1. Healthy home appliances lead the market
Since 2020, my country's home appliance retail market has gradually recovered amid fluctuations. In 2023, the scale of home appliance retail will increase by 3.6% year-on-year, returning to the market size of 2019. From the perspective of market segments, categories represented by floor scrubbers, water purifiers, sweeping robots, etc. have a significant growth momentum, leading the weak recovery of home appliances. High-growth categories mostly have functions such as air purification, water purification, food preservation, and environmental cleaning, and have outstanding health attributes. Its gradually expanding market size reflects consumers' favor and preference for healthy home appliances.
2. Healthy home appliances protect health
Healthy home appliances include home appliances with core functions of personal care and environmental cleaning and obvious health attributes, such as floor scrubbers, water purifiers, air purifiers, dishwashers, etc., and also include home appliances with health functions superimposed on basic functions, such as fresh air air conditioners with air purification functions, washing machines with sterilization and antibacterial functions, etc.
The health functions of home appliances are mainly developed around four dimensions: air, water, diet and personal care. Among them, air, water and diet are important resources for human survival and are the carriers of external environmental health. Personal care refers to cleaning and care including skin, hair, teeth, clothing, etc.
For truly healthy home appliances, green, responsible and smart interaction together constitute their key features. Green means that home appliances consume less resources, are harmless or less harmful to human health and the ecological environment, and have no secondary pollution risk; responsible means that home appliances can ensure the effectiveness and reliability of their health functions; smart interaction relies on technical capabilities to perceive the environment and provide users with better health management services.
3. Policy guidance releases new momentum for green smart home appliances
In order to support the home appliance industry and cultivate new development momentum, the state and local governments have intensively introduced a series of policies. On the one hand, they encourage the upgrading of the home appliance industry, especially for life scenarios such as smart kitchens, healthy bathrooms, and elderly care, focusing on consumer health needs, to achieve technological innovation and product upgrades, and on the other hand, they guide consumers to actively "trade in old for new", give play to the role of fiscal and taxation policies and consumer finance, and stimulate market demand for green smart home appliances.
In March 2024, the Ministry of Commerce, the National Development and Reform Commission and 14 other departments issued the "Action Plan for Promoting the Replacement of Old Consumer Goods for New Consumer Goods", encouraging qualified places to subsidize consumers for purchasing green and smart home appliances, and to improve the recycling network of used home appliances to support the replacement of old home appliances for new ones. Data from the Ministry of Commerce show that the replacement policy has a significant driving effect on home appliance consumption: from 2009 to 2011, the country also implemented a large-scale replacement policy for old home appliances, providing financial subsidies for five types of home appliances, including televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners and computers. During this period, the consumption of home appliances within the subsidy scope reached 92.98 million units, driving an increase of 344.2 billion in the market. The policy's support for the industry and the stimulation of consumption have become one of the important drivers of the growth of the home appliance market.
4. Income accelerates consumer health awareness
The public's health awareness has increased significantly, which has become a reality widely recognized by the society. Health awareness has not stopped at the cognitive level, and the transformation from awareness to behavior has gradually accelerated: According to the survey data of Dingxiang Doctor in 2023, health management for the purpose of prevention has become the mainstream, and 4.3 health management behaviors have been achieved per capita. At the consumer level, it is manifested as a focus on refined health management, which has become one of the key factors affecting consumers' purchasing decisions and has also strengthened their active purchase behavior of health products. According to a survey by China Business Network and JD Health, in 2023, 85.28% of consumers took the initiative to increase the frequency of purchasing health products. As an important auxiliary to health management in home life scenes, healthy home appliances naturally attract the attention of consumers.
The purchase behavior of healthy home appliances comes from the strengthening of consumers' health awareness on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is also driven by the growth of residents' disposable income. In 2023, my country's residents' disposable income reached 39,218 yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.3%. Among consumer expenditures, 22.7% was used for housing-related consumption, second only to food, tobacco and alcohol. Health awareness stimulates consumers' demand for healthy home appliances, and the increase in disposable income provides reliable economic support for the purchase of healthy home appliances. The two together constitute the main driving force for the expansion of the healthy home appliance market.
5. Home appliance manufacturers accelerate green and smart technology innovation
According to data from Aowei Cloud Network, since the scale of my country's home appliance retail market exceeded 800 billion in 2017, the growth rate has gradually slowed down, hovering between 6.2% and -9.5%, and retail sales have not yet exceeded the 900 billion threshold. Most traditional home appliance categories have become saturated: According to GfK Zhongyikang's calculations, the rapid development of the home appliance market in the past has led to a continuous increase in the penetration rate of most traditional categories. In 2022, the ownership of mainstream large home appliances such as air conditioners, color TVs, and refrigerators has reached 3.12 billion units. The slowing market growth rate and high ownership indicate that my country's home appliance market is gradually moving from incremental competition to stock competition.
Faced with increasingly fierce market competition, major home appliance manufacturers have keenly realized that changes in consumer concepts and the rise of health awareness have made healthy home appliance categories expected to become a new growth point in the home appliance industry. Product upgrades and stock replacements based on consumer health needs have become the key for manufacturers to break through. Various home appliance companies are gradually expanding their investment in technology research and development, focusing on health functions, improving the green performance and intelligence level of home appliances, and enriching the supply of healthy home appliances full of technology. Among them, there are many overseas leading groups, such as Panasonic, as well as old home appliance companies such as Haier and Joyoung, and new players such as Ecovacs and Tineco.
6. Artificial intelligence opens new entrances for interaction between home appliances and users, and home appliances and the environment
Home appliance manufacturers' exploration of the combination of health technology and home appliance products comes from the company's own R&D investment on the one hand, and also benefits from breakthroughs in technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet of Things, and 5G on the other. The integration and development of technologies has become the underlying foundation for the realization and upgrading of healthy home appliances: artificial intelligence realizes the intelligent interaction between healthy home appliances and the environment, and between healthy home appliances and users, thereby guiding the interaction between the environment and people to be more targeted, improving the operation effect of health functions and optimizing user experience; big data provides the possibility of understanding user behavior and preferences, and through the intelligent analysis of relevant data, deep cognition and judgment of user health home appliance usage behavior, it becomes the guarantee for the realization of personalized health functions. Big data technology also provides data support for specific functions such as health detection and intelligent reminders; the Internet of Things breaks the boundaries between single healthy home appliances and provides an interconnected intelligent experience for various scenes of family life; and 5G creates a low-latency and high-speed environment for data transmission and data processing, making artificial intelligence, big data and Internet of Things technologies more effectively applied to healthy home appliances.
Among various technologies, the innovation of artificial intelligence and its innovative application are the most obvious. In particular, the deep integration of technologies such as large models, human-computer interaction, and natural language recognition with healthy home appliances is reshaping the realization path of home appliance health functions and opening up a new entrance for home appliances to interact with users. Self-learning, self-understanding, and self-optimization are important features of big models. Therefore, health appliances equipped with big model technology are capable of realizing multimodal interaction, deep perception of scene environments, deep command understanding, intelligent recommendations for health decisions, and intelligent remote upgrades of health functions.
