Rather than run three growing product lines as divisions that would eventually compete for the same budget and shelf space, Duan Yongping split them into fully separate companies — two of which, OPPO and vivo, are now each other's biggest rivals.

问题

multiple promising business lines inside one company will eventually fight each other for the same resources and market position

背景

换别人会怎么做

The standard move for a company with three growing business lines was to keep them as internal divisions under one board, coordinating shared resources and, when their interests conflicted, having management pick winners or impose compromises to keep all three moving forward under unified control.

他们看到了什么

Duan Yongping saw that keeping the three units as departments of one company, however cleverly incentivized internally, still meant they answered to one board and competed for one pool of capital, which would eventually force compromises that slowed all three down rather than letting each pursue its own logic for growth at full speed. Shaped by his own earlier frustration at being denied an ownership restructuring, he believed growth required people to behave like genuine owners, not division managers, so the fix wasn't better internal coordination, it was giving each business line real independent equity and full separation from the others, even accepting that the resulting companies might one day compete directly.

那一手

In early 1999, Duan split BBK into three independent companies — one led by Huang Yihe (education electronics), one by Chen Mingyong (audio-visual), and one by Shen Wei (communications) — each with its own ownership structure and, in the company's own description, no subordination to each other. The three shared the BBK name and roughly 80 percent of the original distribution channels at the start, but operated as genuinely separate businesses, with Duan himself retaining a minority stake, reportedly around 10 percent, across all three rather than controlling any one of them outright.

为什么管用

Splitting BBK into three genuinely separate companies, each with its own ownership structure and leadership answering to no parent board, removed the internal competition for shared capital and management attention that would have inevitably forced tradeoffs between the three businesses had they stayed divisions. Because each new company's leadership held real equity rather than being incentivized only through compensation tied to a shared corporate structure, they had the same ownership-level motivation Duan believed drove superior performance, letting each pursue its own market logic, and later its own rebrand into OPPO and vivo, without needing sign-off from a parent entity balancing competing priorities. The result was that both companies could independently reach the scale and speed to become major smartphone makers, combined quarterly shipments rivaling Apple's by 2016, an outcome that concentrated management attention on one shared corporate structure would likely have slowed by forcing the three original units to negotiate over the same finite resources.

值了多少

In 2001, the audio-visual and communications companies jointly invested ¥30 million to register a new brand, OPPO, under Chen Mingyong, who later bought out the other shareholders' interest in it entirely. In June 2010, Shen Wei's communications company separately launched vivo as its own new brand, mirroring OPPO's earlier move — in both cases replacing an aging house brand with one built for younger, more international buyers. By 2016, OPPO and vivo, both smartphone makers with no ownership overlap by then, had combined quarterly shipments of roughly 39 million units, rivaling Apple's, and now openly compete against each other in the same market their shared corporate ancestor once served as three divisions.

什么时候会失灵

The mechanism depends on each spun-off business line genuinely having enough independent viability and market opportunity to succeed on its own, since a business line too small, too dependent on shared infrastructure, or too early-stage to survive without the parent's resources would be set up to fail rather than freed to grow, unlike BBK's three already-promising divisions. It also depends on the original founder or parent being genuinely willing to give up control, real equity distributed to the new companies' leadership rather than symbolic autonomy inside a structure the parent still ultimately directed, since retaining real authority over supposedly independent units reproduces the exact resource competition the split was meant to eliminate. And the approach accepts a real cost as the price of the benefit: siblings that could have coordinated as one unified competitor in their market may instead spend resources competing against each other, as OPPO and vivo eventually did, a tradeoff that only makes sense when the gains from full independence for each business genuinely outweigh whatever coordination advantage staying unified might have offered.

后来呢

Duan Yongping is now informally credited in Chinese business commentary as the common founder-mentor behind OPPO, vivo and other ventures descended from BBK, and the 1999 split is cited as a rare, deliberate example of a founder choosing to let sibling businesses become full competitors rather than trying to manage their rivalry from inside one corporate structure.

资料来源

1. [1]企业漫谈：步步高、OPPO、vivo到底是什么关系？格隆汇 (Gelonghui), 2022m.gelonghui.com
2. [2]小霸王之父段永平:OPPO和VIVO创始人背后共同的男人新浪财经 (Sina Finance), 2018finance.sina.com.cn

收下它

同一路聪明

• 1970 · AldiAldi didn't hire staff to chase abandoned shopping carts across the parking lot — it made getting a quarter back the customer's own problem to solve.
• 1995 · City of Bogotá (Mayor Antanas Mockus)Bogotá answered jaywalking and reckless driving with mimes instead of more tickets
• 1949 · Government of FinlandFinland didn't mandate prenatal checkups — it just made a free box of baby supplies conditional on showing up to one