Meizu’s Offline Flagship Store to Sell Vehicles

Meizu, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer acquired by a venture under Geely’s chairman last year, will open a new three-story flagship store in Wuhan, Hubei Province. The new store was being renovated and the enclosure was marked with “FlymeAuto,” Meizu’s vehicle system, indicating that the store may be used to sell vehicles.

Wan Zhiqiang, an assistant vice president at Meizu, took to Weibo last October to share two design proposals for the phone maker’s new flagship store indicating the company’s stores will showcase cars. Wan showed two designs in marble and metal styles and asked his fans to comment on which style they would prefer.

In addition, it can be seen in the design proposal that the parking spaces for exhibition cars are conspicuously reserved. Meizu will build more offline brand experience stores in the future, integrating automobiles, smartphones and home appliances to provide consumers with a multi-terminal immersive experience.

Meizu’s building in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, showed a new poster in October last year, which read “all in auto!” At that time, it posted a number of automobile-related positions on the recruitment platform, especially in the field of vehicle manufacturing. The official response to this matter was, “the company is indeed stocking relevant talents in the automotive field.” Victor Yang, the vice president of Geely, said that Meizu does not aim to produce its own cars, only to serve car companies.

The brand-new Meizu 20 smartphone is also expected to be released in the spring of 2023. The smartphone has passed the national quality certifications in China, with a rated battery capacity of 4600mAh to support 80W fast charging. The device will also be equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform and support satellite communication technology.

SEE ALSO: Chinese Consumer Electronics Manufacturer Meizu to Build 1,000 Stores within Three Years

The biggest suspense regarding Meizu’s future smartphones is whether it will adopt Huawei’s HarmonyOS. After the release of HarmonyOS 3.0 last year, it was reported that non-Huawei smartphones would adopt this system, such as the one from a well-known former smartphone maker that was speculated to be Meizu.

The relationship between Meizu and Huawei began in May 2021, when the two sides reached cooperation to launch smart devices equipped with Harmony OS. However, this collaboration was limited to Lipro healthy lighting.