After reading the full text of the “Digital China Development Report (2025)”, a core judgment becomes clear: for the first time, the smart home industry has been officially classified as the core infrastructure of the digital society from a “peripheral category” of consumer electronics.
This is no longer just a simple policy benefit, but a complete rewriting of the rules of the industrial game.
This rewriting is creating real divisions and tensions.
From machine giants to upstream suppliers, from policy makers to ordinary consumers, all parties have completely different answers to “where are the opportunities?”
Only by seeing the collision of these dimensions can we truly understand the next explosive point of this trillion-level track.
For leading companies, the new policy guidelines mean that the competitive logic of the existing market has changed.
In the past, the battle was about whose single product sold more, but now the battle is about who can define the overall smart experience of the user’s “home”.
But the paths chosen by the two giants are completely different.
Midea’s judgment is that the core value of the family lies in the “brain”.
It announced that it will invest 60 billion yuan in the next three years to develop a “family brain” and quickly complete ecological docking with Alibaba Cloud and WeChat AI. The logic is clear: Since the policy requires collaborative promotion of smart communities and digital homes, and opening up the data flow between communities and families, whoever masters cross-device scheduling capabilities first will be the main gate for future home traffic.
Midea’s ambition is not to sell many air conditioners, but to make 140 million connected home appliances its ecological tentacles.
For Haier, the core battlefield lies in its “hands and feet.”
Haier Smart Home’s R&D investment reached 10.717 billion yuan, focusing on “home embodied intelligence” and launched three “Haiwa” robots that can clean, accompany, and link home appliances.
Haier’s logic is equally hard: when policies include smart communities in the old community renovation acceptance list, a large number of new installation and renovation scenarios require not post-installed smart speakers, but physical entities that can actively serve.
Instead of teaching users how to use the app, it is better to just let the robot do the housework.
Supporters believe that Midea’s approach is light and its scale effect is strong; opponents believe that Haier’s hardware moat is deeper.
There is no right or wrong between these two strategies, only different predictions of policy implementation scenarios.
From the user’s perspective, the situation is much more realistic.
Although the report clearly proposes “upgrading from single-product intelligence to whole-house system intelligence,” there is an old problem—ecological barriers—before this goal can be achieved.
The survey data from the Jiangsu Provincial Consumer Protection Commission is very disturbing: 37.12% of users have encountered the pain point of being unable to link devices of different brands.
After buying a smart refrigerator and a smart air conditioner, each with an app installed and connected to a gateway, the so-called “whole-house intelligence” becomes “whole-house intelligence”.
Because of this, two key supporting actions were taken simultaneously at the policy level.
One is the new national standard for L1-L5 smart home appliance classification launched by the China Household Electrical Appliances Association, which directly blocks those pseudo-smart products that claim to be “smart” just by connecting to Wi-Fi.
Second, special guidelines for the protection of personal information for home scenarios will be issued in the future to address consumers’ privacy anxiety about “a 24-hour monitor installed at home.”
The point of opposition is precisely here: there is still a huge gap between the expectations of strong policy promotion and the poor user experience in actual implementation.
Whoever can bridge this gap – whether it is relying on cross-ecological agreements such as Matter/OneConnect, or relying on Midea’s method of connecting the two major foreign aids of Alibaba and WeChat – will be able to reap the biggest dividends of the next wave of large-scale growth.
Unlike the fight between machine manufacturers and the entanglement of users, the upstream chip and sensor track is the most certain beneficiary of this policy dividend.
The “Report” requires that the security and convenience services of smart communities be completely connected with residents’ home terminals.
To achieve this kind of space-level linkage, the device must have “eyes” and “ears” – able to sense the presence of people, identify people’s postures, and judge changes in the environment around the clock.
This has triggered the demand for low-power millimeter wave human presence sensors and integrated all-in-one environmental monitoring modules.
The current market size of perception sensors and end-side AI chips for smart homes is about 70 billion yuan. Driven by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s integrated sensing and computing policy, it is expected that the annual compound growth rate will reach 22%.
This is accompanied by supporting installation, operation and maintenance services.
The sinking market, that is, the fourth-tier and county areas, contributed a full 40% of the increase in home consumption, but the local smart home installation, debugging, and after-sales capabilities are seriously insufficient.
This almost specifies a new blue ocean of hundreds of billions of services.
After putting the puzzle pieces of the above dimensions together, the conclusion is already very clear.
What the “Digital China Development Report (2025)” brings to the industry is not a simple “rising tide lifts all boats”, but a cruel selection that determines the direction.
By including the deployment of smart community hardware in the national renovation and acceptance of old communities and raising the entry threshold with unified standards and data security regulations, it is leaving behind traditional home appliance manufacturers that lack underlying AI and whole-house linkage capabilities.
This also opens up a value space that far exceeds the current market size of 1.017 billion yuan for players who truly have operating system research and development capabilities, sensor self-research capabilities, and full-chain service delivery capabilities.
The cake is not about selling more equipment, but about redefining the function of the physical space of “home”.
Families will transform from passive places of residence to active nodes for the extension of public services such as medical care, elderly care, and security.
This is the true weight of the phrase “collaboratively promoting the construction of smart communities and digital homes” in the policy document—the first shot has been fired in a territorial war for spatial intelligence services.
