As China’s smart home has moved from the single product stage to the whole house smart stage, three camps have gradually differentiated. Chinese mobile phone manufacturers such as BAT traditional Internet giants, Xiaomi, Huawei and other traditional home appliance companies have successively made deployments in the smart home industry.
“The gate is equipped with a weather sensor, which can control the indoor temperature and ventilation according to various weather indicators; each room uses touch sensors to control lighting, music and room temperature; visitors must wear electronic probes for the convenience of computers Know who they are and where they are. On the way home, the gate remotely probes everything in the home through the smart residential system…”
When it comes to smart homes, most people will first think of the Bill Gates Mansion, which has the title of “House of the Future.” This mansion built by Bill Gates at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars can be called a model of smart homes in the world.
Nowadays, more smart home models are being deployed, but are smart homes really “smart”?
How “smart home” emerges?
Since the world’s first smart building appeared in the United States in 1984, the concept of smart home has been introduced to China for more than 30 years.
In 2003, China successively introduced some smart home systems to the market. Led by the development of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technology, China’s smart home industry is booming.
From 2014 to 2019, China’s smart home market developed rapidly, with the market size growing from 72 billion yuan to 211.8 billion yuan. Data shows that smart products have become a hot spot in China’s consumer market. From sweeping robots to smart speakers, from smart child companion robots to smart door locks… More and more smart products have become synonymous with a sense of the future.
The concept of “intelligence in the whole house” has gradually become popular in the field of Chinese home furnishings in recent years. As the name implies, the so-called whole-house intelligence refers to the overall smart home system, which integrates smart lighting, security, audio and video, and home appliance control into a whole home solution.
However, due to the large number of devices and complex usage scenarios, the experience of smart devices throughout the house is often unsatisfactory. Many products stay in single product intelligence, single system intelligence, and their development is limited by seamless integration with multiple platforms, and even more limited by different wireless network protocols such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee.
Three major schools of “smart” in China
In today’s 5G era, as long as there is a “smart” bonus, everyone wants to get a share.
As China’s smart home has moved from the stage of single smart products to the stage of whole-house intelligence, three camps have gradually differentiated. Traditional Internet giants such as BAT, mobile phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi and Huawei, and traditional home appliance companies have successively deployed China’s smart home industry.
One is the Internet camp. Backed by the natural flow of the Internet and huge capital, BAT has natural platform ecological attributes. They use smart speakers as the entry point, such as Baidu’s “Xiaodu”, Ali’s “Tmall Elf”, and Tencent’s “Listening”.
The second is the smartphone camp represented by Xiaomi and Huawei, such as Xiaomi’s “Xiaoai Classmate” and Huawei’s “Xiaoyi”. Xiaomi and Huawei, both of which were born in hardware, have formed a parallel business model of smart furniture and mobile phone business. Take Huawei as an example. In December 2020, Huawei held a new product launch conference for the whole house smart and smart screen, and officially released Huawei’s smart home strategy and whole house smart solutions.
Unlike other smart home manufacturers, Huawei has not designed its own “central control screen”, instead it has its own Huawei mobile phone to achieve central control. From air-conditioning TVs to smart door locks to cameras, the smart phone camp has created a rich industry field for smart homes.
The third is the traditional Chinese home appliance industry camp represented by Haier and Midea.
Traditional Chinese home appliance giants such as Haier tend to establish a full product model for smart homes, enhance brand effects, increase customer stickiness, and develop towards platformization, ecology, and scale as a whole.
According to IDC data, in China’s smart home market in the third quarter of last year, Xiaomi ranked first with a 16.3% share. Except for the continuous shipment of TVs and speakers, two explosive products, smart temperature control, door locks and lighting equipment were released this quarter. The volume of cargo increased rapidly year on year. Midea and Haier ranked second and third in China’s smart home market by a market share of 11.3% and 9.8% respectively.
In the smart home segmentation scenario, many innovative companies have emerged in these fields such as smart surveillance, smart door locks, smart speakers, and smart TVs, and they are single-pointed directly into the smart home field. Such as Di Nike (smart lock), Qisheng Technology (smart electric bed), Kaidi shares (intelligent linear drive equipment) and so on.
The leap from single smart products to scene linkage
Now, whole-house intelligence is not popular, and only smart home single products are popular.
According to the “2020 China Smart Home Development White Paper” survey, smart home consumer-grade hot products are mostly single products. At present, smart home appliances in China are the most used sub-sectors for smart home appliances, accounting for 19.61%, followed by smart locks (18.14%). ), smart speakers (17.67%), smart cameras (13.75%), smart curtains (12.46%), smart panels (6.21%), smart toilets (4.16%), smart clothes dryers (4.28%) and infrared forwarding (2.79 %).
Most of the front-installed users are high-end villas and large flat-floor users, mainly using bus-integrated smart home systems, and users pay more attention to the overall intelligent functions; for most ordinary families, after-installation can fully express their needs, and at the same time It can be not limited to the standard scenario of real estate developers.
However, the current market pricing of smart homes is generally relatively high, and ordinary people may not be able to afford it, so that many people do not know it well, so it is even more impossible to enjoy the fun and convenience brought by smart homes.
At the same time, technology-based companies are subject to market tepidity and have limited technological monetization capabilities; commercial companies see strong demand but a small market size and lack the drive of listed companies, so they are also struggling.
Real smart or fake smart?
After 2020, China’s smart home industry has entered the initial stage of whole-house interconnection. However, the communication protocol in the smart home industry is difficult to achieve uniformity, and at the same time, the smart products of each brand are relatively independent, which hinders the development of smart home interconnection.
First of all, smart products must properly solve the problem of consumer trust. Data is transmitted through the cloud, and there is a risk of leakage of user security and privacy, which is easy for consumers to worry about privacy leakage, security, and system stability. Just like the shuddering stealth camera incident some time ago.
Secondly, although the concept of the smart home is becoming more and more popular, the market situation is still not optimistic. For example, some consumers criticize the “pseudo-intelligence” problem. Although many smart products can be connected to the Internet and can be operated on mobile phones, they are still far from the “intelligence” that consumers expect.
Take smart speakers as an example. When you say “quiet”, Xiaomi’s “Xiaoai classmate” really quiets down, but Baidu’s Xiaodu speakers play the song “Quiet” for you.
In addition, if you want to move into the era of “whole house intelligence”, you still have to overcome problems such as poor product compatibility and difficulty in interconnection, and cross a series of technical thresholds. For example, “whole house intelligence” requires smart homes to achieve cross-product and cross-category interaction on the basis of further upgrading and improving intelligent single products.
In fact, both end-users and intermediate channels can feel the warming up of the smart home market. With the promotion of the concept, it may promote the formation of rigid demand in the market, just like the emergence of smart phones. After the precipitation of time, smart homes can definitely serve human life better.
Source: Yishi Finance