The growth of the home appliance industry has slowed in the past two years. According to data from Aowei Cloud Network, the overall growth of the home appliance industry in 2017-2018 was 11.8% and 1%, respectively, and negative growth became the norm in January-August 2019. At this stage, the home appliance industry is in a downward cycle, and how to achieve growth has become a common problem faced by home appliance brands.
Smart home has become a new direction for the industry to gain growth.
According to the "Quarterly Tracking Report on China's Smart Home Equipment Market" recently released by IDC, China's smart home appliance market shipments in the first half of 2019 were approximately 28.38 million units, a year-on-year increase of 22.8%. Among them, the growth of large appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, and air conditioners was particularly significant. With the increasing maturity of technologies such as 5G, IoT, and artificial intelligence, the smart home market will become a new direction to awaken the growth of the home appliance industry.
The smart home market is showing growth potential. This huge piece of cake not only attracts home appliance manufacturers, but also more and more Internet companies are focusing on this market. Among them are not only giant companies such as Baidu, Ali, and Huawei, but also Xiaomi , OnePlus and other mobile phone brands.
Nail Technology believes that if traditional home appliance brands want to seize this round of opportunities, they need to make improvements in the following two points:
One is to use technological advantages to enhance the degree of intelligence of home appliances.
As the smart home market has become the direction sought after by many manufacturers, there have also been some brands trying to obtain the market through low prices, which has also caused the average price of smart home appliances to begin to drop.
Although the low-price strategy can exchange a certain amount of sales in a short period of time, traditional manufacturers cannot follow their example. In the long run, quality and differentiation are what the industry needs. Therefore, we need to build more products that meet consumer expectations and differentiated products based on our years of technology accumulation in the home appliance industry, so as to gain more market space. .
For example, home appliance manufacturers can rely on their technological advantages accumulated in home appliances for many years, combined with AI technologies such as temperature perception, machine learning, and visual recognition to help smart home appliances get rid of the “simple intelligence” of simple voice interaction control at this stage, and achieve more humanity Upgrade.
The second is to use offline logistics and other resources to establish a diversified ecological service system. Price is the advantage of some Internet brands deploying smart homes, but there are still shortcomings in terms of services, and it is difficult to quickly make up. Therefore, traditional home appliance brands should use their own offline channel advantages that they have accumulated over the years to establish a diversified ecological service system through resources such as logistics and installation, and form a difference with Internet brands. This can not only help the brand build a better reputation, but also help It better occupy the market.
Of course, some problems also need to be avoided. Major General Ding, an observer of the home appliance industry, said that the smart home industry needs to avoid two major problems: one is smart and smart for product innovation, which will increase user costs; second, the technology is immature and smart experience cannot be achieved. Landing. Whether the active layout of traditional brands can make the market develop in a more benign direction remains to be seen.