In mid-September, Google showed off Google Home's latest business results at its annual developer conference, while once again stressing that "openness" is a key trend in the future of the smart home, with open, compatible technologies like Matter and Thread as promising. Google also announced its current Matter partners, revealing that they are actively developing Matter-related products, and believes that a number of Matter products will enter the consumer market and get consumer feedback this year.

So what are the advantages of Matter, and why is it respected by all players? What market opportunities are smart home? As a domestic smart home system-level chip platform company, Boliu Intelligent Technology (Nanjing) Co., Ltd. has a keen insight into the changing trend of the smart home market, and is also a Matter cooperative chip manufacturer, which can help developers to better start the Matter journey. The following is the observation and thinking of Bo liu intelligent deputy general manager Liu Zhanjiang on the smart home market and Matter protocol.

Three changes, the smart home needs long-term capabilities

In 2022, the overall consumer electronics market was sluggish, with gold nine silver ten than expected. Liu occupation admitted that smart home, as a member of consumer electronics, it is essentially a consumption-driven market, naturally also affected by the decline in consumer confidence, production and sales have a certain range of decline of —— this is the actual performance of the market level. But from the perspective of the industry, the development cycle of each industry has ups and downs. A few years ago, the smart home market boom soared, and now the industry has entered the adjustment period, which is in line with the cycle of benign development. Therefore, smart home players need to find suitable segments of the track, plan the future layout, and accumulate development strength during this adjustment period.

Liu occupation shared that now the smart home market clearly presents three changes:

The first is the change of industrial structure, which is reflected in the differentiation of C-end consumers, the differentiation of B-end brand manufacturers and the differentiation of supply chain.

On the C end, influenced by the pessimistic global economic outlook, users' consumption philosophy is more rational. For example, the middle class and high-income groups in North America pursue the real value and user experience of intelligent products, so the interconnection of the whole house intelligence still presents a rapid development trend; while low-income people pursue the cost performance of products, pay attention to whether intelligent products solve their pain points, and make a more rational choice of intelligent products.

At the B-end, the differentiation between brand and white brand is becoming more and more obvious. Due to the stronger anti-risk ability of brand manufacturers, they are relatively less affected by economic fluctuations. In the process of economic downturn, brand customers are precipitation technology and layout the whole-house intelligence.

At the supply chain level, the chip supply structure has realized the transformation from "pyramid shape" to "diamond shape". In the past, the supply chain was a pyramid, with the least number and highly concentrated Fabless manufacturers, who controlled the trend of production capacity and process as the upstream of the whole supply chain; the middle level are necessary chip suppliers of technology and products, and the lower level are massive B-end customers, who directly connect with C-end consumers to the market