Text: Technology Business Yu Hongtao
In the face of the challenges of the new market environment, Made in China is setting off a wave of upgrading to China's intelligent manufacturing and Chinese brands. Anker Innovation is their pioneer.
As a global consumer electronics brand enterprise starting from cross-border e-commerce, Anker Innovation's products sold to the global market are all independently developed and designed and branded.
In the past few years, Anker Innovation has cooperated with Amazon Web Services to provide large-scale application of data analysis, machine learning and other services to empower business innovation. The two parties have also set up a joint innovation laboratory to carry out in-depth cooperation to realize intelligent advertising, product planning decision-making, product quality optimization, sales operation optimization and marketing strategy optimization, etc., so that the whole business process becomes more and more intelligent.
Long-term in-depth cooperation with Amazon
Founded in 2011, Anker Innovation started from the cross-border e-commerce business and embarked on the road of independent research and development in the second year. At present, it has three major product lines of charging and power supply, smart home and wireless audio, which are sold to 146 countries and regions, and have 100 million users worldwide. In 2021, Anker Innovation's revenue exceeded RMB12.5 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 35%.
It is worth noting that the growth process of Anker Innovation is closely related to the Amazon platform. So far, most of its sales revenue comes from Amazon e-commerce, especially in online channels and overseas business.
In order to meet the needs of rapid business development and improvement, Anker Innovation's information system construction ideas are also constantly evolving. Dr. Zuo Xin, CIO of Anker Innovation, said that its IT system construction has gone through three stages: from one system, to a set of business systems, and then to a set of post-oriented digital intelligent cockpits.
In the first phase, IT is simply used to support the company's basic business processes and is deployed fully localized. In the second stage, its system construction began to be gradually built on Amazon Web Services, using the cloud infrastructure provided by the latter.
In the third stage, that is, the digital intelligence strategy stage, Anker Innovations began to fully apply various cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services, including computing, storage, intelligent lakehouse, data analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning, etc., to realize the migration of internal systems and services to the cloud, and gradually build the digital intelligence cockpit of Anker Innovation, realize business innovation and efficient operation, and accelerate product upgrading and iteration.
Establishment of a joint innovation lab
It is the further deepening of the cooperation between the two sides that has promoted the improvement of the level of cooperation. In 2022, Anker Innovation and Amazon Web Services established a joint innovation lab to jointly invest resources to promote innovative research. The joint innovation lab is co-led by Dr. Xin Zuo and Dr. Yaxiao Liu, CTO of Amazon Web Services Greater China.
Liu Yaxiao said that the joint innovation lab is one of the initiatives of Amazon Web Services to empower customers, specifically for leading enterprises in the industry. Relying on Amazon Web Services' advanced technology capabilities in cutting-edge fields such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data, it jointly invests resources with customers to create and carry out long-term cooperation, jointly explores and practices digital innovation on the cloud, and applies advanced technologies and innovative methods to help enterprises better achieve digital and intelligent transformation.
Under the cooperation mode of the joint innovation lab, the two parties jointly carry out the research, design, research and development, communication and implementation support of innovation projects. Liu Yaxiao said that the two parties are not only technical co-creation, but also institutional co-creation, through long-term cooperation to support Anker Innovation to improve customer experience, and then promote the development of the entire industry.
According to reports, the work of the joint innovation laboratory is mainly carried out from three directions. The first is to improve technical capabilities, reduce costs and increase efficiency, such as using artificial intelligence to improve advertising efficiency; The second is to introduce an innovation culture, improve management capabilities, and exchange and improve innovation based on innovation culture and innovation mechanisms; The third is to create innovative tools to expand impact, that is, to enhance the influence of both parties within Anker Innovation and throughout the industry through cloud tools and industry solutions.
Comprehensively improve in the direction of intelligence
It is clear that the goal of the cooperation is not just at the IT level, but also to bring business innovation. In this regard, the adoption of AI technology and AI tools has played a crucial role.
The first joint innovation between the two companies revolves around an AI algorithm model for smart ad delivery.
For Anker Innovations, advertising on Amazon e-commerce sites to achieve sales drainage and brand building is one of its main marketing methods. In order to better optimize the cost and efficiency of advertising delivery, it is necessary to change the traditional model of relying only on manual and regular practices in the past and improve the level of intelligent advertising.
With the assistance of Amazon Web Services application scientists, senior architects, and product experts, Anker Innovations used Amazon SageMaker machine learning services to develop and deliver prototype algorithms through a 2-week Data Lab. On this basis, Anker Innovation has realized the automatic advertising price adjustment bidding mechanism, transformed advertising from manual/rule mode to intelligent mode, optimized the advertising display effect, and increased the efficiency by 33%.
At the same time, Anker Innovation also attaches great importance to improving products and services through customer feedback. In the process of sorting out customer product reviews, it is necessary to quantitatively analyze consumers' experience feedback, not only to achieve precise marketing of products, but also to establish a close connection between brands and consumers. Through the application of Amazon SageMaker, the joint innovation lab realizes label extraction, data annotation, sentiment classification, model reasoning, etc., and optimizes fine-grained sentiment analysis through NLP technology to help better realize product planning decisions, product quality optimization, sales operation optimization, and marketing strategy optimization.
For the future development of the joint innovation lab, Zuo Xin said that the two sides will explore innovations in various aspects such as intelligent customer service and short video customer acquisition, and export solutions to the whole industry.
He emphasized that the ultimate goal of establishing a joint innovation lab with Amazon Web Services is to introduce its innovation culture and industry capabilities and accelerate the implementation of Anker innovation business strategy.