Dilemma and hope in the development of smart home

The global smart home boom has triggered Internet giants and traditional manufacturers to scramble for home entrance. Amazon and Google dominate the global market with smart speakers, while domestic Alibaba and Baidu are investing in smart homes through mergers and acquisitions and price subsidies. Occupy a place; in addition, Huawei has released an all-scenario smart strategy, Xiaomi has built a rich ecological chain, and Haier has built the world's first 5G smart home laboratory... I believe that in the future, more companies will compete to enter the market. Large scale smart home field.

As the world's top procurement exhibition for electronic products, Global Sources Electronics Fair has always been concerned about the development of the smart home industry. As early as 2016, it has set up a smart home area at its Consumer Electronics Show to continuously attract the smart home industry. The upstream and downstream enterprises in the chain have gradually expanded their products from the initial intelligent lighting control equipment and some single products under the intelligent security equipment to the product categories involving multiple product lines in the whole house.

At this spring's Global Sources Consumer Electronics Show, "CEConline" learned at the exhibition site that consumers are no longer unfamiliar with smart home products, and the products of major exhibitors are also accelerating their expansion under the promotion of technology. In the application scenario of smart home, consumers can obviously experience the convenience brought by smart home to life on the spot. However, in the actual application process, because there is no unified interconnection standard, it is difficult for products from different manufacturers to achieve interconnection and interoperability. When different brands of smart home products are put together, their isolated products are still far from true "smart". Far. This has also led to the low penetration rate of many smart home products among consumers.

The evolution of smart home products

In the smart home exhibition area of this year's Global Sources Consumer Electronics Show, "CEConline" saw that many exhibitors have built a whole-house smart home scene, from intelligent Entrance halls, smart living rooms, smart bedrooms, smart kitchens, smart toilets, etc. This also reflects that consumers' demand for smart home appliances has shifted from single products to scenario-based interconnection.

In this regard, Zheng Li, vice president and overseas market director of Shenzhen Oruibo Technology Co., Ltd. ("Oruibo"), told "CEConline": "For smart home users, their needs are In the past, users may only buy a smart socket and a smart camera, but now they want a whole-house smart product solution.”

Smart Home The research and development and replacement of products will be based on the development of Internet technology, such as the development of wireless protocols and Wi-Fi technology to drive the progress of products; the second is through market demand, for example, smart home manufacturers will use their own brand agents in many overseas countries. Business to feedback the needs of local customers to drive the progress of products.

Shenzhen Chuangyi Intelligent System Co., Ltd. ("Chuangyi Intelligent" for short) has participated in the Global Sources Consumer Electronics Show in 2015, and each exhibition will receive a lot of demand from buyers, and buyers The demand is directly put forward by the user. Its general manager Xie Zhe analyzed, "Actually, the habits and needs of smart home users are cultivated by large companies. This is also the case in China. Tmall and Baidu are subsidizing, and domestic consumers are accustomed to using voice to control Tmall Genie. After you come to do things all day, you will gradually stop using your mobile phone. At that time, users will want to use voice to control more things, which is the ecological model of smart home development."

However, the current smart home The product only solves the simple remote control problem, and can perform simple remote switch operations on air conditioners, heating, lights, etc., but it cannot automatically determine whether to cool, heat or turn on lights according to the current environmental status. To truly realize intelligence, further development of technology is required.

In Xie Zhe's view, sensors may become the next category of explosion. After adding temperature and humidity sensors in the future, smart air conditioners can detect the temperature of the skin through the sensors, and then use this data to automatically adjust the air conditioner's performance. Temperature, this is the real intelligence. "Now it can only be said that we are walking on the road of intelligence." Xie Zhe said.

About the next generation of smart home products, Oribo is also making efforts in fully automated artificial intelligence sensing. Zheng Li told "CEConline" that Ou Ruibo is constantly improving the automation of voice control, and adding cameras to increase the function of face recognition, so that some smart products can be personalized according to the habits of different users. After arriving home, the air conditioner will be adjusted to 26 degrees according to his habit, and it will be automatically adjusted to 27 degrees when my mother comes back.”

Shenzhen Haiman Technology Co., Ltd. CEO Liu Ya believes that the current smart home market is undergoing In the start-up period, the market scale of smart cities and smart homes continues to grow, and smart home systems have become the focus of development, which is embodied in three major areas: first, data is the core, moving closer to the core profit model; second, the development of technology helps smart home scenarios For example, 5G can further connect a large number of terminal devices; the third is that data runs through products and services, and intelligent hardware products start from a single product and develop towards diversified services. In her opinion, voice control and voice recognition products will become the next hottest products for smart homes.

The choice between opening and closing

At present, market research institutions are generally optimistic about the future space of the smart home market. The data from the British consulting company "Future Origin" shows that in the global In the market, shipments of smart home products increased by 39% in 2018, and the global smart home market is expected to reach $155 billion by 2023.

In China, the central and local governments have frequently issued various policies to support the development of the smart home industry. For example, the "Twelfth Five-Year" Development Plan for the Internet of Things has included smart homes in 9 key areas of application demonstration projects. ; The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Standards Committee jointly formulated the "Guidelines for the Construction of Smart Home Comprehensive Standardization System", which clearly proposed to initially establish a standard system that meets the development needs of my country's smart home industry by 2020.

"CEConline" learned from the Smart Home Zone of the Global Sources Consumer Electronics Show that both smart home manufacturers and buyers expressed high expectations for the development of the smart home industry, and many other buyers believed that China's smart home The product iterative upgrade speed is very fast, and the price is not very high, which is very attractive for them. From the perspective of market size and growth rate, the smart home industry is on the rise. However, looking at the smart home industry chain, there are still scattered and slow characteristics. What hinders the development speed of smart home?

In this regard, Xie Changfang, sales director of Shenzhen Jimi IOT Co., Ltd., believes that "the biggest obstacle to the smart home industry is mainly reflected in the limited awareness of consumers and the absence of industry standards. The lack of smart home industry With a unified interconnection standard, it is difficult for products of different brands to be interconnected.”

Xie Zhe also expressed a similar view, “Domestic platforms are all independent, and products like Midea, Gree, and Xiaomi cannot be integrated into each other. Together, unlike some overseas big brands that can be linked together through some platforms, the current domestic big system is still relatively closed."

Xie Zhe told "CEConline", "The biggest difference between domestic and foreign It lies in the definition of the product. If you buy a fan and go back, a domestic manufacturer like Midea will think that the control of the fan belongs to them, and other platforms have no right to control it; while a foreign manufacturer such as Samsung believes that the fan is purchased by consumers, as long as consumers Authorization and third-party platforms can be controlled, and there are differences in the recognition of product ownership at home and abroad.”

Therefore, the current interconnection of smart home products in China is the biggest problem, and the entire smart home market is in a state of In a closed state, products cannot be interconnected, and there is no platform that can unify standards and achieve interconnection. However, from the perspective of future development and the Internet of Things, in fact, it should be multi-brand, multi-category, and multi-product comprehensive interconnection, so as to give consumers a perfect smart home experience.

Dilemma and Hope

According to Xie Zhe, 90% of Chuangyi's hardware is shipped to overseas markets, and more than 60% in overseas markets are made by Amazon. Smart speakers are directly controlled by voice, 30% are Google smart speakers, and the last 10% are controlled by App.

Compared with domestic users, overseas users prefer to use voice to directly control smart home products. Open the app on the phone and then control it remotely. Mainly because Europe and the United States have a relatively complete voice ecosystem in smart homes. Before they use voice to control smart home appliances, they are accustomed to using voice to order food and book tickets, so for them, voice control of smart devices is a very natural thing. matter.

But Chinese consumers have not yet formed the habit of voice-controlled devices, so they are now in the stage of forcibly cultivating user habits. Xie Zhe told "CEConline", "In China, if a user is asked to turn off the light by voice, the first thing he will think of is that I walk over and turn off the light. For some users overseas, they have already Accepting voice control is also the reason why the explosion of smart speakers at the end of 2016 promoted the development of the entire smart home. In China, Xiaomi, Alibaba, and Baidu are also vigorously cultivating users' voice usage habits, but the domestic smart home atmosphere has not yet risen. "

In addition, most of the residential buildings overseas are single-family homes, which indirectly leads to the demand for intelligent equipment, but most of the domestic residential buildings are apartment-style buildings, and the lights can be turned off when you stand up. The difference in living facilities such as residential buildings has also led to differences in the development of smart homes at home and abroad.

However, many respondents told "CEConline" that most Chinese consumers still show great enthusiasm for smart home, they believe it is a way of life in the future, and even in The future will change the way they live. Especially now the young people after 8090, they prefer to use intelligent products, even if it is not the intelligent system of the whole house, some intelligent items controlled by App or voice are also changing their way of life.

At present, the competition in the smart home market environment is very fierce, and related parties in the industry chain such as traditional manufacturers, Internet companies and operators have entered the market, or self-developed smart hardware, or deployed ecological platforms, which can be used by a hundred schools of thought. to describe. Xie Changfang said, "The development of smart home enterprises will face many challenges and tests. The choice of development path and strategic planning will become the key points. Cross-border cooperation and open ecology between different types of enterprises will become the mainstream of the smart home market."

With the development of IoT technology and 5G technology, smart home companies are constantly overcoming technical difficulties, and the industry will usher in a golden stage of development. Although the current penetration rate of smart homes in my country is low, as a subdivision of the Internet of Things industry, smart homes have huge potential for future development, and the output value of the entire industry will also reach a scale of 100 billion US dollars. In the future, the home appliance industry should take intelligent manufacturing as the leading direction, and gradually build a whole industry chain of smart home. Whether it is smart home or smart manufacturing, traditional leading companies cannot dominate alone, but can only cooperate with Internet giants and technology companies to dominate the future development of the industry.

Photo/Global Sources