(A) The market heat is unabated, and the overall growth rate is slightly reduced
In 2016, the smart home market heat remained unabated. Major traditional hardware manufacturers continue to tighten the transition to intelligent direction. Baidu, Jingdong, Ali and other Internet companies are also grasping the use of their own capital, big data, cloud services and other advantages, through investment, mergers and acquisitions and strategic cooperation to strengthen the manufacturing capacity of intelligent hardware, to get rid of the shackles of the traditional manufacturing enterprises.CES2016 on the smart home is still part of the hot field, not only the traditional home appliance manufacturers launched a variety of smart home appliance products, other manufacturers have also brought a single product of the smart socket, Smart oven, smart ceiling fans, and SmartThings smart home series sets, etc., dazzling smart products become a major focus of the exhibition.
Considering the development trend of the industry and the existing problems, the smart home market size is predicted. 2016 China's smart home market overall size is expected to reach 381.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth of 27.1%, will reach 600 billion yuan in 2018, and the market size of the next three years compound annual growth rate of 25.9%. Smart TV penetration is about to enter a bottleneck, and the growth rate is gradually slowing down, while small home appliances and other smart home products have not yet entered the explosive period, so the overall growth will remain high, but the growth rate is slowly declining.?
(ii) TV intelligence is basically complete, small home appliances will become the focus of intelligence
In 2016, smart TV sales will reach 39.6 million units, a year-on-year increase of 16%, the penetration rate will reach 84%, an increase of 11 percentage points compared with 2015. 2016 major home appliance companies launched new products are expected to be all smart TVs, non-smart TVs for sale are also basically all previous inventory. TVs are also basically former inventory products. At present, consumers have generally accepted the smart TV, home Internet is also gradually popularized, smart TV content is also gradually enriched, smart TV application APP in the exponential rise, the TV's intelligence will be basically completed, the subsequent face of the original non-smart TV update.
With the basic completion of TV intelligence, small home appliances will become the focus of future intelligence. First of all, small home appliances have a single function, and their own degree of automation is high, so product intelligence is relatively simple. Secondly, small home appliances cheaper, even after the intelligent price will not exceed the acceptability of consumers, so the market promotion is easier. Furthermore, because of the lower technical difficulty of the product, Internet companies are easy to intervene, and can quickly open the market through the cost of product sales. Finally, consumers have higher expectations of small home appliances intelligent, and small home appliances intelligent exploration is about to be completed, so small home appliances will become the focus of future intelligence.
(C) hardware zero profit era officially opened, the service has become the core competitiveness
In 2015, LeTV Super TV sales reached 3 million units, ranking sixth in the domestic color TV industry. 2016, LeTV Super TV plans to sprint to the target of 6 million units, grabbing the top three of the smart TVs, and even impacting the industry's first. In just three years, LeTV has become a giant in the color TV industry from a typical Internet enterprise, and LeTV relies on the "hardware cost sales" model. The main profit point of LeEco Super TV is not hardware, but from content payment income, advertising income and application revenue. The success of LeTV's breakthrough to traditional home appliance manufacturers has brought great pressure, but also brought hope to other Internet companies to intervene in the smart home market.
The era of zero or even negative profits on smart hardware is about to begin, and service has become the focus of future competition. Product intelligence means that in addition to the original hardware features can also carry more services, and the long-tail effect of the service will be incomparable to the one-time consumption of hardware, so as the degree of product intelligence continues to improve, the importance of the service will certainly exceed the hardware. In fact, traditional home appliance manufacturers from 2014 has begun to improve the content and quality of service, but the progress has been very slow.(D) product design ideas change, functional integration into the mainstream
CES2016 exhibition appeared several multi-functional integrated products, such as Withings launched a multi-functional wireless camera, which integrates a variety of sensors, can detect indoor air quality, environmental noise. Multi-functional integration of products can reduce the cost of consumption, a multi-purpose device is much smaller compared to the cost of purchasing multiple smart home devices. Multi-functional integration of products can also simplify the operation, through an APP operation of a variety of functions, to bring users a better product experience.
Smart home is a systematic whole, the products can be interconnected, can solve the user's home problems. However, at present, there are many smart home platforms in China, the industry standard is complicated, consumers often need to use a variety of APP to run the smart home. In the absence of a unified industry standard, different fields, different enterprises to fight each other, each into a system, but also to deepen the difficulty of interconnectivity between products, systematic smart home out of reach. Therefore, from a single product intelligent to a single product multi-purpose change, through a product to achieve a variety of functions, in order to achieve the integrated operation of the product function will become one of the trends in the development of smart home products.