Huawei Hongmeng infiltrated into the hinterland of the home

Author | Jin Wang

Produced by | Zinc industry

On August 10, 2019, with the release of the first product equipped with The Hongmeng system, Huawei entered a new field of smart TVs.

Yu Chengdong said, "Huawei does not want to do traditional TV, we bring AI capabilities to the home big screen, so it is called a smart screen." ”

Whether it is a smart TV, or a smart screen, in fact, it is not so important, what is important is that Huawei, which has not got too many chips in the speaker war, has finally grown a new tentacle that can go deep into the family, which is crucial for Huawei.

This year, the first fire of the smart home has just burned out, but the era of more chaos and excitement has just begun.

01

Hardware boom and enclosure wars

In 2015, the domestic smart hardware entrepreneurship boom has just emerged, the entire industry has entered the western cowboy fever period, at that time, a group of early entrepreneurs with smart sockets, smart bulbs, smart remote controls sporadic simple smart hardware to earn the first bucket of gold, most entrepreneurs began to discuss: what is the next explosive hardware, who can sell the first million-level products.

At this time, the emergence of two forces changed the later smart home war situation.

A force is smart speakers, in 2015 Amazon Echo popularity exceeded any of the smart hardware at that time, seeing such momentum, Ali, Baidu, Xiaomi in the next few years have introduced this product to the domestic market, after several rounds of subsidy wars, smart speakers rose rapidly, China's smart speaker market volume quickly exceeded tens of millions of units, the global market volume is rapidly reaching a hundred million scale.

Another force is the standard protocol and cloud platform, compared to the hardware market's close hand-to-hand combat, the Internet head enterprises are better at spreading the ecology through standard protocols and cloud platforms, and the land enclosure war of smart homes is about to start.

Huawei's smart home territory was also launched in 2015, and at the end of this year, at the Honor 2nd Anniversary Conference, Honor Zhao Ming first mentioned Huawei's HiLink agreement, saying, "HiLink is another historic breakthrough after Huawei's HiSilicon chip." ”

Also in this year, Huawei announced the open source LiteOS system, a lightweight embedded system developed since 2012, which together with the HiLink protocol became two pieces of chips planted by Huawei in the field of smart homes this year.

In the years when fragmentation was severe and hardware products continued to emerge, everyone understood that the more manufacturers and the more products the players were, the more likely it was that they would finally unify the rivers and lakes with the trend of autumn wind sweeping away the leaves, and for the Internet head enterprises seeking ecological expansion, the number of users/device connections became an important indicator at that time.

According to Huawei's official data, the number of Huawei HiLink users reached 20 million in 2017, the number of users exceeded 50 million in 2019, and the number of device connections soared from 3 million to 150 million.

At a smart home conference in March 2019, Yu Chengdong claimed that "in three years, we will connect one-third of the smart home appliances in China."

However, far more than Huawei was busy with this matter, Ali, Baidu, JD.com, Xiaomi and other Internet manufacturers have joined the enclosure war, and the number of device connections on the Xiaomi IoT platform in 2019 even claimed to have reached 235 million units, and the amount of device connections was 50% more than Huawei.

The platform race is crazy and spectacular.

02

Huawei began selling TVs

In the Internet this smart home racing race, the early layout of the ecological chain of Xiaomi is undoubtedly one of the winners, in addition to the ecological chain, Xiaomi's TV, router has been with mobile phones, MIUI and called the four core businesses, these four core businesses have later become the key nodes in the Xiaomi smart home ecosystem.

Compared with Xiaomi, Huawei mobile phones and routers have maintained an absolute advantage before 2020, and they also have their own EMUI on the mobile phone system, and even the Hongmeng system that later became famous, the only drawback is that it has not had its own TV business.

Watching Xiaomi TV grow day by day, especially when the strategic position of smart homes in Huawei's consumer business is gradually clarified, smart TVs that are regarded as home centers are full of attraction for Huawei at that time.

On August 10, 2019, at this year's HDC, Huawei's first smart TV, or smart screen was officially launched, although the first smart screen was released by the glory brand, but in order to distinguish it from many products already on the market, Huawei still made a lot of efforts, not only for the first time equipped with Huawei's long-held Hongmeng system, but also equipped with a number of self-developed chips including Honghu 818 (CPU), HiSilicon Hi3516DV300 (NPU), HiSilicon Hi1103 (Wi-Fi).

Huawei's branded smart screen came a little later and was released a month later at a press conference in Munich, Germany.

Since then, as the last "entrance" in Huawei's "1+8+N" all-scenario ecology and one of the "dual centers" of smart life in Yu Chengdong's mouth, the status of smart screens in Huawei's consumer business has continued to rise, becoming the core product in Huawei's smart home system.

The core product position is reflected in the strategic emphasis of Huawei's consumer business. In the following two years, Huawei has launched X series, S series, V series three series of more than a dozen smart screen products, the price range covers 3,000 yuan - 25,000 yuan, each smart home-themed conference, Yu Chengdong will spend nearly half of the time to talk about the new products of smart screen.

However, Huawei's smart screen shipments have not been able to support half of Huawei's consumer business, and the latest data shows that Huawei's smart screen shipments in 2021 are about 1.5 million units, which is far from Huawei's goal of "achieving annual sales of 10 million units in the next three years" set at the beginning of 2020.

To this end, Huawei had to put down its body, and the entry-level smart screen released in May 2021 - Huawei Smart Screen SE directly jumped to 1999 yuan this year and began to explore the low-end market of smart TVs.

03

Dry back to the old line of communication

On March 14, 2019, at the Shanghai Home Appliances Exhibition, Yu Chengdong proposed Huawei's "1+8+N" strategy, and Huawei's all-scenario ecological map with mobile phone business as the core was launched.

It was also at this press conference that Yu Chengdong pointed out:

For every 3 mobile phones sold in China, one is Huawei (Huawei + Honor), and Huawei aims to have one for every two smartphones sold by the end of this year, that is, the market share is close to 50%.

Later, due to well-known reasons, Honor split independently, and Huawei's mobile phone business plummeted, and even fell out of the first echelon camp of the industry. This year, in the vertical field of smart home, Huawei began to brew a new layout.

Huawei to communications started, the early business is around a communication equipment - switch, the development of domestic fixed telephones in full swing, the switch is an important equipment in the fixed telephone network, in 1994, Huawei developed the first 10,000-door switch C&C08, C&C08 became a foundation for Huawei to go abroad to become a global enterprise.

In 2020, under the wave of whole-house intelligence, Huawei unsurprisingly proposed its own whole-house intelligent solution, which is different in this whole-house intelligent solution, Huawei used two networks - a wireless network based on home broadband and Wi-Fi 6, and a wired network based on PLC-IoT.

What is PLC-IoT?

PLC (Power Line Communication), also known as power line communication technology, due to its high stability, has many applications in urban distribution networks. According to the frequency band segmentation, PLC technology can be divided into narrowband, medium band, broadband technology, Huawei proposed PLC-IoT is a wired communication technology based on the State Grid HPLC specification and IEEE 1901.1 international standards.

PLC-IoT operates in the 0.7-12MHz band, and the application layer communication rate is 100kbps-2Mbps, which can stably transmit information over a range of several kilometers.

As a wired communication technology, PLC-IoT although the network stability is higher, but the networking is not as convenient as WiFi, Bluetooth and other wireless networks, the need for separate wiring networking, which makes it not suitable for hardware items or users their own networking of the smart home industry in the early stage of development, until the real estate manufacturers entered the market, smart home B-end business fire, such technology has a user place.

Huawei launched this set of solutions at the end of 2020, when the domestic smart home industry has shifted from the aftermarket to the front-loading market, enjoying the large-scale business brought by the real estate dividend, Huawei's solution was also used in the smart community pilot project cooperated with China Overseas Real Estate at that time.

04

Huawei hardware expansion, Hongmeng infiltrated into the home

In April 2021, Huawei further upgraded its smart home strategy by splitting a "1+2+N" whole-house smart strategy from the original "1+8+N" all-scenario strategy, in which the development of the blocked mobile phone business faded out of sight and replaced it with home consoles.

"1" refers to the home host, the home host is mainly composed of Huawei H6 router, optical cat, PLC host, equivalent to the original networking hardware in the home integrated into a product, this product is used to directly replace the family weak current box;

"2" refers to the two networks mentioned above, the PLC-IoT wired network is used to connect various home systems, and the Wi-Fi 6 wireless network is used to connect mobile phones, TVs, home cameras and other hardware products that are installed after the entry.

Such a home host and complex networking system mean that Huawei's whole house intelligent solution is a B-end business, facing the front-loading market, through this program to achieve home improvement of 100 square meters of houses, at least about 100,000 yuan; the home improvement cost of 200 square meters of houses is as high as about 150,000 yuan.

However, at this time, the smart home real estate dividend has appeared some variables, the real estate industry thunderstorms, capital tightening, some practitioners told the zinc industry, "in the real estate project, the whole house intelligence is not just needed, if the budget is tight, the first to be cut is generally used in the smart home budget." ”

According to this view, how many real estate projects will have enough budget to pay for this whole-house intelligent solution for sale from 100,000 yuan has become a real problem in front of Huawei.

Because of this, at Huawei's smart home conference today, the zinc industry found that Huawei has made a wave of updates to the whole house smart solution, and in this wave of updates, Huawei has made two changes:

On the one hand, Huawei began to personally do more home hardware. This time, Huawei not only released the central control screen that was personally made, but also released its own smart door lock, human body detection sensor, and PLC light driver.

On the other hand, Huawei further reduced the cost of the whole house smart solution, and released a low-end version of the whole house smart solution with a starting price of nearly 40,000 yuan for small and medium-sized houses of about 80 square meters.

In addition, smart homes have also become a testing ground for Huawei's Hongmeng system.

Before the release of the Hongmeng system, Ren Zhengfei stressed in an interview with the Financial Times that "the production of the Hongmeng system itself is not for (giving) mobile phones, but for the Internet of Things." ”

Such an idea has been fully reflected in Huawei's smart home system.

Nowadays, the Hongmeng system has run through all kinds of products and systems of Huawei's smart home, not only applied to the central control system of Huawei's home host, but also embedded in Huawei routers, central control screens, smart door locks and other products.

In fact, as early as April 2021, Huawei has replaced the original HiLink with HarmonyOS Connect to become Huawei's new ecological brand of whole house intelligence, and Yu Chengdong even called the Hongmeng system "the base of Huawei's smart home".

Obviously, smart home has become a key area for The Hongmeng system, and it is gradually becoming an indispensable core business for Huawei's consumer business in the next decade.

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