"Everyone, calm down, I'm ready to come out."

Under the dim lights, Luo Yonghao slowly walked to the center of the stage. The audience cheered and applauded, and some audience members in the front row even stood up excitedly.

That was Luo Yonghao's last speech in 2010, with the theme "An Idealist's Entrepreneurship Story". Later, this became one of Luo's most famous series of speeches.

"In a fully competitive industry, only the paranoid can survive." In his speech, he mentioned. Perhaps because he firmly believed in this sentence, Lao Luo also took this paranoia to the extreme.

It took him two years to polish a mobile phone. During that period, he strictly controlled every detail and even asked the team to redraw most of the APP icons.

To some extent, he is a contradiction. He prides himself on being as good as Steve Jobs and complains about the poor performance of Apple's mobile phones, but he also wants to build a mobile phone that is the best in the Eastern Hemisphere, second only to Apple.

However, his "craftsmanship spirit" was bit by bit torn by the ruthless reality. Smartisan's mobile phones did not gain public recognition, and he did not become Steve Jobs's successor.

Nowadays, Smartisan is in a new round of crisis, with changes in legal persons, debt collection by suppliers... and there is news on the Internet that Smartisan is seeking to take over the business, including Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba, etc., and has always been talking about it. Luo Yonghao, who is a master of martial arts, is surprisingly silent. Maybe he should wake up from his cell phone dream.

01

It was a conference without mobile phones.

On November 6, Smartisan’s new product launch conference was held in Chengdu. It mainly released three home products: humidifiers, suitcases and smart speakers, all of which are produced by Smartisan’s holding company.

Among these three products, the first two are not in stock, and the flagship version of the suitcase will not go on sale until April next year. This seems to be a new product launch conference without substantial content.

Luo Yonghao was still telling jokes on stage, as if nothing had happened, but news of the dissolution of Smartisan Chengdu Branch and the rupture of the capital chain were spreading on the Internet.

Interestingly, just a year ago on November 7, Luo Yonghao summed up 2017 as "resurrection from the dead" at a press conference in Chengdu. He obviously did not expect that the crisis would come again so quickly. On his head.

"Don't believe the rumors about how our Chengdu company is doing. It's nothing. We just adjusted our R&D personnel." Luo Yonghao refuted the rumors at the scene.

The reality is that some suppliers have raised the banner of "Hammer pays back" downstairs at Smartisan Technology. What's even worse is that former partner Coolpad filed a lawsuit in the Shenzhen court demanding that Smartisan pay back the money. Technology pays back money.

Luo Yonghao immediately apologized on Weibo and said he would "handle it appropriately." I just don’t know how Smartisan Technology, whose capital chain has become increasingly tight, will deal with this problem.

Time goes back to 2012. On April 8 of that year, Luo Yonghao posted a Weibo message. The content was very simple, that is, he wanted to enter the mobile phone industry. It is said that he was excited every day at that time. middle.

At first, he was very ambitious and tried to build the best mobile phone in the Eastern Hemisphere. According to the plan, Smartisan's first step is to make a ROM (a third-party mobile operating system) to prove its capabilities, and the second step is to build a mobile phone.

On March 27, 2013, after experiencing a ticket bounce, Hammer ROM came. The venue of more than 2,000 people was packed, and Luo Yonghao, who had experienced many battles, had no stage fright at all.

However, due to the lack of professional people in the team, the effect of the press conference was not satisfactory. There were overwhelming negative comments on the Internet, but Luo Yonghao still promoted it on Weibo.

In the subsequent years of Hammer's development, Luo Yonghao did not seem to learn such a lesson, causing users to fall into a tug of war between expectations and disappointment. In the end, even the tickets for the always popular Hammer conference were It became a hard sell.

However, it seems that God does not want to be cruel to this middle-aged man. What Luo Yonghao did not expect was that sitting under that less successful press conference was a senior person in the mobile phone industry. ——Qian Chen, who has worked at Motorola for 13 years.

Shortly after the press conference, Qian Chen led a group of old colleagues from Motorola to join Smartisan, and the "Grass Team" finally ushered in a regular army.

02

Before making mobile phones, Luo Yonghao had already become an Internet celebrity.

Luo Yonghao was born in Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, Jilin in 1972. He dropped out of high school and did business such as selling second-hand books and reselling smuggled cars. What really made him famous was his teaching career at New Oriental, with his humor With his teaching style, he quickly distinguished himself.

No one would doubt Luo Yonghao’s fighting ability. After he became famous, he and Fang Zhouzi continued to have wars of words on Weibo. Offline, he raised a hammer and smashed Siemens electrical appliances.

This style of going his own way has brought him a large number of fans, and can be transformed into real business benefits. But to some extent, it restricted him from becoming an excellent entrepreneur.

On May 20, 2014, at the main venue of the National Convention Center in Beijing, Luo Yonghao, wearing brown casual clothes, told more than 5,000 eagerly awaited audiences in the audience about "The Smartphone and his "story.

On the large slide screen behind, every time a technical parameter was announced, the audience of fans responded with lasting cheers and applause. It was the launch site of Smartisan T1, Smartisan’s first mobile phone.

Soon, Luo Yonghao stated on Weibo that the number of pre-orders for Smartisan phones had reached 50,000 units within two days. Two years after its establishment, Hammer finally left PTT.

Luo Yonghao labeled it "feeling" and "high-quality product" and bluntly said that he has penetrated the spirit of craftsman into every aspect of product creation. "Luo fans" and the public have high expectations for it. expect.

Of course, that was just his self-perception. Although negative reviews followed after the press conference, looking back, it may be the best mobile phone Luo Yonghao has ever released.

In terms of timing, Smartisan T1 obviously arrived a little late. At that time, more and more Steve Jobs apprentices appeared in the country, and the competition in the smartphone market had entered a fierce stage.

According to official data, Xiaomi alone sold 18.7 million mobile phones in 2013, and sales exceeded 60 million units in 2014. Smartisan missed the best opportunity.

To sum up the reason, Luo Yonghao always invests too much time and energy in seemingly useless areas. For example, he asked the team to redraw most of the APP icons and boasted about it on Weibo. Much prettier than Apple.

But this does not make the hammer easier to use. What is even worse is that the supply capacity of Smartisan T1 cannot keep up. Luo Yonghao blames the supplier, bluntly saying that the quality control of the supply chain is not good. Meet the standards.

You must know that for a mobile phone manufacturer, the role of the supply chain is extremely important. It is precisely because of this that no manufacturer is really willing to fall out with its suppliers, especially a new brand that has just emerged.

Luo Yonghao seemed not to realize this, and the other party immediately retorted, claiming that the problem was due to design flaws in the hammer itself and that there was no quality control factor.

It may not matter what the truth is. An obvious fact is that after that, Smartisan gradually drifted away from that supplier, and the supply chain problem became an unspeakable pain for Smartisan Technology. Lao Luo finally paid the price for his high profile.

03

There is no doubt that Luo Yonghao is a marketing expert, but users have not lost their basic judgment ability. It is understood that since its establishment, the total sales volume of the nine mobile phones launched by Smartisan has only been around 5 million.

Mobile phones are not a hugely profitable industry, and the gross profit margin is difficult to exceed 10. Once sales fail to increase, it is easy to have a capital chain crisis. In 2016, Smartisan Technology experienced such a moment.

According to the prospectus of Smartisan Technology’s investors, Smartisan Technology suffered a loss of 462 million yuan for the whole year in 2015 and a loss of 192 million yuan in the first half of 2016. At the same time, its total assets shrank from 825 million yuan at the end of 2015. 296 million yuan as of June 30, 2016.

In order to ease the pressure on the capital chain, Lao Luo had to pledge 2.05 million shares to Alibaba. Although Lao Luo eventually redeemed the shares, Smartisan Technology's capital chain was still tight.

Under such circumstances, Hammer’s core employees resigned one after another, were unable to pay wages twice, were rumored to be bankrupt six times, and were rumored to be acquired five times. Afterwards, Lao Luo described that situation as “dangerous”. Year.

Lao Luo even asked legal and financial personnel to go to the company for training and practice how to go through the bankruptcy process one by one in strict accordance with the procedures set by the state if Smartisan Technology went bankrupt.

At a critical moment, the Chengdu Municipal Government, which was trying to lay out the technology industry, played the role of a white knight. An investment of 600 million yuan helped Smartisan Technology turn the corner.

However, Smartisan still has not come up with a product that truly impresses users. After years of development, today’s smartphone market has become saturated.

Data show that global smartphone growth has slowed down in 2017, and fell by 0.2 year-on-year in 2018. Although there was a verbal spat with Xiaomi, Lao Luo changed his hands and learned Xiaomi's ecological chain layout, but it seems that this market can hardly accommodate the second Xiaomi.

In the frenzied marketing campaigns again and again, Smartisan mobile phones have rapidly gained popularity. However, what end users want is not those illusory feelings.

Nowadays, suppliers are collecting debts, internal layoffs are being laid off, and there is news that Hammer is about to be acquired. For Luo Yonghao, this is another dark moment.

Who will be Luo Yonghao’s white knight this time? Always high-profile, he remains silent, wondering when he will be ready to come out again.

Postscript: For more than six years since the establishment of Smartisan, Luo Yonghao has been in a state of putting out fires. This time he may really not be able to overcome this hurdle, but starting a business itself is a narrow escape, and failure itself is not terrible. After starting again, perhaps he will achieve greater success.