Like I said, don’t claim yourself to be a major Internet company in China now if you haven’t come up with your own brand smart phone. With Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and so on all debuted their device for quite a while, Qihoo 360 the digital world‘s safeguard unexpectedly made public its smartphone scheme lately in the wake of a rumor asserting that gaming operator Shanda would announce a Shanda phone in next month.
So either you have a smartphone in the plate or at least in the plan. Otherwise it’s not convincible enough that you’re a mainstream Chinese Internet company.
Joke aside, so what’s the fuss with Qihoo 360’s phone, since there’re already a swath of similar offerings in the market.
At the company’s media conference held yesterday, Zhou Hongyi, CEO and chairman of Qihoo said that the firm’s smartphone will be priced at up to RMB 1999 (US$ 316) whereas it’ll be worth between RMB 3000 and 4000 (US$ 475 ~ 633). The phone’s specification will be read as: 4 inches (if not bigger) high-def display, 1GHz (if not higher) CPU and high-def camera.
It seemed that Zhou didn’t held his peers in high regard, according to him, Qihoo phone would be totally differ from Alibaba phone or Xiaomi phone. “We’re not competing on the same level, we want to create a new forefront”, said Zhou.
Qihoo phone will be OEMed by Huawei, the giant Chinese telecom equipment maker.
Fancy hardware, might not be what Qihoo really bank on to combat its rivals or make money. The company’s software offerings including widely-adopted 360 Phone Protecter and 360 Phone Assistant could help amass users that eventually could be translated into mobile Internet traffic. And traffic means real money. Basically, Qihoo is hoping to tell the same profit-making story on mobile front with its proprietary phone.
Zhou exemplified his point with Amazon Kindle. Amazon reaped in big amount of revenue by value-added service, namely Kindle Store rather than by selling e-reader.
He said that the high-end Qihoo phone’s specification will definitely be better than Xiaomi phone while it’s price will on a par with or even lower than the latter. Watch out Xiaomi, game on now.