Or… The Vendors Never Learn

It’s been a full 2 weeks now since the end of Computex, and the associated roaming around Greater China and certain (mostly Chinese speaking too) neighboring realms. This being at the very least fifteenth Computex for me, I didn’t bother much with press conferences and such, but checking the show floor to see what’s really going on, and then do a real check with selected vendors after the event is done with.

The Taiwanese, with diminishing focus on high end ‘added value’ PC stuff, moving towards mainstream consumer things with corresponding reduction in differentiation and ability to charge larger margins, in some cases increasingly relying on reference designs – tablets could be a repeat of the same story as graphics cards here. The Asus Transformer tablet range is still one of rare exceptions to at least aim there where higher margin Samsung or LG offerings are entrenched, for example.

Asus doesn’t seem to be so lucky with the ROG enthusiast board line, where Gigabyte has, according to more than one insider, claimed the quality prize and is now at the very least on an equal footing for the high end PC market board dominance race prior to the September Haswell-E next-gen Socket 2011 platform launch (the socket is NOT compatible with the current Socket 2011, just to state one more time).

So… The Big Four: Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm and (still for now) AMD, all US vendors, still carry the innovation torch and, willingly or not, have to lead the OEMs into what to design and manufacture to a great extent. Ultrabooks and 2-in-1 convertibles were just an example, other stuff is just the same. Intel lost billions in the last financial year investing in an attempt to lead the mobile phone and tablet segments. Of course, they have the size & strength to ride over it without much impact thanks to over divisions, but a loss is still a loss, something very uncommon for Intel.

It’s funny… even despite all the Computex announcements, the best tablet announced at the time was not in Taipei, but in New York – Microsoft Surface 3 Pro (which we’re currently reviewing). It sports a proper Intel Core processor, proper 3:2 ratio display, proper (for tablet at least) keyboard cover, and proper OS, as much as one can call Windows 8.1 that – at least vs Android. Even though, Intel did have a Surface Pro 3 at their suite at Computex.

Then we come to the sea of mainland China vendors from Shenzhen, Dongguan and other cities, in their little booths at the old Taipei WTC hall. Plenty of them offering plenty of stuff, but it seems they aren’t willing to learn the key lesson from their Taiwan brethren: don’t you all want to avoid making the same cheap crap, trying to make a dollar a piece and then bleeding each other’s margins to death with endless fights for every customer? While only the SoC and IP license owners make any money from it all?

When I asked Intel if they have a role to play in this situation, one of their regional honchos in-charge, Leighton Phillips, Director Product Marketing, Intel Asia Pacific & Japan, explained that Intel is not the one restricting the components ecosystem for Intel-based tablets and such, but the choice is mostly on vendors themselves. After all, in his words, “Shenzhen city is like one really big company itself.” where certain “departments” decide to focus on repeating the low-cost stuff en masse and, hopefully, some bigger boys – or the daring ones with guts – decide to do unique things. Like it or not, after being in that city for years now on-and-off, I find it hard to disagree with this: many attempts to convince even the large groups there – even with ready buyers – to do something beyond the el cheapo fare, hit the risk-aversion wall. It’s a pity, as the Chinese government itself is more strategically focused on developing core technologies than, say, Taiwan.

After all, even outside the Intel world, a good example where a ‘me too’ strategy leads long term is one really big long time OEM in Hong Kong that survives – pitifully at that – basically selling their boards and cards at material cost. Yet, for years now, their very survival depends on their single principal vendors’ marketing money – which could be shut off anytime knowing that principal’s own survival issues.

Intel is, of course, investing a lot in Shenzhen: having (quite rightfully) selected it to be their next major hardware design center worldwide, after the USA and Taiwan. The rumors I hear from the insiders are for close to 700 engineering staff to be hired in Intel’s coming new space, likely in one of city’s many modern science & tech parks, within this year and early next – far more than the official 150 staff mentioned up to now. Whether this will encourage the local companies to do more daring product designs as Intel helps them offload the engineering risks to some extent, remains to be seen soon. The city really must not repeat the mistakes of Taipei, cornered now into doing low-margin ecosystem stuff for the real technology principals.

They aren’t the only ones – Nvidia is also strongly present here, even organizing organic farming fun for its Shenzhen staff, and Qualcomm is preparing their positions in the new hardware Mecca. After all, everything from smartphones to supercomputers are both designed and used here. Only AMD is missing, without even an office to call home here… tells you something, doesn’t it?

That also serves as a warning to Taipei, that – irrespective of the simple cheap stuff shown in their little booths – Shenzhen is on target to take more and more of Taiwan’s IT pie in the near future; you will be looking at reports from their IT fairs here in the next year and beyond as well. So, Taiwan must do what Japan did as well, and boldly go to the top end of technology and produce stuff for the top tier of the users, willing to pay stuff for it. A good reference are Japanese products shown at Singapore’s BroadcastAsia show last week – cameras and monitors for US$ 30K and above EACH, and workstations controlling them costing not much less. And, they sell well… why bother selling million Fiats when thousand Ferraris could make more?

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OnePlus has a new phone that the entire internet has been talking about, which happens to share the same name as HTC’s flagship phone, the One. So, we have the OnePlus One and the HTC One, okay, a little problematic, but nothing too serious since the two brand names usually come before the model name. OnePlus have been billing themselves as an upstart smartphone company, some of which were formerly with OPPO. Funny enough, if you abbreviate OnePlus One, it almost says OPPO but that just seems a bit ridiculous until you look at when the company was founded and when all of the trademarks were filed and by whom. That also goes for a ton of other things which really make OnePlus look like a subsidiary of OPPO, which isn’t really a bad thing until you realize how OnePlus had denied their ownership by OPPO and only claimed them to be a ‘partner’ in manufacturing.

The OnePlus brand was originally announced on December 17th, 2013, however a lot of the applications and trademarks came more than a month before the company supposedly existed. At that time, they hadn’t announced their product or even talked much about what they were doing, yet they were already paying lawyers to file for their trademarks globally. What’s even more confusing is the sheer amount of corporations involved in OnePlus and OPPO and how many shell companies appear to be used to operate these two companies. OnePlus has offices in both Hong Kong and Shenzhen, which is to be expected of any serious tech company in China, but they also have multiple holding companies for their websites and offices. In Hong Kong, they are owned by ONEPLUS TECH LIMITED and in Shenzhen they go by SHENZHEN ONEPLUS SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD. But… if you go back and look at the WHOIS for OnePlus.net you can see an archived version before OnePlus technically existed and their trademarks hadn’t been filed yet. There it clearly shows OnePlus.net was owned by OPPO and registered by OPPO employees. But it gets better, according to documents obtained by Techweb.com OPPO is 100% owner of all the shares of OnePlus, making them a wholly owned subsidiary of OPPO, pulling the wool over our eyes.

Plus, there are a few other factors that cast doubt upon OnePlus and who’s exactly backing them. If the company was founded in December, how were they able to design and manufacture a phone with the fastest chip from Qualcomm (highest bin of Snapdragon 801) for less money than virtually all other manufacturers? Sure, it is a newer phone, but it isn’t really that much newer than the HTC One M8 or Galaxy S5, yet they are able to put the best bin of the Snapdragon 801 into a $299 phone, essentially half the price of the HTC One M8 and the Galaxy S5. Not to mention the fact that OnePlus launched that campaign where they offered to give OnePlus phones to people that crushed their old phones for $1, except some people were stupid and actually crushed their phones before actually getting selected for the promotion. The entire promotion actually gained OnePlus a lot of attention and they ‘suddenly’ succumbed to pressure about ewaste and instead offered to take the phones and donate them towards charity instead.

But this doesn’t change the fact that they’ve effectively built a phone from December until April, which is virtually unheard of from any major smartphone manufacturer for a high-end global device, even HTC or Samsung. Sure, development times for smartphones are getting shorter and shorter, but to start as a new company in December and have a finished phone by April seems nearly impossible. Once you take that into consideration you also have to think about how they were able to get the components and supply chain in place to be able to do it for $299. They wouldn’t be able to secure such components or favorable pricing unless they were considered a major smartphone manufacturer already, it just isn’t possible. So, clearly, someone bigger than OnePlus is involved, and I’m not even sure OPPO is big enough to be able to manage that kind of pull with suppliers. But there might be a bigger entity than OPPO or OnePlus that could…

But things actually get much more interesting, because OPPO is actually owned by BBK electronics, which is the manufacturer of Memorex and Philco brands of electronics in addition to ODM and OEM hardware for various companies, including OPPO. If that link isn’t strong enough, the CEO of OPPO Russia is also an employee of BBK, twice over. And unsurprisingly, BBK also makes mobile products, in addition to OPPO making their own. BBK was founded in 1995, and according to these documents, is a state-owned company. Even though, BBK’s own site says that their ‘group of companies’ was founded in 1998, which would still make sense if it means when all of the BBK companies were combined. However, Forbes confirms the 1995 foundation date as well, even though the address appears to be out of date. In fact, in our searches, we found that BBK had multiple (2 or 3) addresses in Hong Kong and the same number in the Guangdong area. They are an absolutely enormous company and to think that OnePlus is merely a speck in their vast empire is not much of an exaggeration. OnePlus is a brand of OPPO, which is a brand of BBK and remember that when listening to their marketing.

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On January 8, 2009, Nvidia will officially introduce GeForce GTX285 1GB and GTX295 1.8 GB cards. Or that was the theory. As it usually happens, manufacturers “accidentally” started to sell early, and this time, the “honor” of going on sale first goes to GigaByte.

Thanks to HKEPC, we learned that two Hong Kong shops sell GTX285 by Gigabyte. This means GigaByte will be remembered as the first company to offer GTX285 on sale (first blood for GTX260 55nm went to EVGA). Prices are ranged between 410-440 USD, but you can expect it to drop further – this boards sell with at least $30-50 per store margin for being first (as usual).

GPU-wise, specifications are identical to Quadro FX 5800 – GPU is clocked to 648 MHz, while shaders are working at 1.48 GHz. GDDR3 memory is clocked to 1.24 GHz, meaning you have 158,976 MB/s or 155.25 GB/s to play with. Power consumption is set at 183W and this was the reason for putting 6+6-pin PEG connectors, instead of usual 8+6 configuration.
While this may be good news for owners of older PSUs without 8-pin PEG connector, overclockers will turn their heads to enthusiast manufacturers such as BFG, EVGA, PALIT and others for the 8+6 versions of the card. 6+6+PCIe slot can only provide 236W of power, meaning you have 53W for overclocking.

In the days of original GTX280, TDP was set at 236W and 8+6+PCIe slot configuration could provide 300W of juice – or 64W. Still, I may be wrong on this one, since Shamino recently broke 3DMark world record by using single GeForce GTX 285 card with 1.1 GHz core and 2 GHz Shader clock (you think Peter did that with a 65nm GPU? Think again )

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