Smart Connected Makes Consumer Electronics "Exchange Blood"

From July 10 to 13, the 2013 China International Consumer Electronics Show (SINOCES) was held in Qingdao. The reporter interviewed a dozen guests including industry experts and business leaders. In the first half of 2013, under the backdrop of the global economic downturn and the continuous shrinking of consumer electronics market demand in developed countries in Europe and America, China’s home appliance and consumer electronics markets are slowly recovering. The Chinese electronic and electrical industry, which shakes away the stick of the national policy, will face more challenges, but it is also looking for new hotspots and profit points from product to market, from content to experience full-scale smart upgrades. Zhang Weihua, Deputy Secretary-General of IGRS Industry Alliance, Zhou Qun, General Manager of GfK (China), and Zeng Dejun, General Manager of Shenzhen Gendian Technology Co., Ltd. accepted the exclusive of the reporter on the impact of the withdrawal of state subsidy policy and the intelligentization trend of consumer electronics industry. Interview.

GfK (China) General Manager Zhou Qun:

The household appliance industry can not ignore the mobile Internet, whether it is the global market or the Chinese market, and the main factors driving its development come from three dimensions. The first dimension is permeability, the second dimension is technological innovation, and the third dimension is mobile interconnection.

GfK releases quarterly estimates of the total global consumer electronics market. In December last year, an estimate of the entire market was released this year. In the first half of this year, the global consumer electronics market is expected to grow about 4% year-on-year in 2012. We believe that it is much more optimistic than last year's estimate. At that time, the estimate was based on global economic and political factors. Later, it was discovered that the factors worried last year are at least not present at present. Deterioration. And some innovative products in consumer electronics are very strong for market promotion.

It is expected that the global retail sales of 3C products, including mobile phones, IT products, and color TVs (excluding white electricity) will exceed US$1.1 trillion in 2013, an increase of about 9% from last year, which is a very good trend. There are two reasons. First, the emerging markets continue to pull. Asia, China, India, and Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, are all hot spots. Brazil and Russia, which belong to the BRICS countries, continue to drive the market. The second point is that smart phones have not only slowed down their growth, but have grown more rapidly after the emergence of a new round of applications and competition among many brands.

Energy-saving subsidies contribute to technological innovation. White electricity declined slightly in 2012 from 2011 year-on-year. At the beginning of this year, we made three levels of estimates, which were conservative, intermediate, and optimistic. Now it seems that the trend is more optimistic, and it may increase by about 4% from the previous year. White electricity is a relatively stable market, and it would be good if this growth can be achieved globally. China's white goods market is a little more complicated. If you look at the offline market, growth may be slightly negative. If some emerging products and applications on the line can be brought into positive growth, it will certainly not be as large as 3C products.

Whether it is the global market or the Chinese market, the main factors driving its development come from three dimensions. The first dimension is permeability, the second dimension is technological innovation, and the third dimension is mobile interconnection. Increasing the penetration rate solves the quantity problem, but usually the effect of this measure is low value, and the technical level is also low. The second dimension is technology innovation or product optimization. The market brought by this process is a high-quality market. The product price and technology added value are relatively high, including the experience and quality brought to users. This market is more of a new market in some regions. It also includes some alternative markets and is a relatively high-end market. The ideal situation is that the product has both good quality and good added value, but it is difficult to be in that position.

The previous round of state support policies, such as the home appliances going to the countryside, increased the home appliance industry. But it solves the problem of permeability, that is, the problem of quantity. The subsidy for energy-saving benefits will push household appliances to the second dimension. In this market of China, the increase in market reaction and influence is relatively large, and the effect is also significant. However, household appliances need a healthy and energy-saving sustainable development structure. This is true for refrigerators and color TVs, which means that home appliances should be developed in the direction of technological innovation and product optimization. This year, the consumer electronics industry has seen a trend of pro-consumption.

The national policy of saving energy and benefiting the people is to guide the industry in such a new direction. It is not the same as driving the market. Therefore, at the end of the energy-saving and people-friendly policy, we saw that it is not as obvious a function of the release of consumer power as household appliances or trade-in, but this is a relatively healthy performance. No matter what the country’s next round of policy is, it should put the main investment and policy orientation on encouragement to optimize consumption and encourage market development with added value and innovation. If you only look at the offline market of home appliances, it may be a negative growth from the perspective of retail sales. But don't forget to promote the third dimension of the development of the home appliance industry - mobile Internet will actually have a great increase. In the last year or two, the penetration rate of home appliance e-commerce in the lower-level market has been very fast, and this year may have a slight increase, while traditional channels are more difficult.

Internet companies are hard to make TV In recent years, the smart TV market has been developing very fast. Xiaomi, LeTV and other internet companies have also launched smart TVs, but there are several more complicated issues involved. The first is based on the perception of content. How willing is Chinese consumers to pay for content?

Fundamentally speaking, multi-screen interaction is one of the most basic things in the development of this industry. However, the running rate of many family TVs is almost zero, but they are spending time on the Internet for media consumption and content consumption. The color TV access content in the traditional sense can no longer meet their needs. This involves the question of the box, there are two, the first is the consumer subconsciously willing to pay for this box. Traditionally, domestic consumers are still heavy hardware software (content). Some of the boxes are very low cost, but the source of content is not completely legal and certainly not guaranteed.

The second point is whether or not their content is needed by those young users who have a zero boot rate. Cable TV and other content are more infiltrated through traditional channels, such as closed-circuit television in the community. This consumption pattern applies from generation to use to the previous generation. When a new generation of consumers becomes mainstream, if you give something that is not what consumers want and are interested in, they will not even buy if they can afford it.

For TV companies in the Internet industry, I think it is a good attempt. At the same time, more companies are required to participate in the attempt to promote the content and hardware as a whole program. There will be better answers, but objectively speaking, It's hard to try.

Domestic mobile phone companies want to seize the opportunity I am very happy to see that domestic mobile phones are now back to the industry's first camp. With the emergence and popularity of smart phones, there has been a period of domestic mobile phone is backward.

But don't ignore one thing. This year's report on the global Internet has a reference to market innovation. It refers to the Internet market. For a market like China, which has the world's largest consumer group, innovation that meets such a market is a successful innovation. The Chinese mobile phone industry first has an OEM manufacturing base. With the provision of services to international brands, this basis will enhance the manufacturing specifications of the entire industry. This cannot be ignored.

However, relying solely on this point to maintain and promote the development of the domestic mobile phone industry is still far from enough. The second point to be noticed is that with the further deepening of the mobile Internet, Chinese consumers have two characteristics: First, due to cultural, linguistic and other reasons, domestic consumers generally find it difficult to accept some popular software or applications. . In particular, it is difficult to expect that many Chinese will use English. Second, the huge population base of China and the fact that it has influence in the world are determined. The innovation of domestic mobile phone companies has a broad market base. At present, a large number of domestic mobile phone companies are making innovations, among which many SMEs and even individuals are making innovations around mobile Internet applications. This is the basis for the development of the domestic mobile phone industry. Our hardware manufacturing level has reached a certain height, although not at the highest level, but our application of supporting integration, especially the integration of some large companies provides the basis for the above-mentioned development trend of the domestic mobile phone industry today.

But lying on the top is not enough to enjoy. In the face of the next trend of the international mobile internet market, companies should capture the opportunities for change. Ten years ago, we looked at the mobile phone market more based on hardware, but looking at the market today is based on the overall solution and user experience. Domestic mobile phone companies such as Huawei, Lenovo, and ZTE already have this experience and an international perspective. This makes people very happy.

Zhang Weihua, deputy secretary general of the IGRS Industry Alliance:

The key to the future television industry is to integrate the future TV industry. It must not be a mere stage for a single TV manufacturer. Instead, it should be a converged industry. Internet content providers and service providers will certainly join the industry.

With the expansion of IGRS applications, smart homes and smart cities have become very important directions for development. In December last year, the National Standardization Committee formally issued seven standards for IGRS, including some of the underlying physical layer standards in smart homes and general control and white power control standards in smart homes. This provided a very good basis for the IGRS standard to fully enter the smart home sector. These were formally implemented on July 1 this year.

The future TV industry must not be merely a stage for TV manufacturers. It should be a converged industry. Internet content providers and service providers will certainly join the industry. For example, QQ is also trying to cooperate with TCL to produce TV. The second is that Guangda STB producers and content providers will also join here. LeTV has its own content and launched its own super TV when the hardware technology content of the TV itself is not particularly high. This is not only to make money through the hardware of the TV itself, but also to make money through subsequent expansion of services and content. It is a very good attempt. The third is that traditional TV manufacturers are also trying to establish their own content service platform, their own APP SHOP, their own eyes from the traditional production of televisions, to the industry upstream and downstream expansion, such as the acquisition of panel companies, the acquisition of chip companies are Very good direction of development. The tone of the future television field is the integration of two words: industrial integration, technological convergence, and the integration of content and services.

Now domestic stir-fry 4K and 8K concepts. I have contrasted 4K and ordinary 1080P TVs in Japan and I feel that the picture quality is not as high as I imagined. Now the picture of 1080P TV is very clear, although 4K is definitely the direction of development, but the true universal popularity will not be a very fast thing. The development of chip technology may bring a good opportunity for smart TVs. With the gradual application of quad-core chips to TVs, the user experience and fluency of smart TVs are much higher than in the past. What we may need next is a more suitable one. , stand the test of the manufacturers and the industry. I think APP SHOP is one, all TV hardware manufacturers can download applications from here, can run very well on TV, it has been certified by TV manufacturers and third-party agencies. The operation interface is also a development direction. Chinese companies are making some attempts, such as Changhong doing voice input, Hisense, and Haier TV have gestures or eyeball control technologies. This is a good attempt.

We now move some of the applications in traditional fields such as computers and mobile phones onto TVs. This brings users to be satisfied with the application of such applications on televisions. The result of our investigation is that most users think there are several aspects. The problem: First, the application is relatively small. Applications that can be run on many mobile phones, such as the mobile game "Angry Bird", will have problems running on the TV. Second, Chinese TV manufacturers are exploring issues related to human-computer interaction. Unlike televisions and computers, televisions are used by the elderly and children. Speech recognition, remote mouse control, or gesture recognition are only suitable for the human-computer interaction of televisions. At present, the technical development in this area is not very good. For example, how to use gesture recognition to play "Angry Birds" has many technical problems, which is not as good as people playing on the iPad. Thirdly, a lot of new concepts put forward in the market are still far from the real needs of users. For example, using a TV to access the Internet is a very awkward task. It is difficult to see the screen and the operation is difficult. This year will be better. . The ability of TV chips before last year was not enough, and many components of the web pages were poorly rendered or could not be displayed.

Shenzhen Gendian Technology Co., Ltd. General Manager Zeng Dejun:

Intelligent will change the audio industry Because there is no own smart wireless audio and video standard, the development of the domestic audio industry has always been controlled by people, and the industry's net profit is very low. This is because we don't have our own core technologies and we rely on cost competition.

In recent years, the development of the Internet, smart phones and wireless WIFI has had a significant impact on the audio industry and traditional audio products, even revolutionary. Of course, this effect is gradual, and what will happen in the future is yet to be finalized. Such as Bluetooth audio emerged in recent years, the current monthly output of about 10 million units, is not a small number. However, after all, the Bluetooth audio is only a wireless audio rather than a smart audio. The future intelligence will have a greater impact on the traditional audio industry.

In the area of ​​smart audio, only one company in the United States is doing it. In these years, it is basically the same company that has been alone in the market. They have not become short-lived, but instead have become the backbone of the market, and its annual development basically doubles. Domestically, this kind of product has not been well understood and it is thought that the smart sound is a wireless sound and it is totally different. Wireless audio is just to achieve control, local play some simple features, and smart audio has a more user-friendly user experience. Domestic smart audio is still in the early stages of development. The first two years are the sowing period, this year is the budding period, the next year is the growth period, the later year is the development period, and then the harvest period. Because it is at an early stage, we can make a difference. More than 95% of the world's audio products are designed and produced in China. We have monopolistic advantages in manufacturing. However, we do not have core technologies. The core technologies and key component technologies of domestic audio technology are not yet in our hands.

Due to the lack of its own smart wireless audio and video standards, the development of the domestic audio industry has always been controlled by people. The output value of China's audio industry last year was about 300 billion yuan, but the industry's net profit was very low. This is because we do not have our own core technology and we rely on cost competition. This is the lowest level of competition. The highest level of competition is the competition of the system, the competition of the standard, the competition of the patent, the competition of a certain technology, and the cost competition. In order to change the status of the audio industry, we must seize the opportunity to do a good job in standard setting. Fortunately, we started earlier. We set up a standards group last year, and we have about 20 domestic audio companies, and the first draft of the standard formulation has come out. We also hope that more people from the industry will participate in the event, and we will be able to do more together to build up the competitiveness of the entire industry.

Smart audio is only a subsystem in the whole smart home, and it is not even a system that everyone recognizes or values. In this regard, I believe that every employee in the industry should have a sense of responsibility. The application of smart audio at home is both practical and practical, and it is very much needed. Humans love music and need audio products. In the future, audio products can basically fulfill the following functions. First, you can listen to what you want to listen to in terms of user experience, where you want to listen and where you want to listen, and how you can listen.

Music involves a lot of content. If you use traditional methods, whether you buy a CD or download, you cannot meet everyone's needs. At present, only genuine music content providers can meet the requirements of what we want to hear. Now smart audio is basically online, but it can also be used as a local area network.

With the improvement of people’s living conditions, the home’s space is getting bigger and bigger, and the demand for music and music has changed. Often heard in the study, you can't listen to the restaurant or the restaurant can't hear it in the kitchen. Audio equipment that supports multi-room systems can solve the problem of where to listen to where you want to listen. You can also organize, group, or listen to each, or even use it as a background music. How do you want to hear it? listen. Now the overall control, playback controls, settings for what content you want to hear, and the volume level can all be reflected on the smart terminal, which means that you can use the smart terminal to control all the home audio systems, compared to the use of the traditional audio. It has changed.

In the audio industry, the content end is often more active than the product end. This is a good thing, and the content end is never standardized nor standardized. The opportunities are increasing. It involves the entire industry chain. From the production of music, distribution to content provision, to the provision of bandwidth by operators, to the provision of software and hardware solutions, to product design and manufacturing, to product sales and user use, has formed an industrial chain. The future development direction of this industry chain must be equal and integrated. The Internet spirit has never been embodied in the traditional industries of “weak meat and strong food”. In the future, the traditional audio industry may change this situation. In the past, we obtained profits and depended on the difference in hardware to maintain our survival. After the formation of the industry chain, we may continue to obtain profit margins and get the share of content and services. From this point of view, the opportunities for future industries are still very large.

Mr. Sun Guanglong, Minister of Marketing, North Hualu:

The high-end audio and video market is gradually expanding the high-quality audio and video market will surely become bigger and bigger. With the improvement of people’s living standards and per capita income growth, people will pay more attention to their audio and video or entertainment consumption. From a spiritual perspective, people will have Higher and better needs.

We are always talking about intelligence. Many new terms have been added to manufacturers' slogans. However, it is difficult for people to understand what kind of concept intelligence is. In simple terms, it is to make products more intelligent and make everyone's operations easier. But how can we make everyone's operations easier? We deeply feel that everyone will always encounter some difficulties in using playback devices or display devices. With the continuous improvement of living standards, there are more and more devices in the consumer's home. There are useful TV set-top boxes for watching TV. There are both players and stereos. There are also display devices and projections. There is also more than one TV. Different rooms There will be different televisions. At this time, how to properly match playback devices and display devices has become a major problem for enterprises.

Using different remote controllers to control different devices will have a lot of troubles in use. The so-called intelligence is to make trouble things simple, without using a lot of remote control, a remote control can achieve control of all devices. Now that mobile phones and mobile terminal devices are inseparable, we are also making in-depth developments on mobile phones and mobile devices to control all devices so that many remote controllers can be included, with only one remote controller or mobile phone. , you can control all appliances that can be used on the tablet and mobile terminal.

Let's say Blu-ray this market. Everyone may compare it with a DVD. This is normal. Blu-ray is actually an upgrade of DVD. However, in the DVD era, unlike so many options now available, and after the advent of the Internet, everyone's terminal usage habits have also changed. Blu-ray's sales data shows that in the past two years, blue light has shown steady and gradual growth. The momentum. In addition, Blu-ray can give everyone a better viewing enjoyment. It is really high-definition, can achieve 1080P output, and with the popularity of 3D TV, 3D Blu-ray becomes the best player for 3D TV. The set-top box also has 3D TV broadcast programs, but these are not complete and real 3D, only Blu-ray can achieve true 3D capabilities, and its video quality is very good. Many of the people who use Blu-ray have a large proportion of people who are more professional or have higher requirements on sound quality and image quality. Consumers have more ways to get content. Blu-ray discs are one of the channels. Hard drives are also one. The Internet is another.

The high-quality audio and video market is bound to grow bigger. With the improvement of people’s living standards and the increase in per capita income, people will pay more attention to their audio and video or entertainment consumption. From a spiritual perspective, people will have higher and better needs. . In addition, from the perspective of technological development, the ever-evolving technology continues to provide people with more people-friendly or more applicable products. This kind of technological development direction also provides a good technical guarantee for the development of our consumer electronics products. From these two perspectives, we believe that the market for high-quality audio and video products will only grow.