At the largest home appliance exhibition in Europe held in Berlin, Germany. At the booth of the Chinese vacuum cleaner brand “Dui Mi”, the company’s new sweeping robot is climbing over a 5-centimeter-high threshold. The wheels that act as hind legs on the body extend out, and the front end of the vacuum cleaner is lifted up to climb over the high threshold. The inability to cross thick mats or thresholds has always been a major weakness of sweeping robots, but now this weakness has been overcome. Chinese Roborock Technology, which ranks first in the global sweeping robot market, also unveiled a new sweeping robot product that can climb over a 4-centimeter threshold at this IFA. The sweeping robots launched by Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics this year can climb up to a maximum height of 2 centimeters. The sweeping robots of Chinese brands have demonstrated the technical ability to automatically lower the body to enter the bottom of narrow furniture and the ability to install two cameras to avoid thin charging cables.
With its technological strength, Chinese sweeping robots have swept the world market not only in China. At present, the highest-performance high-end products in the fields of televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, etc. are still produced by Korean and European home appliance companies. But in terms of sweeping robots, the technical capabilities of Chinese companies have an absolute advantage. Some analysts believe that the leap forward of Chinese sweeping robots indicates that the future status of Korean and Chinese companies, which are competing fiercely in the global home appliance market, will change.
Why China has become stronger
In the sweeping robot market, the secret of Chinese companies’ leap forward is R&D capabilities and competition. China’s Stone Technology entered the market more than 10 years later than Samsung and LG, but currently ranks first in the world’s sweeping robot market. More than half of the company’s 1,500 employees are R&D personnel, and it invested 116.9 billion won (about 619 million yuan) in technology development last year. Ecovacs, which ranks first in the Chinese market, also has 1,600 robot technology developers. A person in the home appliance industry said: “The sweeping robot research team of Korean companies has only a few dozen people, while each Chinese company has invested nearly 1,000 people in R&D.”
China is also far ahead in the development of core technologies such as autonomous driving and sensor technology. In terms of the cleaning capabilities of sweeping robots such as vacuuming and mopping, it is very important to master the terrain of the home and the ability to make maps to avoid obstacles. To this end, autonomous driving and sensor technology are necessary. Patent Result, a patent investigation company, has statistics showing that China has the largest number of patent applications related to radar sensors, a core component of autonomous driving, with 25,957. In the past 10 years, China has more than 190,000 valid patents related to robots (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China), accounting for two-thirds of the world’s robot patents.
Unlimited competition is also the source of China’s competitive edge in sweeping robots. In South Korea, several Chinese brands such as Roborock, Ecovacs, and Dreame are well-known, but in the Chinese market, more than 200 sweeping robot brands are competing fiercely. The companies and technologies that survived have entered the world market. A person related to a South Korean home appliance company said: “If consumers point out that new technologies such as the automatic cleaning function of wet rags launched by Chinese companies produce bad odors, they will add air drying functions to new models the following year to overcome this problem. On the contrary, Korean companies only want to launch products that are technically complete, so they are lagging behind in the competition.”
A market where only martial arts masters can survive
In order to survive in the competition, Chinese companies launch new products equipped with “killer functions” every year to scratch the itch of sweeping robot users. In 2021, the function of automatically lifting the rag in areas that cannot be cleaned with water, such as carpets, was launched (Stone Technology), and in 2022, the era of “integrated sweeping robots” was officially opened. The functions of emptying dust, cleaning rags and drying are added to the sweeping robot charging station. Coupled with the system that automatically supplies clean water and quickly drains dirty water, users can use the sweeping robot without moving their hands. In addition, the characteristic disadvantage of the round sweeping robot is cleaning corners. Last year, China’s Chaimi installed a robot arm to overcome this shortcoming. When the robot reaches the edge, the robot arm will extend to clean and scrub the corners.
Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics also plan to officially launch an integrated sweeping robot this year to regain the domestic market share monopolized by Chinese companies. The leaders of the two companies also admitted that they were latecomers at this year’s IFA, saying that “sweeping robots lag behind China”, and they are determined to catch up. Samsung and LG are taking advantage of the relatively insufficient management advantages of Chinese companies such as safety and maintenance to capture consumers. However, recently, Chinese companies have also cooperated with Korean backbone companies and home appliance distribution networks to strengthen installation and after-sales services. In order to eliminate the concerns of spying on the home, there is a trend of replacing cameras with other sensors. A person in the robot industry said: “If Korean products do not have obvious technical advantages or reflect cost-effectiveness, they will continue to compete with Chinese sweeping robots.”
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