Breaking up with Xiaomi... China's'Meitwo' to close its smartphone business
Chinese electronics company Xiaomi and software developer Meitu have ended their partnership agreement in about two years. It's been about two years.
On the 29th, according to IT media Gizmo China and some overseas media, China's Meitou has halted the smartphone joint development partnership agreement with Xiaomi and is no longer conducting business of manufacturing and selling mobile phones.
Wu Xinhong, CEO of May2, said, "We ended our partnership with Xiaomi and withdrew our trademarks and licenses," said during a recent annual earnings presentation conference.
As a developer of photo correction apps (applications), May2 gained great popularity by providing various correction and editing functions, as well as selfie and video shooting functions. It became a hot topic in Korea as a cartoon-style photo correction app.
Thanks to this popularity, May2 launched a smartphone that automatically corrects when a picture is taken using a selfie app software. However, it only sold about 3.5 million smartphones over five years.
Afterwards, May2 transferred the smartphone business to Xiaomi in November 2018 and signed a partnership agreement. At the time, the terms of the contract were known in a way that Xiaomi was in charge of designing, developing, manufacturing, and selling all smartphone brands featuring May2's imaging technology and algorithms, and passing part of the sales revenue to May2.
At that time, it became a hot topic because of the meeting of Chinese'top-level' hardware companies and software companies. In the industry, there is also an expectation that the two companies will continue to cooperate in the development of other products besides smartphones, and that the partnership will continue for about 30 years.
In 2019, Xiaomi released the'Mi CC9 Meito Edition-Little Fairy' optimized for selfies when the first smartphone'Mi CC9' of the'Mi CC' series, a new smartphone lineup, was unveiled.
Little Fairy is a product specialized for photography and video shooting, adding all of May2's camera functions and video editing functions to the existing CC9.
In addition to the AI ??low-light portrait function created by the collaboration between the two companies, it supports an artificial intelligence (AI) sky-scapping function that uses deep learning to turn cloudy skies into bright sunny skies or turn them into a moment of sunset, making it a hot topic.
However, the product was not announced any more. Previously, the industry predicted that May2's new smartphone will be released in 2020, but it is known that it was destroyed due to the influence of the Corona 19 pandemic.
It also seems to take into account that, like most Chinese apps, Meito's app is involved in a user's privacy-related issue. Last year, 49.8% of Xiaomi's smartphone sales came from overseas, not from China.
IT expert Kwak Dong-su, columnist, said, "The development of the'pocketless smartphone' that May2 was trying to develop has failed, and the recent funding has also failed." "The result predicted by the absence of sex," he explained.
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