Review of small household appliance market in 2022: some people are happy and others are worried about whether the small household appliances with category expansion will usher in "spring"

In the past few years, under the joint catalysis of the new economy and new consumption habits, small household appliances with high beauty, intelligence, personalization and other characteristics are gradually becoming an important driving force for the growth of the household appliance market. According to the data of iMedia Consulting, the overall market size of China's small home appliance industry has an obvious upward trend from 2017 to 2021, with a five-year compound growth rate of 8.72%. It is expected that the market size of China's smart small home appliances will reach 192.4 billion yuan by 2023.

Subdivided into different types of small household appliances, home appliances are the most popular in the market in 2022, with about 41.6% of consumers preferring to buy, followed by kitchen and bathroom, accounting for 37.2%. In terms of brands, Midea, Jiuyang and Suber are among the most competitive brands in the industry, with the highest purchase rate of small household appliance brands in China, accounting for 51.7%, 50.0% and 45.1% respectively, far higher than Philips, Mijia and Bear.

Data source: AIMedia Consulting

With the expression of users' diversified use needs, more small household appliance products with functional segmentation or expansion are also emerging in succession, and small household appliances have entered a rapid development period of category expansion.

The category of "high-end enjoyment" small household appliances is expanding

Among them, small appliances are trying to expand the high-end enjoyment development track. Looking back at the small home appliance market in 2022, coffee machines, as the representative of small home appliances, performed well. According to the sales data of Tmall, the sales of coffee machines increased for six consecutive months in 2022, with a year-on-year growth rate of more than 200%. In the hot list of coffee machines, the top five have sold more than 500 coffee machines in two weeks. At the large-scale promotion node of the "Double 11", a brand of coffee machines has sold more than 2000 pieces in advance.

Among them, the semi-automatic coffee machine is the best performer in the market. The proportion of retail sales in the whole year is expected to reach 44%, surpassing the full-automatic coffee machine and becoming the leader in the Chinese coffee machine market. Compared with the current situation of the overseas market dominated by fully automatic products, the Chinese coffee machine market presents a unique product pattern different from the mature market.

According to different extraction methods, coffee machines can generally be divided into American coffee machines, capsule coffee machines, Italian semi-automatic coffee machines and Italian full-automatic coffee machines. Among them, the semi-automatic coffee machine takes into account the playing method and quality, and is more suitable for the newly growing coffee consumer group. Compared with the American-style drip filter coffee machine and capsule coffee machine, the semi-automatic Italian coffee machine, although its operation is complex, produces better quality products and has more production options, which can meet the consumer's pursuit of high-quality coffee. At the same time, the semi-automatic coffee machines on the market are constantly iterating and improving their functions. Most of the semi-automatic coffee machines have integrated multiple functions such as grinding integration and flower drawing system to minimize the difficulty of coffee making. Compared with the full-automatic coffee machine with comprehensive functions, the advantages of the semi-automatic coffee machine lie in the cost-effectiveness and production experience. On the one hand, it provides high-quality coffee at a lower cost, while allowing consumers to participate in the production process. In addition to the integrated design, some semi-automatic coffee machines also provide visual pressure gauge, intelligent temperature control and other functions, giving consumers a stronger sense of control over the coffee production process and delivering positive feedback.

Influenced by the concept of refined life and high-end consumption, people's attitude towards coffee has gradually changed from the initial need for refreshment to social needs. Some people regard drinking coffee as their "just need" in their daily life. The expansion and sinking of the coffee market and consumers' habit of coffee taste make coffee no longer a niche commodity, but a consumer demand of the public. At the same time, to some extent, drinking coffee has a certain quality of life symbol. The combination of various factors provides a fertile ground for the growth of China's coffee machine market.

"Service-oriented" small household appliances are still favored

Secondly, "service-oriented" small household appliances maintained a good momentum of development. The fast-paced life scene boosts the birth of the lazy economy, and the "lazy people" in the new era who need to focus on the workplace or corresponding professions are more inclined to make efficient use of their leisure time and do as many things as can please themselves in the limited rest time. However, they often need to face a lot of "have to do" things in their life, such as repetitive and tedious housework, some monotonous and uninteresting work that can not create value, compressing people's leisure time.

Clean appliances that can provide people with alternative labor services can solve their problems. Relevant data show that the retail sales of sweeping robots in the first half of 2022 will be 5.73 billion yuan, up 9% year on year= The evolution of self-cleaning ability under the intelligent attribute makes the utility of the sweeping robot further. In addition to the basic mop cleaning or self-dust collection, the sweeping robot can also "take care" of the front and rear work of cleaning that requires human hands. For example, last year Stone Technology launched the automatic water supply and drainage and intelligent drying kit. Through the automatic water supply and drainage kit, the stone sweeping robot can realize the automatic water replenishment of the clean water tank and the automatic drainage of the sewage tank, making it a history to manually add water to the water tank and change water. The intelligent drying kit can quickly take away the moisture of the mop with a strong wind force of 3160 rpm and a safe temperature of 45 ° C through the specially customized high-speed centrifugal fan and the 26-hole air outlet design of the base. After the sweeping robot completes the ground cleaning, the user does not need to take out the wet mop to dry. The application of the drying function not only avoids the trouble of users' wet hands, but also avoids the problems of bacteria and peculiar smell caused by long-term wet mops.

Covos, another well-known domestic sweeping robot manufacturer, is committed to developing the interactive function of domestic service robots. Take the T10 OMNI as an example. It has an intelligent, full-process functional design and a unique "YIKO Intelligent Voice Assistant". In the process of use, YIKO AI intelligent voice assistant can directly bind the interaction ability of natural language with home service robot products by deeply integrating language AI and visual AI, so that users can conduct convenient voice control without binding any additional equipment and ecology. In addition, YIKO AI intelligent voice assistant can also convert users' spoken language into words, accurately understand users' intentions, and further convert them into operating instructions through powerful voice knowledge base and voice recognition technology, making it possible to achieve the cleaning goal of "clean as soon as you speak".

The downward pressure of traditional small household appliances is high

Even so, there are also many small household appliances that are moving forward under heavy load, and the small kitchen appliances represented by them are facing greater downward pressure. According to the general data from traditional channels of AVC, although the online market as the "big head" contributed nearly 38.6 billion retail sales of kitchen appliances in 2022, the "fracture price reduction" in unit price is the overall "miniature" of the kitchen appliances market.

Relevant data show that kitchen appliances are the most discounted category during the Double 11 this year. Among them, air fryers and other products have a significant discount. Many brands of air fryers, rice cookers and other products generally have a discount of about 30%, and a one-piece oven discount is close to 50%.

Facing the competitive pressure of new and old brands in the market and the bottleneck of product homogeneity, the sales idea of small kitchen appliances is more like "de-stocking" and lacks healthy profit space. The retail sales of small household appliances in personal care category were 8.59 billion yuan in the first half of this year, down 11.5% year on year, and 43.75 million units, down 13.9% year on year.

In the context of tight consumption, consumers have higher requirements for the function and quality of products. Although the category of small household appliances is expanding continuously, small household appliances that lack the attributes of rigid demand need to have solid quality assurance and continuous innovation capability, and integrate more intelligent, healthy, scenario-based and other product concepts to meet the needs of more consumers if they want to maintain a certain market share. When the time comes to 2023, will the small household appliance industry get new development? Let's wait and see.