For Tmall Elves, November 11, 2017 is a memorable day. That day, the Tmall Genie, whose price was reduced from 499 to 99, sold nearly a million units. According to recent data released by market research company Canalys, Tmall Genie has already occupied 59% of China’s market share, ranking third in the world with 1.1 million shipments in the first quarter of 2018. With a market share of 35% and a shipment of 600,000 units, Ai Speaker ranks second.
Choosing smart speakers as the entrance to the smart home scene, Ru Yi, general manager of Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Lab, explained that smart speakers are the portal for voice interaction. The product cycle is short and light enough. Alibaba's advantage is the cloud brain in the background. With the support of the Alibaba Cloud platform, Alibaba's Internet of Things layout has expanded from smart homes to smart communities, smart travel, smart cities, smart pig raising, smart agriculture, and even broader scenarios.
All this is less than half a year after Ali announced at the Yunqi Conference in March this year that it will fully enter the Internet of Things field. When the third wave of world information industry development is approaching, Ali has a layout in the three directions of IoT, AI and cloud computing, and has a deep accumulation and outstanding achievements. At the top of the wave, what kind of conspiracy and scheming does Alibaba have on the track of the Internet of Things?
Ali's schemingSure enough, where there are people, there are rivers and lakes. In the Alibaba Cloud IoT Business Unit, smart home belongs to the smart human settlement platform, and the term "habitation" describes Ali's ambitions perfectly-as long as there are people, they can't escape Ali's IoT circle. Tang Haiping, a senior operation expert on the Alibaba Cloud Link IoT Smart Habitat Platform, said that the home, as a consumer terminal, is no longer a simple smart device. It should be defined as the intelligence of life or the intelligence of services. Alibaba Cloud Smart Habitat starts with a smart home, but it points to the entire world where everything is connected.
Smart homeThere is no doubt that smart home is a blue ocean market worth looking forward to. So far, no company with absolute advantage has appeared. For the smart home market, Ali estimates that it will reach a market size of 329.4 billion and a number of device connections of 20.8 billion in 2020. This market potential makes it impossible for Ali to stand on the sidelines.
In fact, although Ali himself has made some smart home attempts, such as Ali’s first hardware product Tmall Genie, and the smart refrigerator "OS Jizhi" launched by United Midea, Ali’s focus in smart home has always been Based on the Alibaba Cloud IoT smart life open platform. A few days ago, Tang Haiping emphasized in an interview that the core value of Alibaba Cloud is to provide an open IoT connection platform that will not compete with upstream and downstream companies.
Smart communityWhen the concept of intelligence extends from the home scene to the community environment, concepts such as intelligent buildings, Internet of Things monitoring, intelligent parking, and environmental regulation will be derived. In the context of smart communities, Ali’s approach is to choose to cooperate with real estate developers such as Vanke and Midea Real Estate, with Alibaba Cloud’s cloud big data system as the core, integrated into the whole house intelligent system, and create an intelligent community through online and offline service platforms. . In addition, Ali also leveraged on Alipay and DingTalk to create a one-stop solution for "Internet + community", focusing on the property management industry and launching smart community products.
Compared with the family scenario, the community scenario involves payment and interaction. The former is Ali’s strength, and the latter is what Ali has always dreamed of. Therefore, Ali is more involved in the smart community scenario, and it is more handy to use. In addition to being a platform, Ali also wants to seize the offline traffic entrance.
Smart travelCompared with Baidu’s driverless business, Alibaba’s smart travel pattern looks more “forcedâ€: In June 2018, Alibaba released the “Urban Brain†strategy, which aims to seek the individual and overall situation in the transportation system. Optimal dynamic balance. The so-called "urban brain", Ali's goal is to connect people, cars, and roads, and connect the entire urban scene through travel, while Baidu's driverless driving is only a small part of Ali's ambition.
As the saying goes, if you want to get rich, you must first build roads. In the travel market, Ali provides services for government departments and smart travel solutions for users. In addition to static family and community scenarios, Ali finally made a strong mark in a dynamic environment. The pen connects smart homes and smart communities, forming a basic part of a smart city.
Smart CityTo be a smart city, Ali can be said to be a matter of course. Alibaba has payment data, logistics data, plus urban traffic data, city operation data, and relying on Alibaba Cloud’s big data storage and infrastructure construction. Under the wave of the Internet of Things, Alibaba’s becoming a smart city has become "the general trend and the will of the people." ". Cooperate with Hangzhou and Suzhou governments to establish a "smart city", and work with the Fuzhou government to build a sample of smart cities in Fuzhou, and work with the Wuxi government to build China's first IoT town-Hongshan Town, Ali's smart city The road is far deeper and farther than imagined.
The old saying goes: Plan and then act, know and stop and gain. In fact, Ali started the research and development of the Internet of Things as early as 2014, but it was not officially announced until the Yunqi Conference in 2018. At this time, Ali's Internet of Things layout has initially taken shape. From smart homes to smart cities, Ali’s layout in the Internet of Things field basically presents a distribution of points, lines, and planes. Most of them start from the entire “system†and look down on the entire industry from top to bottom. This is what Ali is good at. The genes of "system layout" are inseparable. From smart homes to smart cities, what Ali seeks is actually the traffic portal for the next information age. The goal of online, offline, home, community, travel, city, country, and Ali is to catch it all.
After all, where there are people, there are rivers and lakes, and where there are people, Ali’s battlefield.
Ali's conspiracyIt is undeniable that the Internet of Things is a new trillion-level cake. The second half of the Internet is the physical digitization of the entire world, the interaction of things, and the interaction of characters. The Internet of Things is considered to be the foundation of a new round of technological and industrial revolution. Forrest Research predicts that by 2020, the Internet of Things business in the world will be 30 times that of Internet of Things. Gartner predicts that the total expenditure on the Internet of Things will reach US$3.011 billion by 2020. In the face of such a huge cake, the trend of VCs turning to "larger and more concentrated investment for IoT companies in the growth stage" is obvious, and the industry reshuffle is also intensifying.
As one of the Chinese Internet giants, Alibaba has a market value of more than 3 trillion yuan. With such a large volume, from the 2015 fiscal year to the 2018 fiscal year, Ali's revenue growth rate was 45%, 32.7%, 56% and 58%, breaking the so-called "Law of Large Volume." But objectively speaking, the core e-commerce business that relies on merchant service fees for profit is still the most important driver of Ali’s revenue. In FY2018, Alibaba’s core e-commerce business revenue accounted for 86% of the overall revenue is the best evidence.
The core e-commerce business, including Taobao and Tmall, is Ali’s longest-preserved and largest-scale business. It should support the overall performance of the group. It is also because of the huge volume that Ali wants to break the constraints and achieve growth breakthroughs. It's easy, but it's much easier to change to a new track to layout and make breakthroughs-the IoT track that is waiting to be developed has a lot of opportunities and represents the future.
From another perspective, the architecture of the Internet of Things is very similar to that of the Internet era, which can be roughly divided into four levels: scenario applications, communication networks, operating systems, and hardware devices. Drawing lessons from the development path of the Internet, the development path of the Internet of Things is likely to be to connect first, and then explode. That is, first increase the scale of the Internet of Things, and then interactively derive rich Internet of Things value-added application services based on a large number of connections and massive amounts of data, so as to promote the Internet of Things into an era of full prosperity.
"Connect first", this is what Xiaomi's ecological chain and Huawei Smart Selection are doing, and it is clear that Ali has reached the "post-explosion" stage. Alibaba’s “platform†gene determines that the focus of Alibaba’s profitability is to obtain benefits by providing value-added application services to platform users (including merchants and ordinary consumers). From e-commerce platforms to IoT platforms, what Alibaba lacks is Alibaba Cloud President Hu Xiaoming The goal set at this year's Yunqi Conference is to connect 10 billion devices within 5 years and become a builder of the Internet of Things infrastructure.
Infrastructure, the definition given by Interactive Encyclopedia is "refers to the material engineering facilities that provide public services for social production and residents' life service systems, and is a public service system used to ensure the normal conduct of national or regional social and economic activities." But the problem is that the characteristics of public services are: non-exclusive, non-competitive. In other words, the Alibaba Cloud IoT platform that collects money from users will never be regarded as a "builder of IoT infrastructure."
Therefore, Ali just used Zhang Hu's skin as a banner to expand its business territory in the name of public service. From smart home to smart city, Ali's dream is to realize the transformation from an Internet giant to an IoT giant. However, it is clear that Ali wants to become the overlord of the Internet of Things era and cannot replicate the experience of the Internet era. B-end users have security/privacy concerns, budget/funds shortages, and C-end users are more concerned about product experience and privacy. .
The boat is good for turning around, and the boat is good for heading up the waves. The trillion-class boat driven by Ali at the top of the tide may go more stable, or it may miss opportunities due to misdirection. What's the future, let's go and see and cherish.
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