The more “smarter” it is. Through hundreds of millions of voice interactions, the intelligent voice assistant Alexa has been upgraded and iterated in the tempering of big data, becoming the most “smart” intelligent assistant on the market, and this first-mover advantage has formed a snowball effect, which will become more and more competitive in the future. Lead.
Secondly, Echo, as a terminal for direct contact with users, has promoted Amazon e-commerce sales. One of the surprises even Amazon is that, because different from the purchase experience of smartphones or computers, most of the users of smart speakers have the mentality of buying daily necessities, and the purchase process is less to choose carefully and place more orders. To be decisive, let the purchase conversion rate be higher than other terminals.
After Echo is connected to the smartphone shopping list, you can complete online shopping
So, Amazon doesn’t care how much money is made directly through Echo. What matters more is how many users it covers and how much value it creates indirectly through Echo.
We can take a concrete look at the data: Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets analysts once estimated that Echo will bring more than 10 billion U.S. dollars in revenue to Amazon in 2020, of which about 5 billion will come from direct sales of Echo smart speakers. US dollars, the remaining half will be indirect income from voice sales.
And with Amazon’s further cultivation and improvement in the field of streaming media (such as paid film and television, paid music) in the past two years, the “leverage” of Echo will leverage greater value.
To give a specific example: a consumer spends 100 dollars on an Echo speaker, and then may spend 20 dollars a month to buy Amazon music service. Think 20 dollars a month is too expensive? You can also purchase Amazon e-commerce membership Prime and music “packaged specials”, which add up to almost $25 a month.
At this time, you should see that Echo is a link in Amazon’s entire business ecosystem. An Echo speaker may bring a music member and a shopping member. From leisure and entertainment to online shopping, Echo speakers as an entrance can leverage a huge consumption space.
This set of “gameplay” is actually no stranger to Amazon. Once Kindle devices were popular all over the world, taking off with Amazon e-bookstores and even the entire e-book industry. It is a routine with today’s Echo.
Such a large and perfect closed loop, not justIs it the “ecology” that the tech giants dream of? The large-scale closed-loop “online service + offline equipment” has created a unique Amazon empire.
International giants cut their business, Apple and Google decisively “slim down”
Not all companies have a complete and closed product chain like Amazon. Other companies may not be able to use smart speakers as the terminal driver to promote the development of the overall business. Even giants like Apple and Google are making detours.
Not long ago, Google and Apple “thinned down” their smart speakers. Google removed the large-size smart speaker Home Max product in 2020, and focused on the small-size Nest Studio; Apple announced the discontinuation of HomePod “without warning” in March 2021, allowing the market to report better HomePod Mini as the main product line .
Here is an example of Apple, which is more familiar to Chinese consumers. When Apple announced the discontinuation of HomePod, many people analyzed it from the perspectives of sound quality and cost-effectiveness, but Apple’s real goal was to reduce the cost of smart speakers, lower the threshold, and attract more users for its streaming services.
For example, a person may not have 8,000 yuan to buy a newest iPhone, but he can easily get a 749 yuan HomePod Mini. Although Apple doesn’t make much money from HomePod, it attracts more “potential users” for paid streaming services for music news such as Apple Music and Apple News.
Don’t underestimate the income of this part of the business. According to financial reports, in recent years, streaming media revenue has been the fastest growing segment of Apple, and it has almost become a monopoly channel in industries such as music. Streaming media such as Apple Music accounts for 79% of the US music industry’s revenue. To further penetrate the market and realize this channel, and maintain the growth rate of streaming media revenue business, the layout of HomePod smart speakers is particularly important.
To sum up, abandoning HomePod and using a cheaper HomePod Mini to fight the world is actually Apple’s strategy to lower the hardware threshold and continue to channel traffic for its own software services. In fact, Apple has never intended to seize the real speaker market, especially since it has never really entered the high-end speaker market, and naturally it has not “give up” this market.
From market feedback, the sales of HomePod Mini are also much better than HomePod, which is also an important factor that Apple is willing to cut the latter quickly.
Google, which is also cutting off the smart speaker business, also took away a higher-priced product, Google Home. Looking at the evaluation of foreign technology bloggers a few years ago, it is not difficult to find that the biggest reason for the Google Home being beaten by Amazon Echo is that the price is too high.
Now Google is gradually reacting that what the market lacks is not niche and fussy high-end speakers, but products that are convenient and quick to connect to the smart ecosystem. Expensive products are tantamount to raising the barriers for users to access paid streaming media, and true speaker enthusiasts also “look down on” the sound quality of these smart speakers.
The “domestic player” who has difficulty riding a tiger
Back to the domestic market, the difficulty of riding a tiger is the biggest dilemma facing domestic smart speaker manufacturers.
Although in the huge Chinese market, Xiaomi’s Xiaoai, Baidu’s Xiaodu and Ali’s Tmall Genie have all achieved very good sales records, industry insiders also pointed out that every smart speaker sold is equivalent The consumer smashed a handful of brand-side wool. Because every time a smart speaker is sold, the brand may lose money.
Pan Jiutang, a partner of Xiaomi’s Industry Investment Department, once stated on Weibo that the cost of the Xiao Ai Speaker Mini is more than 20 US dollars, and the normal price of 169 yuan is “sticky cost”.
In some channels and big promotions, Xiaoai Speaker Mini can be won at a price of just over 100 yuan, and the selling price of dozens of yuan on Xianyu is also everywhere. It is evident that Xiaomi lost money to grab market share.
Even if it loses money to grab share, Xiaomi still has a story to tell, that is, the new ecology of Mijia smart home. In Xiaomi’s Internet of Everything, smart refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, electric lights, TVs, sweeping robots, etc., are all controlled by the Xiao Ai center behind Xiaomi mobile phones and Xiao Ai speakers.
However, as Haier Zhijia, Midea, Gree and other traditional electrical appliance manufacturers focus on the development of smart homes, and establish their own enclosures to establish ecology, the space left for Xiao Ai students is shrinking, and speakers are no longer the only entrance to smart home systems. For example, wifi+large screen+speaker is already the standard configuration of smart refrigerators. It seems that it is not out of reach to ask the refrigerator which dishes are running out and order online to replenish inventory.
In other words, Xiao Ai speakers are facing the embarrassment of being overhead.
Different from Xiaomi’s telling stories on smart homes, Xiaodu, backed by Baidu, has been making a fuss on the screen for the past two years. The business is relatively boring, but his actions at the capital level are constantly getting more eye-catching.
In terms of business, Xiaodu speakers have been upgraded to “Xiaodu smart screens” in the past two years, believing that “screens will be ubiquitous in the future Defined as an important part of the company’s “AI to C” strategic layout.
In terms of capital, in September 2020, Baidu’s smart life business group including Xiaodu Speakers (also known as Xiaodu Technology) completed independent financing, with a post-investment valuation of 20 billion yuan, led by Baidu Capital and CPE strategy. After the investment, IDG Capital followed the investment. After the investment, Baidu still maintained absolute control over Xiaodu Technology.
Xiaodu Technology’s independent financing has also been interpreted as preparation for a separate IPO. Baidu also responded positively to this. Some media believe that “Xiaodu may become the first AI concept stock”, but it is not difficult to find out that Baidu is indeed the industry leader in voice interaction algorithms, but the ecological closed-loop story is not as complete as Xiaomi’s, smart phones, Smart watches and smart TVs have become ubiquitous, and it remains to be seen whether the concept of “one thing, one screen” makes sense.
Another consideration of Xiaodu’s independent financing is that the US stock market has not given Baidu a relatively high valuation, which makes Baidu quite disappointed. If Xiaodu with the AI title can be re-priced on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, it will also play a positive role in boosting Baidu’s overall valuation. But although the AI crown is beautiful, it can’t be convinced by a smart speaker.
Last look at the Tmall Elf. Ali’s e-commerce, cloud services and other features are the closest to Amazon, but from the current situation, the Tmall Genie is far from being compared with Echo, and Ali may not even copy the “copy work” well in terms of smart speakers. .
Some users gave feedback on the Internet and asked the Tmall Genie about the weather. In exchange, they were chattering and unstoppable Double 11 advertisements, which bored users.
The development of Tmall Genie has not been smooth in terms of “business”-voice ordering and shopping.
Tmall Elf once announced on Double 11 in 2019 that the result of “voice shopping” was 1.05 million transactions, but no comparable data was released in 2020 and 2021. Could it be that the orders were not satisfactory? Squeezed by the more recognized methods of the Chinese market such as Taobao live broadcast, has the “voice shopping” of Tmall elves shrinking? The answer is not yet known.
What is even more disappointing to the market is that Ali’s entertainment and entertainment sector is “smashed into pieces”, and there are no good pieces in music, film and television, etc., which makes standing