In recent years, with the continuous development of artificial intelligence technology, 5G technology, IOT technology and other underlying technologies, as well as the continuous growth of consumer demand for various smart devices in the home scene, the smart home market has ushered in rapid growth. In the next few years, the smart home market will maintain rapid growth. According to IDC statistics, China's smart home equipment market will ship more than 0.22 billion units in 2021. Shipments are expected to exceed 0.26 billion units in 2022, up 17.1 percent year-on-year. Shipments are expected to approach 0.54 billion units in 2025. According to the forecast of China Business Industry Research Institute, the scale of China's smart home market will reach 651.56 billion yuan in 2022, from which it is not difficult to see the popularity of the smart home market.

In fact, as early as 2013, players from all walks of life, including Internet companies, mobile phone manufacturers, and traditional home appliance giants, have already poured into the smart home market. Among them, due to the characteristics of portability and wide popularity, mobile phones are most closely connected with users. Therefore, mobile phones are generally regarded as the entrance of smart homes in the industry, which has attracted frequent layout of mobile phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi and Huawei in the field of smart homes.

Xiaomi and Huawei have different initial intentions.
As smart phone manufacturers, Xiaomi and Huawei, with their strong brand, user scale, technology, as well as the smart home ecological platform and many other advantages, quickly ran around and seized market share, and their performance was once very eye-catching. But from the perspective of the development of the two, Xiaomi and Huawei's initial intention to enter the smart home market is different.

For one thing, for Xiaomi at the time, due to the slowdown in the growth of its mobile phone business, in order to seek new business growth points, Xiaomi extended its business to the field of smart hardware with clearer prospects. Looking back on the development history of Xiaomi, since its establishment in 2010, it has quickly seized the domestic low-end mobile phone market mainly through high cost performance, and even once became the first sales volume in the domestic mobile phone market. However, as Xiaomi's entry into the high-end mobile phone market was frustrated, and its share of the low-end mobile phone market was squeezed by Huawei OV, the growth rate of its mobile phone business slowed down, which prompted Xiaomi to expand the smart hardware field to seek new Business growth point.

Since then, by virtue of its phased success in the domestic smartphone market, Xiaomi has also replicated the Xiaomi model in the field of smart hardware segmentation, nurturing hundreds of Xiaomi eco-chain enterprises. The so-called millet model refers to the massive millet phone users deep binding on the millet phone, and millet phone (MIUI system) as the control center to control other smart products in the home environment. In short, Xiaomi's layout in the smart home field mainly has two aspects. On the one hand, it is to open the hardware interface and hope that traditional home manufacturers will take the initiative to access the smart module; on the other hand, it starts with C- end users and introduces a variety of designs and high performance. Cost-effective full-category home appliances to create a smart home brand that ordinary consumer groups can afford.

Second, for Huawei at that time, Huawei made full use of its advantages in connection protocols, operating systems, chips and other aspects to launch HiLink, an open interconnection platform for smart homes (last year Huawei announced that HiLink and Harmony OS would be unified into Harmony OS Connect, namely Hongmeng Zhilian), to establish a unified connection standard for smart home industry in view of the lack of unified connection standards in the smart home market at that time, it not only enables smart devices to be quickly networked, but also enables interconnection and interaction between smart hardware.

In addition, at that time, Huawei, with its strong self-research and technological innovation strength, had sufficient confidence and strength to expand its business in the field of smart home. However, in the past two years, due to various reasons, Huawei's mobile phone business has been negatively affected. Therefore, Huawei regards the smart home market as an important part of the future strategic layout, and hopes to find new growth points in the smart home field.

Millet: with the help of ecological chain to seize the opportunity
As the first mobile phone manufacturer to enter the smart home circuit, Xiaomi was the first to eat the dividends of smart home by cultivating a huge ecological chain enterprise and building an intelligent voice AIOT platform ecology, and successfully entered the first camp in the industry. In other words, Xiaomi's achievements in the field of smart home are inseparable from the support of Xiaomi's ecological chain enterprises.

On the one hand, there are many Xiaomi ecological chain enterprises, which can provide Xiaomi users with a cost-effective product matrix, so that Xiaomi's smart home ecosystem can be rapidly rolled out. Specifically, Xiaomi has successfully cultivated a number of eco-chain intelligent hardware manufacturers through investment incubation, which are responsible for product research and development, production and delivery, while Xiaomi uses its market and channel influence, as well as the ability to control the supply chain to provide sales services for eco-chain enterprises and share supply chain resources with them. Xiaomi's ecological chain business model has not only helped itself achieve rapid revenue growth, but also promoted the rapid development of ecological chain enterprises.

According to Xiaomi's 2021 financial report, Xiaomi's revenue in AIoT is as high as 85 billion yuan, up 26.1 percent year-on-year, which shows that Xiaomi's development prospects in the smart home field are good. According to the knowledge of Blue Shark's availability, there are currently more than 400 millet ecological chain enterprises, and the ecological chain products are rich in categories, involving smart bracelets, speakers, smart temperature control, lighting equipment and other categories. Obviously, its entire smart home system has taken shape.

On the other hand, Xiaomi's main cost-effective approach also means excessive price reduction, which directly leads to lower profit margins for Xiaomi itself and ecological chain companies. According to Lei Jun, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, Xiaomi's hardware comprehensive net profit margin will never exceed 5%. Furthermore, adhere to the cost-effective development path may also cause price wars within the industry. In addition, Xiaomi series products mainly involve small smart home appliances, and lack of large smart home appliances with market competitiveness, such as air conditioners and refrigerators.

Because of this, in order to seek new development and have more autonomy, some ecological chain enterprises have gradually broken away from the Xiaomi ecological chain and become Xiaomi's competitors. Take Yunmi Technology as an example, it grew rapidly after receiving the support of Xiaomi, but it also relied heavily on Xiaomi, resulting in limited development space, so Yunmi chose to de-millet. After that, Yunmi's product line and business model are highly coincident with the layout of Xiaomi's smart home business, and there are different degrees of competition between the two in all aspects.

Huawei: Promote ecological win-win
In addition to Xiaomi, Huawei, as a smartphone manufacturer, is also laying out its business in the field of smart home, and after years of efforts, Xiaomi's layout in the field of smart home is becoming more and more mature. It is reported that Huawei relies on the open platform of Hongmeng Zhilian, and actively cooperates with hundreds of head manufacturers in the home industry to jointly build a smart home ecology.

First, Huawei united home industry giants to create a rich category of smart home ecosystem to meet the diverse needs of consumers. According to official website, Huawei Hongmeng Zhilian currently covers hundreds of categories and more than 1,000 kinds of products in six major fields, including home entertainment, energy consumption, lighting, automation and security, and the categories and products are still expanding.

It is reported that Huawei has formed strategic partnerships with Opal Lighting, Shanghai Sansi, Morgan Intelligence, Midea Electric, Bosi Home Appliances, Panasonic, Ox, Xi Linmen and other leading enterprises in many industries. These partners not only bring cutting-edge technology and high-quality products to Huawei's smart home, promote the construction of Huawei's smart home ecology, but also form a superposition of brand value with Huawei.

Secondly, because Huawei does not manufacture traditional home appliances, there is no business competition between Huawei and the traditional home appliance manufacturers it cooperates with, and the ecosystem is relatively healthy. Huawei itself is not a home appliance manufacturer, and does not intend to personally get involved in the design and manufacture of specific home appliances. Instead, it uses its Hongmeng Zhilian to open up the interconnection and interaction between smart home appliances. As Yu Chengdong said at Huawei's "True Ecological Quality" ecological conference, Huawei is only an industry enabler, not a predator. It can be seen that Huawei's main goal in the field of smart home is to create an ecological win-win situation.

In general, Huawei continues to promote Huawei's smart home from single-product intelligence to group intelligence through cooperation with the industry's most hardware manufacturers, home appliance manufacturers, channel manufacturers, and content service providers, in order to provide consumers with A better smart life experience and quality.

Xiaomi VS Huawei, who can dominate the whole house intelligence?
After years of layout and exploration in the field of smart home, Xiaomi and Huawei have finally targeted the whole house intelligence. According to IDC's "Top Ten Forecasts for China's Smart Home Market in 2022", the growth potential of the smart home market is gradually tilting towards the whole-house smart solutions, and the whole-house smart solutions market will usher in rapid development. Therefore, Xiaomi and Huawei are also taking advantage of the trend and deeply participating in the whole-house smart field.

First, the main selling point of Xiaomi's whole house intelligence is its high cost performance and simple and unified design style. In short, Xiao Ai's classmate Mijia APP smart items together form Xiaomi's whole-house smart solution. Because Xiaomi's smart single product is cost-effective, and Xiaomi's whole house intelligence is realized through this series of smart single product ecology with close price to the people, the price of Xiaomi's whole house smart solution is relatively low. In addition, Xiaomi's design style is generally white, with straight lines in the majority, and the corners are generally designed with rounded corners, and then matched with functional display. The overall shape is as simple as possible to create a comfortable visual effect for consumers. It can be said that Xiaomi mainly relies on the product base and user trust, so as to create a scenario and set of whole-house intelligence.

Although Xiaomi's whole-house intelligence has advantages in terms of cost performance and operability, the disadvantages of realizing a series of scene linkage through single-product ecology are also very obvious, that is, Xiaomi's whole-house intelligence relies heavily on ecological chain enterprises, but now some ecological chain enterprises are implementing the strategy of de-millet, resulting in the lack of guarantee of the stability of their supply chain.

In addition, Xiaomi's whole-house intelligence still relies on the stacking of smart items, which does not bring users a good smart life experience, so its development in the field of whole-house intelligence is slightly inferior. For example, Xiaomi once launched smart hotel and smart real estate solutions in 2019, but due to its deep gene of single product model, it did not attract the attention of the industry at that time, and the progress was not smooth.

Second, the main selling point of Huawei's whole house intelligence is technology and ecology. Specifically, Huawei's whole-house intelligence mainly focuses on the Hongmeng Zhilian ecology and open connection protocol to build hardware ecology, and introduces 1(1 smart host) 2(2 core solutions) N(N subsystems) whole-house intelligent solutions to drive the transformation of a single scene to a whole-house scene. Among them, Huawei's latest whole-house intelligent 2.0 solution plays two trump cards: space interaction experience and rear-mounted solution, moving from terminal-centered to human-centered. For example, its 2.0 solution configures gas sensors and water immersion sensors in the home environment, and can actively remind users in case of danger, and close the electric water valve and the main pipe for the first time, and open the window for ventilation.

However, the price of Huawei's whole house intelligent solution is relatively high, which makes many ordinary consumers flinch. It is reported that the two exclusive packages launched by Huawei last year are priced at 99999 yuan/set for 3 rooms and 2 halls (about 100 square meters) and 149999 yuan/set for 5 rooms and 2 halls (about 200 square meters) respectively. The newly released 2.0 solutions are priced at 19999 yuan/set for 2 rooms and 2 halls (about 80 square meters), 3 rooms and 2 halls (about 120 square meters) 39999 yuan/set. Judging from the price of Huawei's whole-house intelligence and its previous main front-loading solutions to the market, Huawei's target customers are B- side enterprises. It is reported that Huawei has reached strategic cooperation with domestic TOP real estate enterprises such as Greenland, Sunac, China Shipping, Vanke and China Resources, and is expected to cooperate with hotels, schools and C- end middle and high-end users in the future.

Generally speaking, Huawei's whole-house intelligent solution can realize the intelligent interconnection and coordination of whole-house intelligent hardware, sound, light, water, electricity and other systems, providing users with immersive, personalized and growable whole-scene intelligent experience, while Xiaomi's whole-house intelligence mainly relies on the stacking of intelligent single products. In this way, Huawei's development in the field of whole-house intelligence is better. However, the large-scale popularization of whole-house intelligence cannot be separated from the price of the people, so Xiaomi whole-house intelligence also has development potential in the future. In other words, both Xiaomi and Huawei's all-house smart solutions have market development potential.