When it comes to domestic smart home appliances, I believe that many readers' ideas will give priority to xiaomi, as the earliest manufacturer in China to enter the smart home appliance market, xiaomi has left a deep impression on consumers and the market with its high cost performance and excellent product strength.
Open the Mijia APP to see from smart locks to bedside lamps, from air purifiers to smart door and window sensors, from smart sockets to smart cameras... "Xiaomi Family Bucket" has achieved an all-round alternative to traditional homes. It is not difficult to imagine that with the development iteration of AIoT new categories and the high user conversion cost formed by the "family bucket", Xiaomi is expected to attract more users to join it with a perfect Xiaomi ecology.
So today's Xiaomi AloT field to what extent? Can Xiaomi use this advantage to establish its own upper position in the market in the future era of the Internet of Everything?
LoT is already the main force of Xiaomi
Before the official start, I want to briefly explain to you what AIOT means, A refers to AI artificial intelligence, in the end, the main experience of AloT comes from the AI computing power behind the device, the Internet of Things is a very complex and very high-level automation process, the mobile phone is not simply a mobile phone, but a connector. But companies that are good at AI lack equipment, they are more about providing solutions, focusing on the technology itself, and can't take over the entire system from the bottom up.
I is the Internet, which is actually very easy to understand, almost all the current Internet giants are naturally players in the IoT market. T is the Things (device), the hardware part that the Internet lacks, the home base of the hardware company. It is precisely because the entrance to AIoT is a device, the data collector is a device, and the application scenario requires more equipment, which makes the hardware company have a natural advantage to lay out on this, and because of this, Xiaomi, which has the Internet enterprise gene and hardware gene, can become the leading AloT "big household" in China in just a few years.
In March this year, Xiaomi announced their performance in 2021, and it is clear from the financial report that Xiaomi's main source of income today Is in addition to the Xiaomi mobile phone we are familiar with, AloT has also become one of the main forces of Xiaomi. From the data point of view, the AIoT business achieved revenue of 85 billion yuan in the whole year, an increase of 26.1% year-on-year, providing more than 1/4 of the revenue for Xiaomi, which also verified Lei Jun's speech at the Xiaomi AloT Developer Conference in previous years: "AI+loT is xiaomi's core strategy, and it will not change in the future." ”
The original Millet mobile phone was relying on ultra-high cost performance to gain a foothold in the cruel competition of the mobile phone market, but the "advantages" of high cost performance also mean low profits, and the profit of Xiaomi mobile phones is far lower than we think. At that time, Lei Jun realized that it was difficult to make Xiaomi a world-class enterprise by selling mobile phones, so in 2014, Liu De, vice president of Xiaomi, led a small team to launch an investment campaign for Xiaomi's ecological chain enterprises.
First of all, Xiaomi around the mobile phone, invested in 100 hardware ecological enterprises in 5 years, launched the Mijia brand in 2016 after everything was ready, officially laid out the smart home and consumer life fields, and officially set "mobile phone + AIoT" as the company's dual-engine strategy in 2019, so that Xiaomi's "1+4+N" pattern was basically established.
The ecological chain and industrial chain it has formed also give Xiaomi's loT an absolute advantage in the domestic market. It is understood that as of now, Xiaomi has completed investment or incubation of more than 400 ecological chain partners, which is absolutely first-class in China. In the bleak days of Xiaomi's mobile phone business, the revenue generated by these loT products has helped Xiaomi through difficult times.
It is not difficult to see that Xiaomi has jointly established a huge ecological chain through partners accumulated over the years, with smart phones as the core, continue to exert efforts to form AIoT to form Xiaomi's own hardware ecology, and then rely on the hardware equipment accumulated over the years and the massive MIUI user base to achieve further data precipitation and ecological chain development, which also makes Xiaomi the technology company closest to the Internet of Things ecological enterprises.
It is certain that the mobile phone x AloT, as the current hardware ecological strategy of Xiaomi, will be one of the most important strategies for Xiaomi for a long time in the future, and behind the support of Xiaomi's strategy is the number of more than 430 million AloT connection devices and as many as 500 million MIUI users.
But then again, how much value can AloT bring to Xiaomi? Is it possible to replace Xiaomi mobile phones as another golden sign of Xiaomi in the future?
Xiaomi AloT, the second "Xiaomi phone"?
Although Xiaomi mobile phones have now completely gained a foothold in the mobile phone market and can maintain the top five in the global market all year round, it is not difficult to find that mobile phones have entered a weak period both at the technical level and in terms of shipments, and users' desire not to change the machine is getting stronger and stronger. Therefore, in the case of negative growth in domestic smartphone shipments year by year, it has become inevitable for Xiaomi to accelerate its expansion into other businesses.
According to IoT Analytics, the global AIoT industry is expected to reach a compound growth rate of 29% from 2020 to 2023. The huge market size has also attracted more and more manufacturers to pour in, in addition to the xiaomi, Huawei, Apple we are familiar with, OPPO, vivo, Google, Amazon and other well-known technology companies are actively laying their own loT ecology, such as Huawei's "1+8+N" strategy, Vivo's IoT open ecosystem alliance established through Jovi IoT, OPPO's "building a three-circle model" and so on, all in order to prepare for this hard battle.
Speaking of Xiaomi, the protagonist of this article, at present, the Xiaomi IoT product matrix has achieved full coverage of intelligent categories, and the product category has reached more than 2,000 kinds. Especially in the Xiaomi ecological chain enterprises, niche categories such as smart drying racks, cooking machines, and smart fish tanks that are suitable for living corners are also available.
A mature and perfect intelligent ecosystem, in addition to rich hardware products, equipment and device interconnection, collaborative work, software and hardware cooperation, are all important architectures to support its intelligent experience. It is as important as smartphones and network signals. As an important ecological entrance hardware, in addition to mobile phones, Xiaomi TV, Xiaoai speaker, Xiaomi notebook and Xiaomi router are all in an important position in the industry.
Xiaomi officials announced last year that Xiaomi TV ranked first in Chinese mainland shipments for 11 consecutive quarters, and it can also guarantee the top five shipments in the global market. In terms of smart speakers, according to IDC data, the domestic smart speaker industry has a high concentration, and the industry Top3 in 2020 occupies nearly 96% of the share, and Xiaomi ranks in the top three, with a market share of up to 27%.
Xiaomi in the mobile phone era brings products to the public, and xiaomi in the IoT era brings life to the public and is a complete ecology of multi-service category aggregation. In this process, mobile phones as an Internet of Things terminal, IoT as an Internet of Things application, the two are not a simple superposition relationship, but mutual promotion, mutual empowerment, in the Internet traffic resources are precious, customer acquisition costs climbing at the moment, through the cost-effective hardware ecology to attract traffic not only in the drainage at the same time to obtain profits, while the complete hardware ecology also greatly strengthens the user stickiness.
Looking at xiaomi's entire ecological layout, the hardware ecology gathers Internet traffic, Internet services divert to hardware, and the underlying technological innovation brings about continuous strengthening of ecological interconnection, and the foundation of Xiaomi's "mobile phone X AIoT" strategy is more solid.
It is not difficult to imagine that in the future, Xiaomi can rely on AIoT to continue to maintain the gap with friends until the market breaks out. If Xiaomi can also × AIoT strategy through mobile phones, in the future can develop a platform similar to WeChat, Pinduoduo, which has both economic value, communication value and social value, until xiaomi at that time, xiaomi at that time, has completed the transformation from a hardware seller to a big data and Internet of Things management enterprise, which is what investors and rice noodles should look like in their hearts.