Entering the era of smart home, as the "entrance" of smart home and an important component of intelligent security monitoring, smart door locks are gradually entering every household. In B-end markets such as hotels, mid to high-end residential areas, long and short rental apartments, and office buildings, intelligent door locks have been widely used. Intelligent door locks are becoming a "standard" feature in various scenarios.
The promising market prospects have led professional lock brands, internet companies, and cross-border enterprises to lay out the intelligent door lock race. So, will the once "Thousand Locks War" start again?
Final Defence
Recently, the intelligent door lock industry brand Deshman released multiple flagship new products of intelligent door locks at the new product launch conference, showcasing innovative technologies such as iris recognition, SHOTAX Sentinel Cat's Eye System, WeChat audio and video call function, and AI voice registration; Coincidentally, on the same day, Huawei also released a new intelligent door lock product, focusing on AI 3D facial recognition 2.0, dual engine AI fingerprint unlocking and other technologies. The decision of two companies to release new products on the same day is undoubtedly thought-provoking, as evidenced by the excitement of the smart door lock circuit.
In fact, according to an incomplete online statistics, since the beginning of 2023, in addition to the aforementioned Deshman and Huawei, a number of smart door lock brands including Xiaomi, Luke, and fluorite have launched new smart door lock products, highlighting a hundred flowers blooming. According to RUNTO statistics, in 2022, there were over 3000 enterprises engaged in smart door locks nationwide. In 2022, the number of brands publicly sold online reached 496, and the number of new entrants that year was 239. In addition to traditional lock brands, there were also cross-border brands such as security giants, mobile phones, home appliances, and smart cameras. In addition, there were also a large number of tail end brands and white brand miscellaneous brands.
In terms of the market, according to RUNTO's "Monthly Tracking of China's Intelligent Door Lock Online Retail Market" report, in 2022, the omnichannel sales of China's intelligent door lock market were 17.6 million sets, an increase of 3.8% compared to 2021; According to the "2022 China Home Intelligent Door Lock Online Market Summary Report" by AVC, the total sales volume of China's home intelligent door lock market through all channels is 18.05 million sets, of which the online market accounts for about 32%, with a scale of 5.378 million sets, an increase of 17.4% year-on-year. In 2022, severely affected by the repeated impact of the epidemic, smart door locks still maintained a growth momentum, which indirectly demonstrates the great potential of smart door locks.
In terms of penetration rate, data shows that the penetration rate of smart door locks in China is still relatively low, only about 10%, and there is still a significant gap compared to Japan, South Korea, and European and American countries. Some analysts believe that the low penetration rate, coupled with relatively low industry barriers, has led to a large influx of players into the smart door lock circuit.
Yesterday Once More?
The prospects for market expansion are promising, with a large influx of players... In fact, a similar scenario had already occurred as early as 2017.
At that time, intelligent door locks were still in a relatively early stage of development, with low barriers in the industry and no product quality standards yet to be established. In such a melee stage, the key to market competition was not product quality, but marketing and low prices. More than 3000 intelligent lock manufacturers ignited a "thousand lock war".
The consequence of the clustering of intelligent door lock brands is that product quality varies under fierce competition. According to a survey report by the State Administration for Market Regulation in 2018, out of 34 smart door lock enterprises sampled, 11 were found to have unqualified products, with a failure rate of 32.4%. Before that, there was even a "small black box" event that shocked the industry: at an international door expo in May 2018, someone used a small plastic black box with a copper wire coil to open the smart door lock in only three seconds without a password. This "small black box" only used the simple principle of "Tesla coil" to open the lock through electromagnetic interference. Since then, the event has fermented, The safety issue of intelligent door locks once became the focus of CCTV's Weekly Quality Report.
After the exposure of the "small black box" vulnerability, many smart door lock brands have made technological improvements to prevent it, so current smart door lock products will not be simply opened. However, it should be noted that although the "small black box" has become a thing of the past, in recent years, reports on the quality issues of smart door locks still occasionally appear in the newspapers.
In 2021, the State Administration for Market Regulation organized a national supervision and random inspection of the quality of 12 online products such as electronic locks. Among them, 157 batches of intelligent door lock products produced by 148 enterprises in 12 provinces (cities) were randomly inspected, mainly involving enterprises in industrial clusters such as Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces. Among the 123 batches of products inspected, 42 batches were found to be unqualified, with a sampling failure rate of 34.1%, an increase of 22.4% compared to the previous sampling.
At the beginning of 2022, the Beijing Consumers Association released a "Comparative Test Report on Intelligent Door Locks", which conducted comparative tests on 39 brands of intelligent door locks. Among them, 5 brands have different models of smart door locks that can be unlocked using fake fingerprints, and 10 brands have different models of smart door locks that can also be unlocked using replication cards.
As a "bonus" for the quality problem of smart door locks, the after-sales problem of smart door locks has also been roast by consumers. On the Black Cat complaint platform, there are over 2000 complaints about smart locks, with most of them focused on after-sales maintenance, except for quality issues.
Although a considerable number of brands were eliminated in the previous' Thousand Lock Battle ', from the current situation, there is a trend of' wildfire cannot burn out, spring breeze blows again '.
In this regard, Li Tao, the editor in chief of Home Appliance Network, believes that the purpose of consumers purchasing smart door locks is to have a safer and more convenient experience. If even the most basic core demands cannot be met, it will undoubtedly overdraw consumers' trust in smart door locks and ultimately affect the development of the entire industry. With the lesson of the "Thousand Locks Battle", I want to buy.