This article is published in the “Outlook Eastern Weekly” (Issue No. 871), originally titled “Upgrading Smart Homes”.Reporter: Luo Xiaoyun, Editor: Qin Liudi
In the past five years, the smart home industry chain has experienced rapid growth across all fronts.
Three Wings Bird Smart Kitchen Scene
Recently, at the “Smart Life: A New Beginning” – Three Wings Bird’s achievements and new product launch event, Three Wings Bird underwent a brand upgrade, shifting from “the world’s first scene brand” to “smart home scene brand”. The combination of “smart” and “scene” positions Three Wings Bird to lead the industry upgrade once again.
Technology is the primary productive force, and technology serves smart living. In today’s world, innovations in artificial intelligence, life sciences, and digital technology are leading a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation. Each round of industrial upgrade brings about a better life.
Vice President of Haier Smart Home and General Manager of Three Wings Bird, Zuo Mozhi, announced the new positioning of Three Wings Bird: Smart Home Scene Brand
Implementation of Smart Home Scenes
The upstream of the smart home industry chain includes basic equipment such as chips, sensors, smart controllers, AI technology, and cloud services; the midstream consists of companies like Haier Smart Home, Midea, Gree, TCL, and management platforms like Orvibo and SenseTime; the downstream includes traditional real estate companies represented by Evergrande Group and Vanke Real Estate, as well as home decoration companies like TuBaTu, and online and offline sales channels represented by Tmall, JD.com, and Gome.
In the past five years, the smart home industry chain has experienced rapid growth across all fronts.
According to data from Zhiyan Consulting, since 2017, the upstream of the industry chain, represented by the AI chip market, has seen a surge of over 120% in 2018 and 2021 due to favorable policies, with growth exceeding 50% in other years.
In 2017, the shipment of smart home devices in China was 110 million units, reaching 210 million units by 2019, and it is expected to reach around 240 million units in 2022. Meanwhile, the number of registered smart home-related companies in China has continued to grow, with growth rates of 29.62%, 31.52%, 26.24%, and 34.56% from 2018 to 2021, showing a trend of rapid growth.
In the downstream of the industry chain, as China’s economy enters a stage of high-quality development, the continuous increase in internet users has expanded the adoption of smart homes, and people’s acceptance of smart homes is gradually increasing. The safety and convenience brought by smart homes will further stimulate consumer demand.
According to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics, in the first three quarters of 2022, the per capita disposable income of residents nationwide was approximately 27,700 yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3.2%. The increase in per capita disposable income will drive the growth of consumer demand and continuously improve the quality of life.
In the current diversified competitive landscape, many companies are cross-border laying out whole-house intelligence, some focusing on underlying system logic, while others are working on ecological chain layouts. Everyone is promoting the smart home industry to evolve from past single-point and partial control to today’s whole-house interconnectivity.
However, in the early development of smart homes, some market supply solutions were complex to operate, frequently disconnected, passively executed, and had poor interaction experiences, leading users to perceive smart homes as “not smart enough”. The Three Wings Bird whole-house intelligence, equipped with the Smart Home Brain, resolves these pain points.
On November 25, 2022, marking the second anniversary of the Three Wings Bird brand, the “Smart Life: A New Beginning” – Three Wings Bird’s achievements and new product launch event was held in Shenzhen. This event announced the brand upgrade of Three Wings Bird, shifting from “the world’s first scene brand” to “smart home scene brand”. The industrial significance lies in leveraging the brand’s strong ecological integration capabilities to truly realize the implementation of smart home scenes, breaking down industry barriers and accelerating industry development.
Smart Home Brain Leading Smart Living
No matter how smart a product is, it can only provide a specific type of service. For example, a refrigerator can help keep food fresh for a long time, and as technology advances, the preservation time gets longer. However, if you want to cook, you need not just a refrigerator, but a series of products including a refrigerator, stove, oven, and cabinets to complete the designed functions.
Products can only provide specific services based on individual hardware capabilities, while scenes are the means to break the constraints of single product functions: each living scene requires multiple products to work together. How can different products coordinate and work in harmony to provide users with complete scene services? The solution from Three Wings Bird relies on intelligent capabilities.
From smart technology to smart living, a smart brain is needed. The best intelligence is the one that does not disturb the user.
In the smart home industry, technology is the “root” of the product, and for Three Wings Bird, this “root” is the Smart Home Brain. The Smart Home Brain integrates advanced AI, big data, and IoT technologies, combining thinking, decision-making, and emotion, capable of self-perception, self-learning, and self-evolution, allowing the home to think and learn.
Based on brain-like intelligent algorithms, it achieves personalized changes from multiple dimensions such as time and individuals, evolving with each interaction with users, updating and iterating every day, becoming smarter with use.
With the Smart Home Brain at its core, Three Wings Bird has built a comprehensive smart home solution, breaking through the bottleneck of “intelligence” and achieving “smart” across all home living scenes.
On May 10, 2022, Three Wings Bird launched a groundbreaking “1+3+5+N” whole-house smart scene solution, creating three professional systems for whole-house intelligence, whole-house water, and whole-house air; five smart spaces including kitchen, bedroom, living room, bathroom, and balcony; and N personalized scenes such as extended viewing, laundry, and cooking.
Six months later, the Three Wings Bird whole-house smart scene solution will be upgraded.
The “1+3+5+N” solution is fundamentally different from single product intelligence and partial intelligence. It fully respects users’ personalized needs, allowing customization of brand, category, components, scenes, and spaces, achieving full-process 1+N guarantee delivery, including pre-design, mid-term implementation, and post-service.
Innovation is the primary driving force, and there is no end to innovative technology. However, if technology cannot be close to users, innovation will lose its meaning. Three Wings Bird not only lowers the usage threshold and learning costs of whole-house intelligence but also makes it practical and user-friendly. Currently, the Smart Home Brain has over 2,000 professional “home” living skills, with daily active users exceeding 600,000.
Building an Industrial Ecological System
According to data from Zhiyan Consulting, since 2019, China’s smart home industry has continued to develop, showing an overall growth trend; in 2021, the smart home configuration volume in China’s refined decoration market increased by 63.69% year-on-year, with a configuration rate of 9.6%.
In the first half of 2022, the smart home configuration volume in China’s real estate refined decoration market was 86,100 sets, with a configuration rate of 12.2%. The data indicates that the trend of home intelligence in China’s real estate refined decoration market is becoming increasingly evident, with the quantity and efficiency of configurations continuously improving.
The vision of Three Wings Bird is to enable hundreds of millions of Chinese families to enjoy a refreshed smart life.
It aims to build a large industrial ecological system centered on smart homes: based on smart appliances, with smart whole-house solutions at its core, radiating into the smart home decoration field, and extending towards a broader direction of smart living, reconstructing the concept of smart living.
Talent is the primary resource. Today, Three Wings Bird has over 1,000 technical R&D personnel, breaking the fragmented digitalization status in the industry, forming a digital platform covering various tools such as App, design tools, BIM (Building Information Modeling), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), empowering the industry to achieve full-process digitalization.
Currently, Haier Smart Home has extended its digital capabilities to all dimensions including consumer users, partners, stores, and post-service.
From the user dimension, it establishes demand profiles to ensure the best user experience; from the partner dimension, it enhances operational efficiency and improves experience quality; from the store dimension, it enhances user in-store experience while improving user conversion, bridging the “last mile” of delivery and installation, significantly increasing user stickiness; from the post-service dimension, it provides users with exclusive customized solutions through digitalization, realizing the “what you think is what you see” in home decoration design.
Currently, there are 1,605 Three Wings Bird experience stores nationwide, serving 238 city-level areas; by 2023, it plans to layout over 3,300 Three Wings Bird smart life experience centers, covering 304 core cities and 1,500 core building material business circles.
Haier is a brand of the times, and Three Wings Bird will continue to evolve based on user needs and policy changes. Three Wings Bird will make efforts and breakthroughs in three areas: low carbon, elder-friendly, and national cultural confidence.
Surrounding the new positioning of the smart home scene brand, Three Wings Bird will continue to iterate the capabilities of the Smart Home Brain, improve the smart whole-house solutions, establish high-precision leading standards, and achieve the realization of smart homes that are implementable, experiential, and widely covered, ultimately achieving value for society, business, and users.
Supervisor: Xia Yu
Editor: Gu JiaYun
Production: Guo Sailing, Shi Jiaqing
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