Gearbest Tech
For smart projection, 2023 may be a different year. You must know that as a dark horse in the home appliance industry, the growth of smart projection in recent years has been eye-catching, but it has gradually cooled down since 2022, and it has stepped on the “sudden brake” in 2023. According to data from Luotu Technology, in the first quarter of 2023, China's overall projector market shipments were 1.61 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 7.3%. In the first half of the year, its forecast projector market shipments were 3.36 million units, a decrease of 7.3% year-on-year. The range expanded to 8.6%.
Although the shipment volume of the smart projection industry has decreased, the LCD projection category has shown growth momentum. In the context of intensified brand competition, there are still new players who want to join the industry, and Cookaa is one of them. However, although Coukaa is backed by traditional home appliance giants like Skyworth, it has chosen a different development path from XGIMI and NutDeli DLP. After the release of new products, it set off a storm in the LCD field. In a word,That is to use more controllable mature technologies of the industrial chain to create a targeted and characteristic cost-effective path.
In fact, these two different development strategies are not inconsistent. Cookaa is working hard to continuously prove to the outside world in this red ocean market that the road to success is not a one-way street.
The Success Learning of Jimi Pioneers
The golden growth period of the smart projection market was actually in 2018 and reached a high in 2021. During this period, the market maintained double-digit growth. During this period, Jimi Technology successfully occupied the position of “industry leader” by virtue of its first-mover advantage. According to IDC statistics, from 2018 to the first half of 2021, Jimi Technology's shipments continued to rank first in China's projection equipment market, with shipment market shares reaching 13.2%, 14.6%, 18.1%, 21.2% and 21.1% respectively. . It always exceeds the sum of the second to fourth places all year round, which is a proper big brother.
How did this company rooted in Chengdu, Sichuan, quickly break into the public eye and stand out in the projection industry led by international giants? In the final analysis, it is nothing more than two factors:
First, on the product side, we have seized the popularity dividend after the technology matures.
In the early days of the projection industry, the scenarios they faced were mainly for offices, and the industry giants were almost all international giants such as Epson and Sony. However, due to the immaturity of LED light source technology at the time, they almost all used mercury lamps as the light source. The product has many disadvantages. Although it has high brightness, it has low color accuracy, white screen, short service life, severe heating, and high maintenance costs. These all hinder it from becoming a mass consumer product.
However, with the maturity of LED backlight technology, projection products not only solve problems such as brightness and service life, but also have automatic focus, correction and other functions with the blessing of some algorithms. Combined with the optimization of content by local companies, Projection products have the prerequisite to become a consumer product.
As the technology matured, XGIMI chose DLP display technology as its main development path. This technology was indeed a hit in the market at the time. Just imagine, at that time, most of the products of other brands were still based on mercury lamps. When used, they not only required the cooperation of the environment, curtains, etc., but XGIMI's products did not have much requirements on the environment, and could provide better display effects. At the same time, they also had With some intelligent capabilities, its competitiveness is naturally unparalleled.
Based on the deep integration of mature supply chain technologies, it is the cornerstone of Jimi’s success.
Second, on the marketing side, we have received traffic dividends.
For Jimi, its success is not only due to dimensionality reduction on the product side, but marketing is also a key factor in its success. According to public data, from 2017 to Q1 2023, Jimi Technology invested a total of about 2.3 billion yuan in marketing, accounting for about 14% of the cumulative revenue. In comparison, R&D only accounted for 6%. Among them, operational promotion and platform expenses account for nearly half of the high sales expenses.
But it is undeniable that Jimi relied on its large investment in marketing to reap the traffic dividends, quickly harvest the market in the early stages, and become the “boss” today.
However, looking back, XGIMI's success is rich in the strong background of the times. Today, many years later, with the end of the high-increase era of domestic intelligent projection, its successful formula will be difficult to reproduce again.
Nuts provoke technical war and attack Jimi
If in the previous high-increase era, the competition was about the brand's ability to “seize the opportunity”, then in today's stock era, the key to competition will be a close-to-hand battle of “you have more and I have less”.Therefore, the competition between brands will become more intense. Among them, the most representative one is the recent “confrontation” between Jimi and Nuts. On the eve of 618, the chief product officer of Nut Projection borrowed a review video to directly “shoot” Jimi, its old rival for many years, saying that it was technically shoddy and reversing the industry. Then the two companies started a battle surrounding ” Technology” live discussion.
In fact, with the explosion of the smart projection industry, the competition between Jimi and Nut has almost never stopped from products to sales, especially at major promotion nodes such as 618 and Double Eleven every year. There is no doubt about who has the best sales. Stop talking.
It is not difficult to understand the years of “competition” between XGIMI and JMGO. For projectors, its core lies in the optical engine. The optical engine mainly includes the optical system, lighting display system and imaging system. The core of which is the light source and related In display technology, both Jimi and JMGO use DLP display technology, which mainly relies on DMD chips, which are monopolized by Texas Instruments and cannot achieve independent commercial mass production.
The ultimate consequence of this is that projector manufacturers that lack independent core technology support can only compete through “war of words.” However, due to the same technical routes, the two basically competed on sales, marketing, promotion and user experience, and did not compare in terms of technology.
But with XGIMI’s different choices in light source technology, Nuts have found a new breakthrough point. JMGO is a solid supporter of three-color lasers, while XGIMI believes that the mixed light technology of LED + monochrome laser is the best solution in the current smart projection market, and has commented on three-color lasers many times at the 2023 spring new product launch conference. There are problems that technology cannot solve. Nuts believes that the speckle and color fringing problems inherent in lasers can be improved through technical means.
Different solutions in light source technology caused the two sides who already disliked each other to “fight” again. But the essence is that in the context of the industry's “cooling down”, they all want to seize the “commanding heights” of technology and establish an image of their own technological advantages, thereby grabbing some users from each other's consumer groups.
Unlike the truth, which becomes increasingly clear as time goes by, the technical merits of consumer products will ultimately be judged by consumers. Therefore, the swordsmanship between the two is likely to continue for a long time to come.
Kukai suddenly appeared
Behind the intensification of brand involution, we need to pay attention to one point. For smart projectors, in the final analysis, it is still a “consumer product.” No matter how gorgeously the technology is packaged by the brand, the key is to gain consumer recognition, and the first condition for consumer recognition is that it needs to “go” into the hands of consumers.
Therefore, in the dark with rice and nuts rolled on one side,In the LCD field, another flag is rising rapidly. Marked on the mast is Skyworth's new strategy in the intelligent projection business – Cookaa Projection.
It is completely different from the model of DLP projection technology adopted by XGIMI and JMGO. From the moment it decided to enter the smart projection market,Kukai has opened its own strategic radar.And established a set of gameplay: focusing on LCD cost-effectiveness strategy.
The reason for adopting such a decision is probably for two purposes:First, compared to DLP technology, the 1LCD industry chain is more controllable; on the other hand, the experience of 1LCD projection technology is also constantly improving, and it also has a price advantage, which can compare with the “laser” that easily costs 10,000 yuan. Products can more easily “get into” the hands of users.
This is indeed the case. Against the background of core technological advancements such as the new generation of LED light sources, the new generation of fully enclosed light engines, and the new generation of 1LCD light valves, 1LCD products can already well meet the needs of users for viewing movies in their bedrooms. When it comes to some brighter scenes, even if you spend a lot of money to buy laser projection products, it is difficult to achieve the picture quality experience provided by TVs of the same level.
At the same time, as consumers' consumption concepts have begun to change in the past two years, when it comes to purchasing projectors, if the product requirements are not high, most people will choose entry-level products priced around 1,000 yuan. You can also get a glimpse of this through market data. , according to online data from Luotu Technology, in the first quarter of 2023, the online market share of 1LCD technology increased to 69.2%, an increase of 8.4 percentage points from the same period last year. Therefore, this strategy also laid the foundation for Kukai’s rapid rise.
Even so, it is important to choose the right time for your “landing”, and now is the most suitable moment in Kukaiyan.
Because while the market is booming, some problems have also broken out with 1LCD projectors. Since 1LCD technology can be domestically produced, there is no big threshold for corporate procurement, so a large number of small and medium-sized manufacturers have flooded in. This has also made most entry-level smart projection products come from The “emerging miscellaneous brands” have led to an unstandardized market, frequent problems such as false standards, uneven quality levels, and fake goods, which have affected consumer trust and hindered the industry's progress.
Against this background, the emergence of Kukai has brought great changes to the industry:First, based on supply chain advantages, Cookaa's products have more price advantages; second, with years of display technology accumulation, the products have better image quality performance compared to similar models; third, compared with “Off-brand” Coukaa has a stronger brand effect.
Although on the surface it seems that Coukaa’s choice of the mature 1LCD route does not have a “profound technological breakthrough”, it is facing the market’s quantitative consumer entities. Therefore, the experience upgrade on the entry-level “volume” models makes it possible for Coukaa to continue to achieve breakthroughs in the popularization value of smart projection. For the industry, it has dual dominant significance on the supply and demand sides.
Only when more products “enter” into the hands of consumers and consumers' macro-perceptions of products begin to change can the industry achieve greater development in the future, and the value upgrades led by some brands that focus on core technologies will be meaningful.
In short, the “cooling” of the market is not a turning point in the era of the intelligent projection industry's decline from prosperity, but a “watershed” in a new round of development of the industry. With the structural changes in consumption, Kukai has set off a new round of popularization storm. Perhaps in the future, the smart projection market, which is dominated by the sinking market, will become a vast blue ocean market. Who can stand at the forefront of this sea? The answer is already obvious.
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