Smartisan's 12th Launch Event, and the Journeys of Six Fans

A Smartisan Technology launch event with no phone in it

At 7:55 pm on November 6, twenty-five minutes past the start time printed on the ticket, the music was still playing and the lights still hadn't dimmed at the Wuliangye Performing Arts Center, one street away from the Chengdu municipal government. Smartisan Technology's 12th launch event hadn't begun.

On the Bilibili livestream, scrolling comments reading "redefining 7:30" drifted past. No one in the hall protested. They chatted among themselves while watching the two sides of the stage, the spots where Smartisan Technology CEO Luo Yonghao might walk out.

The black curtain screening the backstage area swayed once, and the nearest block of seats erupted in applause and cheers loud enough to drown out the music. No one appeared.

At 8:06 pm the lights went out and Luo Yonghao walked out from the spot where the curtain had swayed, in the navy shirt and black trousers he wears to every launch event. He waved to the crowd below. The anxiety and impatience turned into a roar of cheering and applause, mixed with shouts of "Teacher Luo, I love you."

A Bullet Messenger notification popped up on my phone: "Finally saw Old Luo in person, so excited."

The sender, Zhou Ke, was at a Smartisan launch event for the first time. He is 27 and works as a construction laborer for a facade-maintenance company in Zhengzhou. He took a six-hour train, reached Chengdu South Railway Station at 4:45 pm the day before the event, walked to a budget hotel next to the venue with his backpack, and planned to go straight home once the event ended. He had taken time off work for the trip and had no plans to look around the city.

Zhou Ke calls himself a Smartisan fan, and everyone at work knows he likes Luo Yonghao. Two coworkers bought Smartisan Nut Pro phones on his recommendation. In his dorm room sits a touchscreen monitor he bought on Taobao for 1,100 yuan; after work he plugs his Smartisan R1 into it and uses the phone's built-in TNT feature to read Weibo and watch films.

He said his workmates teased him when he told them he was traveling just for the launch event. "They said I was going to chase a celebrity, chase an idol. I think that's about right. I just wanted to see Luo Yonghao."

People like Zhou Ke are not rare. They call themselves Smartisan fans, Luo fans or hammer friends, and they come from all over the country to Smartisan Technology's launch events.

Bullet Messenger, an app incubated inside Smartisan, has become an important channel for them to talk to each other. Leaving aside the local fan-club groups that already existed, one newly created group for people attending this event had 150 members. Some had arrived in Chengdu three days early; others posted photos of their plane tickets from Guangzhou. A group dinner at a nearby chuan chuan xiang (skewer hot pot) restaurant after the event had already been arranged.

Around the time Zhou Ke was on the train to Chengdu, Zheng Pengfei, a student at Southwest Minzu University, walked into the Sinomach Southwest Building with a group of other young people. Smartisan Technology had set up a display stand in the lobby holding the T1, the Nut 3, phone cases and other products. There wasn't enough to fill it, so one side of the counter also held a few books Luo Yonghao had written or recommended over the years: On the Road of Entrepreneurship, and Made in Japan by Sony co-founder Akio Morita.

They had come to interview as volunteers for the launch event. About a week earlier, Smartisan Technology had announced on its WeChat official account that it was recruiting on-site staff. In the end 20 were picked out of 30 applicants, and Zheng Pengfei was not one of them, which he found a little awkward. In the group chat, a Smartisan staffer said those who missed out could still collect a ticket. That excited him again. "I'm definitely getting to the venue early," he said, "to pick up my ticket and see whether there's anything I can still help with."

The Wuliangye Performing Arts Center sits on the south side of Chengdu, or in the words of a local, "the Big Magic Cube is so far out it's nearly outside the city." Big Magic Cube was the venue's name before Wuliangye bought the naming rights; at the previous Smartisan launch event it hadn't changed yet.

By 4:30 pm on the day, the first attendees were already waiting outside. Ju Ye was among them, a 23-year-old engineer on Beijing's new airport, a year out of college. With construction on the airport winding down, he had taken half a month of annual leave to go back to Xi'an and be with his girlfriend.

He arrived without a ticket. By the time he heard about the event the official channels had sold out, and he didn't believe the tickets being resold on Taobao were real.

"I thought even if I couldn't get in, I could take a photo with the Smartisan launch event billboard at the door and post it to Moments," Ju Ye said. Seeing a Luo Yonghao launch event in person was one item on his wish list for the year.

An hour later, other young people as excited as he was had gathered at the entrance, though not many: just over 200 at the ticket gate. A group of fans who had come together unfurled a banner reading "Smartisan shines, cool as hell" for a photo. Security rushed over at once and told them to put it away as soon as they were done.

Someone had brought a touchscreen to demonstrate TNT on the spot, and drew a crowd.

Before the doors opened, Ju Ye got hold of two tickets, on the tiered seats at the back of the inner section. "Just seeing Old Luo was exciting enough. I didn't expect the seats to be this close either." Because turnout was below expectations, scalpers started dumping tickets cheaply right before the start. In the Bullet Messenger group, someone said he had bought an 800-yuan inner-section ticket for 145 yuan.

The moment Luo Yonghao walked onstage, Ju Ye began taking photos with his own R1.

As at the Bird's Nest launch event in the summer, which started 15 minutes late, Luo Yonghao opened with an apology, but this time gave no reason for the delay. "I'll write the reason in my memoir one day. You can read it then."

The fans below began to applaud, and shouts of "Long live understanding" kept going up, a chant Luo Yonghao had taught the audience in advance at the Bird's Nest event in case his live TNT demo failed.

After the apology, Luo Yonghao began reading out media reviews praising Smartisan Technology, a segment he mocks himself for as "reporting the good news, not the bad." It has been part of Smartisan launch events since the company's first phone, the T1, in 2014. The T1 was delayed more than six months before it reached mass production and sold only 280,000 units in a year, though it did win a few design awards.

"Among Snapdragon 710 phones in the 1,798-to-1,799-yuan range right now, the Nut Pro 2S has the best hardware." Before he had finished reading this line from Leiphone, the room was already applauding and cheering.

Ju Ye, still filming Luo Yonghao on his phone, cheered along with everyone else. He was thinking of buying his parents a Nut Pro 2S at the end of the year, but wanted to see the price during the Double 11 sale first.

Having finished with the compliments, Luo Yonghao sighed. "Don't believe the rumors going around in the media that our Chengdu company is finished. There's nothing to it."

He meant the reports that spread the month before, saying the Chengdu R&D subsidiary had been dissolved and about 100 engineers dismissed. More followed, some claiming Smartisan Technology itself was about to collapse.

The day before the event I went to both of Smartisan Technology's Chengdu offices. The Chengdu branch office Luo Yonghao referred to was still running, but the Chengdu R&D subsidiary said to have cut staff had already moved out. On the 15th floor of the World Trade Tower, through a locked glass door, you could see that the entire floor the subsidiary had occupied was stripped bare. A Herman Miller office chair priced at 12,000 yuan had been left behind, and employee badges lay scattered on the floor.

Luo Yonghao's explanation was that spreading R&D across Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen made communication hard, so the company had to consolidate, and consolidating meant cutting people.

The room reacted with little warmth. It is not a persuasive reason: any company moving 200 employees to a new city would have thought about cross-city communication first.

There were also far fewer people this year. A year earlier, Smartisan Technology had launched the Nut Pro 2 and an air purifier in this same hall. A year on, the thinning was easy to see: a third of the seats in the 12,000-seat venue were empty.

"Our marketing people used to think that as long as this fat guy was willing to hold a launch event, the seats would always fill up. Turns out that's not true. It's been less than full since Pro 2S," Luo Yonghao said from the stage, at his own expense. Then he added: "Don't think I'm washed up just because I can't sell out tickets. I'm the first-generation internet celebrity, and I'm still famous today. There isn't a second one."

For many people, listening to Luo Yonghao's solo stand-up routine is the point of a Smartisan launch event. Li Qi thinks so. This was his fifth one in person.

Li Qi, who had come from Linfen in Shanxi, was one of the very few people in the hall who had actually lost real money because of Luo Yonghao. He runs two phone shops, one selling Apple and one selling Smartisan, and has been using the profits from iPhones to prop up the Smartisan side. "I've never lost money on any business except selling Smartisan phones. The Nut Bluetooth earphones sell for 99 yuan on the official site and I buy them wholesale at 95. What's the point of selling that? I stocked them anyway, just to show support."

Mostly he supports Luo Yonghao the man. Li Qi said he has known of Luo since 2000, when Luo set up his English-training school, and mainly likes some of his opinions. He still remembers a line from Luo's public feud with Fang Zhouzi: "Charity done by a scoundrel is still charity; a scoundrel has rights too, and can defend them."

Following Luo Yonghao, Li Qi came to love Smartisan's stubbornness about product design. "The T1: simple, direct, spare. Where else on the market do you find a phone with that kind of hard-edged design?" Of the nearly ten phones Smartisan has released, the only one he never bought was the M1L, because a phone that looked like an iPhone from the front struck him as not Luo Yonghao's design.

This time Li Qi was not as excited as the first-timers. The Bird's Nest launch event in May had ended his illusions; before it started he had posed for a photo with a diaper handed out at the door, because Luo Yonghao had promised a product that would absolutely make people wet themselves. What arrived was TNT.

"Honestly, I'm here to root for Old Luo, and I'm also afraid I'm here to see him off. I'm afraid I won't get another chance to hear him do a launch event." Li Qi said he can't forget the 2015 Nut Pro launch event, one of the rare times he saw Old Luo cry. He watched it twice in his shop. He thinks Luo Yonghao has had a hard time of it.

Lei Ke also felt Luo Yonghao had been off his form at the last few launch events. About the same age as Li Qi, slightly balding, speaking with a Cantonese accent, Lei Ke sells internet-of-things products. He had arranged a business trip for himself this time, flown from Guangzhou to Chengdu the day before, and dropped in on the event while he was there.

"I think he's compromised a lot. There's no way around it, it's a business, I understand that. But once you compromise that much you lose the sharp edge you used to have," he said. It didn't stop him supporting Luo. Like Li Qi, Lei Ke had bought an inner-section ticket, a few meters from Luo Yonghao on stage.

Inner-section tickets cost 800 yuan and cover the frontmost ring of seats. Chinese phone makers once treated fans cheering in the hall as the centerpiece of a launch event; today Xiaomi doesn't even sell tickets to the public for every event it holds. At other companies' events the good seats go to officials, partners and media, not fans.

Although the event was held in Chengdu, whose government put 600 million yuan into the company, there was, as usual, no speech by any official and no words of thanks to officials. Luo Yonghao, said to have compromised on a great deal, still seems to hold the line on some things.

Plenty of people, though, came for the products and not for Luo Yonghao. Peng Changhua, who had taken half a day off to be there, was one. He said he is 26 and has already been a Smartisan fan for six years; he started flashing the phone system onto his handset in high school, simply because he liked the thinking behind the OS and found some of its features better than other makers'.

"At the start, most people who liked Smartisan liked it because of Old Luo. Now it's probably half and half," said Peng Changhua, who hadn't even heard of Luo Yonghao before he found Smartisan. His Moments feed is now full of photos of Smartisan Technology products.

After ten minutes of apology and good news, the big screen showed the three products to be unveiled, rendered as shapes under red cloth. But there had been so many leaks on Weibo beforehand that the fan groups had already guessed: a humidifier, a smart speaker and a suitcase.

Zhou Ke didn't believe that was all of it. He posted a screenshot of a Luo Yonghao Weibo post in the group: "This launch event will also unveil something unprecedented."

The first product was a large 9-liter humidifier, and it was not released by Smartisan directly. Like the earlier air purifier, it was developed by Changhuxi Technology (Chengdu).

At 8:30, an hour after the scheduled start, Luo Yonghao began introducing the first product in earnest: the Changhuxi Smart Floor-Standing Humidifier. It holds roughly the equivalent of 16 bottles of 500 ml mineral water. Though released under Changhuxi, Luo Yonghao stressed again and again that Smartisan Technology had designed it. "The person in charge of this humidifier's design is Luo Yonghao," he said.

Eighteen slides explained why different cities need humidifiers, indoors and out; ten more compared the product with rival brands.

A young woman from Chengdu in the next seat shook her head. "It isn't as uncomfortable as the numbers say. Chengdu is actually quite humid. Maybe it's like that when you run the air conditioning."

Half an hour later the humidifier section still hadn't finished; it ran to 108 slides in all. Ju Ye stopped filming and started scrolling through WeChat. He was a little let down. "It's getting boring. The concept part is far too long." Still, as with past Smartisan products, he thought the design details were good, even though living in a dorm meant he would never use one.

He was not alone. Some people went to the snack stand in the aisle for grilled sausages and posted in the thousand-member Bullet Messenger group: "This is the science-brainwashing hour. I'll go back in when he's finished talking."

Luo Yonghao was tiring too. When the big screen switched from the humidifier to a silver-and-black rendering of the smart speaker, he stepped into a corner for some water, and the stage lights followed him. "Who turned the light on above my head? Turn it off. I came over here to get a rest," he said, and it didn't look scripted.

By now the audience's attention was entirely on the smart speaker: the David & Sheryl premium smart speaker, model D1, developed by Shengpan Technology, a company controlled by Smartisan Technology.

Its shape borrows the "Flash Capsule" form from Smartisan OS, pairing mirror-finish metal on top with a finely woven fabric below. To Zhou Ke's eye it really was designed. "I can't believe they actually made a pill," he said. When the light strip aaround its waist came on, the hall gasped.

The features drew an even cooler response than the humidifier had.

Luo Yonghao spent most of his time on new ways to wake the voice assistant — touch the top of the speaker and then speak, or scatter a few Nut Bluetooth remotes around the house and press one before speaking — and on a voice-pitch-shifting feature.

This was the only moment in the whole event when another member of Smartisan Technology appeared: product director Zhu Xiaomu, as a pitch-shifted voice coming out of the speaker. He has been with the company since its first day.

At every previous launch event, Luo Yonghao invited newly hired executives onstage, giving them a turn alongside the product. Of the executives who appeared over the years, those who have since left include former Smartisan Technology CTO Qian Chen, R&D director Chi Jianqiang, and industrial design VP Li Jianye.

This time no new executives came onstage, and Wu Dezhou, formerly VP of products at Huawei's Honor, Smartisan Technology president Peng Jinzhou — both named repeatedly by Luo Yonghao in the past — and recently hired product manager Zhu Haizhou all went unmentioned. Through the whole event, the executives still at the company said nothing on Weibo beyond reposting a prize draw. Only Zhu Haizhou wrote briefly about using the smart speaker.

The last distinctive feature of the D1 was a button on top that sends a Bullet Messenger voice message straight to a friend.

The hall went quiet. Bullet Messenger has been Smartisan's most talked-about product this year. The chat app, which turns speech into text, shot briefly to the top of Apple's iOS download chart after it launched in the summer. But what matters most in a chat app is the relationships inside it, and against WeChat's 900 million accounts a new chat app is already too late. Since October, Bullet Messenger has dropped out of the iOS download chart's top 1,500.

Neither of the two products moved Ju Ye. He no longer leaned forward as Luo Yonghao worked through each point about the speaker's sound; he sat back and read the chat in his WeChat group.

In the thousand-member Bullet Messenger group, some people started saying they were disappointed. "Came all the way from Wuhan for this. Disappointed." Others were understanding: "The price of taking investment is that you have to shift product. Otherwise how do you survive? Look at Gionee."

After stressing the sound quality and the design once more, Luo Yonghao announced the D1's price: 899 yuan. Applause built slowly. There was no cheering.

"A bit expensive." Li Qi, who had been thinking of stocking it, hesitated. He sent a message: "I'll wait for the reviews and the wholesale price. I'd consider bringing in one unit to look at."

Li Qi may have a long wait. The D1 won't arrive until spring 2019, later even than the desktop humidifier, which ships by Christmas — and no date has been set.

By the time the finale, the suitcase, was unveiled, people had begun leaving.

More than 20 minutes passed between the suitcase appearing on screen and the first round of applause. Even the demonstration of the opening front panel drew nothing. What did get applause was a thoughtful memo strip.

"I think this suitcase will be a hit," said Lei Ke, who had come to Chengdu on business and dropped in on the event — precisely the business traveller Luo Yonghao believes will never let go of the case once he has used it. To him, the smart speaker was not something anyone needs, whereas the suitcase solved real problems for several kinds of customer.

Perhaps with that in mind, the suitcase came in more price tiers than either of the other two new products. The features Luo Yonghao spent nearly 40 minutes on, including the built-in power bank and the front-opening door, appeared almost entirely on the 1,999-yuan flagship.

The rest — a 1,199-yuan standard version and a 299-yuan polycarbonate case pitched at young people — share only the flagship's exterior, with none of the smart features.

Still, the 299-yuan price got the hall clapping after a long silence. Ju Ye nodded. "That price isn't bad." Luo Yonghao then said that ordering on JD.com in the run-up to Double 11 came with a further discount of 50 to 200 yuan, and a room that had been quiet for almost an hour cheered.

Sure enough, the 299-yuan suitcase became the item fans posted about most in the group chats afterwards, sharing their order screens. JD.com also ran a promotion offering the suitcase for 1 yuan if enough friends helped bargain the price down, and calls for help with the bargaining kept popping up in the groups. Someone also dug out a JD Plus member coupon for 60 yuan off 199, bringing the suitcase down to 179 yuan.

The most "unexpected" product of the evening was still the one Smartisan Technology lives on: the phone. Luo Yonghao used a single slide to introduce a peacock-blue version of the R1, and spoke for 26 seconds in total.

On April 8, 2012, Luo Yonghao announced on Sina Weibo that he was going to make phones. Before that he had worked on building sites, taught English, run the blog site Bullog, and smashed a Siemens refrigerator.

Smartisan caught the wave of Xiaomi's rise and watched OPPO and Vivo push shipments past 100 million, as phone competition moved from online to offline and, after more than a decade of fast growth, contracted for the first time.

After several cash crises and rounds of acquisition talks, Smartisan held on through sales of a few cheap models and a 600-million-yuan investment from the Chengdu municipal government, and avoided the fate of Gionee, Xiaolajiao and other second- and third-tier makers that have disappeared.

This was the first launch event with no new phone and no new software features.

At the end, the words "Made in China" filled the screen behind Luo Yonghao. He spent five minutes explaining why there was no new phone and why Smartisan is making these other products. "Honestly, these are easier to make than phones, and easier to make money on. But what we want more is to take Chinese manufacturing onto the world stage."

Twenty-six seconds of phone, five minutes of sentiment, two hours of humidifier, speaker and suitcase. Smartisan's 12th launch event was over.

Three years ago, after the T2 launch event at the National Convention Center outside Beijing's North Fourth Ring Road, the audience did what tradition demanded: took photos in front of the big screen, or crowded around whoever had just grabbed a new phone, waiting for a turn to touch it.

This time there was no phone and no display area.

Ju Ye took his girlfriend's hand and walked out. He didn't linger the way someone might after a wish comes true; he hadn't expected the event to finish so late, and now had to hurry and book a hotel.

Zhou Ke went to the fans' offline gathering. On the phone he sounded a little disappointed. "I might think about buying a speaker to play music, but I'll wait a while. The suitcase is all right, the design looks good. But it's no use to me."

Li Qi went to dinner with the friends he had traveled with. Peng Changhua, knowing a car would be hard to get at that hour, arranged with a few local friends to eat at the chuan chuan xiang place next door before heading off.

Inside the hall, the big screen still read "Made in China." This time, nobody took a photo in front of it.

Cover image: photographed by QDaily; Visual China Group