Perspective Midea's annual report: smart home revenue exceeded 230 billion yuan, harvesting the whole house smart dividend

Text/Yang Jianyong

When it comes to smart homes, the first thing that comes to mind is a promising track. According to IDC data, in 2021, global smart home device shipments exceeded 895 million units, an increase of 11.5%, and shipments are expected to exceed 1.4 billion units by 2026, with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 23.6%. It should be pointed out that as an important global smart home market, the mainland smart home device market will ship more than 220 million units in 2021, and it is expected to exceed 500 million units by 2026.

Due to the growing smart home market, players from all walks of life have poured in, hoping to get a piece of the pie. In terms of global markets, Amazon, Google and Apple are important players. In the domestic market, there is a situation of competing for deer, with Huawei, Xiaomi as the core of the mobile phone camp, as well as Baidu, Ali and other Internet manufacturers. However, in the author's opinion, home appliance manufacturers with rich home appliances are powerful players on the smart home track. Because it has equipment that covers various life scenarios of the family, from major appliances, small household appliances and other life appliances, these devices are an important part of the smart home, and Midea is one of the core players in the home appliance camp.

Midea's smart home business group has a revenue of 234.9 billion yuan and harvests industry development dividends

In 2021, Midea's group revenue was 341.233 billion yuan, an increase of 20% year-on-year, and a net profit of 28.6 billion yuan, which is still the most profitable home appliance manufacturer. Among them, the revenue from the smart home business group reached 234.9 billion yuan, an increase of 13% year-on-year. This is the first time that Midea has shown smart home revenue through the annual report, as the main operator of smart home appliances, smart home and related industries and ecological chains, it undertakes the construction of intelligent scenes for end users, user operations and data value exploration, and is committed to providing end users with the best experience of the whole house smart home and services.

Overall, based on user needs and consumption trends, Midea relies on spaces such as halls, balconies, kitchens, and bathrooms, combines Midea's own products and ecological cooperation products, and uses IoT technology to comprehensively deepen home services and provide intelligent integrated solutions for the whole house. At present, the "Beautiful Smart Home" whole house intelligent solution focuses on the user's life activity line and the five major home spaces, creating a new smart lifestyle integrating smart design, smart scenes, smart products, smart services, smart housekeepers, and smart lives.

Based on the three advantages of all categories, all scenarios and self-evolution, Midea's whole house intelligent solution covers 100 product categories and 300 intelligent scenarios, meeting the needs of users, and providing hardware product self-upgrading and software self-iteration. According to the financial report data, in 2021, the sales of Midea's whole-house space scene solution reached 180,000 singles, and the transaction volume exceeded 14 billion yuan. By the end of 2021, Midea's Mercure has launched more than 300 intelligent scenes, and the cumulative number of intelligent scenes executed in the current year has exceeded 280 million, the number of intelligent networking devices in midea has increased by 96% year-on-year, and the proportion of multi-device households has reached 20%.

At the same time, Midea's IoT builds a user-centered Midea smart home business value chain, providing users with full-scenario experience services and more high-quality ecological value-added services, and creating a "more beautiful smart life" Pan-American Living ecosystem. Starting from user needs, continuously opening up and opening up a new situation, Midea and Huawei further deepened cooperation, equipped with Huawei's Hongmeng system of Midea home appliances involving 25 categories, a total of more than 230 models, to achieve a leap from single product cooperation to whole house intelligence; at the same time, further deepen cooperation with Google, Amazon, Apple and other companies, continue to optimize the product voice interaction experience, to achieve multi-device, cross-brand, cross-platform diversified service linkage.

Promote the sinking of channels and accelerate the landing of smart home scenes

It is worth mentioning that although the mainland smart home has developed rapidly in the past few years, it has still not achieved popularity. In the previous IDC report, on the one hand, there are still a large number of users who do not understand smart homes, and there is no shortage of potential consumers who are hesitant to stop out of concern about complex settings. Therefore, manufacturers not only need to streamline the operation steps from the product side, but also need to upgrade the channel services, improve the professionalism of front-line staff to improve the quality of reach, and actively cooperate with offline channels such as home improvement, strengthen demonstration instructions, reduce user learning costs, and accelerate the user education process.

For midea, in the past year, midea continue to strengthen the sinking of channels, in the domestic building materials home improvement channels have built more than 900 smart home stores, as of now, "the united states of the smart home" has been laid out 2700 stores across the country, and plans to create another 100 smart life experience benchmark stores, as a leader in the smart home industry, midea also rely on its own advantages of digital platform capabilities, the integration of multi-channel resources to vigorously develop the whole house intelligence.

Zhang Xiaoyi, vice president and CIO of Midea Group, mentioned at the 2021 Midea Intelligent Conference that based on the mid-office capability of the Midea cloud sales solution, the new generation of Midea's smart home whole house intelligent solution will rely on the digital platform tools under development to provide services for tens of thousands of front-end stores at the same time, and can also support batch home decoration designers, associate partners, and furniture customization companies to call platform resources at the same time, so that users can fully experience the Midea smart home whole house smart solution in any channel.

At last

With the continuous improvement of users' demand for a better and smart life, the smart home industry is driven by technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence, and the industry has shown a trend of intelligent development of the whole house. It should be known that the mainland smart home market is showing a rapid growth trend, and IDC's earlier report pointed out that the promotion of whole house smart solutions in the consumer market will become one of the important driving forces for market growth. With the double improvement of the living standards of mainland residents and the awareness of the smart home market, the whole house intelligent solution will usher in a broad space for development and promote the development of the smart home market. For home appliance manufacturers, it is expected to continue to harvest industry development dividends.

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.