able to meet various loading requirements.
As China companies begin to promote the localisation of mobile operating systems, Alibaba’s AliOS Things has started to support terminal devices connected to Alibaba Cloud Link through online upgrades and has been widely used in smart homes and smart cities, while TencentOS Tiny is developed by Tencent, a real-time operating system with multiple features, including low resource usage, low power consumption, security, reliability and modularity, which has been widely used in many fields.
In addition, the “2022 China Mobile Internet Development Report” also introduced that China has established the OpenAtom Foundation in order to promote the development of the open-source OS, the OpenAtom Foundation was established in Beijing on June 2020 with the approval of the Ministry of Civil Affairs of China, it is a non-profit organization that promotes the development of the global open-source industry, and systematically builds information industry through co-construction, co-governance and sharing, and industrial open-source open framework, while building an international open-source community, and improve the efficiency of industry collaboration. Currently, the OpenAtom Foundation has the basic capabilities of the HarmonyOS donated by Huawei, this forms the Huawei Open Harmony open-source project. In addition, the foundation also has several open-source mobile smart terminal operating system projects such as TencentOS Tiny by Tencent, and Ali’s AliOS Things. The goal of the Open Harmony open-source project is to build an operating system framework and platform for intelligent terminal equipment in the era of the full scene, full connection and full intelligence era, so as to promote the prosperity and development of the internet industry.
Although China has begun to enter the era of independent technological innovation, the development of the open-source industry is still in its infancy stage, despite China having a large number of open-source software, it still lacks leading projects with international influence. Open Harmony’s open-source projects will promote the possibility of sustainable development of China’s open-source ecosystem, it is of great significance to the development of China’s digital age and the information industry. As for product development, the OpenAtom Foundation will launch stable operating system community versions and commercial versions. In terms of technical paths, the foundation cooperates with leading operating system manufacturers to develop and cooperate to build an industrial ecology. At the same time, in order to create a fully open, safe, stable, high-performance and completely neutral operating system and ecology, the foundation also established the open-source operating system community - OpenCloud OS.
The “2022 China Mobile Internet Development Report” also emphasized that China companies are striving for the initiative in chip development and building key technologies to achieve self-reliance and self-improvement. In China’s smartphone SoC market, terminal sales in 2021 have increased by 3% YoY to 314 million units, while the first and second place in terminal sales is MediaTek’s 110 million units and Qualcomm’s 106 million units. Due to the impact of the ban, Hisilicon chips sales in 2021 have dropped by 68.6% YoY to only 30 million units. Compared with Huawei Hisilicon, Qualcomm and MediaTek's market share in 2020, Huawei Hisilicon which withdraws from market share in 2021, will be replaced by MediaTek, Qualcomm and Apple market share. In 2020, UNISOC has produced 100,000 chips and has begun to emerge in the low-end mobile phone market, which has increased by 103 times YoY to 8.8 million units in 2021, mainly supplying brands such as Honor, China Telecom, DOOV, Nokia and Gionee.
It can be seen that the China smartphone enterprise market will face a structure reshuffling, and the current dominant structure is beginning to change. In order to avoid the recurrence of chip supply cuts, China companies have also begun to strive for the initiative in chip development to achieve independence and self-reliance. The OpenAtom Foundation will be committed to creating “open-source, co-construction of ecology”, focusing on industry ecological construction and talent training, and co-building, sharing and co-governing a more prosperous open-source ecology with partners.
For more details, please contact us.