Text/Ball Review/Zi Yang Proofreader/ZhiQiu
Headphones listen to music, KTV and other entertainment habits, hearing impairment gradually tends to be younger, public data show that the number of adults with hearing loss worldwide is as high as 432 million, 34 million children.
According to the estimation of the Beijing Hearing Association, at this stage, China has more than 72 million hearing impaired people, and the hearing impaired group is not small.
In this context, the size of the hearing aid market is also increasing, according to the data released by the China Industry Research Network, it is expected that the global market size will reach 8.33 billion US dollars by 2025.
The current situation of the domestic hearing aid market
As an auxiliary device, the wearing rate of hearing aids in China is only 5%, which is far from that of developed countries, which means that there is a huge gap in China's hearing aid market.
However, it should be noted that most of the hearing aid products on the domestic market are low-end products, the technical content is low, and the most critical thing is that the hearing aid products produced by Chinese enterprises with the international advanced level have a market share of less than 10%.
The domestic high-end hearing aid market, foreign-funded enterprises have a monopoly position, public data show that Denmark's Ruishengda and Odicon and Hearing, Switzerland's Fengli, Germany's Siemens, the United States Stark six hearing aid giants have mastered more than 90% of China's high-end hearing aid market.
To put it bluntly, most of the hearing aid service stores that exist Chinese mainland are basically the service points of foreign-funded enterprises.
In other words, more than 72 million people with hearing impairments in China want to alleviate hearing difficulties through hearing aids, but the dominance is controlled by foreign-funded enterprises.
It is worth mentioning that due to the monopoly of foreign-funded enterprises in China's hearing aid market is too serious, the price of hearing aids continues to increase, a hearing aid with an average price of 20,000 yuan in the international market, but it sells for 50,000 yuan in the Chinese hearing aid market, and even a hearing aid can be sold for nearly 100,000 yuan.
In addition, almost all foreign giants, for the Chinese market, deliberately raise prices to slaughter Chinese consumers, some insiders said that the same model of hearing aid products, after entering the Chinese market, the price of the highest double.
Why do foreign companies sell hearing aid products so expensive, but they can still suck up gold in the Chinese market?
The reason is very simple, foreign giants like to carry out brand premiums, and domestic consumers subconsciously believe that the quality of imported hearing aid products is better, coupled with foreign companies continue to upgrade the technology of hearing aid products, imported hearing aids are more popular.
In contrast, domestic hearing aid products are disorganized, the industrial cluster is small, and it has not formed a certain scale, which is difficult to compete head-on with foreign companies, which also leads to the continuous compression of the living space of local hearing aid companies.
In fact, there is another reason why foreign companies monopolize the domestic hearing aid market, they have mastered the core technology. It should be known that the most core technology of hearing aids is the chip, because the powerful chip computing power can be used for different environments in the outside world, suppress noise, and enhance the speech output ability of the hearing aid.
Western companies are relatively perfect in the chip supply chain itself, and for Companies such as Fengli, Siemens, and Stark, it is more conducive to the development of hearing aids.
On the contrary, the hearing aid products independently produced by Chinese enterprises are monopolized in terms of core technology, and parts and components products need to be purchased from foreign companies, which directly reduces the competitiveness of local enterprises in the hearing aid market.
How to break the situation of domestic hearing aids?
At present, the number of hearing impaired people is still rising, China's hearing aid market has long been monopolized by foreign capital, obviously not friendly to such groups, domestic hearing aids to break the monopoly is imperative.
In my opinion, we can start from two aspects:
On the one hand, domestic hearing aid brands want to enhance their influence in the domestic market, and the solution is naturally to strengthen the research and development of core technologies and create more practical hearing aid products.
According to the author's understanding, the well-known domestic hearing aid company Zhi Listening Technology has carried out relevant research and development for chips, in order to break the monopoly of Western companies in core technologies.
On the other hand, in the face of the super monopoly of foreign companies on this market, Chinese enterprises can enter the market segment, such as the unilateral deafness market.
In most people's minds, hearing aids are mainly a necessity for the bilateral deaf community, and in fact, unilateral deaf patients are also a huge market.
Although China does not count the number of unilateral deaf patients, some experts predict that the cumulative number of unilateral deafness and conductive hearing aids in China has exceeded 50 million.
The most critical thing is that in the face of the huge market for unilateral deafness, there is no satisfactory solution on the market, for domestic hearing aid companies, the unilateral deafness market will be a good point of force, which can effectively avoid direct competition with foreign companies.
Write to the end
In general, breaking the monopoly pattern of foreign companies in China's hearing aids is a relatively long process, which requires the unremitting efforts of related enterprises, and one day the situation of Western monopoly will be completely broken. It is expected that domestic hearing aids will achieve autonomy.