Meizu Phone "Disintegration": Over Half of the Employees Leave, Zhajianxing Gives Up Acquisition But Has Taken Away Core Assets, Brand Will Become History

According to 1M AI News's monitoring, Meizu recently announced a major reorganization, with over 50% of its employees set to leave, involving about 400 people. Most of the departing employees will receive N+2 compensation and must complete the procedures by this Friday; the trendy brand team PANDAER will be split off and operate independently; the AR glasses team reportedly has been partially absorbed by the AR glasses company Thunder Innovation, although Meizu has denied this claim.

Of particular note is the flow of assets behind the scenes. According to an exclusive report, the AI company StepLeap Starlight had previously negotiated the acquisition of Meizu's mobile phone team but eventually gave up, citing that they "believed Meizu's current brand value is not high." However, StepLeap Starlight's AI hardware company Zhiyue Qianli has already absorbed some of Meizu phone's core assets, including code, product documents, technical interface documents, and visual motion effect documents. The connection between StepLeap Starlight and Meizu lies in their common investor Geely: Geely acquired nearly 80% of Meizu's shares several years ago and is also an investor in StepLeap Starlight and Qianli Technology, with Yin Qi, the co-founder of Megvii, concurrently serving as Chairman of StepLeap Starlight and Qianli Technology.

After the adjustment, Meizu's mobile phone team has about 400 remaining employees, who will be redeployed to the Flyme in-car team and the AI software direction. It is reported that this group of personnel is mainly concentrated in Zhuhai, and will no longer use the Meizu brand in the future, or may change the company entity. Meizu had issued an announcement on February 27, announcing the suspension of the hardware project for self-developed new mobile phone products. The announcement pointed directly to the reason for the strategic adjustment as the rise in memory prices, stating that "the commercialization of new mobile phone products has become infeasible."