At the 2018IFA consumer Electronics Show in Berlin, Huawei unveiled a smart speaker AI Cube with a router and plans to sell the product in Europe by the end of the year, but it has not yet been publicly priced.
This marks the first time Huawei has entered the smart speaker market. In the track of smart speakers, there are Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi and other mobile phone manufacturers eyeing.
Similar to other handset makers, Huawei, which has been using smartphones as its core, has been aiming at smart speakers for its smart life scene, in addition to the huge cake in the smart speaker market, to enrich the surrounding ecology of smartphones and expand its smart home business.
Hardware manufacturers vs. Internet vendors
In the bat and millet, jingdong into the Bureau of Smart speakers, Huawei also finally sit down. From the current news, AI Cube looks very similar to Google's home speakers, but Huawei is trying to create differences in the competition with the built-in 4G routers.
The AI Cube also has a built-in Amazon Alexa Voice assistant, which means that users can use all the different features of Alexa, including many features or applications written by the developer for Alexa. Huawei is struggling to catch up with the target Samsung, also almost in front and back to join the smart Speaker war. Samsung unveiled a smart speaker Galaxyhome on August 10 at the Samsung NOTE9 Conference.
Galaxyhome built-in six speakers a subwoofer, eight remote-field microphone for detecting voice input, with playback music, far-field recognition sound, control of smart home appliance equipment and other functions.
Galaxyhome will be a high-end speaker, through this sharp weapon into the smart audio market, and Apple homepod a positive confrontation, while with the Amazon Echo and Google home and other rivals to narrow the gap.
In contrast, another big mobile phone manufacturer Xiaomi, has been a year ago in the domestic handset manufacturers in the first to launch smart speakers, recently, Xiaomi officially announced by the end of July, ' Little Love Students ' monthly active equipment more than 30 million, this July, the small love to wake up more than 1 billion times, the cumulative wake has been more than 5 billion times. The original price of 199 yuan of days cat elf Sugar Smart speakers, Taobao members 89 yuan can be snapped up, the price of 299 yuan of Jingdong ding-dong Mini2, then to start at only 79 yuan to fight back, Baidu also launched from 89 yuan to 599 yuan of small smart speakers ...
This year, smart speakers are more intensive set off a round of price war. At present, in the field of smart speakers, has formed to Xiaomi, Huawei, Samsung as the representative of the hardware manufacturers and Ali, Baidu, Tencent and Jingdong as the representative of the Internet manufacturers.
Ali related responsible person told reporters, smart speakers are not the competition between manufacturers, but with the mobile phone to seize the replacement of the market, in the case of the growth of smartphone shipments stopped, smart speakers are to seek new alternative flow of the entrance.
How big is the market left for Huawei? Although it is a post-knowledge, Huawei still sees the huge market behind the entrance to the smart speakers. In August this year, the global smart speaker market increased by 187% in the second quarter of 2018, according to a report by Canalys analysts.
Apple, Google, Xiaomi, Amazon and other companies have total shipments of 16.8 million units, higher than the first quarter of 9 million units. In China, the biggest winners are Alibaba and Xiaomi.
At present, Alibaba's Tmall elves in China's domestic market share of 50%, but Xiaomi is fast catching up, its small love speaker mini sales increased by 228%. Canalys pointed out that China has great potential. In a previous report, Canalys predicted that the number of smart speakers to be used by the end of 2018 would be close to 100 million units and that sales would reach 225 million units by 2020.
Canalys also predicts that Amazon's market share is expected to drop from 50% in 2018 to 34% in 2022. For the Amazon and Google and other internet manufacturers, in the absence of their own mobile phone-related hardware products, smart speakers will become smart home the best flow of access and back to the second hardware products.
Apple as the representative of the hardware manufacturers, the need is the product at a lower cost to achieve rapid popularization, access to traffic, data training. and the different backgrounds, also decided the enterprise's pricing strategy, internet manufacturers for smart speakers to play a price war, and Apple's smart speakers become a part of its profit source. First Mobile Research institute Dean Sunyan said, on the one hand, compared with mobile phones and other products, smart speakers are not just needed. As a result, most hardware manufacturers are more cautious in pricing, while Apple is still the traditional hardware-based thinking, in pursuit of high profits.
On the other hand, internet giants are more of a gateway to the ecosystem.
Huawei is the largest mobile phone manufacturer in China, and also has a large number of mobile phone users, which has become a solid foundation for its conversion into smart speaker users, at the same time, by virtue of Huawei manufacturing advantages, can continue to reduce costs, Huawei in the cloud, big data, AI algorithm, architecture and other fields of innovation and core competitiveness can also be help.