Text/Yang Jianyong
At the two sessions of the National People's Congress that was just held, "digitalization" has become one of the hot words, indicating the key direction of future social and industrial development. A trend is that the continuous upgrading of consumer quality of life requirements and the strong demand for smart devices are driving the smart home industry to flourish.
As an important consumer of smart home devices in the world, China's growing user scale and resident income have shown a high growth trend in the market. IDC expects mainland smart home shipments to approach 540 million units in 2025. According to the forecast of the China Commercial Industry Research Institute, the scale of the mainland smart home market will reach 651.56 billion yuan in 2022.
There are cake grabbers, and the promising Chinese smart home market has naturally attracted heavyweight players. Among them, Haier Zhijia, Huawei, Xiaomi three major manufacturers have attracted much attention, and the various comparisons between them are also eye-catching.
Build a platform and do scenes, but each family is different but reaches a consensus on "ecology"
Due to the different advantages of each manufacturer, the layout logic of smart homes also has its own emphasis.
Mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei and Xiaomi, based on the logic of mobile phones and smart speakers, extend to the field of smart homes, and they hope that in addition to mobile phones, they can open up a new track in the consumer technology market. The difference between Haier Zhijia is that it has been deeply rooted in the family life scene for many years, and the transformation of smart homes is more logical and has certain innate advantages.
However, in terms of ecology, the three companies have formed a basic consensus. Why? Because the user's needs are directed.
With the improvement of people's quality of life, the living environment is getting higher and higher, and the intelligent and scenario-based smart family life is favored. However, the original model of providing a single product and a single company providing one-way services has been difficult to meet the complete, perfect and intelligent quality of life needs pursued by contemporary consumers. The rich scene experience based on ecology will be a stepping stone to open up a new market space in the future.
In terms of the basic consensus that "ecology is the only way to go in the future", the ecological layout of Xiaomi, Huawei, and Haier Zhijia is also different in terms of specific paths in addition to being different in terms of timeline.
The ecological layout of Haier Zhijia is mainly based on "scene ecology". Today's global Internet of Things ecological brand Haier Zhijia is actually the earliest enterprise in the industry to adapt to the transformation and upgrading of the Internet of Things era. As early as 2006, Haier Zhijia has begun to explore smart home platforms, technology, in 2015 in the industry's intelligent strategy budding, released the smart home strategy, and released 7 types of network devices to promote smart home into ordinary people's homes. In 2020, the release of the industry's first scene brand, The Three-Winged Bird, allowed Haier Zhijia to officially embark on a new high-speed channel of scene ecology.
What is scene ecology? The core, of course, is in the scene. The significance of the scene brand three-winged bird is not simply to make the product richer and the connection smoother, but to provide users with a seamless intelligent experience in the whole process based on these, and to cooperate with various high-quality ecosystems across industries and fields to create a win-win situation. Therefore, The Three Winged Bird has the industry's only "one-stop customized smart home service" covering home appliances, home, home improvement, and home life, as well as all-demand, lifelong, and continuous iteration of home life services such as food, clothing, housing, and entertainment.
Xiaomi mainly relies on the ecological chain enterprise as the support to build an intelligent voice + AIoT platform ecology. What is platform ecology? To put it bluntly, it is to provide a platform to attract various small and medium-sized enterprises to join the group in the form of investment or cooperation. As of September 2021, Xiaomi has invested in 360 companies, including Huami, Yunmi, Stone Technology, etc. This ecology mainly emphasizes the richness of categories and brands, and the whole family can achieve basic coverage of products large and small, and users have more choices.
Huawei builds a hardware ecosystem based on the Hongmeng system and HiLink open connection protocol. This ecological focus is on the interconnection of various intelligent devices, Huawei takes the Hongmeng system as the cornerstone to cooperate with various hardware companies, and has been working hard for a long time in product linkage, and has produced 1+2+N whole house intelligent solutions. The "1" here refers to the smart host of the Hongmeng framework, which can realize the integration of connection, computing, storage and intelligent services.
The three major manufacturers harvested the smart home dividend and opened up a broader performance space
Overall, the change of haier zhijia scene ecological brand, while meeting people's good wishes for smart family life, is also leading the development of the industry and opening up a new track and growth space. According to statistics, Haier Zhijia's revenue from January to September 2021 continued to increase by 2 digits, and the profit growth rate exceeded the revenue growth rate, of which the revenue profit in the Q3 quarter increased twice.
Behind the strong growth lies in the development of Haier Zhijia from a high-end brand to a scene ecological brand, and has realized the transformation from product premium to experience premium. Giving full play to the advantages of complete sets of products and high-end brands, Haier Zhijia continues to amplify user value and harvest high-end market growth opportunities, which is the main reason for the rapid growth of revenue. Moreover, the layout of the scene brand three-winged bird has also entered the harvest period, and the landing ability of complete sets has been continuously improved.
At the same time, the extension of mobile phone manufacturers to smart homes has also developed rapidly. In particular, Xiaomi has performed strongly on the track of smart homes. From the perspective of revenue, the revenue scale of Xiaomi's AIoT business continues to expand, which proves that its dual strategy of mobile phone + AIoT has achieved results. Behind this, it is also driven by the huge ecological chain enterprises it actively cultivates, as well as the huge market demand for smart TVs, smart air conditioners, sweeping robots, air purifiers and other smart devices. It can be said that Xiaomi is the first domestic mobile phone manufacturer to harvest the smart home dividend. In the first three quarters of 2021, Xiaomi's revenue from IoT and consumer products reached 59.9 billion yuan, an increase of 29% year-on-year.
However, at present, Xiaomi is also facing the hidden worry of "de-milletization" of ecological chain enterprises. As of September 30, 2021, Xiaomi has invested in a total of 360 companies. Among them, Huami, Yunmi, No. 9 Company, and Stone Technology are all continuing to increase the cultivation of their own brands and reduce their dependence on the Xiaomi brand.
Huawei is also aiming at the wearable device and smart home markets, and is fully committed to whole house intelligence, in order to seek new performance growth. In this regard, Shao Yang, chief strategy officer of Huawei Consumer BG, previously revealed the new goal of Huawei Whole House Intelligence: "Achieve 5 million sets in 5 years and be the leader of space intelligence" The ambitious confidence comes from Huawei's strong brand, user scale, technology, and the smart home ecosystem it has built. It is just Huawei's "entrance + connection + ecology" model, after the mobile phone is restricted, it is urgent to accelerate the creation of a new smart host entrance, which is also the logic behind the current 1+2+N whole house intelligent solution.
At last
The smart home market is huge, players from all walks of life are pouring in, and the industry shows a pattern of competing for deer, and the accompanying competitive pressure increases. For players on this track, in addition to excellent products, it is also necessary to build an ecology, and to make people's smart home life realize with a complete set of scenes, which is the key to winning in the smart home market.
In the competition of China's smart home market, Haier Zhijia's complete set of scenarios and Internet of Things ecology, as well as Xiaomi's AIoT intelligent ecology, are all industry-leading layout achievements. In particular, Haier Zhijia focuses on the three-level brand strategy of high-end brands, scene brands and ecological brands, gives full play to the advantages of high-end complete sets and scene solutions, and leads the industry into the era of customized smart scenes. Of course, Huawei's competitive strength in the smart home track cannot be underestimated.
Jianyong Yang, a contributor to Forbes China, is committed to in-depth interpretation of cutting-edge technologies such as the Internet of Things, cloud services and artificial intelligence.