In 2000, the air conditioning market opened the "bloody industry" price war curtain. In 2004, there were about 50 major active brands in the market. Five years later, there were only 29 brands in the domestic market. After 2012, there were only more than 10 brands that could be heard of. But since 2017, home appliance brands have ushered in new growth, Gree, Haier, Midea and other brands began to focus on foreign markets, no longer take price as the only advantage. But surprisingly, on this year's Singles' Day, the home appliance industry is fighting again. This time, the battle is on the market for robot sweepers.
According to the data of ZhongYikang, the retail sales of the domestic sweeper market reached 5.6 billion yuan in 2017, with a year-on-year growth of 30%; Retail sales reached 4.06 million units, up 32 percent year on year. Industry insiders say that globally, by 2022, the global scale of sweeping robots will reach 100 million. At the beginning of 2017, home appliance giants began to enter the field of sweeping robots, and achieved about 8% of the market share during the same period. Under such a market background, new brands rushed in to get a piece of the action.
(Data source; Zhongyi Kang)
Since 1997, the first sweeping robot was born. The sweeping robot has experienced three stages: random, gyroscope navigation and visual navigation. Nowadays, the laser scanning and positioning technology of the fourth generation sweeping robot has been popularized, which is the ideal solution at present, and the cleaning coverage rate can reach 96%.
Although the laser sweeper cleaning effect is good, but the disadvantage is high cost. From this year's double 11 major sweeper brand war situation, Xiaomi ecological chain of stone technology played S50, S51 two laser sweeper, double 11 price is 2199 yuan, 300 yuan lower than the daily price; The dog will vacuum cleaner as the main battlefield, sweeping machine only R55 Pro a product to participate in the war, the price reduction of about 400 yuan; Pusanik LDS M6 laser sweeping robot from the daily price of 2599 yuan, discount to pre-sale hand price of 1799 yuan. In addition, the cheapest laser-type sweeping robot on Nov 11 is 360 and Keyu. The former is priced at 1,499 yuan for the first time, and the price will be reduced to 1,111 yuan if you pay before 2 am. The Keyu small black box, which is priced at 2,999 yuan daily, is only 1,049 yuan, which is almost equivalent to the price of gyroscope and visual navigation models. Why such a wide price gap? Xiaobian believes that the power of independent brand, improve product competitiveness is currently with professional technical support and complete production chain of domestic brands want to seek the way of change.
From the perspective of the overall domestic market, sweeping machine brands are mainly divided into three categories:
The first type, OEM products OEM (ODM) account for 60%, ODM commonly known as "OEM", and the traditional OEM way is different, ODM manufacturers will provide brand from product creativity to drawing design, hand plate proof to large-scale production of the full ecological chain services. Such as in the first echelon of China's sweeping robot OEM Songteng, Grambo, Silver star.
In the second category, brand owners design their own products and find OEM factories for production accounts for 30%. This situation not only includes many domestic home appliance giants, but also overseas brands such as Panasonic admit that some of their products come from OEM.
Third, only about 10% are developed and produced by brand owners themselves. It includes Cobos, which has been successfully transformed, as well as Chi Yi and Ko, which have just been transformed.
International brand ODM is extremely strict to domestic manufacturers, the production system is far beyond the common ISO9001 enterprise standards, and the products must pass the international standard sweeping robot testing laboratory strict testing. Domestic mainstream ODM manufacturers have mastered the resources and technologies of the whole chain from design, research and development to production and operation of sweeping robots. However, limited by the weaknesses of brand awareness, they have been seeking a road to self-breakthrough.
In the first tier of China's sweeping robot ODM OEM enterprises Zhiyi, Keyu, Grambo, Silver Star and other brands, although Zhiyi, Keyu has been transformed, but the OEM business is still the premise of its strong market share.
The successful transformation of Covos, the "first stock" of sweeping robot from OEM, has brought new thinking to sweeping machine ODM manufacturers. Now many excellent ODM manufacturers in China are also expanding their business scope, forming their own brand, using channel capabilities and supply chain management, and carrying out head-to-head competition with their original partners. Force independent brand, improve the price competitiveness has become a strong technical support and complete production chain of domestic brands the way to change, cheap domestic brands, greatly affect the original brand manufacturers of the market pattern, double 11 is very direct sweeping robot brand price competition put on the surface.
At present, the domestic sweeping robot consumer market accounts for a relatively large is Cobos, IROBOT as the representative of the sweeper brand entered the C-end consumer market earlier, they entered the market early, the market share is about 60%; Then there is Xiaomi's ecological chain company Stone Technology, and the home appliance giant represented by Haier. It is worth mentioning that although home appliance giants have channel and brand advantages, they mainly rely on domestic manufacturers to provide ODM products. The new forces represented by Zhiyi, Science language, etc. have just transferred from the field of ODM to the field of independent brands. Due to the low brand awareness and recognition, the market share is relatively disadvantaged.
According to insiders, the traditional ODM forces turn to independent brands. On the one hand, from the perspective of profit, according to the current market price level, the independent brand with independent research and development production capacity will have greater profit space. At the same time, due to the improvement of its industrial chain, the production cost has been effectively improved, so there is a trump card in hand, the price has obvious advantages; On the other hand, with the rise of "smart made in China", consumers are no longer blindly pursuing foreign brands, which is the perfect opportunity for domestic manufacturers such as Covos, Zhiyi and Keyu to enhance brand recognition and market competition.
With the continuous expansion of market demand, for many sweeping machine brands, the integration ability of the supply chain is particularly important.
The integration of brand, research and development, production and sales can reduce costs, and facilitate the company to flexibly adjust the product design scheme according to market feedback, and timely docking research and development and production links, which is beyond doubt. Then, if the team, production line and channels used in the whole process of product development and design, testing and production, and putting into the market are all owned, the cost will naturally fall. If we only play the price war instead of starting from the industrial chain, such "money burning game" may be able to get a binge of consumption in a short time, but it is not conducive to the upgrading of industry technology and products in the long run. In the era of increasing consumer requirements, it may not be able to go far.
The whole sweeper industry wants to make progress and go further and further, it must have a complete ecological chain. Covos has become the first stock of sweeping robot technology from the foundry, which is not unrelated to its original ecological chain. It is very interesting to see whether the new forces, which started from ODM and own the whole industrial ecological chain, represented by Zhiyi and Science language, can confirm this point again.
