Xiaomi rushes to run, Huawei is late, who is closer to the whole house intelligence?

"With an iPhone 13 in my hand, a mijia smart lamp, a purifier, and a drying rack at home, in order to experience Huawei Hongmeng, I ordered a midea oven and Haier refrigerator equipped with HarmonyOS 2." Netizen Richard laughed at himself, "I have no loyalty to smart electronic products." ”

In order to pursue the high-quality experience of product connection and use, using products of the same brand and ecology, it is more possible to obtain a silky and smooth interactive feeling - digital enthusiasts call it "entering the pit family barrel". Compared with Apple, which focuses on mobile phones, tablets and computers, the market has higher expectations for Xiaomi and Huawei to create a system ecology in multiple scenarios. "Xiaomi and Huawei's family bucket is the real family bucket, and Apple can only be called 'office bucket' or 'mobile device family bucket'." Richard said bluntly.

It is true that in the field of all-scenario intelligence, the mainstream smart home ecology options in front of domestic consumers are only Xiaomi and Huawei. After the battle zone of the two top players extends from the single field of smart phones to the all-round AIoT ecology of intelligent hardware, Xiaomi and Huawei face the coming whole house intelligent war, who has the greater chance of winning? Who is more anxious?

Xiaomi, which is "far ahead"

In 2013, Xiaomi established the ecological chain business, took the lead in throwing out the concept of "everything can be OTA", and began to build Xiaomi's ecological barriers with the orientation of "enriching product categories".

At that time, Xiaomi was well aware of its shortcomings and strengths: if you use cost-effective logic to do hardware research and development and the old big factories "hard and hard", it is obviously not smart; the advantages of software and ecology are played to the extreme is the right way - around the smart home scene, from small electrical appliances to gradually extend to daily necessities, integrating market resources into the Xiaomi ecology.

Lei Jun repeatedly reiterated that "Xiaomi must always adhere to the road of high cost performance and high quality, and low gross profit can force itself to pursue efficiency and maintain the company's combat effectiveness" The concept runs through the incubation of Xiaomi's ecological chain.

Xiaomi also follows the efficiency logic when selecting ecological chain categories and enterprises.

Huang Hai, executive director of Fengrui Capital, believes that the potential investment direction of Xiaomi is mostly an "ant market" with "no obvious leader, the market is scattered, and there are many miscellaneous brands but big brands are expensive". Xiaomi selects high-quality enterprises to invest in and intervene in production, attaches importance to industrial design and quality control, and concentrates limited research and development, production and marketing resources on a single product to cultivate "explosive models".

With an IoT platform and the appeal of the mobile phone field, Xiaomi has attracted enough technology startups to join the ecological chain.

Xiaomi not only deeply participates in the growth of Xiaomi's ecological chain enterprises in the mode of "investment + intervention in production", but also leads product definition and supply chain management, allowing the latter to enjoy Xiaomi's brand dividends, channel dividends, user dividends and overseas market dividends, and strives to help it grow rapidly from a start-up to a medium-sized enterprise.

Facts have proved that this set of playing methods has been effective, and the scale of Xiaomi's ecological chain has expanded rapidly. By the end of 2021, there are more than 300 Xiaomi ecological chain enterprises, contributing 30 billion yuan in sales revenue, of which 4 have been listed.

The concept of "smart home" is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and the strong xiaomi hardware ecology has become the only choice for most users to build a whole house of intelligence, and xiaomi seems to be "far ahead".

Is Huawei late?

Huawei's layout of the smart home ecology is late compared to Xiaomi, which is the first to board.

At the end of 2015, Huawei officially targeted smart home scenarios and released the HiLink strategy to announce its entry, when Xiaomi had been deeply involved in the field for more than two years.

At the beginning of 2019, Huawei released the "1+8+N" all-scenario smart life strategy - "1" represents mobile phones, "8" represents tablets, PCs, VR devices, wearable devices, smart screens, smart audio, smart audio, and car machines; "N" represents pan-IoT devices. While developing smart products, Huawei is promoting an all-scenario intelligent strategy, focusing on five life scenarios: "smart office, sports and health, smart home, smart travel, and audio-visual entertainment."

In the same period, the product matrix of the Xiaomi ecological chain with smart phones, smart speakers and smart TVs as the core has been initially formed, and as of June 2019, the number of smart device connections has approached 200 million units.

Huawei's strategy is to build the underlying platform and accumulate the underlying capabilities consistently.

Huawei's HiLink protocol enables different brands of smart devices to interconnect and fully share information with devices from different manufacturers. Through the open HiLink platform, Huawei connects more and more ecosystem partners and attracts more compatible products to quickly cover mature product categories.

As a result, Huawei's AIoT alliance is increasingly prosperous. According to the disclosure, Huawei has established cooperation with more than 600 global home appliance brands such as Haier, Midea, Gree, Philips, Toshiba, and Canon. In 2020, midea, boss, Jiuyang and other brands equipped with Hongmeng OS smart electrical products have also been listed.

The preemptive "pre-burial" of the front-loading market is Huawei's far-sighted thinking before Xiaomi. In order to cope with the stage transition from single-product intelligence to whole-house intelligence, Huawei has targeted the "All in One Whole House Intelligent Solution" as a "smart home infrastructure front-loading construction solution".

To this end, Huawei has united real estate companies such as China Overseas Real Estate, China Merchants Real Estate, COFCO Real Estate, Greenland, Vanke, and Country Garden, as well as home improvement companies such as Actually Home and Oupai. In 2020, a number of smart landing model rooms in the whole house will be opened.

In order to attract mature brands and traditional enterprises to join the Huawei ecosystem, Huawei's underlying software capabilities of "defining hardware" and the technical accumulation of collaborative hardware and software unification are the most convincing.

At the operational level, Hongmeng OS realizes the interconnection of the underlying system between the mobile phone and the smart home, and the interactive connection is also quite "elegant": the user only needs to "touch" the mobile phone to quickly connect the device, and the working status of the home appliance is immediately visible; at the same time, the device can actively push the operation situation and the consumable margin.

Same soul, different forms

When human beings enter the intelligent world of interconnection of all things, intelligent hardware devices will most likely develop from "technological diversity" to "standard unification". The final picture of multi-device unification may be - "one soul, different forms".

In fact, most of the intelligent product ecology on the market only stays in the stage of sending and receiving instructions and control, and the technical threshold is not high, and it can be achieved by adding WiFi module switches to the product. However, connecting multiple smart items that receive and execute commands is not enough to meet the expectations of the "smart system", and Xiaomi is no exception.

Therefore, manufacturers have begun to step up the optimization of the system and start the ecological layout.

At this time, the unsatisfactory xiaomi ecological interaction design is particularly "not thinking of making progress", and the phenomenon of many rice noodles turning against other products has also been seen. "Xiaomi has a lot of independent apps, resulting in a fragmented user experience, but the ecological gulf between Xiaomi products is getting bigger and bigger." Veteran rice noodle SeeOne admits that the word "pity" is far from enough to describe his disappointment.

With a plethora of rivals, Xiaomi's space for continued to soar in the pan-IoT field is increasingly tight. Since last year, the sales growth rate of Xiaomi's ecological chain has braked, miUI wind evaluation has fallen, and now Xiaomi does not seem to be "riding the dust" like in the past. In SeeOne's view, Xiaomi should realize that polishing the integration of software and hardware products is more long-term significance, if in a hurry, the function seems to be cool, but in fact full of bugs of semi-finished products to the market, is equivalent to handing over users to people.

For Xiaomi, the market challenge is quite severe, Huang Hai said, "Xiaomi's smart small home appliances product positioning, as well as the success of the cost-effective model, the factors of the times can not be ignored." "Under the trend of consumption upgrading, users have begun to change their consumption habits; smart products only have a cost performance, or it will be difficult to convince Chinese consumers."

In the past, the market with smart products as the mainstream has achieved the glory of Xiaomi. The story of the whole house's intelligent stage may be another set of scripts: from the perspective of the underlying technology, Huawei has taken the lead in the "Internet of Everything" with the underlying architecture of the Internet of Things.

As stated in its corporate vision, Huawei is committed to bringing the digital world to everyone, every home, and every organization, building a fully connected and intelligent world, and enabling consumers to obtain the ultimate personalized and intelligent experience in all scenarios such as home, travel, office, audio-visual entertainment, and sports and health.

Huawei's layout can already glimpse this shadow: Hongmeng OS, which is expected to land on a large scale in the future, its distributed technology can help IoT hardware equipment manufacturers achieve "product-as-a-service", effectively empower IoT hardware upgrades, and greatly enhance the added value of existing products.

When Hongmeng matures, its system performance and synergy performance will be particularly worth looking forward to.

End

On the one hand, Huawei is confined to the well-known dilemma, on the other hand, Xiaomi's ecological barriers are gradually declining, and fans inevitably have mixed feelings, but they are not depressed:

Even so, Huawei still represents China's most advanced independent research and development technology; Xiaomi still has the strongest resource integration capabilities in China, both of which belong to the national enterprises that have boosted the rise of China's industry. Even if you are temporarily at a low point or even struggling, if you walk on the right path, you will always reach the top.

This time, I hope that both Huawei and Xiaomi can reach the top.

Resources

1. "Xiaomi Ecological Chain Battlefield Notes", Xiaomi Ecological Chain Barn Notes

2. 2020 Annual Report, Huawei Investment Holding Co., Ltd

3. "Huawei's Growth Path: 22 Key Events Affecting Huawei", Deng Bin

4. Why do huawei mobile phone chips see no hope? Bad reviewer

5, "Worse than MIUI is xiaomi's layout and ecology", SeeOne