Development challenges of smart home

The rapid development of information technology has brought great changes to people's lives. In recent years, smart home is gradually favored by consumers for its intelligent and convenient home experience. As a relatively mature field of Internet of things applications, smart home has continuously enriched the types of products and rapidly expanded the market scale.


In 2021, the total expenditure of global smart home, including consumption of equipment, systems and services, was close to US $96 billion, and the compound annual growth rate in the next five years (2018-2023) was 10%, which will continue to grow to US $155 billion by 2023. Enterprise survey data show that by the end of December 2021, there were more than 640000 smart home enterprises in China.


Undoubtedly, the development of smart home in China's home market is unstoppable. However, with the popularity of smart appliances, the market penetration of smart home in China is only 4.9%. The development problems hidden under the huge market scale should not be underestimated.


Smart home development challenges


The biggest difference between smart appliances and traditional appliances is that the former uses microprocessor, sensor technology and network communication technology, which can be remotely controlled through networking. It does not need to be immersive and rely on remote control for sensing. Products such as smart cameras, smart water heaters and smart refrigerators can be controlled by mobile devices such as mobile phones.


However, due to the large number of smart home brands, the products used by consumers may be very different and belong to one brand, which requires downloading many applications at the same time, increasing the difficulty of operation.


From a technical point of view, the common integration between different smart home appliances has not been completed. At present, the smart home ecosystem in the market mostly takes app or smart audio and other products as the entrance. It seems that smart appliances are integrated into one scene, but careful observation will find that these appliances are still independent of each other and cannot be linked.


The reason why consumers choose smart home products is to liberate their hands and enjoy a more convenient and advanced life; At the same time, make full use of the living space and expand the actual use area of the house. It is difficult to realize interconnection between intelligent products, which makes it difficult for consumers to experience the convenience brought by intelligent products.


Therefore, building a complete set of smart home scenarios and realizing the interoperability and integration between smart appliances is an important issue to be solved by smart home brands.


Scenario construction mode


Some leading enterprises in the development of the industry have begun to lay out intelligent scenes. Xiaomi, Midea and other brands adopt the "two-way opening" mode, which not only outputs appliances suitable for other smart home ecosystems to the market, but also allows appliances of different brands to enter their own ecology.


Haier chose another business model, that is, the whole scenario solution of smart home provided by the third-party platform, which not only matches smart appliances for consumers on demand, but also provides supporting home services.


Although the construction of smart home scene is not easy, the benefits are also proportional to the difficulty of expansion. Midea's financial report for the third quarter of 2021 showed that at the end of the third quarter, its operating revenue increased by 20% year-on-year, its net profit increased by 6% year-on-year, and its gross profit margin remained above 20%. The impact of the epidemic has been basically eliminated. Among them, the growth of smart home scene is indispensable.


Smart home scene landing


Whether it is an inclusive "two-way opening" model or an independent model matched on demand, if you want to occupy one market, you can't just push products, but build a complete smart home scene. On the one hand, the general direction of the development of smart appliances must be full scene products, not iterative upgrading of a single product; On the other hand, smart home ecological construction is the premise of the existence and popularization of smart appliances. Only when the whole smart home ecological construction is completed, consumers can feel a more convenient, intelligent and integrated smart life.


With the development of science and technology and the improvement of residents' acceptance, the consumer group of smart home products will only further expand. If the brand wants to build the smart home scene in consumers' homes through its own team, the labor cost is too high and it is difficult to cover families all over the country.


In this regard, the business model adopted by Haier can well solve this pain point, reach cooperation with a third-party professional service platform, and formulate the whole scenario solution of smart family according to its own products and user needs. The representative brands in the market are master Wan home service platform.


It is reported that master Wan platform has comprehensively laid out the smart home market at this stage. For popular smart products, the platform regularly organizes relevant extended skill training to build a new era home service team with both service awareness and professional skills, so as to ensure that consumers can continue to enjoy efficient and high-quality services. The platform formulates one-stop service solutions according to the customized schemes of different brands to help smart home enterprises realize the efficient landing of a full range of products in the whole space.


With the help of the service system of the third-party service platform, the brand can collect more use data. On the one hand, it is conducive to improve its own consumer insight ability, and continuously carry out product iteration and innovation through analysis, evaluation and prediction of consumer preferences; On the other hand, in the upgrading and optimization of products, the smart home ecosystem will become more and more perfect, so as to attract consumers in reverse, strengthen consumers' dependence on the smart home ecosystem and expand the brand effect.


epilogue


Although smart home has become the mainstream trend, it has not yet ushered in a period of rapid growth. There are still many challenges in the expansion of smart home brands. If brands want to reshape the market pattern, they should not only focus more on consumer demand, but also further stimulate and create new consumer demand from the demand side.


Enterprises always rely on products that meet the needs of consumers to open the market. Therefore, they need to constantly innovate technology and optimize the use experience. Perhaps a few years after breaking through the technical bottleneck, smart home products can become "just needed" like traditional products.