vivo, one of rising Chinese smartphone specialists, has refreshed its portfolio by launching X9s and X9s Plus this week in China. X9s and X9s Plus didn't come with major hardware upgrades, instead, dual front camera (20MP+5MP) still remains as one of key selling points. However, the competition in this segment has become intensified, with OPPO's newly launched R11, Gionee's four camera model S10, as well as Huawei's P10 etc. We don't expect X9s and X9s Plus will beat OPPO's R11 and Huawei's P10 models this year. According to our Smartphone Model Tracker (SMT) services, OPPO's R9s ranked the third best-selling model in Q1 2017, just after iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.  

Interestingly unlike OPPO and Xiaomi, vivo didn't increase price of X9s models. In contrast, it slightly reduced the price by RMB 100 for X9s from predecessor X9. Moreover, it has reduced price for X9 series last month, making me believe vivo is trying to play the card of "price war" to compete with OPPO and other vendors.

Another movement catching eyeballs is that the company demonstrated under display fingerprint technology at MWC Shanghai last week. The technology is based on Qualcomm's ultrasound solution and widely expected to be adopted in upcoming new iPhone models later this year. However, based on the info from upstream supply chain, we believe under display fingerprint tech would not massively adopted in smartphones before 2018. vivo was trying to showcase its R&D capacity by demon the solution at MWC Shanghai, but we don't think it will help vivo truly standing out from many other Chinese OEMs.

vivo ranked the fifth largest smartphone vendor in Q1 2017 by shipments, with 6% market share. However, majority of volumes were still generated from China market.