Produced by Tiger Sniffing Technology Team
Author｜Odin Asgard
Head Image｜Visual China
Li Ting also contributed to this article
Huawei just released the whole house smart host equipped with Hongmeng OS and the new Huawei V series smart screen.
Earlier, Huawei just released its 2020 financial report. Although its revenue has reached a new high, its growth will inevitably slow down under the current special environment. Therefore, Huawei’s smart home solution equipped with Hongmeng OS actually carries the important task of finding Huawei’s next growth point. However, can this smart home solution attract enough users to become Huawei’s next 100 billion yuan business?
Smart home, whose opportunity?
For many years, consumers’ response to smart homes is not very enthusiastic. The saying that “smart homes are pseudo-needs” has been unceasingly heard, and the relevant markets have been stunned. However, although China’s smart home market was once stagnant in 2020, IDC still predicts that China’s smart home market will continue to grow by 26.7% year-on-year in 2021; many analysts believe that today when the smart phone market is saturated, smart home The home furnishing market will be a brand new growth point for the consumer sector.
Because of this, in this originally controversial market, in addition to Gree, Haier, Midea and other traditional home appliance companies that are eager to transform, more and more foreign competitors have suddenly appeared. Smart phone companies such as Huawei, Xiaomi, and OPPO have successively wanted to take advantage of this market. Internet giants such as Baidu and Tencent have also followed the trend. Overseas powers such as Apple and Amazon have always wanted to share a drink. As a result, the smart home market has become more and more crowded and competition has become more intense.
While companies of all sizes are optimistic about the smart home market, investors do not buy it. According to Phoenix.com, smart home investment began to decline sharply in 2017; the reason is that although the current smart home appliance market is growing, it mostly focuses on single-product smart products, but the volume of smart homes has not been very Big.
Picture source: Huawei.
Under the above background, Huawei’s whole-house smart host (pictured above) this time is equipped with Kirin SoC and Ascend AI processor, including whole-house Wi-Fi6+, optical modem, and whole-house storage. The whole house power line (PLC) control bus composed of other modules is an out-and-out whole house intelligent device.
In other words, Huawei’s new smart home solution is a whole-house smart solution that investors are not optimistic about.
Why don’t consumers love whole-house intelligence?
Why don’t consumers love whole-house intelligence? To be correct, consumers are not not in love, but in love. The author once wrote an article to analyze the obstacles encountered in the current whole-house smart market, mainly: expensive but not easy to use.
Smart homes rely heavily on the Internet of Things, but since they are now in the early stages of the development of smart homes, users often only have a small number of home appliances that can be connected to the Internet, so there is no synergy effect with other devices. Unless users are willing to spend a lot of money to purchase a large number of new smart home appliances, it is impossible to feel the cool experience promised by smart homes, and it is also difficult to obtain a better life by purchasing new products.
In addition, since home appliances are all durable goods, TVs, refrigerators, microwave ovens and even door locks have been used for more than ten years. Do users really want to replace new smart home devices? It is necessary to discard products that can function normally, and the waste caused is actually the “potential cost” of users. Moreover, if users want to experience a more complete smart home collaboration, they have to renovate the whole house, build civil engineering, and drastically change the electrical circuit. The related costs may scare away many potential buyers.
Picture source: Aning pot winter melon.
What’s more troublesome is that general consumers who want to deploy smart homes have to do it one by one, including selecting different coordination functions and different triggering methods of products, and also to consider which standard these products support. . Accidentally stood on the wrong team? It will be even more difficult to replace consumables or purchase new equipment in the future. “A Ning cooks winter melon”, the master of smart home UP at station B, said that “you will regret it if you don’t do your homework” (above), making the threshold of deployment “hidden cost” higher.
In other words, consumers will feel that the cost of implementing a whole-house smart home at one time is much higher than its effect; therefore, they think that smart home appliances are not cost-effective and feel “very expensive”.
Huawei’s business model
Since this is the case, why does Hua intend to enter the market rashly? In fact, Huawei also has its own unique style of play. They planned to separate two paths from the beginning: First, while walking on the C-side single-product smart market, they launched smart home devices with smart screens as their mainstay. Traditional home appliance partners led by Midea have launched a variety of single-product smart home appliances.
Picture source: Huawei.
On the other hand, Huawei is also following the B-side approach, cooperating with real estate and home improvement companies to promote whole-house intelligence in the pre-installation market (above); this will allow users to move inIn the past, smart home equipment was equipped for users in advance, which greatly reduced the threshold for users to enter the market. After all, the whole-house smart host launched by Huawei this time was originally a device that could replace the weak current box, and the price was as high as 99999 yuan. It can be seen that this device is not a product that ordinary consumers would buy lightly, but a device for Equipment on the B side.
But if smart homes for the B-side will be better, why don’t other home appliance manufacturers take this path?
According to Zhou Jun, secretary-general of China Smart Home Industry Alliance, the biggest problem in cooperating with real estate developers in the whole house is “winning the bid at the lowest price”, so that the market is already flooded with products from many small manufacturers, and the overall quantity Not big. Since “low price and small quantity” is the current problem in the pre-installed smart home market, can Huawei be able to reverse the problems that other manufacturers cannot overcome?
Actually, Huawei has two important advantages in the whole-house smart market: First, Huawei is more famous than other manufacturers, has stronger marketing capabilities, and a higher-end brand image; consumers are therefore willing to pay. Higher premiums, and real estate home improvement companies are therefore more willing to adopt related programs. In addition, Huawei’s years of experience in networking and intelligent technology allow them to design solutions that are more advantageous than competitors; the most important of these may be the Hongmeng OS based on distributed computing.
The advantages of Huawei’s solution
For a long time, the reason why the public cares about the Hongmeng system is only limited to whether it can replace Android on mobile phones. It often ignores what Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said:
The generation of the Hongmeng system is not for mobile phones itself, but for Hongmeng for the Internet of Things.
In fact, the author once introduced Huawei’s Internet of Things layout. Through the distributed computing-based Hongmeng OS, the entire mobile phone device can be integrated on another device; for example, users can use the Internet of Things on a tablet computer. View and execute files on the mobile phone directly through the Internet. Now, Huawei uses the Hongmeng OS distributed computing technology to easily connect various smart home devices to form a stronger collaboration scenario, and smart home appliances can achieve closer but smarter linkage.
Picture source: Huawei.
According to Huawei, Huawei’s smart devices can call related cameras, microphones, speakers, etc. to interact, and answer questions on the big screen and on the small screen during online classes; you can also call the phone’s gyroscope to make the phone bigger in seconds. The on-screen gamepad allows you to play distributed games smoothly. Huawei’s smart screen can also be linked with the camera to realize the picture-in-picture child care function. When the camera detects crying, it will immediately remind the smart screen in the picture-in-picture (above).
In addition, Huawei’s whole-house smart host uses high-end computing power systems (Kirin and Shengteng chips) that are rarely seen in general smart home equipment, which can collect and calculate data from various terminals, sensors and the Internet in real time; then through Hongmeng AI engine realizes multi-condition dynamic prediction and active intelligence. Compared with traditional whole-house intelligence, which generally adopts a single condition and passive trigger mode, it can only be linearly linked and has the effect of forced wake-up. According to Huawei, the whole-house intelligent host is easier to adjust the home environment to the most comfortable state.
1+2+N
Huawei’s whole-house smart solution, in addition to the business model and smart technology worthy of our key, another also worthy of attention is the development of Huawei’s consumer-level ecosystem based on Hongmeng OS.
In the past, Huawei has always referred to its consumer-level ecosystem as the “1+8+N” solution: 1 refers to mobile phones, 8 includes personal computers, tablets, TVs, stereos, glasses, watches, car machines, Headphones are eight major businesses, and N includes four major sectors: mobile office, smart home, sports and health, audio-visual entertainment and smart travel.
Picture source: Huawei.
But Odin noticed Huawei’s ecology, and there was a very subtle change in this smart home conference: a brand new “1+2+N” solution (above) was proposed.
The so-called “1+2+N”, 1 has become a whole-house AI based on whole-house smart hosts, 2 is a two-wire network composed of PLC power line control and Wi-Fi 6+, and N is based on N major home control systems such as lighting system, water health system, environmental system, etc. No matter whether it is 1, it is 2 or N, there is no smart phone, no 5G network, and no mobile device scene.
Although in Huawei’s smart home conference, the coordination and interaction between smart home and smart hands still appears many times, and in their press releases, they still mention the “1+8+N” solution; so we are currently It cannot be determined whether Huawei intends to downplay the handling of Huawei mobile phones. However, Zhou Jun, secretary general of the China Smart Home Industry Alliance, told Hu Xiu that it is estimated that Huawei’s mobile phone shipments have fallen out of the top three. The original “1” has already met resistance, so the route taken this year is actually “infrastructure + Hongmeng”. System” two-line system.
Industry views
Hu Xiu also interviewed some practitioners in the smart home industry and asked them their views on Huawei’s new strategy for the whole house smart. Peng Wenjun, executive managing director of Homing Pigeon Intelligence, told Huxi that Huawei’s entry into Whole House Intelligence is also a good thing, which is of educational significance to the entire industry. After all, competition between leading companies can break the pattern of several monopolies. Consumers will eventually Benefit.
However, he believes that it often takes some time for smart homes to be released to launch and promote. It is still hard to say whether there is a market for Huawei’s whole house smart, after all, no one has ever made such a comprehensive solution. Moreover, the ideal state of the smart home is “good products, good channels, and good services.” Based on the information currently available, Huawei still needs to pay some tuition for the C-side. ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
And Zhou Jun, secretary-general of the China Smart Home Industry Alliance, told Tiger Sniff that Huawei has a basic network connection, Hongmeng operating system ecology, and cooperated with the terminal store service model, there is still a certain opportunity. The foundation of smart homes is network connectivity. Especially in the 5G era, Huawei has inherent advantages and hardware genes. Years of mobile phone sales have also accumulated a large amount of user data and AI algorithms for indoor spaces. Integration and collaboration, There is still enough room for development.
However, Peng Wenjun also said that Huawei’s focus is on the early-stage real estate and business-oriented business; after all, the integration of home improvement lies in the early-stage network layout and infrastructure, while the integration of home appliances lies in ecological promotion and collaborative profitability.