This year, the hype surrounding smart homes has plummeted, a stark contrast to the booming scene of a few years ago. Previously, the industry was highly competitive, with numerous companies vying for dominance, progressing from single-product smart home solutions to whole-house smart home solutions. Starting with individual smart products, companies gradually built intelligent solutions covering living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and other scenarios, attempting to capture the consumer market through complete suites of solutions. However, reality has been harsh. Problems such as the lack of seamless interconnectivity between smart devices in the home and the independence of various ecosystem platforms remain unresolved after many years, hindering industry development. Crucially, weak consumer demand has pushed the industry into a period of slow growth.
To achieve growth in a relatively stagnant industry, companies are resorting to fierce price wars to seize market share. This involutionary competition has forced a vicious cycle of price wars, leading to exhaustion and putting pressure on overall industry profits while simultaneously causing stagnant growth. Taking leading manufacturers as an example, Hisense’s home appliance revenue reached 71.5 billion yuan, but its year-on-year growth rate was only 1.35%, almost stagnant. Gree Electric Appliances faced even more pronounced pressure, experiencing a double decline in revenue and profit, decreasing by 6.62% and 2.27% respectively. Smaller manufacturers such as SUPOR, Robam, and Goodwife also faced survival challenges. This demonstrates that price alone cannot sustain growth, and technology-driven product innovation and experience upgrades have become the key to breaking the deadlock.
**Large-scale models are currently the most popular AI technology. In home life scenarios, various smart home products are equipped with large-scale model services to achieve more intelligent interaction, enhance the user experience of smart homes, and stimulate new demand. For example, in the washing machine market, Haier Smart Home launched its AI-powered “lazy washing machine” as a breakthrough, creating new demand and leveraging differentiated experiences to penetrate the market, making it a key product for its continuous marketing efforts this year.** The disclosed data shows that Leader’s Lazy Wash three-tub washing machine has become a phenomenal product in the industry, with cumulative sales of the Lazy Wash series exceeding 200,000 units by the end of September. In the refrigerator sector, Midea has also created several differentiated products. For example, the COLMO990 large-format built-in series is the industry’s largest capacity fully flat-panel built-in refrigerator, equipped with AI dynamic food recognition and molecular-level nutrition management functions, and supports users to freely choose from a variety of appearance and functional accessories. This series achieved sales exceeding 100 million yuan within three months of its launch.
In the television sector, its unique AI image quality chip, with its superior clarity and realistic visual effects, has set a new global benchmark for image quality, enabling it to achieve growth against the trend in this highly competitive market.
According to AVC Revo statistics, in the first half of 2025, Hisense’s TV shipments accounted for 14.38% of the global market share, an increase of 0.57 percentage points year-on-year, maintaining its leading position in China and second globally. In the robotic vacuum cleaner market, Ecovacs is sending a clear signal to the industry by driving a generational leap from “disc mops” to “roller-type water cleaning,” making 2025 the “year of the roller-type” robotic vacuum cleaner. This not only drives technological innovation in the industry but also gains widespread user recognition, driving steady growth in overall robotic vacuum cleaner shipments. AVC Revo data shows that from January to October 2025, Ecovacs’ roller-type water cleaning robots accounted for 91.5% of sales revenue and 91.9% of sales volume.
In the smart home sector, the large and small appliance markets are in a stage of market saturation competition, with the essence of competition returning to the product itself. Leveraging the transformative capabilities of AI big data models, traditional appliance categories are accelerating their product structure upgrade cycle. As a result, competition is shifting towards high-end, intelligent, high-quality, and personalized products, moving away from price-driven competition and towards differentiated competition through technological innovation. Leading companies have benefited from their differentiated strategies, allowing them to break through the challenges. Haier Smart Home, with its global high-end layout and blockbuster product strategy, has successfully stimulated user demand for upgrades, especially its Sadi brand, which stands out in the high-end market. This has driven steady revenue growth. It’s worth noting that while most home appliance companies are mired in stagnant growth or even declining performance, Haier Smart Home has achieved 10 consecutive years of positive revenue growth, becoming an industry benchmark that weathers cyclical fluctuations. This is mainly due to its forward-looking global layout, differentiated high-end strategy, and technology-driven scenario-based solutions, successfully building a “moat” against industry fluctuations and maintaining its leading competitive position while demonstrating consistent resilience.
In the robotic vacuum cleaner sector, competition is becoming increasingly fierce, and the industry has entered an era of intense competition. Ecovacs, one of the leading robotic vacuum cleaner companies, has improved its product competitiveness through technological innovation, resulting in double-digit growth in both revenue and net profit. In the first three quarters of 2025, Hisense’s revenue reached RMB 12.877 billion, a year-on-year increase of 25.9%, and net profit was RMB 1.417 billion, a year-on-year increase of 130.55%. By shifting its focus from simply pursuing scale expansion to achieving synergistic improvements in market share, operating scale, and profitability through technological upgrades, product innovation, and refined operations, Hisense has set a benchmark for high-quality development in the industry. Notably, its innovative drum-type technology has led the way for robotic vacuum cleaners into the drum era. As a leading brand of AI TVs, Hisense has built an integrated AI capability system encompassing “edge-cloud-chip” by leveraging AI image quality chips, large-scale model algorithms, and scenario-based applications. This has propelled the evolution of televisions from single display devices to smart home hubs, resulting in growth against the trend. According to Hisense’s sales data, in the first three quarters of 2025, in the 98-inch and 100-inch+ large-screen TV market, Hisense’s global TV sales increased by over 64% and 59% year-on-year, respectively. In the high-end TV market represented by Mini LED, Hisense’s global Mini LED TV shipments increased by 76% year-on-year, and sales in the Chinese market increased by over 200% year-on-year. Ezviz Networks is driving steady growth in overall performance through AI-enabled smart home and IoT synergies. In the first three quarters of 2025, revenue reached RMB 4.293 billion, a year-on-year increase of 8.3%; net profit was RMB 455 million, a year-on-year increase of 10.56%. Smart home cameras are the core business and considered Ezviz’s cash cow, accounting for over 50% of revenue, maintaining steady growth and holding a leading market share. Data recently released by IDC shows that Ezviz smart cameras maintained their leading position in China with a 25.4% market share in the first half of 2025. Meanwhile, Ezviz deeply integrates its expertise in audio and video technology, intelligent recognition technology, and AI capabilities with various smart home products such as smart locks, smart doorbells, doorbells, and intercoms, continuously refining products and technological innovation to provide differentiated smart home products, increasing product added value and market competitiveness. As a result, smart home technology has become Ezviz’s second growth curve, with a CAGR of 48.68% from 2022 to 2024. Finally, AI technology will become the core engine for the growth of smart homes. Driven by the big data model, smart home products, including smart appliances, smart cameras, smart door locks, and robot vacuums, are being integrated into the big data model, thus ensuring the continued steady growth of the smart home market, with smart cameras and robot vacuums showing particular strength. Overall, smart homes remain a promising sector, but as the market shifts from incremental expansion to a competition for existing market share, the core competitiveness lies in the products themselves. The deep application of AI technologies such as big data models is reshaping the product experience. From washing machines and refrigerators to televisions and robot vacuums, companies are actively embracing AI to enhance user experience through intelligent interaction and scenario-based functions, activating new user demands through “hardcore technological innovation,” and ultimately achieving counter-trend growth in a market with limited existing market share. This confirms that competition in the smart home industry has returned to the essence of products; only by breaking through homogeneous competition with technological innovation can new growth be created in the existing market, activating the industry’s long-term growth momentum.
