Before Jimmy left Jinling and returned to New York, he got the sales figures of BenQ S1 in China for a week.
In one week starting from April 8th, BenQ S1 mobile phone shipments in China reached 120,000 units. This shipment volume is not bad and can meet Jimmy and Yudong's expectations, but it has not yet arrived.
To the point where it can surprise them.
Shipment volume is not equal to sales volume, but the BenQ S1 has just come out and is very popular, and shipments are fairly even across regions, so the gap between shipment volume and sales volume should not be big.
However, out of a shipment volume of 120,000, BenQ Store only sold 10,000 songs. On average, each user only purchased less than one-tenth of a song from Mingji Store.
This data did not exceed Jimmy's expectations. He was not optimistic about the domestic Internet music market from the beginning, and now this data seems to confirm his thoughts.
But there is not only this data in the report, there is another data that also attracted Jimmy's attention, and that is the number of registered users of BenQ stores.
In the past week or so, the Chinese version of BenQ Store has only registered 5,000 accounts, which means that for every twenty users who purchased the BenQ S1 mobile phone, only one user has registered a BenQ Store account.
Calculated in this way, it means that on average, one registered account purchases two pieces of electronic music. It seems that the data is not that bad.
In addition, there is another piece of data that is equally eye-catching.
Among the more than 5,000 registered accounts, more than 600 are from Jinling, accounting for more than 10%. This data is very exaggerated. Although the sales volume of BenQ S1 in Jinling is higher than that in other cities, the high
It's not much, let alone 10% of the total.
Obviously, a larger proportion of Jinling users have registered for BenQ stores.
Seeing these data, Jimmy quickly realized the problem. The Internet and computers in China were not popular enough. Even if many people bought a BenQ S1, they did not have computers or did not know how to do these things.
The computer and Internet penetration rates here in Jinling are much higher than in other cities, so more people are able to buy electronic music online at BenQ stores.
Another point is that BenQ’s offline promotion of mobile phones mainly focuses on music playback. As for the online BenQ store, although it has been mentioned, it cannot be introduced in detail, and general offline promotion does not have too many functions.
The presentation is unrealistic and no one will read it.
As for those private mobile phone stores, they rarely help BenQ promote the online store, and many people who buy mobile phones have not watched the live video of the conference, so they may not know the existence of the online BenQ store at all.
.
But Jinling is different. There is the world's first BenQ retail store here in Jinling. Any customer who walks into a BenQ retail store will definitely have a staff introduce them to the online BenQ store, so in Jinling they know about the online BenQ store.
There are more people.
Therefore, the reason why the online BenQ store only sells 10,000 songs is not because users in China are reluctant to spend money, as Jimmy thought before, but because of limited conditions.
However, in addition to the lack of popularity of computers and the Internet, there are actually other reasons for the low music sales in BenQ stores. Otherwise, there are so many Internet cafes in China. Even if users do not have their own computers, they can go to Internet cafes and use the Internet cafe’s computer to log in and purchase.
music.
In addition to the insufficient popularity of computers and the Internet, there is another difficulty for Chinese BenQ S1 users who want to purchase music at Mingji stores, and that is the payment method.
There are relatively few electronic payment methods in China, and the operation is not particularly convenient, let alone popular. Even if users can go to Internet cafes to log in to the online BenQ store, they will still be stuck at the payment level.
…
After sorting out the data, Jimmy felt a little regretful because his strategy had gone wrong.
In the past, he was not very optimistic about the electronic music market in China. He thought that not many people would spend money online at BenQ stores, so he did not spend much information here. He always said that he would use electronic payment software in China.
I also planned slowly and calmly.
If he had paid attention to this matter before and let Shen Kong's electronic payment software go online in China earlier, then the sales volume of BenQ stores would definitely be different at this time, and this would also be a good opportunity to promote electronic payment methods.
.
However, it was not too late to remedy the situation. Jimmy took the data and went to find the remaining resources to speed up the progress and asked them to quickly build the domestic payment software.
Yu Dong also got the data that Jimmy got. Yu Dong also saw the problems that Jimmy saw, but Yu Dong didn't care much. No one can take everything into consideration, even a business genius like Jimmy.
, there are also unexpected places.
Yu Dong himself had the same idea as Jimmy before, believing that domestic piracy was rampant and the electronic music payment market would definitely not be good. However, it turns out that it is not as bad as they thought, and there are still many people who are willing to pay for electronic music.
In addition, the data from China also illustrates a situation, that is, the BenQ store model is still feasible. Since this model can be recognized by users in China, there will definitely be no problem in other countries. In general,
This is a positive sign.
…
The fact was as Yu Dong expected.
One month later, on May 6, the American version of BenQ S1 was officially released.
On the same day, the first BenQ retail store in the United States on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan also officially opened.
This retail store is not only the first BenQ retail store in the United States, but also the first 24-hour BenQ retail store in the world. The rest of the BenQ retail stores are planned in China or other cities in the United States.
It's not 24 hours a day.
The BenQ S1 achieved very good results in its first week in the United States, with shipments reaching 110,000 units. It sounds like this data is not as good as the Chinese market, but in fact the potential of the BenQ S1 in the US market is greater than that of the Chinese market.
It's better, because the data is increasing every day, and the sales volume of the online BenQ store is very good.
In just one week, the online BenQ store sold 50,000 songs. Compared with China, although the shipment volume of mobile phones is less, the sales volume of electronic music is several times higher, and with the growth of mobile phones
Sales are increasing, and so is the rate at which music sales are growing.
There are many people who don’t care about the other functions of their mobile phones, but only focus on the music functions. It can even be said that they bought a BenQ S1 just to be able to download songs and listen to them in the BenQ store.
Even though the sound quality of the BenQ S1 is not good enough and the battery life is not high enough compared to those top MP3 players, there are still a large number of users who pay for it. It’s not that they don’t care about the battery life, but it doesn’t matter if they listen to music for a few hours less, and it’s not that they don’t care about the sound quality.
, but ordinary people won’t be able to hear much difference between the sound quality of S1 and the sound quality of top MP3 unless they are paired with good headphones. They care more about being able to connect their phones to their computers at any time, and then download music from their computers to listen to.
, this is what BenQ S1 can do but those MP3 players cannot.
Besides, the BenQ S1 is a mobile phone after all. It can make calls, send text messages... it can do everything a mobile phone can do, and it has a good-looking appearance, and the slider design makes people unable to stop using it.
The BenQ S1 US version has one more color than the Chinese version, with a total of three colors: silver and white, black and white, and red and white.
The prices of these three colors are the same, but more people buy silver and white and red and white. Among ten users who buy BenQ S1, about six choose red and white, three choose silver and white, and only
One would choose black and white.
However, choice does not mean that they can be purchased. In many stores, the quantities of the three types of products are almost the same, and customers all want red, white, and silver. At this time, those store owners will come up with ideas and start to provide red, white, and silver models.
The price of the red and white model will be increased by $30, and the price of the silver model will be increased by $15.
Many people don’t quite understand why the BenQ S1 mobile phone is obviously good-looking in silver and red, but it goes the extra mile to make it black and white.
It’s not that black and white phones don’t look good, it’s just that the black and white version of the BenQ S1 phone has no sense of design at all. The upper layer is white and the lower layer is black. It feels very perfunctory and cannot arouse the interest of users at all.
Whether it is from a subjective aesthetic point of view or from objective data analysis, we can know that red, white and silver are obviously more popular among users, while black and white have no market at all.
Why can't we not produce black and white, but only silver and red?
However, what they don't know is that designing this black and white product is just a sales strategy.
BenQ Mobile certainly knows that the black and white models are not popular, and they even deliberately designed the black and white models to be more ordinary.
Red flowers and green leaves. Among these three colors, black and white are green leaves, red, white and silver are red flowers. With the contrast of black and white, many people think red, white and silver look better.
The cost prices of the three colors are almost the same, but when sold by outside stores to customers, each one costs US$30 or US$15. Obviously, the added value of mobile phones has changed with the emergence of black and white models.
BenQ Mobile won't get a dime of the price increase, and all of it goes into the pockets of those stores. However, BenQ Mobile acquiesces to this situation.
Because of this situation, those merchants can make more money. If they can make more money, they will be more active in promoting the BenQ S1 mobile phone for BenQ Mobile.
In addition, after all, mobile phone shipments are in the hands of BenQ Mobile. They can decide who to give the goods to or not to give the goods to, and they can also choose to give more popular models to whom. In this way, the relationship between the two parties will also change.
, in order to get more popular models, they will cooperate more with BenQ Mobile.
It seems that the extra profit from the price increase has not gone to BenQ Mobile, but in fact it has been used by BenQ Mobile. This is more useful than BenQ Mobile directly lowering the purchase price for merchants.
…
The great sales of BenQ stores not only boosted the sales of BenQ mobile phones, but also promoted BenQ Mobile's negotiations with various music copyright companies.
Before BenQ mobile phones were released, BenQ Mobile was already discussing music licensing with various copyright holders. Many companies were reluctant and unwilling to license BenQ Mobile.
They mainly believe that the share given to them by BenQ stores is not high enough.
BenQ Mobile sets the same share ratio for all copyright parties, which is 68%. After a song is sold on the BenQ store, BenQ will pay 68% to the copyright owner.
This ratio is barely acceptable to those companies, but they believe that the pricing of songs in BenQ stores is too low. New songs are generally priced at only US$0.99, and some old songs cannot even be obtained for US$0.30.
With such a low price, no matter how high the share ratio is, they cannot accept it.
They believe that licensing music to BenQ stores will cause many problems. Firstly, it will increase hidden piracy. Secondly, after people buy music online, they will no longer pay for physical music, which will reduce physical sales. Even if BenQ Mobile
They have repeatedly insisted that licensing music to BenQ stores will only make them more money, but they still don't believe it.
However, after the release of the BenQ S1 mobile phone, many companies found that the situation was different from what they imagined. Electronic music can indeed be sold in BenQ stores. The most important thing is that some old songs will also be welcomed and have a second life.
Why BenQ Mobile prices old songs more cheaply is of course because people rarely listen to old songs, and since they are old songs, they have been sold for a long time. People who like to listen to these songs have basically bought them before.
No need to spend any more money to buy it.
On the BenQ store software, there is a very conspicuous special price area. Click on this special price area, and it is filled with old songs at low prices.
Just after the BenQ S1 went on sale in the United States, the special price section became very popular, especially some classic old songs priced at US$0.29, with particularly high sales.
For example, the song "sailing" sung by British singer Stuart more than 20 years ago, after entering the special price area, was downloaded 2,200 times in just over a week, ranking first in the special price area.
Although the price of the single is only 0.29 US dollars, the total revenue from 2,200 times has reached 638 US dollars. According to the 68% share ratio, the copyright can get 433 US dollars in pre-tax income.
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More than four hundred dollars may not sound high, but the key is that this is just the beginning. As more and more BenQ mobile phones are sold and BenQ stores become more and more popular, the sales of songs will definitely increase.
Moreover, after such a long time, many old songs have very little income, and the extra income feels like they are picked up for free. More importantly, in addition to making money, selling songs on the platform seems to be a means of publicity.
It’s an opportunity for more fans to see the songs.
Chapter completed!