Image source @ Visual China
Today is March 21st, World Sleep Day, and we want to tell the story of a Chinese smart bed.
In 1998, the 45-year-old Tang Guohai bid farewell to his car-building journey with great regret and unwillingness. Obsessed with "making dreams", he turned to other fields and established Qisheng Technology, China's first intelligent electric bed company, in 2005. Tang Guohai, who wants to be the "first person to build a car in China", mistakenly became the "father of China's electric bed".
The income mainly comes from Qisheng in overseas markets, although it successfully registered on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2019, its popularity in China is not high. Until 2021, Qisheng became the official smart bed supplier for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, providing more than 6,000 smart beds and 17 public smart sleep rest pods for the Winter Olympic Village during the Beijing Winter Olympic Games.
Athletes spontaneously went down to "bring goods" to make the smart bed popular overnight. American bobsleigh player SummerBridge posted a video on social media praising the Winter Olympic smart bed, saying it was incredibly smart. Another American snowboarder, Tessa Maud, liked the Winter Olympic Village smart bed, and when she returned home from the Games, she placed an order for the same model from the Internet.
Around the time of the Winter Olympics, the Baidu search index for the "smart bed" keyword doubled 5 times, and the information index soared from almost zero to nearly 470,000. During the Winter Olympics, the turnover of Jingdong's smart bed category increased by 230% year-on-year.
Tang Guohai, Qisheng Technology, this company, smart bed this industry into people's vision, is only a Winter Olympics hot search time.
From making a car to making a bed
In 1953, Tang Guohai was born in Jiaxing, Zhejiang. After graduating from junior high school, he went to the countryside for two years to exercise in the tide of intellectual youth going to the countryside. "At that time, the farm work in the countryside was very hard, there was no machinery, not even a walking tractor, and the material was very scarce. I felt that technology should be used to create wealth. Tang Guohai said.
To this end, he taught himself the knowledge of mechanical drawing, design, manufacturing, etc., and has worked in a number of state-owned enterprises and social factories, doing mechanical invention and manufacturing related work. After the reform and opening up, the tide of going to the sea to do business began, and Tang Guohai also founded jiaxing automobile mold factory in 1987 in the name of a village-run enterprise.
Jiaxing Auto Mould Factory cooperated with China Second Automobile Group to participate in the development of a truck cab. "We did the stamping die for the entire cab." Tang Guohai told Yiou that it was his first bucket of gold and earned 15 million yuan in a year and a half.
After tasting the sweetness of truck cab research and development, Tang Guohai had a bigger dream: to produce a family car. In 1992, the first mini-car of Jiaxing Automobile Mould Factory officially rolled off the production line and passed the condition test of Tianjin National Technology Testing Center. According to the records, this should be the earliest automobile produced by domestic private enterprises.
But the product was not mass-produced. Because the products of Jiaxing Auto Mould Factory have not entered the national catalog, it is equivalent to not having a "quasi-birth certificate". For the next 6 years, the company was on the run for it. In the case that the "quasi-birth permit" was far away, Tang Guohai, who could not make ends meet, completely withdrew from the automobile industry at the end of 1998.
The world seemed to be joking with him. However, even if the dream of building a car is shattered, life will continue.
At that time, the elastic sofa bed with steel-based materials was in vogue, and people in that era were pursuing "let the sofa lie down", and Tang Guohai turned to the sofa industry. The material for making the sofa bed is the same as the car is steel, the spring design also has a mechanical principle, the previous car-making technology can be used, and the technical team that followed Tang Guohai's car-making before also turned the direction with him.
After working on the sofa bed for several years, Tang Guohai came up with a new idea: Since the sofa can automatically adjust the height, is the bed also possible? By chance, Tang Guohai found that Europe and the United States already had this kind of bed, and it sold well.
In Europe and the United States, smart beds are a good business.
Chinese like to sleep in a hard bed, because Chinese generally have a long waist and short legs, and the waist should be supported enough on the bed, otherwise the waist will sink and cause back pain. But Europeans and Americans love to sleep in soft beds, because most foreigners have long legs and short waists, and sleeping hard beds will be dangling at the waist, so they buy beds mainly to see whether the mattress fits the curve of the body.
Therefore, the mattress-based air cushion revolution occurred in the European and American markets, the air cushion can adjust the angle and curvature of the bed, and on this basis, there is a smart bed that can be automatically adjusted. In 1987, the American company Sleep Number was founded, positioning itself as a "provider of sleep solutions and services". In 1998, Sleep Number was successfully listed and became an American smart bed unicorn.
Tang Guohai, who saw this market opportunity, founded a smart electric bed company with several friends in 2005 - Qisheng Technology, which is also the first batch of companies in China to focus on smart beds.
Affected by consumption habits and the scale of market use, Qisheng's initial goal was to sell China's smart beds overseas. According to the prospectus submitted at the time of Qisheng's listing in 2019, the company's customers are mainly American companies SSB, TSI and COSTCO, and the sales revenue of the top five customers accounts for more than 70%, which brings nearly 2 billion yuan of revenue to Qisheng every year.
According to the report of the International Association of Sleep Products, the sales of fixed beds in the United States in 2020 are 18.32 million, of which the sales of smart electric beds are 3.13 million, accounting for 14.08%. At present, the installation rate of the US smart bed market is growing at a rate of 30%. Especially under the influence of the epidemic, the popularity of smart bed products is further increasing.
After more than ten years of efforts, Qisheng has become one of the three giants of smart beds in the world. In 2018, the sales of smart beds produced by Qisheng exceeded 1 million for the first time in the world, and in 2021, it has occupied 1/3 of the market share of the US market, ranking first in the US for ten consecutive years. At present, the global cumulative sales of Qisheng Technology smart beds and smart electric bed products have exceeded 8 million pieces.
More than just the bed
The smart bed that is popular in Europe and the United States is not so fragrant in China.
According to the Caitong Securities Research Report, only 2% of consumers in the mainland have known and used smart electric beds; 28% of consumers have heard of but have not seen them; and more than 60% of consumers say they have never heard of them.
The data of smart bed suppliers for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics also shows that of the more than 1.5 million smart electric beds sold in China every year, more than 1 million are sold to the US market, and the domestic market is less than 100,000, which is a huge difference from foreign countries.
This is not because Chinese who are accustomed to hard beds do not accept soft beds, and the main reason for the small domestic smart bed market is in the price.
Jingdong data shows that the price of traditional non-smart beds is about 3000-5000 yuan, while the official website of the same smart bed brand Schifferde in the Qisheng Winter Olympics is priced at 8800 yuan / piece, and the arrival price of another chivas smart bed under its umbrella is 7299 yuan. This price is slightly higher even at current consumption levels.
Image source: JD.com
So for a long time, smart beds have been doing very hard in the Chinese market. Most investors also think that the matter of making a bed seems too "traditional" and does not have a rich imagination.
Until 5G and AI technology are applied to the entire home industry, this will bring technological revolution and capital heat to the industry.
In the past two years, traditional home appliance companies and Internet technology companies have "taken advantage of the momentum" and announced that they will do the whole house smart and smart home, and the smart bed is naturally one of the components. Huawei, Haier, and Xiaomi are constantly fighting over the whole-house smart concept; Red Star Macalline, Actually Home and Dream Lily are also constantly innovating in smart home and smart bed products.
Public data shows that since 2016, the scale of China's smart electric bed market has been expanding, reaching 2.44 billion yuan in 2020 and is expected to reach 2.73 billion yuan in 2022.
For example, Tesla is not made of "cars", Apple is not made of "mobile phones", and smart beds are not made of "beds".
Free lifting and lowering according to needs is only one of the basic functions of the smart bed. With the remote control, the user can easily adjust the height of the bedside and bed.
The Winter Olympic smart bed also supports "zero gravity mode". The so-called zero gravity mode refers to the posture close to the astronaut in space, which can be raised by 15 degrees in the head position and 35 degrees by the foot through the remote control, so that the heart and the knee are at the same level, effectively dispersing the body pressure, helping athletes to relax before going to bed, and meeting the game in a better state.
The intelligence of the smart bed is not only that it has functions such as free lifting and lowering, but its main core technology is reflected in assisting sleep and detecting sleep health. Through the operation of the mobile app, the user's body data can be monitored, helping the user to view sleep and physical health in real time, and providing reference indicators for physical function.
This opens up space for smart beds to be applied in more industries.
Nowadays, more and more people are suffering from sleep problems. According to data from the World Health Organization and the Chinese Sleep Research Society, the global sleep disorder rate is 27%, and the incidence of insomnia in Chinese adults is as high as 38.2%, and more than 300 million Chinese have sleep disorders. Public information shows that the market size of the mainland sleep economy will exceed 400 billion yuan in 2020, and it is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan in 2030.
With the blessing of a number of technologies, the smart bed can now allow the experiencer to effectively disperse the body pressure and help them relax before going to bed, and also has health detection functions such as angle adjustment, snoring intervention, voice voice control, sleep reporting, breathing and heart rate variation detection.
"If the smart bed can really assist sleep, and it has many functions such as heart rate detection, I will choose to buy it." A consumer told Yiou.
Equipped with sleep and great health economy, the smart bed may not be a simple bed.
China's "Sleeping Valley"
The future of the sleep economy is unlimited, and Jiaxing, which is out of the circle with the winter Olympic smart bed, is also aiming at this trillion-level market.
"The United States has a 'Silicon Valley', can China make a 'Sleeping Valley'?" Two years ago, Tang Guohai germinated such an idea and proposed to the Government of Xiuzhou District of Jiaxing that the sleep industry economy could be developed locally. Finally, the Government of Xiuzhou District of Jiaxing decided to do China's "Sleeping Valley" under the coordination of local enterprises.
At the "Internet + Healthy China" conference held in Jiaxing in September 2021, Jiaxing Xiuzhou District said that it would focus on planning and building "China Sleeping Valley", and the goal was to reach 100 billion yuan by the end of the "14th Five-Year Plan" and the scale of Jiaxing's "China Sleeping Valley" related industries.
What is "China Sleep Valley"? It is to build a sleep health industry chain of "science and technology, intelligent manufacturing and ecology" around the "sleep health" industry. According to the plan, the sleep economy includes intelligent manufacturing industries such as smart homes (smart beds), sleep medical devices and smart wearable devices.
Jiaxing wants to do "China's Sleeping Valley", for the following two considerations.
From the perspective of market size, there are 2 billion people in the world with sleep disorders, and the sleep market has great potential. Public information shows that 60% of sports enthusiasts are willing to pay for improving the sleeping environment, such as changing mattresses, customizing sleep plans, etc., and they are willing to spend thousands of yuan.
From the perspective of industrial base, Jiaxing has home furnishing enterprises gathered. Xiuzhou District Wangjiangjing Town Health Smart Home Industrial Park gathered more than 30 smart home production supporting enterprises such as Qisheng Technology and Gujia Home. These enterprises related to sleep and smart home have become the industrial basis for Jiaxing to develop the sleep economy.
But "Sleep Valley" is not so good. On the smart bed track, Chinese companies want to establish their position in the international market, and there are still some problems that need to be solved.
First of all, the industry is currently very new, and clear standards have not yet been formed. Although the relevant departments and relevant enterprises are already drafting agreements, the production standards and qualifications of the smart bed industry have not yet been clarified.
Secondly, the price of smart beds is usually twice that of ordinary home brands, and consumers will worry about the price and cost performance of products, and it is not clear what legitimate rights and interests consumers can enjoy.
Third, the current smart bed market lacks brands that consumers are familiar with, and the market will inevitably coexist after its fame. A smart bed company said that the previous market recognition of smart beds was low, and the reason was that smart bed companies rarely took the initiative to establish a brand image in the market.
Finally, the smart bed is no longer simply selling the bed, behind it is the support of the entire intelligent software and service system.
The upstream of the industrial chain includes electrical components, steel, leather and other raw materials, and the electrical components are mainly linear drives, main control boxes and remote controls; the middle reaches are the production links of intelligent electric beds; and the downstream is online and offline sales. The electronic and intelligent attributes of the production link are extremely high, and there is still a way to go to the intelligence and data of domestic smart bed enterprises.
In a new era of consumption in which "what you see is what you get", the market is no longer a "merchant-defined product", but a consumer's reverse customization of products. As Tang Guohai said: "In the past, when starting a business, I wanted to do a good job in products and sell products; now in the era of intelligence of all things, products are only the beginning, and what is really sold is the system and service experience." ”
Emerging industries such as smart beds need a complete set of product software and multi-dimensional sales and service systems. At that time, "China's intelligent manufacturing" will really begin.
Resources:
1. "Deciphering the Development History Behind the Market Value of Sleep Number, a Smart Bed Unicorn", Sina Home
2. "Another mysterious category exploded: sales increased by 300% after the Winter Olympics", Pencil Said
3. "Let the bed "talk" to escort the people's sleep and physical health", Qianjiang Evening News