Smart home life is no longer a concept, smart home is showing a rapid growth trend

The trillion-dollar smart home market is being opened up, and smart home life is no longer a lofty concept, which has driven the rapid growth of smart homes. Data from IDC shows that China's smart home shipments increased by 36.7% year-on-year to 150 million units in 2018, and are expected to grow to 500 million units in 2023. However, the market is becoming increasingly concentrated, with the top five manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Haier, Midea, Alibaba and Baidu accounting for nearly half of the market share.

Among smart products, smart speakers, smart bulbs and smart door locks are growing rapidly, leading the smart home market. Among them, smart speakers have increased by 1051.8% year-on-year to 20 million units, but Alibaba, Xiaomi and Baidu are the leaders, accounting for more than 80% of the market share. It is expected that the shipment volume will reach 35.88 million units in 2019, but the domestic smart speaker market will be divided into three parts. The competition landscape has changed from the previous battle of hundreds of boxes to a three-way competition. There seems to be little opportunity for players such as Huawei. Some brand manufacturers will face the embarrassing situation of having no taste for food and a pity to abandon it, and some innovative companies will face the test of life and death in the face of the situation where giants are offering high subsidies to grab the market.

Ali

The cumulative shipments of Alibaba's Tmall Genie smart speakers have exceeded 10 million units. This is the third smart speaker brand in the world to break the 10 million mark after Amazon and Google. In addition, Alibaba's smart life ecosystem, which relies on smart speakers as a hub, is growing. Various smart devices can be easily connected and automatically networked through the open connection protocol IoTConnect, and are adapted to and support Tmall Genie voice control. In the competition landscape of smart life portals, Alibaba has taken the lead and occupied the vast majority of domestic home portals.

So far, all walks of life have actively reached in-depth cooperation with Tmall Genie to promote smart devices into more homes and help people realize their smart home life. Earlier this month, Gree cooperated with Tmall Genie under Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Gree home appliances will be connected to IoT, aiming to achieve 1 million smart air conditioners sold on Tmall in 2019 and accelerate the IoT strategy. On the 27th, Midea also reached an IoT cooperation with Tmall and planned to sell 2 million smart air conditioners supporting Tmall Genie on Tmall.

Alibaba even opened an unmanned future hotel with robots as services. All the rooms are designed with intelligent features, from turning on and off the TV to lights, air conditioning and curtains, etc. All the smart devices in the room can be controlled by Tmall Genie. Once entering the room, Tmall Genie becomes the user's exclusive butler to provide various services.

Millet

Xiaomi previously announced its 2018 annual report, which showed that its IoT and consumer goods revenue reached 43.8 billion, a year-on-year increase of 87%. In four years, its revenue scale has increased by more than 9 times, which is amazing. The core of Xiaomi's rapid growth in smart home lies in the cultivation of a huge ecological chain and the creation of a number of popular products, such as smart TVs, which increased by 225% year-on-year to 8.4 million units, and the shipment volume of wearable devices ranked first in China, accounting for 23.2% of the domestic market share in 2018, ahead of Huawei and Apple and other manufacturers. The cumulative shipment volume of smart speakers is 9 million units, and the number of devices equipped with Xiao Ai smart voice assistant exceeds 100 million units, with 38.8 million monthly active users, making it one of the most active AI smart voice interaction platforms in China.

Xiaomi's IoT platform connects 151 million smart devices, and the number of users with more than five Xiaomi IoT devices is 2.3 million. In the entire smart home ecosystem, Xiaomi has successfully opened the home entrance by using the ecological chain. As long as you are willing, you can build your own smart home life based on the Xiaomi IoT life platform, and control it through the voice of the Xiaoai smart speaker.

It is not limited to the products of ecological chain enterprises. More third parties have achieved interconnection and interoperability with Xiaomi. For example, last year Changhong and Xiaomi IoT cooperated deeply and realized the interconnection and intercontrol between Changhong CHiQ TV and CHiQ refrigerators, air conditioners and Xiaomi smart home ecological chain devices. In addition, many products from ORVIBO, the world's most innovative smart home enterprise, have been connected to the Mijia ecosystem. ORVIBO ALLone Pro multi-functional smart host, ORVIBO Xiaofang smart remote control and many other products can achieve interconnection and interoperability with the Xiaomi IoT platform.

Baidu

With Baidu adjusting its pricing strategy last year and launching a cheap version of its smart speaker, the shipments grew sevenfold, and Baidu quickly entered the first camp as a dark horse. In the fourth quarter of 2018, Baidu surpassed Xiaomi, with shipments of 2.2 million units, ranking fourth in the world and second in China. In the view of Yang Jianyong, a senior consultant of the Internet of Things, Baidu's smart speaker was able to enter the top three in one year mainly because it released cheap entry-level products, through high subsidies and celebrity endorsements, combined with its own AI capabilities and the huge smart ecosystem built by DuerOS, which led to the rapid growth of Baidu's speakers. As of the end of December 2018, the number of activated devices equipped with DuerOS reached 200 million, far exceeding the 100 million units of Xiaomi Xiao Ai.

Baidu speakers combined with DuerOS have created a smart home ecosystem that has gained ground. This ecosystem has taken shape, which means that Baidu has entered the harvest period of commercializing artificial intelligence. Jing Kun, general manager of Baidu's smart life business group: As the pioneer of conversational artificial intelligence in China, driven by Baidu, the artificial intelligence industry based on voice dialogue has exploded. Its integrated hardware and software artificial intelligence ecosystem has been formed, and Xiaodu is entering thousands of households, using artificial intelligence to make the interaction between people and devices natural and life simple and beautiful.

Do other players still have a chance?

Smart speakers have continued to grow rapidly in recent years and have become an indispensable smart device for smart homes. As a central device in the home, they combine the ecosystem fostered by voice and open platforms to control other smart home devices. The market potential is huge, which has caused technology giants to scramble to make arrangements in the hope of getting a piece of the pie. Among them, the smart speaker market has grown particularly rapidly.

Many top players such as Tencent, Lenovo and Huawei have joined in succession, including 360's Zhou Hongyi, who has also entered the market to disrupt the domestic smart speaker market. The entry of all giants has triggered a war for home entrances. As a small piece of hardware, smart speakers are highly expected by technology giants. As one of the core smart hardware products competing for the entrance to smart homes, all walks of life are full of expectations. However, the domestic market has been firmly controlled by Alibaba, Xiaomi and Baidu, and there seems to be not much opportunity left for other players. IDC predicts that the domestic smart speaker shipments this year will reach 35.88 million units, but the leading manufacturers have obvious advantages.

at last

Using intelligent voice as the means of interaction, smart speakers as the home hub, and combining them with the smart home ecosystem to seize the entrance to the smart home is the strategic core of all major players. In the view of Yang Jianyong, senior consultant of the Internet of Things, the scale of the smart home market is as high as one trillion yuan. It is a huge cake that the giants will naturally not miss, and hope to get a share of the huge market. Especially with the trend of slowing shipments of smartphones, there is an urgent need to find new hardware growth points other than mobile phones, and smart speakers have become the target of all mobile phone manufacturers, hoping to seize the right to speak at the entrance to the smart home.

However, with Alibaba, Baidu and Xiaomi dividing the market into three parts, it is very difficult for other players to get a piece of the pie. However, market competition is changing rapidly, and we hope that with the active participation of heavyweight players such as Tencent and Huawei, consumers can get better smart speaker products and services.