Source of this article: Wulian Media
Author of this article: Lucy
Around 2014, because of the rise of the concept of smart home, a large number of entrepreneurial teams positioned in the development of smart home and smart hardware emerged in an instant in China. Tuya Smart is one of them and a typical representative.
In the author's opinion, the representativeness of Tuya Intelligence can be reflected in two main points:
First, the track and strategic route chosen by Tuya Smart are different. Trapped in the chaos and confusion of the domestic smart home industry in the first three years of 2014-2016, the business development of Tuya Smart was not smooth in the early days of its establishment. But the key turning point was that at that time, Tuya discovered that the willingness and ability to pay for smart devices in foreign markets were significantly higher than those in China, so it quickly "turned the horse" to cut its business into North America, Europe, India, Japan and other markets until 2017 The domestic smart hardware market gradually matured in 2009, and only then took advantage of the trend to extend its business back to China. With this strategic route, Tuya Smart is significantly ahead of its early competitors.
Second, Tuya Smart was officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the concept of "the first share of the global IoT cloud platform" last month. Looking at the significance of listing from an industry perspective, Tuya Smart is the first to stand out from the complex and fragmented IoT industry as the main identity of the IoT PaaS platform, and has a positive incentive for other industry players.
Of course, listing is not the end, but should be a new starting point.
On April 26, the "Global Hard Technology Developers Conference (Shenzhen)" hosted by Tuya Smart was grandly held. This is the first global hard technology developer conference held after Tuya Smart goes public in 2021, including Hillhouse, CICC, Microsoft, Himalaya and other investment institutions and developers attending the conference.
At the meeting, Tuya Smart officially released nine smart industry solutions (industry, agriculture, tourism, retail, medical and health, pension, education, energy, real estate), and released the "Klein Plan" for developers and application demanders. ", and jointly established Tuya IoT Industry Fund with Hillhouse.
In order to dig deeper into the logic and thinking behind the launch of Tuya Smart, a reporter from IOT Media interviewed Huang Rui, the marketing director of Tuya Smart, and business related personnel, focusing on how Tuya chose the nine major industries? How to maintain stability in the nine major industries Spreading business? What are the new features of Graffiti's "ecological" style of play, etc. to discuss and exchange topics.
1. Why did you choose these nine industries?
In the era of the Internet of Everything, digitization and intelligence are the inevitable trends for the survival and development of enterprises. Tuya Intelligence is undoubtedly the in-depth practitioner of this intelligent transformation.
Simply put, by understanding the nine industry solutions released this time, we will have a clearer understanding of Tuya's core capabilities and market positioning.
In the real estate industry, Tuya first extends the hardware ecological advantages of the house to the outside, and fully supports to meet the digital needs of diversified real estate projects such as new buildings, old communities, office buildings, smart homes, etc.; supports front and rear installations, indoors Link with outdoor; support and help real estate group to build strategic digital middle platform, realize full-stack service capabilities from project intelligence to real estate group's internal management intelligence.
In the elderly care industry, it mainly focuses on consumer-grade light application equipment, provides home care, community care, and high-end institutional care products and solutions, and creates a comprehensive health management, safety guarantee and life assistance service system for the elderly.
In the retail industry, with the "Internet of Things + AI" as the technical support, we will create smart scene solutions, shared rental scene solutions, and create a digital management system that reduces costs and increases efficiency.
In the energy industry, it mainly provides energy equipment and energy consumption monitoring and management, energy saving optimization, energy management data visualization and other tools around households, industries, buildings, hotels, parks and other energy users to realize the full link of energy generation, transmission, use, and storage. Closed loop management.
In the education industry, based on Tuya's intelligent hardware ecology and IoT platform capabilities, it provides services such as campus digital management, campus security, and smart classrooms around core scenarios such as "campus, classrooms, and dormitories".
In the tourism industry, it mainly helps the tourism industry's scenic spots and accommodation spaces to achieve intelligence, for example, it can achieve goals such as improving the experience of staying, increasing the price of rooms, and increasing the occupancy rate.
In the medical and health industry, based on Tuya's rich IoT product ecology and cloud platform capabilities, with medical treatment, sleep, health, and nursing as the core, it helps companies create smart medical and health solutions.
In the industrial industry, it is mainly for electronic consumer-type manufacturing plants, equipment connection, monitoring, data storage, analysis and visualization of the production process, and strengthen the intelligent control and operation and maintenance of the entire process of industrial manufacturing.
In the agricultural industry, with the support of Tuya's smart IoT platform capabilities, through a variety of IoT-based applications such as precision agriculture, smart irrigation, smart greenhouses, etc., it promotes the improvement of agricultural processes, builds smart farms based on the Internet of Things, and achieves a double harvest of crop quality and yield.
Obviously, taking a closer look at these nine major industries, graffiti is actually restrained.The logic is to focus on extending the hardware ecology from the existing consumer-level field. Factory, for example, in the medical and health industry, it focuses on consumer-level smart hardware instead of surgical-level hardware products...On this basis, it combines with the PaaS platform to build a complete service system.
But even so, because of the diverse and fragmented needs of IoT customers, it is even difficult for many customers to clearly describe their needs to the company.Under su
ch conditions, the industry generally has a priority when doing horizontal IoT platforms. The common industries, such as cities, automobiles, life, manufacturing, etc., will generally be prioritized into 4-5 fields.But why did Tuya Smart launch the "9+N" industry strategy? Will large and comprehensive product R&D investment drag down business revenue?
For such a question, a simple conclusion is that from a technical analysis, Tuya Smart is positioned as the underlying general-purpose platform of the IoT, and the platform itself can be used in many scenarios. And Tuya Smart has a huge hardware access ecosystem (according to CIC data, as of December 31, 2020, the number of smart devices supported by Tuya Smart is about 204.3 million units) and a developer ecosystem (according to Tuya official website information, As of December 31, 2020, Tuya IoT development platform has accumulated more than 262,000 registered developers), coupled with the gradually accumulated PaaS layer capabilities, it is natural to extend a rich industry SaaS based on the growth of customer demand.
In addition, a passage from Huang Rui, the marketing director of Tuya Smart, gives a key answer to such behavioral motives:
"Now that this node has launched nine major industry solutions, it is not that Tuya has rushed to choose these industries, but these industries are choosing Tuya to meet their smart needs."
In the author's understanding, this means that graffiti has always been in these industries, but it has made a clearer summary and continuation.
It is especially important that Tuya still adheres to the positioning of the underlying IoT infrastructure platform, and will not completely take root in sub-industries for in-depth applications. Correspondingly, the content of the more subdivided industries is completed by the developers, and the two parties jointly serve commercial customers. The advantages in cost and efficiency are outstanding.
2. The "Klein Plan" releases positive signals to developers
Tuya Smart has always regarded “building a developer ecosystem with diverse technologies and rich scenarios” as its core strategy.
In 2019, Tuya launched the "Nebula Project", which aims to provide key support to potential customers around the world. Since then, many developer support programs targeting local market characteristics have been launched, such as the Catfish Project in India and the Seal Project in North America, to help developers achieve sales growth or business model innovation in various ways.
At this conference, Tuya announced the contents of the "Klein Plan" for the first time.
Huang Rui introduced to the media that the term "Klein Project" originated from the "Klein Bottle", which represents a non-orientable topological space in topology, which can be simply understood as an "infinite loop" concept.
In the Klein Plan, based on Tuya's IoT hardware development tools and cloud development platform, Tuya has built a communication bridge between developers and application demanders. By inviting both parties to enter the Tuya ecosystem together, so that they can enjoy the technology and technology from Tuya. Full-link support for products, brands, marketing, training, and capital.
Ultimately, the goal of the Klein plan is to help developers and application demanders complete the full-scenario smart landing with high efficiency, and in the continuous communication iteration, it is expected to obtain the unlimited value of IoT applications.
It is reported that in the first phase of the "plan", Tuya will recruit members from nine areas of "retail, education, real estate, energy, pension, tourism, medical and health, industry, and agriculture".
3. After Tuya Smart went public, what other changes have been made?
According to Chen Liaohan, the co-chairman and president of Tuya Smart, in an interview with the media in March, he said that although Tuya currently accounts for a higher proportion of overseas investment, the development potential of China's IoT market is also very large. More resources to deepen the Chinese market.
Therefore, there is another highlight at the conference-Tuya Intelligent Director and CFO Liu Yao and Hillhouse Venture Partners Li Qiang jointly announced the establishment of Tuya IoT Industry Fund. The total size of the fund is 400 million U.S. dollars. It will leverage the resource advantages of the integration of industry and finance to help IoT companies and developers around the world complete the intelligentization of products and business models, and share the fast-growing IoT track dividend.
At this point, Tuya Smart shoulders the role of "IoT Ecological Empowerer".
In addition, only two weeks ago, Tuya Smart announced that it officially joined the Open Intelligence Alliance (OLA Alliance) and became the vice chairman unit of the alliance.
The alliance was established in December 2020. The first group of members gathered 24 academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and 65 leading companies. It is a rare high-standard IoT government-industry-university-research organization. And the first project of the alliance is to use smart home as a pilot. It will focus on formulating smart home connection standards, testing and certification standards, and AI standards to promote smart home interconnection and interoperability, so that the scene will be expanded to other IoT applications in the future.
At this point, in the advantageous scenario, Tuya Intelligence has become a key participant in the "setting of standards for the Internet of Things".
Finally, let me talk about my personal impression of graffiti.
In a report in 2019, Graffiti founder and CEO Wang Xueji described the English name "Tuya" of Graffiti once, saying that "Tuya" has the meaning of "volcano under the glacier", although the surface is low-key, But it is gathering momentum at any time.
By 2021, before the news of Tuya Smart's listing is widely spread through media channels, many people in the Internet of Things circle have long regarded Tuya as the industry "benchmark", especially in the field of Internet of Things platforms.
Of course, because the overall development of the Internet of Things is not as expected, it is normal that the companies on the track have not made profits, so the English name of Tuya still matches the current development situation of the Internet of Things.
But in fact, everyone is expecting that with the rapid growth of people's demand for intelligent connection of all things and digital transformation, can Tuya Smart, which upholds the concept of neutrality, openness and compatibility, as an "industry benchmark", can seize the opportunity to take advantage of the trend?
Let Tuya use more actions to answer this question.