Written by | Understand the | of editing Qin Yan
Source: Understand the notes
Preface
The spiral of the stone robot is upwards
In April 2019, Ren Zhengfei talked about Apple in an interview with CNBC. "Apple's greatness is to always take the market bigger, not smaller. Apple plays an 'umbrella', sells products with high prices, provides good performance, and has a large market space, allowing many other manufacturers to survive. And reflect on Huawei's low-price strategy that has been adhering to in the telecommunications field.
This kind of reflection may have created the high-end route of Huawei's mobile phones later. With good components, good experience, selling high prices, from more than 3,000, more than 5,000, and then to more than 10,000, Huawei and other domestic mobile phones have embarked on a road that sells more and more expensive. Prices have risen, consumers have not stayed away from domestic brands, but their loyalty has become higher and higher, which has also made China firmly stand on the high ground of the global mobile phone industry.
Today, China's sweeping robot industry has also begun to copy the path of mobile phones. Sweeping robots, from a few years ago, thousands of yuan to 3,000 yuan, 5,000 yuan. On March 22, Stone Technology released the G10S series of self-cleaning sweeping robots, including two new stone G10S and G10S Pro, with the initial price of 4799 yuan and 5699 yuan respectively, which is equivalent to the price of a high-end smartphone. Looking at the industry, 4,000 to 5,000 self-cleaning sweeping robots are becoming the main new products of each company.
The data of Aowei Cloud Network also shows that in the sweeping robot industry, the proportion of low-end machine sales below 2,000 yuan has rapidly shrunk from 79% in 2019 to 45% in 2021. At the same time, the proportion of high-end machines above 3,000 yuan climbed from 2% to 29%.
Well, here's the problem. Is the increasingly expensive sweeping robot worth owning, and can it embark on a virtuous cycle of more expensive prices, more high-end products and healthier industries like the mobile phone industry?
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Consumers are willing to pay for good expensive ones
In 2021, Deloitte conducted a survey of more than 26,000 consumers in 25 countries around the world. The survey shows that consumers in most countries and regions around the world are not willing to pay more for advanced automotive technology, while Chinese consumers are more receptive to new technologies and willing to pay an extra fee. In the dimensions of "safety", "Internet of Vehicles", "Entertainment Information", "Autonomous Driving", "Diversified Powertrain" and other dimensions, Chinese consumers are the most willing to spend money.
In fact, not only in the automotive field, but also in various fields such as food, beauty, consumer electronics, home appliances, etc., it has become a common phenomenon that consumers are willing to buy expensive and buy good. As a result, we have seen that new categories such as latex mattresses, silicon non-pressure pillows, fascia guns, high-speed hair dryers, electric toothbrushes, and sodas have been sought after by consumers in the past two years.
The sweeping robot industry also sees this trend, through product upgrades to meet consumers' pursuit of good and expensive products. According to the data of Aowei Cloud Network, in 2021, the omni-channel sales of the sweeping robot market will be about 10.62 billion yuan, with a growth rate of 32%. This is mainly due to the increase in the unit price of cleaning products, and the average price of sweeper products has risen from 1800 yuan at the beginning of the year to 2799 yuan since 2021, an increase of 55%.
In August 2021, Stone Technology released two products, the self-cleaning sweeping robot G10 and the intelligent double brushing machine U10, priced at 3999 yuan and 3499 yuan respectively. Compared with the previous products of the stone, these two products are typical good and expensive products, which achieve better cleaning effect, stronger endurance, and more trouble-free, and its sales volume and customer praise rate also confirm the market's recognition and welcome of high-quality products.
Even though the average sales price of G10 in January 2022 was 4023 yuan, 625 yuan higher than the average sales price of the second list, from December 2021 to February 2022, G10 still won the first monthly sales volume of the sweeper category for three consecutive months. By the beginning of March this year, the cumulative sales volume of G10 has reached nearly 200,000 units, and the revenue of Stone Technology in 2021 has increased by 28.84% year-on-year.
The recognition of the market has also given Stone Technology the confidence to continue to launch good products. On March 22, Stone Technology released two new G10S and G10S Pro to further achieve performance upgrades: among them, the G10S series of suction power was upgraded from 2500Pa of G10 to 5100Pa, and the cleaning ability was stronger; the automatic function was upgraded from four to seven items of G10, and new functions such as automatic bacteriostatic, automatic drying, automatic water supply and sewerage were added, which further liberated the hands; the algorithm was upgraded to RR mason 9.0; it is also equipped with the world's first intelligent control lifting sound wave vibration wiping module of stone, and realizes constant wet wiping.
From this new product, we can see the competitive strategy of Stone Technology: with high-performance, smarter and more trouble-free good products, seize the high-end market and occupy the competitive highland.
Technical planting, high-end cooling
For electronic products, technological upgrades can not only enrich product functions and experiences, but also subvert products. Before the advent of the iPhone, phone calls, text messaging is the main function of the mobile phone, after the iPhone opened the smart phone and mobile Internet era, the mobile phone has achieved a subversive innovation, no longer a traditional mobile phone, but a smart terminal that combines functions such as taking pictures, shopping, payment, leisure and entertainment, and most things in life can be done with a mobile phone.
Price is the result of high-end, and technical iteration is the reason for high-end. The reason why brand products such as stones are selling more and more expensive is precisely the technological innovation behind them. The innovation of technology has enabled the sweeping robot to achieve qualitative change, from the previous auxiliary roles and supporting roles to the protagonists who liberate people's hands and housework.
Sweeping robots, with the three words robot, also come with their own technical genes. A small sweeping robot, taken apart, has at least four major capabilities: cleaning, navigation, endurance, and interaction. In the past one or two years, behind the sweeping robot to the high-end, it is relying on technological innovation to achieve a comprehensive breakthrough in these four capabilities.
The cleaning function is the basic function of the sweeping robot, but a few years ago, the domestic sweeping robot only solved the problem of sweeping, which is more like a chicken rib product for consumers who want to use it to free their hands. On the one hand, the sweeping robot cannot sweep cleanly, especially in the corners of the walls and the edges of the furniture. On the other hand, Chinese families generally use hard floors based on floors and tiles, and they are accustomed to sweeping and dragging them over and over again.
As a result, technological innovations for wall corners and furniture edges began to appear. Stone's newly released T8 sweeping robot has an "intelligent dynamic speed regulation" design, when sweeping along the wall, the brush will always be close to the wall, and the speed is much faster than in the open area. In this way, it is possible to avoid the side brush from hitting the garbage when cleaning in a straight line, so as to more effectively sweep away the dust in the gaps and corners.
The sweeping and tractor machine is not the user's demand, the user's demand is that the ground is clean. Therefore, self-cleaning has become the standard of high-end sweeping robots, after automatic mopping, there is no water trace, and the dirty mop can also be automatically cleaned, plus automatic water replenishment, automatic drying and other functions, truly liberating the user's hands.
Navigation ability is the criterion for distinguishing between the intelligence of the sweeping robot and the mental disability, and also affects the cleaning effect. Navigation technology mainly includes laser navigation (LDS SLAM) and visual navigation (VSLAM) two, of which laser navigation technology, although high cost, but wide visual range, strong environmental adaptability, higher map accuracy, while being able to obtain depth information, obstacle avoidance effect is better. Stone Technology is the main advocate of the laser navigation technology route, promoting its large-scale application in the sweeping robot industry.
And from the T7 series launched in the past two years, the T7S series to the G10, and the G10S series launched this year, a variety of products of the stone are superimposed on the basis of laser navigation WITH AI cameras, through computer vision and laser planning algorithms to achieve truly unattended automatic cleaning.
In addition, the larger battery brings a longer range of endurance, a larger range of cleaning; more intelligent interaction, allowing users to control the sweeping robot through mobile phone App or even voice interaction, bringing experience upgrades.
The quantitative change of each of the above technologies has brought about the qualitative change of the sweeping robot and brought about the popularity of the high-end sweeping robot market. Among the many first-line brands, Stone Technology has adopted a light asset operation mode of production outsourcing, which allows it to have more energy to invest in research and development innovation, and core technologies such as SLAM algorithm, path planning algorithm, and motion control algorithm are indeed independently developed by Stone Technology. Stone Technology, which is known for its research and development, has more advantages to grasp this wave of high-end products based on technological innovation.
The stronger the stronger, the Matthew effect appears
In the past few years, many industries in China have generally entered the stock market from the incremental market, which has put forward new requirements for enterprise operation and commercial competition. The demographic dividend slowly recedes in the technology dividend, and it has become a new trend for enterprises to grow to new technologies. In the past, people often said that all industries are worth doing again on the Internet, and now, it should be said that all industries are worth doing again with technology.
The same is true of the sweeping robot industry. In the past few years, many brands have entered this track, but they have fallen into the quagmire of low-end competition in the price war, and the industry has also fallen into a vicious circle: low product prices - enterprises have no funds to invest in technology research and development - product functions have stagnated - user experience, word of mouth is not good - enterprises have no momentum for development. This is also the main reason why in the past few years, sweeping robots have been tepid, and even considered "a bit silly" and "chicken ribs".
The high-end movement that has emerged in the past two years has brought the industry the opposite virtuous circle: the product function is good - the price is high - the company earns more - more money is invested in research and development - the product function is better. In this virtuous circle, who has strong research and development capabilities and good products will be able to gain more market share, and the Matthew effect of the stronger the stronger gradually appears.
Taking Stone Technology as an example, from 2016 to the third quarter of 2021, its R&D investment exceeded 1 billion yuan; it obtained a total of 730 intellectual property rights.
Technological power is accelerating the transformation into product strength and competitiveness. Thanks to the accumulation of technology, the pace of its launch of high-end products has accelerated significantly, launching the LDS+ visual navigation flagship series in 2020; launching the T7S series and self-dust collection products in 2021, launching the self-cleaning sweeping robot G10 and the floor washer U10 in August; and launching the T8 and G10S series of new products this year.
In the domestic market, the online market share of Stone Technology has always remained at TOP3; in overseas markets, Stone Technology has also accelerated significantly. In the first half of 2021, the overseas revenue of Stone Technology was 1.255 billion yuan, an increase of 124.14% year-on-year.
Not long ago, a report issued by Huachuang Securities showed that under the background of the continuous growth of overseas sweeper demand, Chinese brands represented by Stone Technology are gradually opening up brand awareness with the high-quality experience of LDS+ visual obstacle avoidance products, and cannibalizing the market share of the leading iRobot.
【Conclusion】
In the past two decades, Chinese mobile phone brands have grown from scratch and from strong to strong, not only sold to India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the United States and other global markets, but also led the global mobile phone industry in terms of functional innovation and product experience. This is a typical case of relying on technological innovation to go to high-end and achieve a virtuous circle of industry with high-end.
Today, the sweeping robot industry is replicating such stories. Under the trend of high-end promoted by technology research and development, the entire industry will enter a virtuous circle and spiral
Cold-eyed bystander Spicy Reviews In-depth analysis
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