The bloody rivers and lakes of sweeping robots. Is this industry really that attractive?

In 2025, the global and China sweeping robot markets will reach 13 billion U.S. dollars and 5 billion U.S. dollars respectively (UBS forecast data). At present, the penetration rate of sweeping robots in the domestic market is only 4%-6%, which is much lower than the 13% in the United States.

This is an important reason why capital is enthusiastically chasing the sweeping robot industry.

Even though Cobos (603486.SH), which has a market value of 100 billion yuan, and Rock Technology (688169.SH), whose stock price once rushed to 1,300 yuan in the industry, sweeping robots are still hot targets in the equity investment market.

According to the company's data, the total amount of investment and financing in the domestic robot industry in 2020 will reach 26 billion yuan, of which the cleaning robot track, which is dominated by sweeping robots, accounts for about 13%.

Since the beginning of this year, there have been more than 10 financings for robot vacuum companies, and brands have completed tens of millions of financings almost every month.

On June 15, Lesheng Intelligent announced the completion of tens of millions of yuan in Series A financing; on July 19, Yuli completed 50 million yuan in Series A financing; on September 21, Trifo completed hundreds of millions of yuan in C1 round of financing; in October, Mi Technology completed 3.6 billion yuan in C round of financing, breaking the industry financing record; in November, Beetle Intelligence announced that it has completed two rounds of financing, and the overall financing amount is over 100 million...

Behind the entrants, it is worth thinking about: Is this industry really so attractive? Under the blessing of capital, what kind of fairy fights are staged by various competitors? What is the main line of competition in this industry? Which companies will become the absolute head of the industry?

"Sweeping robot" temptation

The "lazy economy" is full of buffs for the rise of the robot vacuum industry.

When it comes to "lying flat", the post-90s generation has the most say. After working and squeezing the subway bus to go home, who would be willing to spend their youthful little tail on sweeping and mopping the floor? Data from Zhiyan Consulting shows that the robot sweeps the floor. Consumers are mainly 21-30 years old, accounting for 42.33%, followed by 31-40 years old, accounting for 34.95%.

Following the consumption habit curve of young consumer groups, robot vacuum companies have taken advantage of the momentum. Under the strong east wind, innovative manufacturing Cobos and innovative technology Roborock Technology have emerged as representative enterprises in the industry. Under the temptation of low market penetration, capital expects more industry giants to appear.

Especially after the listing of Cobos and Stone Technology, the market value, stock price and sales performance of the two star companies in the consumer market have produced a huge halo effect, attracting entrants from all walks of life.

Currently, the market is flooded with more than two hundred sweeping robot brands. Among them, there are many traditional home appliance giants such as Midea and Haier who have brought their advantages in the past, and there are also rising stars with stronger Internet genes such as Yunjing and Chase. On the whole, Cobos and Stone Technology constitute the most competitive industry in the industry. The first army of the force.

The former has been deeply involved in the industry for more than ten years and has a good command of manufacturing language, which has a lot of fruitful influence on the development of the sweeping robot industry; the latter is flying close to the market to insight into consumer behavior and users' hearts to force technological innovation, and use this to drive the market change. The two took very different development paths.

From the perspective of global market development, sweeping robots have gone through a process of industrial scale landing, technology-driven development, and demand deciding the market. It is the entry of Chinese companies into the competition that has changed the trend of the global sweeping robot industry.

In 1996, Electrolux's product "Trilobite" was officially unveiled, becoming the beginning of the traceability of sweeping robot products. Seven years later, the U.S. company iRobot is expanding the home sweeping robot industry, but its initial product technology is not mature, and it is in urgent need of iterative upgrades in spatial navigation, machine recognition, and voice recognition. The result is low coverage and weak suction. , The practicality is greatly reduced.

The pioneer status of iRobot is respectable, and therefore iRobot has become a target that all companies in the sweeping robot industry must refer to and surpass. In fact, today, as the industry's predecessor, iRobot can't talk about leading the way at the technical level. The late wavers have crossed the industry threshold and gradually cannibalized iRobot's original market share.

From 2014 to 2018, iRobot's global market share has remained above 50%, but the rise of Roborock, Cobos and other companies represented by the new forces of sweeping robots from China has also allowed iRobot to step down the altar. , Not only facing the dilemma of narrowing profits and falling stock prices, the global market share has also fallen to the current 46%; in the Chinese market, iRobot's market share is even less than 3%.

From the perspective of domestic market development, since 2013, Chinese robot vacuum companies have ushered in a cycle of high growth.

From 2013 to 2018, the compound annual growth rate of domestic sweeping robot sales was 58.66%, far exceeding other home appliance categories. After a brief cooling in 2019, it broke out in 2020, with sales returning to 6 million units and sales reaching 9.41 billion yuan. According to data from Aowei Cloud Network, the total online sales of sweeping robots from January to July 2021 were 5.262 billion yuan, compared with 3.728 billion yuan in the same period last year.

The low domestic penetration rate means that sweeping robots are still a huge potential market in China. Currently, it has a scale of nearly 10 billion. According to UBS's calculation, there will be two or three times the incremental space in the next three to four years. Who doesn't want to grab such a market? Deterministic opportunity?

Billions of blue ocean has turned red

The question is, what kind of development logic is used by more and more competitors and the capital behind to judge the trend of this market? Will the future market show a Matthew effect concentrated in the head, or will it fall into a marketing war, The tragic melee of the price war?

From a technical perspective, the leading companies with first-mover advantages rely on early accumulation to occupy part of the market. However, technological innovation is no longer the prerogative of the first-mover, and the "later waves" have the vitality and innovation power that are not inferior to the predecessors. .

The rapid progress of the new generation of technology has brought strong support to the industry on the supply side. Domestic sweeping robot companies have been relatively mature in mobile navigation technology, obstacle avoidance technology, cleaning technology, etc., and benefited from the development of domestic autonomous driving technology, most of the core components have been localized.

The technological level of Chinese enterprises has been advancing by leaps and bounds in recent years. AI visual recognition, dToF (direct time of flight) navigation, 3D structured light and other technologies have been successfully applied to sweeping robots, which has taken the industry as a whole forward and led the industry trend.

Navigation and obstacle avoidance are the core technology of sweeping robots. The real idea of consumers buying sweeping robots is "you clean it yourself, I don't want to do it." This puts high demands on the relevant technical level.

Random collision technology has been eliminated. At present, the mainstream market is relying on LDS SLAM (laser navigation) and VSLAM (visual navigation) navigation map-building robots. Compared with collision-type routes, there has been a qualitative leap in user experience. Get rid of the "artificial mental retardation" hat.

For products currently on the market, these two technologies have their own merits. Roborock and Xiaomi's sweeping robots mainly use LDS SLAM technology; Dyson, LG, and iRobot's sweeping robots mainly use VSLAM technology.

From the product side, the product iteration of sweeping robots is getting faster and faster, and the cleaning function has gradually developed from the initial single sweeping function to sweeping and mopping, and then to dust collection and self-cleaning functions. In general, deep cleaning and navigation avoidance Obstacle technology is the direction for players to exert their strength.

In 2019, when the sales of sweeping robots declined, Yunjing launched an intelligent all-in-one machine for washing-free mops, which solved the pain points of mopping, caused various brands to follow up, and boosted sales in 2020.

In the first half of 2020, Rock Technology launched the AI binocular vision technology robot T7 Pro, which is equipped with laser navigation to complete the construction of the whole house map. The T7S Plus launched this year integrates AI algorithms on the basis of 3D structured light obstacle avoidance to further improve the accuracy of obstacle avoidance Spend. The flagship product released by Cobos is also making a fuss about recognition accuracy.

New products have not stopped evolving. Intelligent voice, air purification, and mobile fragrance. The small sweeping robot has three heads and six arms, which carry more and more functions.

Observed from the channel side, 80% of the sales of vacuum cleaners come from online channels, which is also in line with the consumption habits of the younger generation. According to data from the State Grid of China, in 2020, the online market Cobos, Xiaomi and Stone Technology ranked TOP 3 in market share, accounting for nearly 70% of the total.

And Yunjing and Chaimi have a strong catch-up momentum. With a core product called "Little Beluga", Yunjing has achieved 10.72% market share in the domestic sweeping robot market in 2020, ranking fourth; after Chaimi entered the game in 2019, In the second year, sales exceeded 2 billion. In the first half of this year, sales increased by 100% year-on-year, which has great potential for dark horses.

Midea, Haier, and other traditional home appliance manufacturers with strong supermarket channels, if they can arouse the vitality of the offline market, change the existing structure is not known.

However, the current market is still in its early stages, and the internal volume has become a true portrayal of the moment. Products are emerging in endlessly, and more are just homogenized functions. Obviously, following the trend of products does not represent the competitiveness of the industry.

At present, the players of sweeping robots are divided into three levels. Cobos and Roborock are basically in the leading position. New Internet brands such as Yunjing and Chaimi show strong vitality. Then there are the traditional powers of Midea, Haier and Shuitu. Dissatisfied with foreign brands such as iRobot.

Pain points of "the leftover is king"

The nearly tens of billions of sweeping robot market looks beautiful, but the market will never be the market for most people. In the past five years, the number of robot companies that have been revoked, written off, and closed as many as 24,000, including pioneers such as Kaili, which was once popular.

In this competition where fierce competition can be foreseen, what kind of company can win? What obstacles need to be cleared for the development of sweeping robots?

As a product of the intersection of consumption and technology, sweeping robots have determined their own direction from the beginning: consumption is more in line with user needs, and technology is strengthened in research and development-in China with complete industrial manufacturing capabilities, there are tens of millions of factories with manufacturing capabilities. Only companies that can operate their brands and have core technologies have real competitiveness.

An excellent sweeping robot product should have the characteristics of thorough cleaning, smart work, and convenient use. These seemingly simple demands have various problems in practical applications.

On relevant online forums, there are many negative comments such as "artificial mental retardation", "sweeping robots are waiting for me to save", "stuck in various unimaginable corners" and other negative comments.

The focus of the current sweeping robot is more about "dragging" rather than "sweeping." According to statistics, 56% of the floor materials of Chinese homes are ceramic tiles and 43% are wood floors. Compared with carpets, which account for up to 50% of the floor in the United States, Chinese home carpets account for only 1%.

However, the addition of the mopping function is not simple. It is necessary to pack the mopping function into the volume of the sweeping robot, increase the pressure to achieve strong cleaning, and reduce manpower operations. This is proposed in terms of product structure, space utilization and cost control. Posed a huge challenge.

In the context of sweeping and mopping, no-washing and automatic washing mops have become a killer selling point to save "lazy people". It is a step further from liberating hands, and many brands have added weight to this technology. For example, one of the selling points of G10, a high-end product of Stone Technology, is "mop self-cleaning." Cobos X1 OMNI and Yunjing's J2 also shouted the slogan of "freeing hands".

But it takes more time to educate the market from the "thorough" level. Automatic cleaning relies heavily on the water tank of the base station, and the cleaning and replacement of the water tank also requires manpower to achieve. In other words, the so-called self-cleaning is to move the cleaning process from the sweeping robot to the base station, which is obviously not enough for consumers who pursue "lazy" to the extreme.

Completely realize automation and maintenance-free. It is necessary to wait until the sweeping robot can realize the stage of automatic watering and watering like a washing machine, but it needs to be pre-reserved during the decoration, otherwise the later installation requires wall hole drilling or wiring. This is also the development of the sweeping robot to today A little embarrassment.

Some people in the industry believe that there is no obvious improvement in navigation technology in the short term, and functions such as automatic mop cleaning are generally complete, and the new functions are icing on the cake.

Senior home appliance industry analyst Liang Zhenpeng told Yidian Caijing, “At present, sweeping robots are still unable to replace hand-held vacuum cleaners. The technical difficulties that companies will overcome in the future will basically revolve around improving the intelligent level of products, including path planning accuracy, Improve recognition ability, etc."

The low degree of product intelligence will reduce consumers' trust in the product and weaken people's desire to buy. This is also the reason for the low penetration rate of sweeping robots in the home. It is precisely because of this that whoever can make another breakthrough in technology will be able to change the pattern.

This is indeed the case. Countless industry experiences have pointed out an eternal truth-a brand established by first-mover advantage and marketing is destined to be short-lived, and only by increasing R&D can a real brand barrier be built.

Innovation to win is reaching a consensus. In the first three quarters of 2021, Stone Technology R&D has invested a total of 311 million yuan, accounting for 8.13% of operating income, an increase of 80.07% over the same period last year; Chaimu Technology’s R&D accounted for more than 10% of revenue.

Undoubtedly, under the pressure of intense competition, no one dares to take the lead in letting go.