Original

Article/Zhou Hongli

Editor/Sun Jingxin

At the end of the last century, electronic information technology has entered a stage of rapid development, and has been widely used in the field of consumer electronics. Accompanied by technological advances, electronic products, whether from the inner fast and strong, or the extension of the wide and broad, have given consumers a rapid experience of upgrading, the huge market demand makes the related industry's innovation ability to continue to strengthen, the product competition between manufacturers is also increasingly white-hot. With the gradual saturation of the global smartphone industry, Apple's iPhone revenue has entered a negative growth phase since 2018Q4. In the upcoming 5G era, the wave of replacement will bring a second spring to the smartphone industry. Following the smartphone, in terms of wearable devices, AirPods products ignited market enthusiasm once launched, and countless domestic manufacturers began to tend to join the TWS headset market, chasing the industry's development dividends, and began to replicate the road of domestic substitution of smartphones.IDC's "Quarterly Tracking Report on China's Wireless Headset Devices Market, Q2 2020" shows that the 2020 China's wireless headset market shipped 42.56 million units in the first half of the year, up 24% year-on-year. Among them, true wireless headphones accounted for 64%, up 49% year-on-year. At present, the industry's high-end market is dominated by AirPods series products, and the low-end market is highly competitive. Similar to the situation when the smartphone market was blowing up with cottage machines, the cottage TWS headphones from Huaqiangbei are generally priced between $100 and $300, and a single small and medium-sized assembly plant can ship tens of thousands of pairs of pairs every day, directly through the e-commerce into the market, the industry has shown a barbaric growth trend.

From "wired" to "wireless", Airpods lead the industry in innovation, and high-end users get a taste

TWS (True Wireless Stereo) is a new generation of audio and video products. Stereo, TWS (True Wireless Stereo) headset, by the wireless headset and charging box composed of two parts, the main use of Bluetooth technology for audio transmission, the headset between the left and right units are independent of each other and no physical connection, constituting a stereo sound channel. Compared to wired Bluetooth headset, its design is more streamlined, more convenient to store and carry, no stethoscope effect, and usually equipped with a charging box, with a pod of high-speed pairing and enhance the function of the headset battery life, and at the same time can be used as a voice assistant access point, which greatly enhances the user experience.

The TWS concept was initially launched by Apple and quickly became popular around the world. In 2016, Apple released the first smartphone without a 3.5mm headphone jack, iPhone 7, and TWS headphones AirPods, which is a huge revolution in the shape of past consumer electronics products. iPhone 7 innovatively solves the defect of smartphones being prone to water ingress by reducing the external interface of the phone, supporting IP67 level waterproof function. In addition, the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack module saves space inside the phone, and iPhone 7 utilizes the extra space inside the phone to house a Taptic Engine vibration motor for better vibration. Better waterproofing and more space inside the phone has led other phone manufacturers to follow suit, with most mid-range and high-end phone models removing the 3.5mm headphone jack. At the same time, cell phone manufacturers are synchronizing the launch of TWS headsets with their phones based on their own ecosystems.

Despite the fact that Android phone manufacturers have entered the TWS headset market, AirPods have always been the leader. This is due to Apple's self-developed W1, H1 series SoC chip listening technology (Snoopy), and at the same time on the listening mode of the patent blockade. AirPods using the listening technology, the vice ear signal does not need to be forwarded by the main ear, but directly listening to the signal sent by the phone, from which the main and vice earphone signals can be distinguished, thus improving the connection experience of the earphone, and reducing the power consumption caused by poor connection, so that the battery life has been significantly improved. Since then, Apple's TWS products have continued to iterate the technology, and have launched AirPods2 and AirPods Pro, both of which are equipped with a new generation of H1 main control chip. Among them, AirPods 2 was updated with voice control and wireless charging. airPods Pro introduced SiP packaging, further improving the integration of internal components while realizing active noise reduction. Higher performance processing chip, Siri voice wake-up, waterproof, noise reduction and other features of the upgraded, so that the AirPods series of products to lead the way, the rapid growth in sales.

From the first generation of Airpods came out, its price of more than $ 1,000 is not pro-people, the initial period is mainly Apple products die-hard fans and other high-end users taste experience.

According to institutional surveys, users are highly satisfied with Airpods' design, charging efficiency, Bluetooth compatibility, battery life, and wearing comfort. At the same time, Airpods is based on Apple's own iphone ecosystem, which enables fast pairing of Apple devices, perfect compatibility with Siri, Find my iphone and other Apple exclusive applications and services, excellent user experience and Apple's own ecological effect is the key to Airpods become a breakthrough, which has shown a strong trend of replacing the traditional headset once it is launched. According to Slice intelligence data, before the launch of AirPods, the Bluetooth headset market was dominated by traditional audio factories, with Beats and Bose ranking in the top two with 24.1% and 10.5% market share, and one month after the launch of AirPods, the market share reached 26%, becoming the highest-selling headset in the United States. Apple AirPods achieved nearly 60 million sales in 2019, accounting for 71% of the TWS headphone market revenue and 50% of the market share, according to data from Strategy Analytics research report. According to Counterpoint, AirPods sales are expected to reach 100-150 million units in 20-21, with AirPods Pro accounting for 36-40%.

Second, from "one branch of the show" to "blossom" brand and white brand **** exist, the market feast enjoy

Apple AirPods huge success, leading the industry companies have layout TWS headset. The industry companies have layout TWS headset market, the market presents a hundred flowers bloom a hundred competing situation.

(1) Mobile phone manufacturers, Huawei, millet and other cell phone manufacturers to TWS headset as a voice assistant interaction portal, optimize the multi-scene application, integrated into their own smart products ecosystem.

(2) Traditional audio equipment manufacturers, Sony, Walker, Wanmo and other audio manufacturers, in terms of sound quality and sound effects with more professional and more mature technology.

(3) Internet companies, Google, Amazon Feng Internet technology giants, in the artificial intelligence voice chips, algorithms, bone voiceprint and other technology areas more advantageous.

(4) Huaqiang North white label manufacturers, by virtue of its cost advantage, through the thinning of the way, the rapid occupation of the market.

(1) The core pain point is broken, and the connection gap with Apple's products is gradually narrowing, and the user experience is more optimized

Connection stability is the core pain point of TWS headphones. Due to Apple's monopoly on listening (Snoopy) program patents, early Android-based TWS headsets mainly use a forwarding mode, where the audio is transmitted from the connected terminal to the main device, and then forwarded by the main device to the secondary device. The program uses 2.4GHz Bluetooth signals to transmit audio, but the 2.4GHz band is easily absorbed by the human body, resulting in poor penetration, and is susceptible to interference from WiFi and other Bluetooth signals. Meanwhile, due to the need for secondary forwarding, the connection stability and latency of the forwarding mode is much worse than that of the listening mode. In addition, the forwarding mode is only for the primary device in monaural use, and the secondary device cannot be used separately, which results in the power consumption of the primary device being significantly higher than that of the secondary device. Poor connection stability, short standby time, large voice latency, poor quality and even pairing issues have led to the unsatisfactory development of Android-based TWS headsets over time.

In recent years, Loda, Hengxuan, Qualcomm, Huawei and other companies have broken through the technology blockade of the listening mode, the launch of the optimized transmission scheme, the function of the Android-based products have been significantly improved.

Qualcomm's early use of 2.4GHz TWS forwarding program, in February 2018, Qualcomm launched the QCC5100 series chip-based TWS + technology, by the cell phone terminal to send two independent left and right channel audio signals to the left and right two headphones. This dual-transmission solution requires the support of the Bluetooth chip on the cell phone terminal, and can only be realized on cell phones equipped with Snapdragon 845, 670, 710 and later chips, and on other platforms the headphones will switch to the traditional high-latency forwarding mode. Although the compatibility is relatively poor, but thanks to Qualcomm's higher share of the cell phone SoC market, this program also has a certain audience.

Hengxuan LBRT-Low Frequency Forwarding technology transmits signals to the primary headset with a high-frequency Bluetooth signal, and then synchronizes it to the secondary headset through magnetic induction forwarding technology. So as to enhance the signal penetration, and can avoid the loss of sound quality, reduce the delay, in the Huawei Freebuds2 and millet TWS headset used, at the same time, this program does not require cell phone SoC adapted to support different cell phone platforms can achieve better compatibility, the disadvantage is that you need to add a low-frequency antenna in the headset.

Huawei's early TWS headphones used Hengxuan's solution, and in September 2019, Huawei released a new TWS headset Freebuds3, equipped with the latest Kirin A1 chip, which adopts a self-developed dual-channel synchronous transmission technology, similar to the Qualcomm TWS+ technology, which can realize that left and right headphones get left and right channel Bluetooth signals from the phone respectively. The chip is the first certified BT/BLE dual-mode Bluetooth 5.1 SoC, dual-channel synchronous transmission configuration of high-rate audio processing unit, to achieve stable and fast wireless connection, accurate audio and video synchronization, but also need to be used in conjunction with the Kirin SOC, which has greater limitations.

In 2019, Loda broke through Apple's patent blockade and released the MCSync program, which is implemented in a similar way to Apple's listening program, and after the Bluetooth connection between the phone and the main speaker is built, each of the other speakers is then connected to the signal. The advantages of this program are stable connection, support for high-resolution audio streams, does not rely on cell phone terminal support, better compatibility with various platforms, and is applied in many white-label manufacturers' products.In July 2019, Lodar released an upgraded version of the AB155X platform along with the SNOY WF-1000XM3 headphones, which further supports active noise cancellation and voice control functions.

On January 7, 2020, the Bluetooth SIG launched the Bluetooth audio technology standard BLEA, releasing a new generation of Bluetooth audio technology standards - Low Power Audio LE Audio, using the new codec LC3, Multi-Streaming Audio, Hearing Aid, and Broadcast Audio technology, which Multi-Streaming Audio, can
* Due to standard PC architecture, a certain amount of memory is reserved for system usage and therefore the actual memory size is less than the stated amount. Android TWS headset manufacturers can leverage the new Bluetooth audio standard to continually introduce and develop new technologies to narrow the gap with Airpods between basic connectivity transmissions, dramatically improving the user experience.

(2) brand and white brand **** exist, all people **** enjoy TWS headset gourmet feast, the market demand was triggered

Thanks to the development of Bluetooth technology, chip technology and transmission technology, the performance of TWS headset has gradually improved, and more and more for the user to recognize the shipments continue to accelerate, showing explosive growth. showing explosive growth. According to Counterpoint statistics, the global shipment of TWS headphones in 2016 was 9.18 million pairs, mainly contributed by the first generation of AirPods; subsequently accompanied by the iteration of AirPods new products and Android companies to cut into the market, the increase in the shipment of TWS headphones has continued to expand, and the shipment volume in 2017-2019 will be 20 million, 46 million, and 129 million pairs respectively, and it is expected that in 2020 the shipment volume will reach 20 million, 46 million, and 129 million pairs. Shipments are expected to reach more than 230 million pairs in 2020, with a 2016-2020 shipment CAGR of 123.73%.

From the point of view of the brand competition pattern, Apple is a dominant player, and the rest of the cell phone, traditional audio, and technology vendors share the market. According to market research organization counterpoint data, global TWS shipments reached 51 million pairs in Q4 2019, of which Apple's shipments accounted for 41% of the industry, and market sales accounted for 62% of the overall market. The rest of the market share is occupied by other cell phone systems Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei, etc., whose share is 15-25%; another part is occupied by traditional audio producers, with a share of 10-15%; and the rest is occupied by the spin-off companies of various technology industrial chains, with a share of 10-15%.

From the price point of view, by virtue of its performance advantages, Apple AirPods series focus on the high-end market, the price is always more than a thousand dollars. Compared to the high-end positioning of Apple's TWS headphones, Android products have a complete product price system, realizing the full coverage of different price points. In the high-end market, Huawei, Samsung TWS headset prices are generally distributed in the 799-999 yuan, part of the product can be with the Apple product performance standard. In the low-end market, millet, OPPO, VIVO and other cell phone manufacturers of TWS headset prices are mostly distributed in the 199-599 or so. Among them, Xiaomi's TWS headphones focus on cost-effective, Redmi AirDots S is only 99.9 yuan. From the point of view of the average price of the product, according to GFK statistics, the global ASP of TWS headphones in 2017-2019 was $100, $126 and $85.08, respectively.The unit price of TWS headphones has seen a more pronounced decline in 2019, mainly due to the rapid development of white label products in 2019, which led to the downward movement of the overall market average price of TWS headphones market release.

From the perspective of market penetration, it is expected that within 2020, the global stock of iPhones will be more than 1 billion, and the total shipments of AirPods 2017-2019 will be about 110 million pairs, so the current penetration rate of AirPods products is about 11%. Meanwhile, according to Ericsson, the current global market*** has 5.6 billion smartphone signing users, excluding iPhone users, the total installed base of Android phones is about 4.6 billion. Android's TWS headset 2017-2019 total shipments of about 90 million units, so the current penetration rate of TWS products in Android machines is about 2%. In contrast, the Android market has a much larger user base and more room for growth for TWS headsets.

Mobile phone manufacturers and wireless headset to form a high degree of ecological fit, is the first mover advantage of cell phone manufacturers into the TWS market.

The global 925 million iPhone ownership is an important reason for the success of the AirPods series of products, and global shipments of Apple six times the number of Android phones, will also give full play to the advantages of the installed base, and gradually break the technological bottleneck constraints to accelerate the penetration of the market. According to the head of the Leopard Research Institute predicted data show that the next five years, along with Bluetooth, chips, sensors and other technology maturity, as well as online office and online learning needs day by day exuberant, TWS headset industry will accelerate the development of the fastest-growing field of smart wearable devices is expected to predict that the global market size in 2024 will be 42.1 billion U.S. dollars.

Overall, in the high-end market, Apple products riding high, in the low-end market, Huaqiang North began to harvest. Huaqiang North white brand with a low price significantly start, quickly seize the low-order market, user habits gradually cultivate the establishment. The current domestic brand TWS headset shipments accounted for only 25% of the roughly, this proportion includes Huawei, Samsung, OV, millet and other Android phone manufacturers, but also includes the traditional audio class manufacturers, and even Internet companies such as Aqiyi, NetEase cloud also joined the whole track of the rapid expansion of the industry is in the period of chaos. TWS headset market brand and white brand **** exist, product users from the first and second tier cities sink to the three to six tier cities, all people **** enjoy the market feast.

Three, from "can use" to "good use" technology innovation upgrade, consumer experience polarization

(a) sound quality

The sound quality of TWS headphones is related to Bluetooth codec technology, chip capacity, and propagation methods. Currently, Bluetooth 5.0 technology is popularized and has been providing greater communication capacity for audio. And in terms of high definition audio codecs that can significantly improve sound quality, Sony LDAC, Qualcomm aptX HD, and Huawei's HWA are the main technologies represented.

(1) Sony officially launched LDAC high-resolution audio technology during the 2015 CES, and in 2017, the technology was officially opened to Android 8.0. But the prerequisite for an encoder to realize high-definition audio transmission is the bi-directional support of both the transmitter side and the receiver side, and Android 8.0, which supports LDAC, only solves the transmitter side of the problem. LDAC support on Android 8.0 only solves the problem on the transmitter side, but the popularity of LDAC on the receiver side (headphones, speakers, etc.) still needs a process.

(2) Compared to Sony LDAC, Qualcomm launched aptX HD HD Bluetooth audio codec technology in 2016, because of the aptX pad (currently about 4 billion devices have been supported), as well as Qualcomm's own advantages in the field of chips, communications, etc., there is a wider application potential.

(3) Huawei in 2018, in conjunction with key component suppliers and equipment vendors on the audio link, *** with the development of an end-to-end Bluetooth high-definition audio solution HWA (Hi-Res Wireless Audio). At present, the HWA HD Audio Wireless Transmission Standard and Industry Alliance has also been established, with members including Walker, Institute of Acoustics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, AKM, Sennheiser, HiFiMAN, 1MORE Wanmu, and Hewlett-Packard.

In addition, the new generation of Bluetooth audio technology standards continue to improve in audio, LE Audio integrates a new high quality, low power audio decoder, LC3, and supports audio sharing, which can optimize the transmission efficiency of Bluetooth audio by reducing the bit rate by 50% and still maintaining no loss of sound quality.

With the popularity of Lossless Audio Coding and the release of Bluetooth's audio technology standard BLEA, the audio quality of TWS headphones is expected to take a quantum leap forward, and the gap between wired and wired headphones in terms of audio quality will be narrowed down gradually.

(2) Noise Cancellation

As a portable headset product, its application scenarios are often outdoor and public **** place, in the noise or poor signal to ensure that the quality of the call, is to enhance the user experience of the key factors.

At this stage, the active noise cancellation methods of TWS headset are mainly ANC (Active Noise Control) and ENC (Environmental Noise Cancellation).

ANC (Active Noise Control) is a technology that generates reverse acoustic waves equal to the external noise through the noise cancellation system inside the headset to neutralize the noise, thus achieving the effect of noise cancellation.
With the development of AI and Deep Learning technologies, headset active noise cancellation technology has gradually begun to get rid of the limitations of the setup of fixed parameters, allowing for deep learning of multiple usage scenarios, finding the optimal filter parameters for each scenario, and realizing adaptive noise cancellation to provide better noise cancellation results. At present, the latest chips from Apple, Loctite, Hengxuan, Qualcomm, Renesas, Sony, AMS, Dialog, Cirrus Logic and other manufacturers have all supported active noise reduction. Applied in Apple Airpods Pro, Sony WF- 1000XM3, Amazon Echo Buds, Huawei Flypods3, OppoEnco W51 and other mainstream products in the market. Meanwhile, Apple's Airpods Pro's excellent active noise cancellation performance makes ANC noise cancellation technology is expected to become the standard for TWS high-end headphones.

ENC noise cancellation technology uses a dual-microphone array to accurately calculate where the voice speaker is speaking, eliminating distracting noise from the environment while protecting the target voice in the primary direction. ENC technology suppresses up to 90% of inverted ambient noise, providing users with high-quality voice calls. However, ENC technology requires a high level of software algorithms and increases system-wide power consumption. From the product side, Airpods uses bone conduction technology + dual microphone noise reduction, where voice and environmental noise are captured by the dual microphones outside through airborne transmission, and the bone conduction acceleration sensor only captures the audio information of the vocal cord vibration, which is processed by the DSP algorithm to realize clear calls. Huawei Freebuds3 uses dual microphones plus a bone acoustic pattern sensor to realize call noise reduction. During a call, the bone pattern sensor picks up and enhances only the human voice by sensing the vibration of the head tissue, effectively weakening the ambient noise, thus creating a high-quality call and allowing the other party to hear clearly.

(3) Battery life

The future trend of headset intelligence, biometrics, and the need to carry more chips, all require low power consumption support. The longer the battery life, the less frequent the charge, the better the user experience. Most of the TWS headphones on the market today can achieve more than 3 hours of battery life, and some, such as Samsung Galaxy Buds+, have achieved up to 11 hours of battery life. The battery life of the headset is closely related to the power consumption of the chip. In the past, Bluetooth chip power consumption is generally around 20mA, Gainey model AC6936d Bluetooth headset chip power consumption down to 6mA, Hengxuan's BES2300 chip power consumption is as low as 4mA, Qualcomm's QCC5144 chip power consumption is 5mA, compared to the past 20mA of power consumption, brought the qualitative leap of the battery life enhancement.

(4) Intelligent

Headphones have a high-frequency use demand and private personalization, which will give rise to AI applications suitable for the whole scene.

The current intelligent function of TWS headset is mainly reflected in:

(1) integration with cell phone voice assistant, such as integration or support Siri, Google Assistant, etc.

(2) equipped with biosensors, support for biometric motion tracking, such as can monitor heart rate, record the path of the movement, etc.

(3) Real-time translation in multiple languages. Combined with Bragi's positioning of the TWS headset (computer on the ear) and the evolution of technology, TWS headphones are gradually having independent perception, storage and even computing capabilities. 27 sensors are built into the Bragi Dash headphones to help realize health tracking, new types of interactions and other functions, such as the realization of the head shaking to control the virtual 4D menus. 8 sensors in a single headphone of Airpods.

As the degree of intelligence increases, TWS headphones are expected to carry more sensors in the future, which is no longer just a headset, but will become a portable voice interaction device to collect information on physical data, cross-data, and three-dimensional data, so as to make the user profile and behavior more clearly outlined.

Overall, it has been four years since Apple's first-generation AirPods were released in September 2016, and they have now become one of the main drivers of Apple's growth. Android TWS headset in MediaTek Lodging, Qualcomm, Huawei and other companies have successively realized a breakthrough in Bluetooth connectivity technology, solving the Bluetooth connectivity stability, latency and other issues, the market space was detonated, demand is rising rapidly. In the future, with the commercialization of the new generation of Bluetooth audio technology standard LE Audio, as well as the improvement of sound quality, noise reduction, battery life and other functions and the further enhancement of the degree of intelligence, the industry will cross the stage of barbaric growth, and the competitive landscape will further concentrate to the cell phone brand manufacturers to bring consumers a better scene experience. Huawei, millet, OPPO, vivo and other national brands will continue in the field of TWS headphones through continuous technological iteration and independent innovation, and gradually realize the domestic substitution of AirPods, in the "internal cycle" of the economy to bring incremental at the same time, to realize the external output, to help build a "double cycle" pattern. The company's products have been widely recognized by the public and the public.