Ten insights into China‘s smart home market in 2023

    In 2022, China‘s smart home market experienced the challenges of weakening consumer demand, reducing manufacturer subsidies and slowing technology development under the background of macroeconomic downturn, and gradually upgraded and adjusted under pressure.

    In terms of future ecological connectivity, functional technology and channel services, IDC summarized and gave ten insights into China‘s smart home market in 2023. The specific contents are as follows:

    With the in-depth development of smart home scenarios, the demand for platform connectivity is increasing. However, restricted by the three factors of strategic identity, development pace and user coverage, China‘s smart home platform ecosystem will continue the development path of branch connectivity, and it is still time to reach a unified industry standard. IDC predicts that in 2023, about 44% of smart home devices will support access to two or more platforms, enriching user choices.

    Based on the centralized collection and comprehensive processing of air, light, user dynamics and other information, the smart home platform will gradually build the ability to perceive and even predict user needs, thus promoting the development of human-computer interaction and personalized scene services. IDC predicts that the shipment of sensor devices will be close to 4.8 million in 2023, with a year-on-year increase of 20%, providing a hardware basis for the development of environmental intelligence.

    The intellectualization of household equipment will expand to the household energy system represented by water, electricity and heating. IDC predicts that the shipment of smart home equipment related to water, electricity and heating will increase by 17% year on year in 2023, enriching connection nodes and accelerating the realization of whole-house intelligence. With the development of system intelligence, industry players will gradually enter the game, realize the intelligent upgrade of household equipment and service platform, and promote the intelligent management of household energy security and use efficiency.

    The function definition orientation will promote the emergence of multi-scenario and cross-form smart home devices. There will be more and more smart home devices that can meet the needs of multi-scenario use and achieve smooth and seamless scene conversion. At the same time, the diversified configuration combination and function improvement will promote the continuous emergence of form-integrated devices and accelerate the innovation and iteration of smart home products.

    The rapid growth of the number of smart home devices and the continuous diversification of connection methods put a greater test on the simplicity of connection settings. The capacity of batch networking of devices will be expanded from the existing only supporting a single protocol to the multi-protocol-based integrated connection, realizing the batch connection and setting of cross-protocol devices, reducing the deployment and use threshold of smart home devices, thus accelerating the promotion and penetration of the smart home market, especially the DIY market.

    Home smart mobile devices will deepen the connection with other smart home devices and optimize the relationship with family members and other home mobile devices based on the spatial model, so as to build space service capabilities and expand dynamic and static collaborative application scenarios. IDC estimates that the shipment of smart home devices with independent mobility will be about 4.4 million in 2023, accounting for 2% of the total shipment of smart home devices.

    With the aging of the population structure, the demand of the elderly user group will continue to grow. The migration of technologies such as millimeter wave will promote the expansion of the sensing range and the improvement of the recognition accuracy of home devices, and meet the health care needs of elderly groups such as fall rescue and sleep monitoring. IDC predicts that the shipment of smart home devices equipped with millimeter wave technology will exceed 100000 in 2023.

    Style design will gradually become one of the important considerations of intelligent design deployment of the whole house outside the application scenario to adapt to the diversified home decoration needs. The pursuit of aesthetic design will promote the development of smart home equipment to multiple sets in appearance and style, drive the rise of relevant customized services, and gradually form one of the advantages of whole-house intelligence that is different from DIY market.

    With the deepening of market demand from single product to whole-house intelligence, the optimal deployment time is constantly advanced, and the ideal user touch node is also advanced. Immersive channels with the help of industry traffic layout are conducive to manufacturers to expand the scope of customer acquisition and advance customer acquisition opportunities. IDC predicts that in 2023, whole-house smart experience stores will account for 8% of the share of offline open market shipments, leading to the recovery of offline channels.

     Content application richness and payment mode will become an important indicator for users to purchase smart home devices under the convergence of hardware configuration. Users‘ demand for content applications is increasing. However, due to the low degree of ecological richness and integration, and the impact of national consumption habits, China‘s smart home "as a service" transformation will require a long development cycle.