What should the smart door lock industry look like? From the consumer side

In the era of intelligence, many smart products have also appeared in the lock market, and smart locks have entered the lives of many consumers whose economic conditions have generally improved. As a new type of product, companies will inevitably experience a situation where you compete, blindly pursue new functions, and vicious competition becomes chaotic in the industry. It not only affects the judgment of consumers, but also causes frequent problems in the door industry.

The influx of entrepreneurs has created a vibrant scene in the smart door lock industry, but the appearance is always temporary. It is never quantity but quality that determines the prosperity of the industry. Smart door locks, which have just entered the Internet of Everything (IOT) era, seem to have unprecedented prosperity, but there are various problems in the industry camp that is booming. Xiaoxiang Finance believes that smart door locks are blocking themselves, mainly due to the following problems.

Minimum product quality is a problem

The biggest public opinion in the smart door lock industry is the "little black box" incident in May this year. It is understood that the "creator" of the "little black box" is the owner of a smart lock company. "Things" is really "kick the hall", the industry is in urgent need of rectification, and finally the insiders themselves can't stand it; in August, the news broke that a reporter made a 3D fake fingerprint model of clay plasticine at the Internet conference and successfully unlocked it. The experimenter’s fingerprint lock. At present, the State Administration of Market Supervision and Administration is conducting random inspections on the quality of electronic door locks. The key random inspection items are areas where problems frequently occur in smart door locks-information protection, damage prevention, alarm functions, and lock core quality.

Homogeneous competition, developers can’t get a foothold

According to the survey, almost 100% of the smart door lock industry is composed of channel distributors, manufacturers and upstream suppliers. Only a small number of suppliers supply core components such as lock cores, fingerprint sensors, and chips. Due to technical development bottlenecks and R&D costs and other restrictive factors, most of the smart door locks on the market are produced by manufacturers such as Shunde and Nanhai, and the control switches are also mainly through WiFi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, infrared and other technologies. In the lock market, under the huge potential environment, only with the "unique weapon" can we stand out and survive for a long time.

In fact, not only door locks, but almost all the functions of smart home products are temporarily fixed on the functions of connecting with other product switches, monitoring the home environment through the terminal APP, voice communication, etc., and door locks are more attractive as entry-level products. note. Brands that have hollowed out R&D and survived only by listing production are doing the same thing, imitation has become the norm, and there are few application developers driven by smart door locks.

"There are fewer porridges and more monks", and the current situation of product surplus is rigid.

"Rough OEM" is the label that Big Multimedia puts on the status quo of the smart door lock industry, and the market is homogenized and tends to be fragmented.

The market rules are vague and the top brand is not clear, but the growth rate of manufacturers is still shocking. According to statistics, the current penetration rate of smart locks in my country is only about 5%. According to data from Yusheng Electronics, the market share of smart door lock brands with larger sales volume is only 2-5%. Therefore, although the sales volume reached 8 million sets in 2017, it was collectively divided by more than 2,000 companies. On average, each was 4,000 sets, and the largest share would not exceed 400,000 sets per year. The domestic smart lock market is fragmented, and users use The coverage rate is only serious although it has improved a lot compared with 2016. The current situation of product surplus has rigidified the supply and demand market to a certain extent.

Security is a problem, and consumers do not buy it.

The "2018 China Smart Lock Consumption White Paper" released this year shows that although the demand for door locks is extremely strong, the current penetration rate in my country is only about 5%, and it is mainly concentrated in first- and second-tier cities, with more than 20% of consumers not listening Speaking of smart locks, 15.5% of users are using or planning to change to smart locks. Although smart door locks have entered the consumer's field of vision, it is still an emerging industry, and consumers' awareness of door locks is still relatively weak.

The "little black box" incident has caused panic, but the essential safety issue has become a pain point in the door lock market, which discourages originally intended consumers. Not only that, the installation procedures of smart door locks are complicated and there is no unified standard for door lock integration. , After-sales service is difficult, some door locks have low performance and poor battery life problems also affect consumers' subjective intentions of smart door locks. Consumers’ consumption awareness needs to be educated. However, smart door locks cannot do their own “work”, and consumers who pursue more “smart” will not buy it.

At present, the smart lock products of many companies, especially small companies, do not have many bright spots, and even serious plagiarism has occurred. I can't wait to move all the functions of smart locks on the market to my own products. This is like India's IWC weapons. Due to the unified standards, it is difficult to form a strong combat effectiveness. The same is true for smart locks. They are greedy and good. The result is that smart locks on the market are the same and have no characteristics. This creates the illusion that all smart locks are the same, leaving consumers no choice.

More functions have led to a corresponding increase in the cost of smart locks. In order to keep costs down, many companies do not hesitate to lower the cost of raw material procurement, reduce manufacturing processes, and reduce quality to obtain cost-effective. At the same time, more functions will inevitably affect the stability of the entire smart lock. With more functions, lower quality, and lower stability, will consumers still pay for your smart lock?

The original intention of developing smart locks is to make people's lives more convenient. But the smart locks on the market now go against this original intention. To put it bluntly, the emergence of smart locks is to let people get rid of the inconvenience of carrying keys and avoid the troubles caused by forgetting to carry keys. However, with more functions, how convenient is the smart lock unstable?

Any product should be based on the needs of consumers, and smart door locks should be the same. Intelligence should bring convenience to our lives and provide consumers with quality assurance. Smart door locks should also improve technology, and do a good job in security and anti-theft, and practicality is the last word.