For robot companies, "selling out" is the essence of business.
How to "sell" is often the focus of competition among enterprises. It may be technology or marketing, but as the service robot war enters the second half, the focus of competition for service robots is undergoing fundamental changes.
The focus of competition has changed
On the one hand, the growth of the industry is slowing down, on the other hand, follow-up players continue to enter the market, and the market competition is becoming more and more fierce. What is the key to "selling"?
As a typical hard technology industry, the importance of technology to service robots goes without saying. Looking back at the achievements of service robots in recent years, although external factors such as new infrastructure policies and the epidemic have played an important role, the key lies in the upgrading and iteration of technologies such as speech recognition, machine vision, autonomous navigation, and human-computer interaction. Technology competition has become the focus of competition among enterprises for a while.
However, today, we have to admit that technology is still the "engine" that drives the development of the industry, but for enterprises, can a car with only an engine go far?
With the increasing difficulty of research and development, drastic technological progress is no longer there, and the strategic value of a single technology competition is weakening.
According to the latest "2022 China Service Robot Industry Research Report" released by 36Kr, with the steady development of the service robot industry, leading players have achieved the deployment of ten thousand units, which means that service robots are gradually being used in various industries and industries. Scenarios are popularized and applied, and some service robot products have become increasingly mature and stable in usage scenarios.
Under this trend, the focus of competition among industries has also changed from a single technology competition to the pursuit of product landing and benign business models. On the one hand, market-proven product applications can help promote the maturity of business models and form a closed business loop; on the other hand, only by relying on large-scale landing applications and healthy cash flow can companies achieve healthy growth.
Traditional giants enter the game, and the industry structure is reset?
According to the "China Robot Industry Development Report (2022)", the Chinese robot market continues to flourish. It is estimated that in 2022, the Chinese robot market will reach US$17.4 billion, with a five-year average annual growth rate of 22%. Among them, the market size of service robots is expected to reach 6.5 billion US dollars, and it is expected to exceed 10 billion US dollars by 2024.
It should be noted that although the market size is increasing year by year, the growth rate has been showing a downward trend since reaching 56.2% in 2018. This means that the service robot industry has passed the era of "explosive growth" and entered a new stage of slowing growth, and the dividends are also rapidly shrinking.
However, according to market research, the slowdown in growth has not affected the popularity of the track. Players from different backgrounds are still entering the game one after another. The market competition is becoming more and more fierce. Behind the seemingly contradictory reasons are not complicated. In the long run, The industry is still in the "growth" stage, and players' confidence in the market has not diminished. Among these new players, in addition to start-ups, traditional giants are also increasing investment, such as Midea, ICE and other companies, which also makes the industry speculate that the service robot market structure may be reset.
By analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of traditional companies, the headaches for emerging technology companies are precisely the advantages of traditional companies. Such enterprises have been the leaders in their respective fields for many years and have accumulated rich key resources such as products, technologies, channels, and services. The disadvantage is that traditional enterprises are blank for the emerging robotics technology, but with the improvement of the industrial chain, robotics service providers provide them with shortcuts, which makes it possible for traditional enterprises to become a new round of leaders in the industry.
In this war, with the change of the focus of competition and the "spoiler" of new players, before the emergence of major breakthrough technologies, the horn of market competition for overall strength has already sounded. Who can take the lead in achieving large-scale landing, It will be the key to gaining market dominance in the future.
It can be seen that traditional manufacturers are attacking cities in the field of commercial service robots. In May of this year, the global cleaning giant ICE released the medium-sized cleaning robot Cobi18, which has been deployed in batches in more than a dozen countries around the world, and has achieved zero failure in European and American markets, and has received extensive praise and feedback. Its speed of action can be said to have exceeded many people's expectations. Through investigation, ICE did not adopt a full-stack self-developed strategy, and its navigation and AI technologies all came from a domestic AI company INDEMIND.
It is understood that INDEMIND is the first batch of stereo vision AI companies in China. At present, it has multiple product lines such as commercial robot AI and household robot AI. It focuses on the research and development of stereo vision AI for many years and has a complete robot technology stack. Its commercial robot navigation AI products have been adopted by many domestic and foreign giants, with orders for commercial robot navigation AI exceeding 20,000 sets.
According to reports, the commercial robot AI Kit used by ICE is based on INDEMIND's self-developed OS Fusion AGI system, and is an overall solution specially developed for 100KG-class robots, including navigation and positioning, intelligent obstacle avoidance, path planning, decision-making interaction, etc. The development of core functions can be widely used in commercial service robot platforms such as commercial cleaning, hotel delivery, meal delivery, and inspection.
INDEMIND provides mature hardware reference design and mass production design services. Combined with relatively mature operating unit technology, the whole machine can be controlled within 2 months from project approval to mass production, which significantly reduces the enterprise's landing cycle and input costs. At the same time, the unique visual fusion navigation architecture adopted by INDEMIND does not require expensive multi-line lidar sensors. The lowest development cost of the robot can be lowered to less than 2,000 yuan, and the cost of the complete chassis including navigation and battery can be lowered to 5. Less than 1,000 yuan.
It is worth mentioning that the robot equipped with this solution does not need to be pre-deployed, it can be used out of the box, supports multiple map storage and global scheduling, and also has an intelligent elevator control system, which can realize flexible operations on multiple floors.
The change of the focus of competition is not only a new challenge for enterprises, but also an inevitable stage for the development of the industry. The entry of players with different backgrounds has once again intensified the intensity and complexity of market competition. But the only constant in this change is the nature of business, which has nothing to do with "identity" or "size", and whoever can "sell" is the winner.