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The situation of being acquired by Geely is basically certain, and there are different voices inside and outside Meizu. The optimistic view is that "success is also yellow, failure is also yellow". After Geely takes control of Meizu, another speaker should bring some changes. It seems that Ali once brought money, but the results were not satisfactory. Geely, whose supply chain advantage is in the automotive industry, may not be able to help Meizu's mobile phone business.
Author Lin Xiaxi Edit Lei Yanpeng
Source: City boundary (ID: ishijie2018)
Lu An remembers that when he first joined Meizu, the M8 had not yet formed. During the interview, Bai Yongxiang, the director of R&D Department, said to him with the interactive drawing, "We should make a phone that is even cooler than Apple".
Later, Meizu M8 began the national field test. Lu An demonstrated the M8 system to the agents, demonstrating the M8's fall resistance. The agents were extremely friendly wherever they went. He deeply felt the charm of M8.
Lu An has worked for Meizu for more than ten years. In his impression, this is the first and most beautiful appearance of Meizu mobile phone.
The M8 is regarded as the first truly domestic smart phone. Meizu is also regarded as "the Huangpu Military Academy of home-made smart machines".
In 2015, Meizu finally exceeded the sales volume of 20 million units, but the carnival only lasted for three years. After that, Meizu's voice became smaller and smaller. Since 2022, news of acquisition has been reported from time to time.
The "most soulful Android phone manufacturer" finally changed its name.
Meizu changed its ownership to Geely, and Huangzhang became the second shareholder
The "rumor" that Geely plans to acquire Meizu has been circulated for half a year, and finally became an official announcement on June 13, 2022.
The announcement shows that the buyer of this transaction is Hubei Xingji Times Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Xingji Times"), which was founded in September 2021. The majority shareholder is Geely Group, and the actual controller is Li Shufu. Therefore, the acquisition was also described as "Geely's acquisition of Meizu".
Before the completion of the transaction, Huang Zhang, the founder of Meizu, held 49.08% of Meizu's equity and Taobao held 27.23%, jointly controlling Meizu.
After the completion of the transaction, Huang Zhang's shareholding in Meizu dropped to 9.79%, Taobao withdrew from the list of Meizu shareholders, and Xingji Times obtained 79.09% of the absolute control of Meizu.
A former employee once sighed, "Say a big disrespect, Meizu can only change its boss if it wants to change the status quo." Now the boss has really changed.
Before this acquisition, Meizu mobile phones had already fallen to "Others" in the shipment ranking list. If there is anything valuable left for Meizu, it is undoubtedly Flyme.
In addition to the 17 and 18 series that have received a dull response in the past two years, Meizu launched the Flyme for Car on-board system in 2021. At the same time, it made customized car engine systems for some car enterprises, and also earned some advertising money from Flyme system.
According to the original rhythm, Meizu 19 series should be released in April this year, but insiders said that no project has been approved yet.
As for the staff size, Meizu's former employees said that during the peak period, the company had more than 4700 people, and then continued to lay off staff. At first, the whole company made a unified layoff, but the external response was relatively large. Later, it was replaced by monthly layoffs in each department. Industry and commerce information in 2021 shows that there are only 547 Meizu employees who pay social insurance.
Behind the shrinking team size is the declining morale.
For a long time in the past, Meizu's in-service employees did not carry out performance appraisal or incentive, and there was no big leader to talk about strategy for a long time. Many people who want to leave choose to stay put and wait to be laid off by the company to get compensation of "N+1".
Lu An heard that Huang Zhang once made a statement with the senior management that he had no ability to bring everyone up. "You can toss the rest up if you can, but not if you can".
To acquire Meizu in such a situation, Geely naturally needs to make some changes.
According to an insider, Many shares of Meizu are still in the hands of the former middle and senior management, and should be repurchased in the future After Geely became a shareholder, the new management needed to buy new shares out of their own pocket, which was equivalent to a strong binding with the company's interests.
From senior managers to directors, there will be about 3 million to 5 million shares in their hands, and the price has not yet been determined. But in October or at a time when the buyback will be completed, a wave of Meizu's "elder" management will also cash out at that time.
In terms of valuation, Meizu obtained an investment of $590 million from Ali in 2015, transferring 29.34% of its equity, and the corresponding valuation was around 13 billion yuan. In 2016, Tianyin Holding obtained 0.655% of Meizu's equity with 200 million yuan, and Meizu's corresponding valuation reached 30.5 billion yuan.
Lu An told the city that from about 2019 to 2021, in order to boost staff morale, Meizu once opened its equity trading system. At that time, Meizu had already gone down a long way. The trading price per share fell from 2.8 yuan in the peak period to less than 1 yuan, but still "there was no market". No one was willing to accept it until it fell to 30 cents per share later, There was some trading volume at the beginning.
More than a year ago, Meizu's equity trading system was closed, and the trading price before the closure was as low as 10 cents per share. According to this, Meizu's valuation at that time was only over 1 billion yuan.
However, the price at which Geely will purchase Meizu is still unknown.
Short carnival, long downhill road
In terms of sales volume, Meizu's highlight period is from 2015 to 2017. At that time, Meizu's overall sales volume remained above 20 million units, a leap compared with about 4 million units in 2014.
In fact, the rise and fall of Meizu can be found in the distinctive personality of Huangzhang.
Huang Zhang, who has been evaluated as a "top product manager" by many people, has a "paranoid" personality and is closed to the outside world all the year round. He is more like a craftsman in the mountains.
An old employee who has left Meizu revealed that Huang Zhang once scolded the leader of the company's testing department, asking him why he didn't use more, experience more, make some improvements in user interaction, and even change the name of the testing department to Test Experience Department. Before that, user experience problems were generally completed by UI design engineers or product managers, but Huang Zhang required all staff to participate in the improvement of user experience.
Another time, on the eve of the system release conference, when everyone had worked late, Huang Zhang suddenly said that there was a problem after reading the final release version. He thought that there was a pixel difference in one line of an icon. Others felt that the naked eye could not see it, but the staff found it after checking.
However, as Meizu has moved from "small and beautiful" to more popular, the other side of "paranoia" has also shown up.
In Meizu Forum, Huang Zhang said a lot of words like "Go away if you don't like it" in his "J. Wong" vest.
In 2018, the "Meizu" logo on the exterior wall of Meizu's Zhuhai headquarters was replaced with the red seal of "unique" - a new slogan put forward to Meizu by Yang Zhe, the then senior vice president of Meizu after he joined Meizu.
The "pithy and unique" from the ancient book Shangshu Dayumo has the meanings of "pure techniques", "attitude of keeping improving" and "good intentions" in Yang Zhe's interpretation. The Emperor Qianlong also carved a "unique" seal on his private seal.
An internal employee said that the version they heard was that "only one and best" was the seal of Emperor Qianlong, which was called "Emperor's Seal" for short. This was one of the reasons why Huangzhang liked this idea, and also made Huangzhang trust Yang Zhe much later.
Huang Zhang retired twice and returned twice. After returning in 2017, Huang Zhang said that he would "go out of the mountain again to build my dream machine to meet the 15th anniversary of Meizu". Later, this "dream machine" was named Meizu 15.
However, before Meizu 15 really went on the market, Huang Zhang appeared in Meizu's official community and said, "15 years later, Meizu returned to the market for a small test, and the subsequent 16 series were the products I made with all my strength", which was regarded by the outside world as a statement of "watching Meizu 15 decline".
The internal staff said that, "I don't quite understand why the boss wants to smash his own products, and most of my colleagues are also puzzled".
As for the partners who left the team, Huang Zhang's attitude was also not decent - "kerosene" (Meizu fans) asked Lao Bai (Bai Yongxiang) where he was going on the forum, and Huang Zhang replied, "You want him to buy his Pro7 at the original price"; Kerosene proposed to retain talents, while Huang Zhang alluded to Li Nan as "waste money", saying that talents are the ones who can earn money.
(Meizu MEIZU pro7 smartphone promotion picture)
In addition to Huang Zhang's own factors, Meizu has several key nodes on its way down.
Some people believe that Meizu once abandoned Qualcomm to use MediaTek chips, which led to its inability to support the premium of high-end series. This is an important reason why Meizu was gradually "abandoned" by the market.
However, Li Nan publicly said as early as 2020 that Meizu's highest growth year was the year when it insisted on not using Qualcomm. Meizu's cooperation with MediaTek was a VIP treatment and only a "second-class citizen" in Qualcomm's rules.
(Li Nan, former Vice President of Meizu)
Before the release of the Pro 7 led by Bai Yongxiang in 2017, the internal expectations for this model were very high, with advertisements widely spread and quite a lot of goods in stock. However, some internal employees believed that Meizu's market capacity at that time was unable to support this expectation, so they "played off".
Later, Meizu 16 series, a model that Meizu used back to Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, learned a lesson after the fiasco of Pro 7 and adopted a relatively conservative stock up, resulting in market demand exceeding supply. The stock up of orders added later missed a period of high demand for new products, and the final results were not ideal.
After these two attacks, Meilan has also been cut off by Meizu, and Meizu's voice has obviously shrunk a lot, and its path is getting narrower and narrower.
Former employees of Meizu said that manufacturers like Meizu need to pay in advance in the supply chain, while large-scale manufacturers like Huami OV can talk about, and there is a big gap in the requirements for capital turnover.
Some good suppliers have even "stopped paying attention to us, because the size is too small", especially some details that require high-quality suppliers to cooperate with debugging and improvement, facing numerous resistance.
The future is still full of unknown
The limited founder pattern, the company's wrong judgment of the market and its own strength, and the internal struggle are constantly consuming Meizu's early accumulated product reputation and team morale. All this also pushed Meizu farther and farther on the downhill road.
Before announcing the change of ownership, Meizu launched "30 mobile phones" with 0 ads, 0 preloads and 0 push, but soon returned to the old way of making money by advertising under pressure; The poster of "Hello, Hongmeng" has been spread out. It is believed that the mobile phone may be equipped with Hongmeng system, but in fact, it is just a smart lighting product that uses Hongmeng system, which is a "smart" marketing method; They also sold Apple's customized accessories on the official website, which was ridiculed as "once expected to challenge Apple, but now they live by providing accessories for Apple users".
Now the situation of being acquired by Geely is basically certain, and there are two voices inside and outside Meizu.
The optimistic view is that "success is also yellow, failure is also yellow". After Geely takes control of Meizu, another speaker should bring some changes.
It seems that Ali once came with money, but the result was not satisfactory, Geely, whose supply chain advantage lies in the automobile industry, may not be able to help Meizu's mobile phone business.
People close to Geely's mobile phone once told Caijing Tianxia that Geely is interested in Meizu's Flyme OS design and development team and some intellectual property rights related to human-computer interaction communication, but according to Li Shufu's style, he can only be Geely's own brand.
(Li Shufu)
Whatever the outcome, changes are already taking place. According to insiders, Meizu, which has been laying off staff for many years, began to expand its enrollment, hoping to bring back its former employees from the grass-roots level to expand its business, but the specific business direction and details have not yet been announced.
Li Shufu said to the market that, This transaction still needs to go through the approval procedures of the relevant regulatory authorities, and the transaction details are still under negotiation We believe Meizu will take this strategic investment as an opportunity to create a better future.
When this acquisition is completed, the first to usher in a "bright future" should be a group of former Meizu management who can cash out and leave the market, and Ali who can finally shake off Meizu's "burden".
In 2015, after Li Nan, one of the "three swordsmen" of Meizu, pulled an investment of 590 million dollars from Ali, Meizu completed a gambling agreement on the sales of 20 million units, but the two sides were still unhappy.
The reason was that at that time, Ali hoped to use its AliCloud OS on more Meizu mobile phones to expand its ecosystem, but only a few low-end Meizu models used this system, and Meizu was once accused by Ali of "treachery".
(Meizu mobile phone Meilan 3 is sold from 599 yuan)
In the end, the Magic Blue series was cut off by the Yellow Seal, and the cooperation between the two sides ended in nothing. Ali even asked for divestment, and the two sides fell into an awkward situation. Geely's entry this time has undoubtedly given Ali a chance to completely solve the problem.
When talking about Meizu, many people will still describe it as "a good hand, two kings four two, broken".
As far as Huang Zhang is concerned, he has no way to deal with Meizu's decline. In May 2019, he said on Meizu Forum: "If I can choose, I don't want to be a major shareholder. I'm too tired."
Meizu's destiny now seems to have been predestined.
(At the request of the interviewee, Lu An is a pseudonym in the text)
(Unless the source is indicated separately, the above pictures are from Visual China)
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(Statement: This article only represents the author's view, not Sina.com's position.)
