The role of Internet smart door locks in the construction of smart home ecology still exists in the imagination. At present, the development of smart door locks has faced some difficulties.

When a smart door lock brand communicated with the person in charge of Jingdong Crowdfunding for the first time, Jingdong’s first sentence was “a lock came again”. In Jingdong crowdfunding, there are currently 39 projects on smart door locks.

The smart door lock, which is considered to be the entrance to the smart home, has also begun to be lively. According to public information, nearly 20 smart door lock companies have received investment.

“It is a bit exaggerated to say that the smart door lock is the entrance to the smart home.” Lu Po, the founder of the smart door lock brand Yunge, believes that the intelligent door lock has limited computing power and connection capacity, and the service threshold is very high. It is difficult to achieve one. The number of entrance platforms required.

But for a single family, it is the physical entrance to the family. “When someone walks into the house, the door lock can know who has entered, and tell other smart home devices in the house, according to the preset or self-setting brightness of the light, what music to put, whether the curtains will automatically open.”

The role of Internet smart door locks in the construction of smart home ecology still exists in the imagination. At present, the development of smart door locks has faced some difficulties.

Hotel market: lack of motivation

Lu Po, the founder of Yunge, belongs to the industry of accidentally hitting the smart door lock.

In 2012, after leaving Huawei, Lu Po founded a short-term rental website similar to Airbnb. When operating a short-term rental website, Lu Po found that the operation efficiency of short-term rental was very low. Users were looking for the owner to take the key and return the key. There is still a risk involved.

The short-term rental website was not done. Lupo’s team made a management system and found a domestic door lock manufacturer to cooperate with the door lock and short-term business process.

But neither project has been successful.

"In fact, the market capacity of short-term rental is very small, and there are 60 to 800,000 suites across the country. If you still do hardware, there is definitely no profit space." Lu Po said.

Lupo saw the hotel market. Lu Po analyzed several characteristics of the hotel market: First, all the doors of the hotel are electronic and have the possibility of transformation. Second, the hotel industry is very concentrated and standardized, and once the product is opened in a small area, the popularity will be very fast. Third, the hotel is a high-frequency flow of physical traffic scenarios. In addition to connecting hotels and tenants, door locks may have other commercial contributions.

In 2014, Lupo founded the Yunyou smart door lock. The first product is oriented to open the WeChat in the hotel market. The conversion cost of this product is relatively low, only need to add an external box to the original electronic door lock. The purpose of the Lupo team to open WeChat is to improve the user experience and operational efficiency of the hotel.

"We are all purely technical, and we all see good aspects, that is, we didn't expect ourselves to be too poorly aware of the actual operation of the hotel."

Yunyou's products canceled the house card from the door opening, but did not consider the necessity of the card to take power for the hotel. The room is in a power outage when no one is there, on the one hand to save energy and on the other hand for safety reasons.

"WeChat has been very simple to open the door. Users can open the door directly with WeChat after paying attention to the public number." But in fact, WeChat unlocking still has a threshold for some people. The hotel that opened the door with WeChat found that only 5%-10% of users use WeChat to open the door, and other users still choose to open the door by credit card, which increases the operation burden of the hotel.

Based on these two points, Yunyou changed the original WeChat to a password lock. At the same time, Yunyou also developed a cardless power-up kit, including a card-free power switch and smart body. This device can sense the movement and the static human body. Through an algorithmic model, it is judged according to different data whether there is anyone in the room.

Although there are already more mature products, Lupo does not dare to say when the hotel market will break out.

After two or three decades of development, the hotel's credit card system has been completely intact and lacks motivation. For hotels, card-free opening is an investment, but the added value is unpredictable. In the case that the overall environment of the hotel industry is not good, there will be a lot of resistance to hotel investment.

Long-term rental apartment: just need the market

The second B-end market of Yunyou is a long-term rental apartment, which is also the most important market for almost all smart door lock companies.

For long-term rental apartments, smart door locks are just a product. Lu Po said that the team had sorted out the management of the apartment key usage scene, and there were almost a dozen. "It's hard to imagine that when I have two or three thousand houses, I need to manage two or three thousand keys."

In addition, long-term rental apartments are mainly distributed, which increases the difficulty of management.

Lu Po believes that the essence of the big accommodation industry is actually the use of operational space. The carrier of the space use authority is the door lock. A core node of all business and transactions is to give the user the right to use this space. Around the core node, the management of the door lock is electronic, including a series of actions such as registration, application, authorization, transfer, and distribution of the salesperson.

“All electronicization can promote the work of salesmen.” Lu Po said that while renting smart door locks for long-term rental apartments, it will also use the equipment developed by Yunyou to manage the SaaS system.

Different from hotels, the long-rent apartment staff does not have high frequency of circulation, the frequency of authorization is very low, and the service demand and user scene are very different, corresponding to two different SaaS systems.

But in this most important market, the early profit is not easy.

Lu Po told the interface journalist that the traditional electronic lock factory is doing low threshold and low value-added processing, and the gross profit is very low. “We have a higher gross profit, but the investment in operational R&D is also high.”

The intelligent door lock industry has a strong scale effect. The early stage of technology research and development investment is very high, including the establishment of the service system. Lu Po said that last year, Yunyou invested nearly 20 million yuan in research and development and procurement, mainly relying on External funding support.

"No matter how high the gross profit is, in fact, how to set the price, 200,000 sets below is definitely not profitable."

Family market: the critical point of the outbreak

In Lupo's view, smart door locks are the real market for home users.

In Europe and the United States, the penetration rate of electronic door locks is 60%-70%, while the domestic penetration rate is around 2%. Compared with the Internet smart door lock, the electronic door lock only has the functions of password lock, fingerprint recognition, etc., and has no communication capability.

Lu Po said that the electronic door lock has been developed in China for more than ten years, but it has not been up. “In this industry, the research and development strength of many lock companies is very weak. More than 90% of the locks made by the company are assembled from modules and hardware of different assembly plants. After they are sold out, they will not be used. So many people have used them. The product itself has not formed a reputation."

At the same time, the electronic door locks were basically more than 5,000 yuan two years ago. For consumers, the decision-making cost is relatively high.

There is no strong brand in the smart door lock industry. Consumers do not have the ability to identify. In his decision-making scenario, whoever he is exposed to may choose.

"The critical point of the family market is erupting. Some poor quality products are delivered to consumers, and it is likely to pour cold water into the entire industry." Lu Po said.

The B-end and the C-end have different requirements for the functional characteristics of the smart door lock products. The B-end must make all the remote management functions particularly good. The C-end user's appeal is that the more stable the product, the safer the better, the technical solution of the product is also It will be different. From the technical difficulty point of view, the C-end product is lower than the B-end product, but the C-end market is about three times more expensive than the B-end. "The products at the B end are generally around 500 yuan. Under the condition of ensuring product quality and service, the C-end products are basically priced at 1,500 yuan," Lu Po said.

On the one hand, the service cost of the C-end is much higher than that of the B-end. Each user on the C side needs to be installed and maintained separately, but the installation and operation and maintenance of the B end are large-scale, the cost is relatively low, and the B-end has its own management system and service personnel. The basic use and maintenance of the door lock is docked. It can then be done by the company itself.

On the other hand, a customer on the B side of the marketing may be hundreds or even tens of thousands of shipments, but a C-end home user is a shipment and the marketing cost is higher.

“The decline in prices must be related to the outbreak of the market.” Once the C-market is out, the dependence of smart door locks on traditional distribution channels will decrease, and channel costs and marketing costs will decrease accordingly.

“The market cultivation phase will take three to five years,” Lu Po said.

Editor in charge: Zhou Jiao