"The dishwasher is really fragrant", after enjoying a sumptuous Chinese New Year's Eve meal, looking at the dishes piled up in the sink, more and more people began to realize the charm of the dishwasher.
Like the sweeping robot, the dishwasher is the product of the upgrading of residents' consumption and is also a part of the "lazy economy". "Cooking is OK, Washing Dishes Is Not", it allows countless people to free themselves from the tedious dishwashing process and enjoy the pure pleasure of cooking.
This home appliance, which appeared in China very early, has also become one of the few growth categories in the domestic home appliance industry in recent years, attracting many domestic manufacturers to join, and has experienced a whole process from imitation to innovation.
At present, with the help of the outbreak of domestic demand and manufacturers who understand domestic consumption better, a dishwasher surpass war is happening!
Dishwasher Chase Battle
In recent years, affected by factors such as the downward cycle of real estate and the saturation of demand, the growth of traditional home appliances has slowed down, and high-growth kitchen and bathroom and living appliances have become a place of contention for soldiers. The dishwasher of "everyone is doing it, everyone is grabbing it" is one of them.
On January 17, Aowei Cloud Network released the "2021 China Kitchen and Bathroom Market Year-end Summary - Dishwasher" that 2021 is in the structural adjustment stage of the dishwasher. If 2016 is regarded as the first year of the explosion of dishwashers, then 2020 and 2021 are the first years of the popularization of dishwashers.
According to the data of Aowei Cloud Network, the size of the dishwasher market in 2021 is nearly 10 billion, the retail sales volume is 9.96 billion yuan, an increase of 14.4% year-on-year, and the retail volume is 1.952 million units, an increase of 1.7% year-on-year - although compared with the popular home appliance category, the scale of 10 billion is not huge, but just five years ago in 2016, its scale was less than 2 billion yuan.
At the moment when the domestic home appliance industry enters the incremental market, as one of the few growth categories, dishwashers are regarded as a new "blue ocean", various brands have integrated into the market, and the market pattern has changed rapidly - it just so happens that the products are in a period of transformation and upgrading, providing possibilities for the rise of new brands, such as under the awakening of health awareness, from dishwashers to washing and eliminating machines.
Since the introduction of foreign brands such as Siemens into China in the 1990s, the domestic development of dishwashers has been thirty years, before the market has been occupied by foreign brands, and in recent years, the proportion of domestic brands has increased, and boss electrical appliances, Midea, Haier, Fangtai and so on have been involved in the dishwasher market.
Especially in the past two years, the pace of layout has accelerated. In April 2021, Martian announced that it plans to self-finance the construction of a dishwasher manufacturing center project; in May 2021, Vantage said on the investor interactive platform that it will deploy dishwashers as a strategic category.
As of October 2021, 17 new embedded dishwashers have been added on omni-channel (since the second half of 2020) - 12 for the same domestic brand Fangtai and 4 for foreign brands.
In the end, under the siege of domestic brands, the market pattern that was once monopolized by Siemens was loosened. According to Aowei Cloud Network data, in 2021, from the perspective of sales, Siemens' offline KA and online market share were 41.8% and 19.5%, respectively, down 13.2 and 1.8 percentage points, respectively.
In contrast, the market share of domestic brands such as Boss and Fangtai has increased significantly. The data shows that in the whole year of 2021, the market share of offline KA channels and boss dishwashers ranked second, at 19.0%, an increase of 9.7 percentage points; Fangtai's market share ranked third, at 16.2%, an increase of 1.6 percentage points.
Under their leadership, domestic brands have set off a dishwasher chase war.
Localization innovation
Although the dishwasher has entered China in the 1990s, since then, domestic dishwasher brands have also followed the trend of gold, but until 2016, its annual sales were less than 2 billion yuan, and the development can be described as quite slow. One of the reasons is that the product function is not localized enough, "the entire industry copied the European and Japanese design, and did not fully and effectively consider the actual use of Chinese catering habits and tableware", relevant practitioners have pointed out.
The "2020 White Paper on the Development of China's Dishwasher Market" (hereinafter referred to as the "White Paper"),written by the State Grid of China, shows that for users who have purchased, the dishwasher has problems such as "water and electricity", "insufficient washing capacity", "can only wash dishes and cannot wash pots", of which the proportion of users who are dissatisfied with the three is more than 40%.
Behind the complaints of "water and electricity", "insufficient washing ability", "only washing dishes and not washing pots", it is the embodiment of the difference between Chinese and Western food. Different from the relatively standard Western tableware, the different dishes and different dishes of Chinese food lead to great differences in the size and depth of tableware such as dishes and plates, and the degree of oil pollution in Chinese eating habits is also different, which ultimately causes the dishwashing scene to be more complicated.
Not adapting to the needs of the Chinese market – with fewer sales – not deliberately designed to fit the Chinese market, it can be said that for a long time, the Chinese dishwasher market has fallen into such a vicious circle. Only by truly breaking this cycle can the Chinese dishwasher market grow and grow, and truly allow themselves to grow.
The first to take this step are domestic brands, these companies that grew up in China and understand Chinese consumers better, from imitation to creation, brought "Chinese design" to this industry, and eventually prompted the industry to explode. Take the boss who achieved a breakthrough in market share last year, at first it was imported products, and then it began to gradually localize and innovate, and in recent years, it has completed its own creative road.
As shown in the above white paper, some Chinese people have a large amount of oil on tableware after eating, and it is difficult to clean the Western-style dishwasher. To this end, the boss has applied for many dishwasher spray patents, such as a patent entitled "a retractable spray arm for dishwashers and dishwashers" obtained in July 2017, which rotates and extends the spray arm to increase the cleaning area and eliminate cleaning dead ends - the cleaning index of WB755 is 1.21, far exceeding the national water efficiency standard 1.12.
In 2020, the boss went further in the "Chinese style", self-made research and development into the spray arm 3.0 era, WB755 original four-layer three-pronged reinforced washing system, with a special area for washing pots, to solve the problem of "can only wash dishes can not wash pots" feedback from many consumers in the white paper.
Respecting the Chinese market and achieving product innovation may be the reason why domestic brands such as bosses can increase the market share of dishwashers in 2021 and gradually break the monopoly of foreign brands. For them, of course, the road to localization innovation has only just begun.
In December 2021, Boss Electrical Appliances released its self-created washing and elimination machine Guangyan S1, on the basis of super decontamination, can wash dishes and wash pots, towards the dishwasher, disinfection cabinet, cupboard three-in-one, using the patented 105 ° C Guangyan independent drying technology, so that the washed tableware can be quickly dried, reject the growth of bacteria from the source, and at the same time can achieve three levels of sterilization, Helicobacter pylori, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and polio virus Sterilization rate of up to 99.999%.
Affected by the epidemic, the demand for disinfection and sterilization in China has increased sharply, and products with sterilization and disinfection functions such as Guangyan S1 not only cater to the current market demand, but also guide the direction for further innovation of future dishwashers.
The road to transcendence of domestic brands
In 2009, mobile phone giant Nokia ranked first in the world with a market share of 39%, and just a year later, Apple launched the iPhone 4 that led the era of smartphones, and by 2014, the former mobile phone overlord had become one of the "others" in various sales rankings. Hegemony is being challenged by rising people from high latitudes, and some have referred to such industry moments as "Nokia moments."
For the dishwasher that has just come out of the "not adapting to the needs of the Chinese market - less sales - not deliberately designed to adapt to the Chinese market" cycle, the localization innovation of domestic brands has begun to create this "Nokia moment" for this industry, as to whether it can really cross this moment and let the entire industry move towards a new future, more factors are needed.
Although the sales of dishwashers are now high, the ownership rate of Chinese households is less than 5%, far less than the level of Europe and the United States and other countries. This shows that the dishwasher still has a lot of room for excavation in China, and if you want to accelerate China's pursuit of the road, you need all-round efforts from domestic manufacturers, the industry and society.
In order to change from a big dishwasher producer to a big consumer country, it needs to be further localized, such as the social responsibility given by the boss, "so that every Chinese family can use a dishwasher that is more suitable for Chinese kitchens." Following the washing pot area, the boss has once again created the category of washing and eliminating machines, and with the awakening of chinese people and the participation of more manufacturers, China is expected to find its own dishwasher innovation and development route.
The market and innovation are complementary, the market demand is not satisfied by innovation, it is undoubtedly a rootless wood; too fast market innovation without market to rely on, is undoubtedly a passive water. Under the big proposition of the rise of dishwasher China, it is equally important as product innovation, and market popularization.
On the one hand, it comes from the precision of product and marketing, and even the promotion of free. The main domestic brands of the current layout of dishwashers are involved in kitchen appliances, and the set may become one of the promoters to promote the rapid popularization of dishwashers. The boss electrical appliances are draining the flow of the dishwasher in the form of a set, and have said that they will quickly promote the water and kitchen appliance product group represented by the dishwasher.
At the same time, as the most powerful and fastest growing domestic brand in the dishwasher market, the boss has taken the popularization of dishwashers as his mission. Last year, Boss Appliances established the China Dishwasher Festival and launched a 100-day free trial plan, covering the star new product WB756E, the explosive products WB755, WB735, WB722 and so on.
On the other hand, it also comes from the price reduction under the joint efforts of the upper and lower industrial chains. "The price of dishwashers is mostly 'high and cold', a bit similar to the feeling of big brothers at the beginning of the listing," some consumers said in 2016. Indeed, one of the reasons that put the dishwasher into a death cycle is the price, and the high price restricts sales, and the price cannot be reduced without increasing sales.
The rise of domestic brands has contributed to reducing product prices - localization has reduced the cost of product production and circulation, and technological innovation has reduced production costs. Once, one of the reasons for the rapid popularization of smart phones in the Chinese market was the emergence of cost-effective brands and products such as xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, etc. In a mature market, high-end and cost-effective are the norm.
Once, in addition to the monopoly of foreign brands, the dishwasher market is also filled with large and small, miscellaneous brands of many domestic manufacturers, with the boss such as the addition of many domestic leading home appliance brands, as well as a series of market popularization actions, the entire industry can work together to cross that crucial moment and enjoy the "Nokia moment" dividend.
epilogue
In China's home appliance industry, localization innovation is an eternal theme. When a home appliance category has just entered China and gradually sunk to every corner of China, it is inseparable from the figure of localization and innovation, inspired by rural consumers washing potatoes with washing machines and designing vegetable washing machines.
At this moment when home appliance companies have become one of the main forces of China's economic globalization, and at this moment when localization innovation is reduced in India to adapt to consumer habits, under the leadership of the boss and other head manufacturers, the localization of dishwashers in the Chinese market has just started, and it is on the road from 0 to 1 and is moving from 1 to infinite possibilities.
Whether it is now or in the future, China's home appliance industry has its successful reference.