From the perspective of the technical base, the core logic of the new generation of Hongmeng Smart Home is to use an operating system to open up the biggest “ecological island” pain point of previous smart homes.
In the past, the deadlock in the smart decoration of finely decorated houses was the fragmentation of protocols, and devices of different brands could not be interconnected. As a result, the so-called “whole-house intelligence” ended up being reduced to multiple apps lying side by side on mobile phones.
Huawei’s solution is to use open source Hongmeng as a unified digital base to achieve seamless collaboration across brands and categories of devices.
This is not only an experience problem, but also a killer of front-loading efficiency.
In the very large villa project of Everbright Tianjiao International in Dongguan, Hongmeng Smart Home relies on PLC power line carrier technology for connection and transmission, directly using the original wires of the house without the need for additional wiring.
The result is a 60% increase in installation efficiency and a 30% reduction in overall costs.
For the mass pre-installation market of finely decorated houses that pursues construction time and turnover rate, the temptation of cost reduction and efficiency improvement is real. The stability of equipment connection has reached more than 99.9%, which solves the flaw of signal blind zone in large apartments.
The switches on the wall and the lights above the head no longer need to worry about which ecosystem product they are. For developers, this means that the risks in the design, procurement and post-maintenance chain are reduced.
For real estate developers, selling houses in the current market is no longer a single logic of who has a better location. Only those who can produce “good houses” can command a premium.
Judging from the feedback from the China Construction Baiyun Star project, after the Huawei Hongmeng Smart Home intelligent decoration system was deeply implanted, its decoration evaluation directly received a perfect score of 9.75.
This shows that intelligent configuration is no longer a dispensable marketing gimmick, but has actually become the core competitiveness of the project in the region.
The real pain points of real estate developers include after-sales service.
Traditional smart homes involve many parties including hardware, software, network, and construction. When there is a problem with the equipment, the owner cannot find the responsible party, and ultimately the real estate developer takes the blame.
Hongmeng Smart Home promotes an integrated service system, including ecological unified after-sales, continuous system upgrades, and full-cycle management from project construction and commissioning to post-delivery operation and maintenance by the owner.
This kind of “turnkey” service allows developers to roll out projects on a large scale without having to worry about being overwhelmed by endless repair reports later.
More importantly, the openness of Hongmeng Ecosystem allows real estate developers to have the initiative in pricing combinations, without being tied to the expensive equipment of a single brand. At present, the ecosystem has access to more than 7,000 single products and more than 2,800 brands, laying the foundation for a path from high-end to cost-effective.
However, once the technology is ready and real estate developers are interested in it, the most difficult step is actually how to spread it to more cities.
You can’t just focus on high-end properties in first-tier cities. The real incremental space for smart furnishings is in second- and third-tier cities.
Huawei’s current strategy is “government-enterprise cooperation + local channels sinking”, which is a very realistic path.
In Weifang, Chengtou Group cooperated with local licensees to build the first smart home model room, which was directly tied to the “good house” construction standards of local state-owned enterprises.
In Dongguan, Huawei directly signed a strategic agreement with the government to build the “Hongmeng City”, established an open source Harmony Adaptation Center to help local small and medium-sized enterprises lower their access threshold, and even established a joint laboratory with companies like Mousse Health to conduct Hongmeng R&D.
This kind of city-level ecological co-construction is equivalent to allowing local governments and local enterprises to jointly pave the way for Hongmeng Smart Home and make local adaptations.
The sinking of channels no longer depends on Huawei itself, but by activating the local real estate, decoration and home appliance ecology to take root of Hongmeng.
The authorized experience store in Hefei takes another approach. It joins forces with local companies to create a one-stop zero-carbon smart healthy life service platform, and combines resources such as German Vaillant and Daikin Air Conditioning to create a full-cycle service ecosystem.
The technical foundation solves the problem of whether it can be used, the real estate payment solves the problem of whether anyone wants it, and the channel paving solves the problem of how far it can be sold.
These three threads are twisted together, pointing to a clear variable: Hongmeng Smart Home is trying to push the smart furnishings from an “optional upgrade package” to an “infrastructure”.
IDC predicts that China’s smart home market will ship 281 million units in 2025, a year-on-year growth of 7.8%. The industry is transforming towards systematization and pre-installation, and Hongmeng Smart Home’s path of “unified base + real estate pre-installation + city-level replication” is accelerating this transformation process.
In the end, intelligent pre-installation in finely decorated houses will gradually become a standard feature in the eyes of home buyers from a bonus item in a certain project, just like the original fine decoration delivery.
Whoever can come up with a solution that saves both real estate developers and consumers in this “standardization” process will get the biggest bite.
