Refrigerator industry is not optimistic about the year

On July 2nd, the 2014 (The 7th) China Refrigerator Industry Annual Meeting and the 2013-2014 China Refrigerator Industry White Paper jointly organized by China Electronics News, Suning Cloud Business, and Beijing Zhong Yi Kang Times Market Research Co., Ltd. were released in Beijing. Held. The theme of this year's annual meeting is “Zizhixianbeijie”, with well-known brands from Haier, Meiling, Siemens, Bosch, Rongsheng, Hisense, LG, Midea, Hefei Sanyo, TCL, Konka, Skyworth and other domestic and foreign brands all coming together. Representatives from associations, consulting agencies, channel distributors and reporters from dozens of mainstream media in China participated in this annual meeting.

At the annual meeting, China E-Newsletter and China Yikang jointly issued the "2013-2014 China Refrigerator Industry White Paper" (hereinafter referred to as the "White Paper"). The White Paper pointed out that due to the combination of factors such as weak economic conditions, withdrawal of subsidy policies, and sluggish real estate market transactions, China's refrigerator industry failed to continue its rapid growth in 2013 in the first half of 2014 and fell into a downturn. Despite weak market growth, large sales of high-volume products, faster landing of smart products, and preservation of refrigerators, sterilization, and anti-microbial technology have also provided room for growth.

Year-round or downturn

In 2013, China's refrigerator industry came out of the "winter", the market showed rapid growth, especially in the "May 1", "11" two important consumer nodes, sales showed a larger increase year-on-year. According to the data of China Yikang, the total retail sales in the refrigerator market in China reached 34.58 million units in 2013, an increase of 7.9% year-on-year, and retail sales reached 86.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 11.0%. In this regard, Peng Yi, vice president of Beijing Zhongyekang Times Market Research Co., Ltd. believes that the reason for the strong recovery of the refrigerator market in 2013 is mainly due to the overall macro level of the refrigerator market in the recovery period after the 2012 white-market drop. The increase in the demand for new weddings brought about by the demographic dividend, the increase in demand for refrigerator products, the tailgate effect of the last train in May, and the increase in demand driven by real estate, have promoted the scale of the refrigerator market. At the same time, from the brand level, Haier, Siemens, Hisense, Meiling and other industry giants have also gained a lot.

However, in 2014, the negative start of growth has kept the entire industry in a low position. According to statistics, from January to April, the retail volume of the refrigerator market was 10.22 million units, and the retail sales amounted to 27 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 8.5%. According to Chen Gang, the deputy secretary-general of the China Household Electrical Appliances Association, the combination of data from recent years indicates poor performance in the first few months of 2014, mainly due to the macro environment and industrial environment. At present, it seems that China's overall macroeconomic environment is unlikely to be significantly positive in 2014. The new government’s policy tone is “steady growth, structural adjustment”, and the economic structure will shift from extensive growth to intensive growth. For manufacturing companies, the desire to pull terminal sales through stimulus policies is difficult to achieve in the short term. The real estate market as the biggest factor affecting the renewal demand, in the first four months of 2014, both the sale of commercial housing area and sales, have a significant decline. In addition, the popularity of the Chinese refrigerator market in urban and rural areas is already very high. Under the background of these factors, it is also reasonable that the Chinese refrigerator market is relatively sluggish in the first half of the year. He believes that the decline in the market in the second half will be narrowed, but from the perspective of the whole year, it may show low or even negative growth.

"Intelligence" and "Fresh" Promote Industry Upgrade

Although the entire industry is not optimistic about the trend, but the "white paper" believes that the market still has four major sources of growth: First, large-capacity refrigerators continue to rise. From January to April, retail sales of refrigerators with a capacity greater than or equal to 300L increased by 7.9 percentage points over the same period of last year. The second is that the "fine" of consumer demand has changed significantly. From the perspective of product structure, the proportion of retail sales in the overall market was more than 70% with three-doors, two-doors, and multiple doors. Third, consumers pay more attention to health functions. Fourth, the smart refrigerator has become the new favorite.

As the theme of this year's annual meeting, “Wisdom has no borders,” and “smartness” and “freshness” are just a glimpse of the downturn in the industry. Since the end of 2013, the refrigerator industry has made great strides toward intelligentization. Among them, Meiling has released CHiQ refrigerators with cloud image recognition technology and food management functions; Haier's intelligent cloud refrigerators can implement remote real-time control. It can be said that although the technical standards, consumer awareness, and experience are still mountains in front of the smart, but the rapid landing of a series of products will undoubtedly make ordinary household smart refrigerator dreams go one step further.

"Preservation" and "health" are the original intentions of mankind inventing refrigerators. This seemingly simple function is accompanied by the improvement of refrigerator technology. In this respect, companies represented by Siemens, Hisense, and Rongsheng have achieved outstanding performance. Among them, Siemens' fresh-keeping technology has experienced zero-freshness, zero-vacuum preservation, and zero-green freshness. Hisense's dual ion sterilization and fresh-keeping technology has provided consumers with dual health protection; "Ryoichi uses refrigerators", and Nano-fresh Nano Anion Fresh-keeping technology has achieved high quality in food preservation. In addition to the basic functions of refrigerators such as refrigeration, freezing, and preservation, health functions such as antibacterial, sterilizing, and odor removal are increasingly becoming the main points for consumers to purchase refrigerators. According to the data in the White Paper, about 50% of consumers consider fresh-keeping, anti-bacterial, anti-bacterial, and odor-removing functions when purchasing refrigerators. 80% of consumers are willing to pay nearly 300 yuan more for such health functions. Therefore, for refrigerator companies, only in accordance with the market consumer demand, research and development to launch anti-bacterial, sterilization, odor, preservation and other health-functional refrigerators, in order to comply with market trends and promote the upgrading of enterprises.

At the same time, at this annual meeting, the current trend of antibacterial, sterilizing, decontamination and preservation technologies for refrigerators, and the topic of consumption characteristics of refrigerators online and offline in 2014 were met by professors from the School of Food Science and Technology of Beijing Technology and Business University. Experts from the China Household Electrical Appliances Research Institute and Suning Yunshang representatives delivered wonderful speeches respectively.

In addition, this year's annual meeting also named the annual awards for the brand and product of China's refrigerator industry in 2014. The award-winning products basically represent the highest level in the domestic refrigerator industry.