On September 17, Yijia Technology CEO Liu Zuohu announced on Weibo that he started from the smart TV and joined the Internet smart home field.
The concept of the Internet of Things was proposed from the 1990s, and the immature technology has not been rapidly developed. However, the industry believes that with the advent of the 5G era and the construction of next-generation communication standards, the Internet of Things is the most important as 5G. Application scenarios, or ushered in explosive growth.
According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the scale of China's Internet of Things industry reached 750 billion yuan in 2015. By 2020, the overall scale of China's Internet of Things will exceed 1.8 trillion yuan.
In the industry chain of the Internet of Things, both component manufacturers, operators, application vendors, upstream and downstream enterprises are keenly aware of the huge prospects of the Internet of Things. Smart home as the most suitable consumer scene in the Internet of Things has become A new battlefield of a large number of intelligent hardware manufacturers. Mobile phone manufacturers including Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and one plus are taking the TV as the first step and marching towards the Internet of Things.
From small screen to large screen
For the concept of smart TV, Liu Zuohu hopes to build a high-end flagship TV like a flagship mobile phone. Over the years, it has been praised as a 'small and beautiful' one plus, and thus began to leap from small screen to big screen.
Liu Zuohu is aiming at the future family life scene, but his competitor Lei Jun has already preempted the game, and has already occupied a small market.
Recently, Xiaomi's high-profile publicity, Xiaomi TV achieved the omni-channel sales champion in the second quarter of 2018, global sales increased by 350%, and successfully entered the Indian market.
The competition of Chinese mobile phone manufacturers has shifted from the screen in the hands of users to the screens in the family living room. In the long run, it is in the layout of smart homes. In the near term, it is because the mobile phone market is weak.
Communication expert Liu Qicheng believes that the competition in the mobile phone industry is fierce, companies need to find new markets, and traditional TV manufacturers are not doing well in terms of user experience.
According to the latest data from China Telecomtsu, in August 2018, the domestic mobile phone market shipped 32.595 million units, down 20.9% year-on-year, down 11.8% from the previous month, of which the number of smartphone shipments was 304.48 million, down 17.4% year-on-year; From January to August, the domestic mobile phone market shipped 266 million units, down 17.7% year-on-year.
On the other hand, the demand for smart TV industry is growing at a high rate. Global information service provider IHS Markit predicts that due to the decline in LCD TV panel prices and the recovery of global TV shipments in 2018, it will increase by 3.5% to 223 million units. Shipment share is expected to grow to 70%.
Giant loT ecological layout
Liu Buchen, an analyst in the home appliance industry, said that TV and mobile phones are the products most closely related to the Internet of Things. Mobile phone companies do the same for TV and TV companies.
However, mobile phone companies are entering the TV industry not only because of the development of smart TV, but also for the future of smart home scenes and even the entire Internet of Things.
As Liu Zuohu said, for today's users, mobile, home, car and office are the four most important life scenes, but 'family' is a very important scene in life, still in a relatively early stage.
Today, Huawei, OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi, the top four domestic mobile phone companies, are using the 'family' scenario for IoT layout.
In 2015, Xiaomi first disclosed the loT strategy of connecting all devices with mobile phones as the core. In the past three years, it has invested in 100 eco-chain companies. At the end of 2017, Xiaomi announced the second step of loT strategy, opening the loT platform and cooperating with Baidu. Build 'oT+AI' ecosystem.
The first financial report after the listing of Xiaomi shows that nearly 1.7 million users have more than 5 millet loT devices, and the Xiaomi Internet of Things has connected 115 million smart devices worldwide.
Huawei is also establishing its own ecology. According to public information, HiLink, Huawei's smart home open platform, has more than 20 million user bases, cooperates with more than 150 manufacturers, accesses more than 100 categories, covers more than 500 products, and realizes 4 Billion APP link.
Unlike Huawei and Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo do not produce home appliances themselves. Instead, they have joined forces with American, TCL, Cobos, and Mimi to form the 'loT Open Ecology Alliance'.
Although the layout strategies of various Internet of Things are different, each family has one thing in common - ecological openness.
Jia Jingdong, director of the strategy research department of vivo, said in an interview with the media that consumers want to be more diversified, more unconstrained, open to bring less competition barriers, or a moat, but the scale can be made bigger, consumers The experience can also be done more complete and rich.
Industry difficulties
IHS recently predicted that the installed base of global IoT equipment will grow from 15.4 billion units in 2015 to 30.7 billion units in 2020. By 2025, this number is expected to reach 75.4 billion units, with a compound annual growth rate of 17.21 in the next 10 years. %.
According to McKinsey estimates, the potential economic impact of the Internet of Things will be 2.7 trillion to 6.2 trillion US dollars by 2025. Faced with such huge industrial development space and interests, companies at all stages of the industrial chain are not willing to make wedding dresses for others. Competitor unified market.
Among mobile phone manufacturers, Huawei launched HiLink smart home open interconnection platform and Lite OS IoT operating system. Vivo expects to connect more devices through its IoT product 'Jovi IoT'. Among home appliance manufacturers, Haier launched the ecological operating system Haier UHomeOS. TCL, Gree and other home appliance companies are all deploying smart homes. As an Internet company, Ali released the YunOS@Home smart operating system, showing ambition to smart homes.
It can be said that mobile phone companies, home appliance companies, and Internet companies all have a must-have for the Internet of Things. This has also brought about a major industry problem. Under the complicated interests, it is difficult to achieve a unified industry standard.
Industry observer Liang Zhenpeng said that due to the continuous change and improvement of technology, the Internet of Things industry itself will not be able to quickly introduce a unified standard, but only under the unified standards, the hardware produced by enterprises according to the standard will not cause huge waste of resources. From the perspective of international competition, if Apple, Microsoft, Google and other companies unify the industry standards and apply for international standards, Chinese companies will be more passive when they enter the overseas market.
Now, in addition to the promotion of the government and related associations, major mobile phone manufacturers are also promoting the improvement of industry standards while expanding their scale of ecological openness. Jia Jingdong said that pure technology, the entire technical solution should be iterated to make it lighter. Quantify, adapt to more vendors, the entire standard protocol needs to have an iteration, but the standard will be close to stability at a certain stage, the next work will focus on getting more vendors to join, let the equipment, application volume increase, control More and more equipment.