In the reshuffle of the industry, choice is more important than hard work, and profits are more important than honest stories.
In the spring of 2026, the smart home industry ushered in a capital narrative of ice and fire.
On March 29, Lumi Lianchuang officially submitted a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and plans to list on the main board. This company, which specializes in AI-driven spatial intelligence, is valued at approximately US$850 million.
In Hangzhou, EZVIZ Network recently handed over a rather decent 2025 annual report: full-year revenue of 5.901 billion yuan, net profit attributable to the parent company of 567 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.43%.
According to iiMedia Consulting data, the domestic smart home market has reached 815.4 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 29.0%, and is expected to exceed 1.8 trillion yuan by 2030.
However, this industry that has been struggling for many years seems to be facing a storm, but a large number of players have not been able to wait for the warm wind to come: In the past few years, companies such as Aila IoT, Zhixuan, and Xiaoyan Technology have closed down one after another, Konke has transformed into a factory, Yunqi has turned to high-end sub-brands, Oribo has plunged into the red sea of major appliances, and Green Rice and EZVIZ have become the few survivors in this cruel elimination competition with completely different attitudes.
The ebb of real estate has laid the foundation for industry reshuffle
Set the time back to 2022, and the smart home industry has encountered an unexpected “late spring cold”.
At that time, the domestic real estate industry was undergoing a profound adjustment, with the delivery volume of new homes falling off a cliff. The centralized purchasing orders for smart home furnishings with fine decoration almost evaporated overnight. Companies that were deeply tied to real estate channels suffered from a severe blow. Oribo was the most typical example.
In the early years, Oribo relied on low-price bidding to win a large number of centralized purchasing orders from leading real estate companies, thereby rapidly expanding, attracting dealers to join, and even proposed an expansion plan of “thousands of stores in three years”, which made it famous for a while.
However, as the real estate trend receded, a large number of centralized procurement orders turned into bad debts, projects were suspended, and there was no hope of repayment. Not only did Oribo face the loss of orders, but it was also unable to deliver goods on time due to high costs. It was eventually forced to transform into the air-conditioning track. It lost a large number of dealers and severely damaged its brand reputation. It became the most painful footnote of the “real estate dependence” in the smart home industry.
Common bottlenecks before breaking out
In sharp contrast to Oribo, Lumi and EZVIZ have escaped the disaster because they have never been deeply tied to real estate channels, but they also face development bottlenecks.
As a company that grew up in the Xiaomi ecological chain, Lumi relied on popular products such as Xiaomi smart home kits in its early years. However, the gross profit margin of OEM for Xiaomi was extremely low, and its brand recognition was firmly bound to the “Xiaomi series” label.
In 2021, Lumi took the initiative to reduce the proportion of Xiaomi channel sales and focus on its own brand Aqara, but it fell into the dual dilemma of losing old traffic and blanking out new growth: in 2021, its refined decoration smart home market share was only 2.9%, ranking last among mainstream whole-house smart manufacturers. It had a net loss of 159 million yuan in 2023 and a net loss of 231 million yuan in 2024, highlighting the pain of transformation.
As a smart home brand incubated by Hikvision, EZVIZ has experienced a development stall in 2021-2022: the competition in its main smart security camera track has become fierce, and giants such as Xiaomi, Huawei, and 360 have entered the game, while EZVIZ C-end brand recognition
It has weak knowledge, its products are specialized in security, and its sales channels are overly dependent on offline. It has missed out on the dividends of the explosion of online traffic for home smart hardware. In its first year of listing in 2022, its revenue growth rate will only be 1.61%, and its net profit attributable to the parent company will drop by 26.10% year-on-year. The problem of “increasing revenue without increasing profits” is highlighted.
Differentiated paths through cycles
Difficulties are often the beginning of a turnaround. Lumi took the lead in finding the direction to break through: fully embracing the Apple HomeKit ecosystem and laying out the Matter protocol in advance.
Unlike Xiaomi users who pursue cost-effectiveness, Apple users are willing to pay a premium for experience and ecology. After accessing the Apple ecosystem, the overseas gross profit margin of Lumi’s own brand can be stabilized at around 50%.
As of 2025, Lumi has 15 categories and more than 340 products connected to Apple Home. It is the third-party brand with the most comprehensive access to this ecological product in the world, and is also the only smart home brand in mainland China to be on Apple’s official website.
At the same time, as one of the few companies in the world to participate in the full life cycle development of the Matter protocol, Lumi has also built a technological moat for global market interconnection.
In recent years, Lumi has shifted its main battlefield overseas. From 2023 to 2025, the overseas revenue of the Aqara brand has soared from 380 million yuan to 629 million yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 28.7%. The proportion of overseas revenue has increased from 42.2% to 66.5%, and the overall gross profit margin has steadily increased from 29.7% to 38.4%.
In terms of sales volume, Lumi ranks first in Amazon’s U.S. smart gateway category and Amazon’s German smart sensor category.
If Lumi relies on changing the global ecology, EZVIZ relies on strategic self-awareness and restraint: always anchoring the basics of smart security cameras, focusing on service monetization to build a profit moat.
In 2025, EZVIZ will continue to rank first in the world in consumer camera shipments, with a shipment market share of 13.2%.
At the same time, EZVIZ is accelerating the commercialization of the IoT cloud platform and forming a “PaaS + SaaS” service model. In 2025, consumer value-added service revenue will reach 529 million yuan, and industry-side developer customer service revenue will be 675 million yuan, totaling 1.205 billion yuan. The gross profit margin of the IoT cloud platform is as high as 71.05%, which is much higher than the 37.41% gross profit margin of smart home hardware.
The model of selling hardware once and charging for services continuously makes EZVIZ’s cash flow very abundant. In 2025, the company’s net cash flow from operating activities will reach 1.12 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 104.30%.
Overseas market expansion is also progressing simultaneously. In 2025, EZVIZ’s overseas business revenue will be 2.338 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22.27%, and overseas revenue will account for nearly 40%. At the same time, it has also begun to increase investment in online channel operations to make up for past shortcomings.
Future Challenges for Survivors
Surviving does not mean sitting back and relaxing. The shortcomings and risks of the two companies are equally clear.
Standing in front of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Lumi’s revenue has been stuck at around 1.5 billion for three consecutive years from 2023 to 2025. In 2025, it even dropped slightly by 1.1% year-on-year. Net losses continued to expand. Xiaomi orders still accounted for 32.4% of total revenue. “De-Xiaomi” has not yet been fully implemented, and the underlying chips rely on overseas supply chains, and the core technology moat still needs to be built.
EZVIZ is facing pressure from the category ceiling: the penetration rate of the camera market is already very high, the industry growth rate is slowing down, and new categories such as smart door locks and robots have not yet made large-scale contributions. At the same time, as a brand incubated by Hikvision, the “Hikvision” label may also become a potential obstacle to its European and American market expansion.
Data shows that the global smart home market has reached US$169 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow to US$385 billion by 2035. The track is still growing at a rapid pace.
The survival stories of Lumi and EZVIZ also bring clear enlightenment to the industry: In an industry lacking barriers, choice is more important than hard work, and profits are more honest than stories. Finding a clear user positioning and a sustainable profit model is the core password for crossing the cycle.
