On June 8, the National Data Administration released the “Digital China Development Report (2025)”.
This annual blockbuster report systematically outlines the panoramic view of China’s digitalization process with three major sections: “development foundation, enabling effect, and development environment” – the Digital China Development Index reached 170.1, a year-on-year increase of 12.99%; the added value of the core industries of the digital economy accounted for 10.5% of GDP; the number of generative AI users soared to 602 million.
On the surface, this is a “report card” for all digital builders.
But if you re-examine it through the lens of smart homes, including home appliances, consumer electronics, and embodied intelligence, you will find a set of key signals that have been ignored by the mainstream narrative: In the era of artificial intelligence +, smart homes are changing from “optional” to “infrastructure.”
Smart Home: “Silent Growth” Behind 323 Million Terminals
The report disclosed an easily overlooked data in the “Digital Infrastructure” section: the number of mobile IoT terminals used in the smart home field reached 323 million households.
At the same time, public services (1.164 billion households), Internet of Vehicles (529 million households), and smart retail (365 million households) ranked among the top three.
Smart home ranks fourth with 323 million households, and its absolute scale cannot be underestimated.
But what is more interesting is the comparison: “the scale of users has achieved double-digit growth in the field of Internet of Vehicles and public services, becoming the main driving force for industrial development” – smart home has not received the same “double-digit growth” wording, indicating that its growth rate may be relatively slow.
Looking at the digital transformation of the service industry: “Smart homes, unmanned retail, and personalized services are developing rapidly, and innovative scenarios such as immersive cultural tourism, smart elderly care, whole-house intelligence, and telemedicine are becoming increasingly abundant.” And the digital society part: “Collaborative promotion of wisdom
The construction of communities and digital homes has identified application scenarios in six key areas such as medical care, elderly care, and education.
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From the report, smart homes are undergoing a key identity transformation: upgrading from “consumer electronics category” to “digital social infrastructure.”
The report promotes smart communities and digital homes side by side, which means that the policy focus has shifted from “single product intelligence” to “scenario closed loop”.
For home appliance companies, here are three directions worth pondering: First, the trend from selling products to selling services: When “whole house intelligence” is written into a national report, companies need to think about “how to make home appliances become data nodes and service entrances for smart communities.”
Second, the silver economy is a hidden growth: the report specifically mentions that “technological products such as intelligent sweeping robots and health monitoring bracelets have long become the focus of consumption for many silver-haired people” – digital consumer users over the age of 60 have reached 117 million, accounting for 12.2%.
The six key application scenarios of smart elderly care (medical care, elderly care, education, etc.) are highly overlapped with the home appliance industry.
The third is the reconstruction of real-time retail channels: the report shows that the revenue of Internet life service platforms will increase by 9.4% year-on-year in 2025, and catering delivery will increase by 13.3%.
Can instant retail in the home appliance category replicate the path of FMCG?
This is a line worthy of attention in channel reform.
Consumer Electronics: Structural Opportunities for AI Mobile Phones, Smart Wearables and “Digital Consumption”
The report gives extremely impactful data in the section “Digital Consumption Continues to Heat Up”: total digital consumption will reach 25.3 trillion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 8.7%; digital consumption
The number of users has exceeded 958 million; users who have purchased smart products online account for 45.0% of online shopping users – almost one out of every two online shopping users has purchased smart products; consumption of new products such as AI mobile phones, AI computers, AI educational robots, smart glasses, etc. continues to rise; sales of smart glasses, smart watches, and smart bracelets on key platforms have all achieved rapid growth of over 40%.
Closely related to consumer electronics are: the added value of the electronic information manufacturing industry increased by 10.6% year-on-year, double-digit growth for two consecutive years; the added value of the digital product manufacturing industry increased by 9.3% year-on-year, accounting for 12.5% of the added value of industries above designated size; the output of integrated circuits was 484.3 billion units, growing steadily for three consecutive years, and exports exceeded US$200 billion, becoming “the single commodity with the highest export volume.”
The progress of open source Hongmeng is particularly worthy of attention in the home appliance industry: the number of devices loaded with the open source Hongmeng operating system has reached nearly 1.2 billion, and the number of open source Euler users has exceeded 6 million. It has installed “smart hubs” on more than 1,200 types of products such as mobile phones, cars, and home appliances.
AI reshapes the industrial chain: from “smart factories” to “smart products”
The report disclosed a set of key data on the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry: the penetration rate of digital production equipment in industrial enterprises above designated size is 57.7%, and the digital control rate of key processes is 68.6%; a total of more than 35,000 have been built nationwide
There are more than 8,200 basic-level, advanced-level, and more than 500 excellence-level smart factories, and 15 pilot-level smart factories have been cultivated, covering key areas such as consumer goods; artificial intelligence has penetrated more than 70% of the business scenarios of pilot factories, and has accumulated more than 6,000 vertical field models; the penetration of large vertical models in subdivided industries such as raw materials, equipment manufacturing, consumer goods, and electronic information has accelerated.
In addition, the report also mentioned that new business formats such as flexible production, cloud manufacturing, shared manufacturing, virtual manufacturing and industrial e-commerce are accelerating the development, and new models such as “black light factories”, “unmanned mines” and “smart ports” are accelerating the promotion and application.
“Smart product and service innovation will inject continuous impetus into consumption growth, and the potential of smart consumption will be further tapped, gradually forming a virtuous cycle in which supply creates demand and demand drives innovation.”
The report’s clear statement that “smart factories cover the field of consumer goods” shows that the intelligent upgrading of home appliance manufacturing has entered the national vision.
Among the more than 500 outstanding smart factories, a considerable proportion come from home appliance and consumer electronics companies.
But the real thing to watch is: when “black light factories” and “AI vertical large models” become popular on the manufacturing side, the competition in the home appliance industry will shift from brand, channel and price to “who can achieve the greatest efficiency jump and personalized customization capabilities on the manufacturing side.”
Looking at a deeper level, the virtuous cycle logic of “supply creates demand and demand drives innovation” proposed in the report is accurate for the home appliance industry.
When new categories such as AI mobile phones, AI glasses, and smart home control screens create new consumer demands, the upstream industry chain of chips, sensors, and operating systems will benefit.
On the contrary, as consumers’ expectations for “smartness” continue to rise, home appliances that are “not smart enough” will face accelerated elimination.
Embodied intelligence: from “rapid growth in data production” to “implementation in training grounds”
In the section “Accelerating the release of the potential of data elements”, the report specifically mentions one sentence: “Embodied intelligence, low-altitude economy and other emerging technologies
Domain data production is growing rapidly.”
The weight of this sentence is that it juxtaposes “embodied intelligence” with “low-altitude economy”—the latter is already a recognized trillion-level track—and this positioning itself conveys the clear intention of incorporating embodied intelligence into the key cultivation sequence at the policy level.
The report further disclosed a series of hard-core data: there are about 1 million robot-related companies in the country, more than 140 domestic complete machine companies, and more than 330 humanoid robot products have been released; the output of service robots is 18.581 million sets, a year-on-year increase of 16.1%; Beijing
, Tianjin, Shanghai and Hubei have laid out the construction of embodied intelligence training venues to strengthen the supply of high-quality data sets; according to statistics from the “Embodied Intelligence Development Report (2025)”, as of the end of 2025, there have been 744 investment events in the field of embodied intelligence and robotics, with a total financing of 73.543 billion yuan.
What is even more noteworthy is that in the “2026 Outlook”, the report clearly lists quantum technology, embodied intelligence, and brain-computer interfaces as the three major directions for “accelerating the cultivation of future industries.”
The “visibility” of embodied intelligence in the 2025 Digital China Report has increased significantly, which is not accidental.
Three forces are converging: First, the technical path for large models to extend from multi-modal understanding of text/images to physical world interaction has become clear; second, the output of service robots has maintained double-digit growth, and the industry has a foundation for scale; third, infrastructure such as data training grounds has begun to be implemented, and the “national team” has officially entered the field.
What does this mean for the appliance and consumer electronics industries?
Embodied intelligence is defining the form of “next generation smart terminals”.
When humanoid robots move from B-side factories into C-side homes, the competitive landscape in the home appliance industry will no longer be “whose refrigerator is more energy-efficient”, but “whose home AI intelligent body can truly understand and serve family members.”
The current “Battle of 100 Models” situation of humanoid robots just shows that the industry is still in the technology diffusion period, and the window is still there.
Outlook for 2026: Three things worthy of continuous tracking by the smart home industry
In the report’s outlook for 2026, there are three points that are directly related to our areas of concern:
First, the formation of new forms of smart economy is accelerating.
The report proposes that “large models will achieve more accurate intelligent service supply through in-depth analysis of user behavior and needs” and that “intelligent product and service innovation will inject continuous power into consumption growth.”
This means that AI will be upgraded from “functional addition” to the “core defining element” of the product – in future home appliances, AI capabilities will become as important as “refrigeration”, “washing” and “display”.
Second, embodied intelligence is listed as one of the three future industries, alongside quantum technology and brain-computer interface.
This is a strong policy signal: embodied intelligence is no longer just a hot word in the industry and investment circles, it has entered the national strategic vision.
Third, exports of integrated circuits exceeded US$200 billion, and industrial robots were net exported for the first time.
Looking at these two sets of data together, they reveal a structural change: China is changing from a “big consumer of digital products” to a “powerful supplier of digital products.”
For home appliance companies, this means that the domestic substitution capabilities of the upstream supply chain (chips, sensors, motors) are rapidly improving.
The biggest inspiration from the “Digital China Development Report (2025)” to the home appliances, consumer electronics and robotics industries is an upgrading of strategic perspective.
In the past, when we talked about smart homes, we were accustomed to talking about it from the perspective of “whole house intelligence” – connecting air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, lights, and curtains and controlling them through an APP.
However, the report actually outlines a bigger picture through the parallel description of “smart community + digital home”, the industrial crossover of “embodied intelligence + smart home”, and the two-wheel drive of “digital consumption + smart manufacturing”: the future “home” is not an isolated space, but the smallest unit of digital China.
The big industry of smart home will no longer be “manufacturing”, but may evolve into “spatial intelligent service industry”.
