On April 28, under the expectations of the Chinese people, Huawei's second press conference this spring was met as scheduled. Somewhat surprisingly, in the context of the all-round offline development of China's TV industry, Huawei's smart screen business line has not only further completed the product category, but also carried out product iteration in the main shipping market.
First, the industry downturn, user iteration, Huawei smart screen strong rise
The Chinese TV market in 2021 is in a mess.
According to the market tracking data of Aowei Cloud Network, the retail scale of China's TV market hit a new low in 12 years in 2021, and the overall shipment jumped through the 40 million unit mark, down 13.8% year-on-year. Entering 2022, this industry trend has further intensified, in the first quarter of this year, the sales scale has further declined, the overall retail scale is only 9.03 million units, down 8.8% year-on-year, and the market retail sales have fallen by 10.1%.
From the perspective of market saturation, as early as 2013, the number of 100 color TV households in China exceeded 115 units/ 100 households, and by 2021, the market penetration rate was as high as 121.8 units / 100 households, and the decline in the overall market was reasonable. After the realization of intelligence in the Chinese TV market, in the industrial environment where there is no major change in content and use, it is still reasonable that the user update cycle will become longer, and the decline of the overall market can be understood.
Although the overall TV market is not performing well, from the performance of innovative products, the transformation of the new industrial structure has begun.
The Huawei smart screen SE 55, which was listed in 2021, has long occupied the top three TV sales on the JD platform (changing in the first to third places) in less than half a year, and the sales volume exceeded 410,000 units in less than half a year. According to the current online market accounting for more than 60% of the overall market and the JD platform accounting for 60% of the online market, it is conservatively estimated that huawei's smart screen SE sales of 55 months exceeded 1 million units.
In the weak market, there are items that exceed expectations, which cannot but attract the attention of the industry.
Huawei has only entered the TV industry for two years, not only gradually improving the product line layout, but also in the industry downturn of the industrial environment, both technology and products have been affirmed by users, obviously this is not only a breakthrough at the product level.
In fact, from the perspective of the development status of the TV industry, tv products in the Chinese market have basically achieved intelligence; but from the perspective of user use, smart TVs based on Android systems, in addition to adding a part of the on-demand content on the video platform, in actual use, do not provide more functions and user experiences with the same type of products that use operating systems.
The smart tv is still only in its infancy.
Huawei's smart screen has been an outlier since its birth, it did not follow the industry's common "TV" title, but created a concept of "smart screen", which brought a lot of inconvenience to the promotion of Huawei's wisdom in the early promotion.
However, Huawei's smart screen based on the Hongmeng system can realize the functions that all smart TVs on the market can provide, but on the basis of this basic use, Huawei smart screen has built a home multi-device integration system and application circulation system with smart screen as the core, thus forming a set of family center scenarios based on new living room entertainment, education, fitness and social functions.
In October last year, the parents' TV was upgraded to SE 65, and by the way, the TV that I had not watched at home for a long time was also upgraded to Huawei's smart screen, and I did not have much expectation when I bought it, thinking that it was just an ordinary replacement.
Half a year later, Huawei's smart screen has changed the judgment of knife users on the future direction of the TV industry.
The most surprising thing is the unblocked call function of Huawei's smart screen. If you only say that video calls or video conferences, as well as the installation of cameras on the TV, is not a new thing, but what you did not expect is that Huawei made the video calls between TVs so easy to use and humanized. For people who have lived in other places for a long time, it is difficult to have time to see their parents, but if you eat every day, as long as you press a key, you can see the parents in your hometown at home, and you don't have to take your mobile phone, you don't have to deliberately find a space, just sit in front of the TV, you can sit and chat across from home every day, talk about the things you encounter in the day, and rediscover the feeling of being with your parents.
Of course, what has changed is not only remote video calls, based on the distributed architecture of the Hongmeng system, Huawei's smart screen provides more possibilities, from mobile phones, computers and even mobile phones on the application flow, so that users whether from the outside home, or from different rooms at home into the living room, can seamlessly transfer the application to the smart screen; the same data between various devices, can also be stored and called to each other, and so on, and so on.
In fact, Huawei's smart screen has been completely different from the traditional sense of smart TV, if the current TV is still just a screen, a device suitable for display in the living room, its function is still only the function of "watching". Then Huawei's smart screen is no longer just "looking" so simple, more functions and use value, has shifted the focus to "use" and "play", from a single display device to a multi-device fusion system with smart screen as the core.
This may be the reason why Huawei no longer calls its products "TV", from the perspective of industrial progress, Huawei's smart screen is changing the future product form and user value of the "TV" category, and it may be based on this recognition of the future TV industry that reconstructing the future product form and industrial pattern of the TV industry is the final thinking problem of Huawei's TV business.
In fact, the restructuring of the industrial structure has long been revealed.
The group structure of Chinese TV users is undergoing tremendous changes, and the number of elderly people over 60 years old in China in 2021 is 264 million, and the consumption potential of the elderly is huge, which is a group that cannot be ignored in the future. On the other hand, with the post-80s becoming the main body of society, the Z era gradually enters the society, they will become the main group of future consumption, and the Z generation and the X generation and the Y generation have great differences in consumption concept and consumption behavior, and their use and use of TV are completely different from the past, from "watching" to "playing" to "using", which is the core change in the way they use TV.
Second, Huawei's new smart screen technology upgrade and interactive upgrade
Whether from the perspective of changes in Chinese user demand and the trend of industrial development, TV has moved from "watching" to "playing" and multi-functional "use", which is an opportunity to reshape the industrial pattern.
Huawei's new smart screen products at the April 28 conference, what better features will they bring us?
Huawei's smart screen SE series has always been the main shipment model of Huawei's smart products, which not only retains some functions of the Hongmeng system, but also its price is extremely penetrating. At the press conference, a 43-inch product was added to the SE series, the entry-level model was completed, and the SE 55, SE 65 and SE Pro 55 and SE Pro 65 were iteratively upgraded.
The new generation of Huawei SE series smart screens, as Huawei's entry-level products, has further improved the picture quality by using better materials and stricter color corrections on the basis of maintaining Hongmeng distributed technology and cross-platform integration.
In the entry-level market TV products, the general TV generally only provides about 70% of the color coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut, but the new generation of Huawei SE series all provides 92% of the color coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and the higher color gamut coverage makes the color performance of Huawei's smart screen SE more delicate and rich. At the same time, in order to ensure color accuracy, Before leaving the factory, Huawei has carried out strict color calibration for each smart screen product, which is rare in entry-level products.
The most surprising thing about Huawei's smart screen SE series this time is the return of HDMI2.1 ALLM ultra-low latency, and the addition of automatic low latency mode has completed the defects of the previous Huawei smart screen SE series in games, which can greatly improve the user experience in game scenarios, and can form a better home entertainment center with XBOX and PS console games.
The improvement of hardware performance allows Huawei's smart screen SE series based on the Hongmeng system to be an entry-level smart screen product, which can better experience the new experience of the intelligent multi-terminal system that surpasses the ordinary smart TV brought by the Hongmeng system, and no longer let the living room TV is just a screen that can be seen, and becomes a multi-functional, multi-purpose home core terminal for the future.
The biggest difference between Huawei's smart screen SE series and other Android TVs in terms of functionality is still the cross-platform operation experience brought by the multi-terminal integration system brought by the distributed architecture of the Hongmeng system. Through the Hongmeng system, various devices in the family, including mobile phones, tablets, speakers, notebooks, watches and even routing devices, can realize cross-platform storage, application circulation and resource invocation through intelligent interconnection technology, and it is possible to achieve distributed computing in the future.
It is precisely because of the advantages of the system architecture that huawei smart screens can provide users with practical functions such as AR fitness, intelligent sound field calibration, personalized spatial audio output, and remote video calls with face tracking.
Considering the price of Huawei's smart SE and the excellent system capability performance of the Hongmeng system, it is not surprising that its previous generation of product SE 55 has become an industry hit, and the new generation of SE series smart screens, under the dual influence of excellent experience and highly competitive prices, has become a "closed eyes" type of product, and it is likely to become the beginning of industry restructuring in the future.
Third, the power of China's television market is reconstructed
The changes in the user group of China's television industry have provided a potential driving force for the transformation of China's television industry. This means that China's future TV products on the one hand to meet the consumption habits of the growing number of elderly user groups, on the other hand, to understand the trend of future product changes from the Z generation crowd to the consumption of TV products, so as to achieve the value transformation of TV from "watching" to "playing" to "using", from "screen" to the functional transformation of the family core "terminal".
From the market level, the current Chinese TV market, has formed the traditional five major manufacturers and Huawei millet as the representative of the new generation of technology manufacturers to compete in an all-round competition of the power pattern, at the same time from the perspective of the market growth of both sides, the new entrants, from the product form, function and experience in many aspects of the surpassing traditional manufacturers, and traditional TV manufacturers in the process of sticking to the city is becoming more and more difficult, leading to the elimination of each other, the future industrial pattern gradually emerged.
It can be said that from the current trend of the TV industry, whether from the perspective of user demand or product innovation, a new industrial pattern is taking shape.
Although Huawei's smart screen has only entered the TV industry for two and a half years, it is driving changes in the industrial landscape with new product functions and values. The increasing impact of Huawei's smart screen on the industry makes Huawei's smart screen ecosystem based on the Hongmeng system show its industrial value in reconstructing the living room entertainment social center with multi-terminal integration of the family.