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As the benchmark for China's home appliances and consumer electronics industry, the annual AWE is not only a show for home appliance companies to show their “muscles” to the outside world, but also a window for us to peek into the development direction of the home appliance industry in the next year.
At this AWE exhibition, reporters noticed that the craze for high-end and packaged home appliances is still continuing. Major companies have invested huge resources in R&D and marketing, including leading companies such as Hisense and Haier Smart Home, which are showing off to the outside world. Its latest achievements in high-end and package series.
01: Home appliances enter the Red Sea, and high-end sets usher in a development window period
The home appliance industry has long passed the incremental era, and it has almost become a consensus both inside and outside the industry.
According to public data from the China Household Electrical Appliances Association and the National Bureau of Statistics, from 2021 to 2023, the cumulative main business revenue of the national home appliance industry was 1.73 trillion yuan, 1.75 trillion yuan, and 1.84 trillion yuan respectively. The home appliance industry has fallen into stock competition. The situation is obvious.
In terms of segmentation, except for home appliances that regulate indoor temperatures, led by air conditioners, which have shown impressive growth driven by weather changes, the performance of other categories has been unsatisfactory. Even the segments that have performed well in previous years have Different categories have also encountered growth bottlenecks.
It is not difficult to see from this phenomenon that the extensive development routine of the home appliance industry that was purely price- and scale-oriented in the past no longer works.
Enterprises have already seen this change. We can see that in the past few years,All major home appliance companies are committed to innovation and transformation, continue to explore high-tech, and try to seize the “commanding heights” of technology through technological innovation, establish an image of their own technological advantages, and then seize some potential users.
However, while innovating, companies must also consider that as a related industry that is deeply connected with the real estate industry, the home appliance industry is affected by the real estate industry. At a time when real estate has been in a low-lying area in recent years, how can we use products as a starting point to quickly find products? Finding a way out and achieving a breakthrough has become a top priority for major enterprises.
Judging from this AWE, high-end and packaged smart IoT life solutions have become one of the focuses of home appliance manufacturers. In this regard, Major General Ding, a senior observer of the home appliance industry and chief analyst of GKURC Industrial Economics Think Tank, said that there are three major motivations for the formation of the high-end trend of the home appliance industry:From the industrial side, the explosion of technologies and industries such as AI, IoT and smart home has strongly promoted the innovation and transformation and value reconstruction of the home appliance industry; from the user side, the wave of consumption upgrades continues to move forward, and consumers are increasingly interested in home appliances. There are increasing expectations for smart, aesthetic, service and other capabilities; from a market perspective, high-end deployment under a dumbbell-shaped consumption structure is conducive to building overall market potential and bringing steady growth to companies.
Therefore, under the deserted macro and industry background, the ordinary single-product home appliance strategy not only cannot become the “secret key” to activate the market, but also cannot provide the company with the ability to sustain growth during the industry downturn. On the contrary, high-endization can not only meet the wave of consumer upgrades, but also help companies better balance costs.
In this context, we can see that home appliance giants led by Hisense, Haier, and Midea have long proposed independent brands for the high-end market, such as Cuican, Casarte, COLMO, etc., and these brands are not only positioned as high-end , and another common feature is that they are mostly sold in “sets”.
This approach is not difficult to understand. The sales of packages not only help users solve the problem of uniform design of home appliances, eliminating the need to “match” them by themselves, but also because of the package, there is no need to worry about complex cross-brand and category interconnections. The products Only simple operations are required to realize linkage between multiple products, and users can easily realize smart home scenarios. At the same time, for enterprises, this is also a means to increase unit price per customer.
This is also in line with the current consumption trend of consumers. According to the previous consumer survey data of Aowei Cloud Network, the proportion of people who choose to package home appliances in the past two years accounts for 12%. Among those who have purchase plans in the future, it is expected that they will choose The proportion of customized homes reaches 25%. In addition, compared with some developed countries where set home appliances account for 30% of the overall home appliance market, China's set home appliances have considerable room for growth.
Therefore, just for the moment,Consumer demand for home appliances is still in a downward cycle. Coupled with current macroeconomic fluctuations, sluggish real estate market and other negative factors, the home appliance market is trapped in the red sea. The industry has also entered a new cycle of inventory and quantitative games. Therefore, high-end packaged products, It is undoubtedly the current direction of industry growth for home appliance companies.
02.Although COLMO is absent from AWE, the “3C” pattern of the series has begun to emerge.
At AWE2024, we saw integrated and packaged solutions from major brands.Behind this, companies are closely following the changes in consumer consumption concepts and conducting self-iterations with customers as the center. Home appliance companies are breaking away from stereotypes and are gradually creating new consumption patterns that focus on high-end and packaged products.
However, for home appliance brands, competition in bundled home appliances is not considered a business opportunity and direction for the entire industry, but rather belongs to the future of a small number of multi-category, comprehensive home appliance companies and merchants. At the same time, the reporter noticed that although they are all in a series, by integrating different home appliances into the same system, they achieve a high degree of unity in appearance style and product experience, and provide consumers with “scenario-based” solutions, but in terms of product There are still many differences in design concepts and details.
For example, Casarte, a subsidiary of Haier. Its name comes from Italian, meaning “art of home”, and based on its international vision, it has created French door refrigerators and Italian drawer refrigerator categories. Subsequently, Casarte began to focus on the creation of series, and launched a number of high-end series products, including the Conductor series, Designer series, Galaxy series, Nebula, Zhijing, etc. Judging from this AWE, Casarte’s series of products mostly use dome white as the main color, focusing on using flat-screen embedded aesthetics to bring “simplified life” to the majority of users.
Another example is the brilliant brand owned by Hisense. As a high-end full-range smart home appliance brand under Hisense, Cuican focuses on “Oriental elegance” in design, injecting Chinese art and cultural genes into Cuican's design philosophy, and its products are more in line with the aesthetic tastes of contemporary Chinese consumers. At this AWE, Hisense Bright displayed a full set of high-end smart home appliances based on full categories, full scenarios, and full intelligent interconnection. From the booth, Hisense Bright series products have obvious differences compared to products of other brands. Refrigerators, air conditioners and other products all contain oriental aesthetic concepts in industrial design. Compared with the minimalist designs of other brands, they are more in line with oriental aesthetics.
It is worth mentioning that the latest fusion series of Cancan not only draws on the unique elegant art and cultural genes of the East in terms of design aesthetics, but will cover 9 major appliance categories such as home kitchens, living rooms, balconies, and bedrooms to seamlessly integrate with the home. This achieves “true full inlay”, coupled with oriental elegant aesthetics to give the all-white appearance a “true unified” tone, becoming the world's first fully inlay and full-scenario high-end set.
Finally, there is COLMO, which is absent from this AWE. As a set of home appliances under Midea that targets different scenarios and groups of people, COLMO uses AI to empower products and follows the concept of New Bauhausism. Simply put, it integrates geometric lines and Original texture and rational and restrained design are used to create home appliances that fit consumers' lifestyle of simplicity over complexity.
Now it has formed product lines covering large series products such as BLANC series and TRUNING series, as well as small series products such as EVOLUTION series and AVANT series. Although there are many product lines, its products still maintain the neo-Bauhaus concept in the language of industrial design and have the consistency of minimalist design.
From a consumer's perspective, there is not much difference in product functions and smart interconnection between different brands of products. Instead, the distinction between brands is mainly focused on industrial design. In this regard, Liang Zhenpeng, a senior industrial economic observer and home appliance industry analyst, said,Because the essence of high-end sets of home appliances is actually the standardization and integration of home appliances that are not standardized and unified across categories. Behind this lies the general trend of unification of the traditional home appliance industry. The final competition in this trend will no longer be the design of a single product. , function, but the unity and integration of cross-category product design. Therefore, the differentiated design and unique brand tone of high-end series products will become the watershed that distinguishes different brands.
From the perspective of AWE, in addition to Cuican and Casarte, there are also some brands that have demonstrated their package solutions, but in fact this is a “category” that only multi-category, comprehensive home appliance companies can play with, and there are no multi-category ones. Support is difficult to implement the concept of the system. In this regard, Major General Ding, a senior observer of the home appliance industry and chief analyst of GKURC Industrial and Economic Think Tank, said,At present, high-end layout has become an industry consensus, and high-end capabilities determine the height of enterprise development. From the perspective of brand structure, Casarte, COLMO, and Cuichan form the first high-end camp. The three major brands are backed by the three major home appliance giants Haier, Midea, and Hisense, and have systematic high-end capabilities in design, R&D, manufacturing, channels, and services. In terms of competitiveness, the high-end market has formed a “three pillars” trend.
From the current point of view, whether it is Casarte, COLMO or Cuichan, for consumers, the obvious differentiation of package products is mainly reflected in the design. In this regard, Liang Zhenpeng, a senior industrial economic observer and home appliance industry analyst, said,The different design concepts of Casarte, COLMO and Cuichan are derived from the original intention of their brand establishment. For example, the word Casarte comes from Italy, and it also integrates Western aesthetic relief technology, embedded design, etc. into its product design. , creating a strong artistic attribute for the product; CLOMO integrates the minimalist design concept based on New Bauhaus into the design; Hisense Bright integrates oriental aesthetic design into the product. Relatively speaking, the oriental aesthetic characteristics of Hisense's brilliant series of products are particularly in line with current consumption concepts, and therefore have also shown strong growth in the past two years.
03. Set of home appliances leads high-end lifestyle
Regarding the layout of home appliances, one of the most obvious pain points for consumers is that the different items they purchase are very beautiful when placed individually, but due to multiple categories and cross-brands, it is difficult for them to integrate into the existing hard decoration style. , even the aesthetics and style are not very unified. With the emergence of sets of home appliances, consumers' pain points in this regard have been solved.
Therefore, consumers' demand for sets of home appliances is no longer the same as in the past when considering single appliances, but only in terms of functional performance and intelligent experience. More importantly, whether the product has full scene coverage, unique and unified design style.This means that a set of home appliances not only requires advanced leadership in product performance and an in-depth understanding of the intelligent Internet, but also requires an aesthetic grasp of design language.
In fact, this is exactly what Casarte, COLMO and Cuichan have done in creating a series of products. They have integrated multiple categories of home appliances in the past in terms of design and functional interconnection, so that home appliances can get rid of the existence of “isolated products”. Better integrate into users’ homes and even lives. but,Whether it is high-end, intelligent or packaged, it is all just to meet the specific needs of consumers at a certain stage. What manufacturers can decide is to lead and define the trend of consumers' consumption habits and lifestyles.
Today, as a large number of manufacturers participate in the category collaboration and market implementation of sets of home appliances, the market has formed a development wave of “consumption upgrades and complete sets of home appliances”. Against this background, whether it is the Western elegant artistic style of Casarte, the minimalist design of COLMO, or the balance of technology and oriental aesthetics presented by Hisense, in the near future, there will be opportunities to become international high-end home appliances. Brand representatives lead the industry towards high-end, fashionable and intelligent lifestyles, and create an optimal solution for perfect home life for users.
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