Huawei layout whole house intelligence, and Xiaomi compete on this track, who are you more optimistic about?

Text/Yang Jianyong

When it comes to the smart home industry, the first thing that comes to mind is the strong consumer demand for various smart home products, followed by the broad prospects of the industry. So far, it has attracted all kinds of heavyweight players to pour into this track, making the industry more and more serious, mainly reflected in the fact that the market is in the hands of a small number of players. From the current point of view, the smart home market has four major camps of players, namely traditional manufacturers, mobile phone camps, Internet giants and smart home innovation enterprises.

In the mobile phone camp, Xiaomi and Huawei are the most representative. Among them, from the perspective of revenue, Xiaomi is the first mobile phone manufacturer to harvest the smart home dividend. In the first three quarters of 2021, the total revenue of IoT and consumer products reached 59.9 billion yuan, an increase of 29% year-on-year; the Xiaomi AIoT platform has connected more than 400 million IoT devices, and the number of monthly active users of the artificial intelligence assistant "Little Love Classmate" has reached 105 million.

It can gain a lot on the smart home track, mainly thanks to the huge ecological chain enterprises actively cultivated many years ago, and build an intelligent voice + AIoT platform ecology, after years of exploration, making it rank among the first camp in the smart home industry. As of September 30, 2021, Xiaomi has invested in a total of 360 companies, including Huami, Yunmi, Stone Technology, etc. As well as smart TVs, smart air conditioners, sweeping robots, air purifiers and other series of smart devices, the strong demand has brought about the steady growth of Xiaomi's IoT and consumer goods revenue, showing that the core strategy of mobile phone + AIoT has achieved results.

For Huawei, due to the limited development of mobile phones, the consumer business sector is fully promoting the smart home strategy, and this track is also developing rapidly, and currently cooperates with more than 1800 industry partners to cooperate with more than 4000 smart products, and jointly build a prosperous hardware ecology. Just in October this year, Huawei's whole house intelligence strategy was upgraded again. With HarmonyOS as the cornerstone, the 1+2+N whole-house intelligent solution has been upgraded to drive the transformation of a single scene to a whole-house scene and further enhance the smart home experience.

Among them, 1 refers to the smart host of the Hongmeng framework, which is upgraded from the connection to a new smart host that integrates connection, computing, storage and intelligent services. 2 upgrades to a set of space interaction hardware and an interactive software, consumers can manage the devices at home anytime, anywhere, efficiently, and improve the sense of control of life. N represents the subsystem, which can be subdivided into 6 spatial subsystems and 4 whole-room systems.

Overall, with many advantages such as strong brand, user scale, technology and the smart home ecology built, the whole house intelligent solution brought to consumers is committed to creating a high-quality experience of all-scenario smart life. At the same time, Shao Yang, chief strategy officer of Huawei Consumer BG, even revealed the new goal of Huawei Whole House Intelligence: "Achieve 5 million sets in 5 years and be the leader of space intelligence."

Finally, in recent years, the smart home market has shown a rapid growth pattern. According to data given by Omdia, the global smart home market size is expected to exceed $178.5 billion by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 24.1% during the period 2020-2025. As an important smart home market in the world, China's smart home device shipments will reach 230 million units this year, and will grow to nearly 540 million units by 2025. This data comes from IDC.

Therefore, many players on the smart home track, because of the huge industry cake, each manufacturer harvests the industry development dividend with its own advantages. Of course, in addition to excellent products, it is also necessary to build an ecology, so that people's smart home life can be realized with the intelligent landing of the whole house, and it is also the key to the victory of the smart home market.

Yang Jianyong, a contributor to Forbes China and winner of the NetEase 2020 Most Influential Award, is committed to in-depth interpretation of cutting-edge technologies such as the Internet of Things, smart home and artificial intelligence, and his views and research strategies have been cited by many authoritative media and well-known enterprises.