Household appliance industry: difficult to increase in scale during the stock development period, but not without scale competition

Do home appliance enterprises still need large-scale production in the era of personalized demand? This is an issue that many people in the current industry are debating endlessly. Because theoretically, the personalized needs of users and modern mass production are paradoxes. However, the reality is that without continued expansion of scale, enterprises will lose their momentum for development.
It is undeniable that today's society has entered an era where users are the core and products are the core. Taking users as the core is to meet the diverse and differentiated needs of users. The finer the division of user needs, the higher the degree of personalization, and the greater the diversity of products required.
Modern industrial production is characterized by intensification, intelligence, standardization, and scale. Without intensive scale and standardization, it is difficult to achieve intelligent production on automated production lines. Therefore, it is difficult to achieve intelligent production on automated production lines if users' personalized products cannot achieve scale.
This contradiction obviously exists at the moment and is extremely prominent. The soul of home appliances in a highly intelligent enterprise has encountered such a phenomenon. The automated production line in the factory is stopped while the manual production line next to it is running. The soul of household appliances asks the person in charge of production why? He told me that once an automated production line starts up, it requires a certain amount of energy. If it fails to achieve this amount, the advantages of the automated production line cannot be brought into play, and it is not as cost-effective as manual production. To realize that an intelligent production line requires a lot of effort to replace the grinding tool and adjust it. By this time, the manual production line has already been completed. The person in charge also said that only large batches of products can take advantage of intelligent automated production lines.
From this, it can be seen that in the era of pursuing digitalization and intelligence in the field of industrial production, scale is indispensable and inevitable. Without a certain scale, Industry 4.0 cannot be implemented at all, and the advantages of intelligent and automated production lines cannot be brought into play. Of course, the needs of users have shown a trend of diversification after their consumption capacity has greatly improved. Users have indeed differentiated, and their needs have also diversified. A single product must not be able to meet the needs of different levels.
What we need to do now is to centralize the personalization of many users to form a certain number, which avoids the problem of insufficient quantity to meet personalized needs? Moreover, users are now divided into different circles, and different circles will have great similarities in requirements. Seizing identity may solve the problem of personalized quantity.
In this sense, the connotation of scale in the digital era is different from that in the traditional era, with essential differences in its connotation. In the traditional era, the scale is the most basic because the enterprise has a large number of employees and relies on the tactics of a large number of people to expand its market and competitive advantage; The difference is that in the digital era, large-scale personnel have been replaced by robots, and the scale is reflected in the size of the business volume of the enterprise.
In fact, in the digital era, there are broad and narrow senses of scale. In a broad sense, scale refers to the overall scale formed by the diversification of enterprise operations. The current market value in the capital market is a manifestation of scale; In a narrow sense, scale refers to the quantity and scale of a product or a subdivision category.
Although we do not need to compete on a large scale for a certain product now, it does not mean that industrial production, especially intelligent and automated production, should not be scaled up. Therefore, we see that the development of home appliance enterprises is a process from specialization to diversification. In the early stages of the development of the home appliance industry, the overwhelming majority of winners were professional and focused enterprises. As we enter the mature development stage, professional focus is obviously constrained in scale, and diversification has become the main theme of development.
For example, based on the development history of the air conditioning industry, Gree has always been the leader in the industry during the period of industry growth, relying on its professional focus. However, when the industry enters a period of stock development, its scale moves forward against the ceiling, and is surpassed by Midea in terms of overall scale through early diversification. As a last resort, Gree now also has to choose diversification in order to continue to grow the size of the enterprise.
What is worth rethinking in the industry is that Japanese home appliance brands used to be pioneers and seeders in the Chinese market, with industry and technological advantages. However, Japanese funded enterprises generally only care about making money at the high-end, while ignoring the vast majority of user groups in the industry. Therefore, although there are favorable conditions for first entry, they still cannot increase in scale. Without scale, how can there be a voice in the industry? As a result, they were defeated by Chinese enterprises in terms of scale and ultimately had to withdraw from the Chinese market.
Let's take a look at the market again: there are a wide range of products in the market, including the showrooms of first-tier brands, but there are only a few that are really promoted in the market. Why? It is necessary to concentrate products on several models, allowing the same product quantity to be concentrated during a certain period, forming a certain scale of production, which can significantly reduce costs and increase market competitiveness.
In the final analysis, the most basic characteristic of industrialization is scale. Leaving scale is like returning to the era of handicrafts. Handcraft can produce craftsmen and highlight individuality, but it does not represent modern industry. It is undeniable that the digital era is a diverse era, with users divided into multiple levels, so household appliances should also meet different levels. But don't forget that the pursuit of scale is still one of the driving forces for the development of home appliance enterprises.
Most importantly, in a market economy, scale is not only the competitiveness of enterprises, but also the moat of enterprises. Otherwise, there won't be so many enterprises actively pursuing scale expansion. A certain scale can significantly reduce production and operating costs, endow brands and products with strong competitiveness, and thus win in market competition.
Of course, the larger the enterprise, the better. On the one hand, the larger the scale, the formation of monopoly is a problem. Anti monopoly has always been the top priority of management work, and it is inevitable to be restricted after a certain scale; On the other hand, when the scale reaches a certain size, it is easy to have marginal effects in management, thereby weakening the competitiveness of enterprises. Obviously, the larger the enterprise, the better.
Therefore, the soul of home appliances believes that everything should be done with a degree of restraint, and the scale of enterprises should also be restrained, not uncontrolled expansion. In other words, it's about finding the balance between scale and personality. Otherwise, scale will become both an advantage and a potential hazard!