In the spring of 2026, the smart home industry ushered in a capital narrative of ice and fire.
On March 29, Lumi Lianchuang officially submitted a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and plans to list on the main board. This company, once known as the star of Xiaomi’s ecological chain, packages itself as “the first global AI-driven space intelligent infrastructure stock” with a valuation of approximately US$850 million.
In Hangzhou, about 600 kilometers away, EZVIZ Network recently handed over a quite decent 2025 annual report: full-year revenue of 5.901 billion yuan, net profit attributable to the parent company of 567 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.43%.
According to iiMedia Consulting data, the domestic smart home market has reached 815.4 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 29.0%, and is expected to exceed 1.8 trillion yuan by 2030.
This industry that has been struggling for many years seems to be finally ushering in spring, but it is a pity that many companies have collapsed before the warm wind hits: in the past few years, under the fierce homogeneous competition, companies such as Aila IoT, Zhixuan, and Xiaoyan Technology have closed down successively; Kangke has transformed into a factory; Yunqi has turned to high-end sub-brands; Oribo has plunged into the red sea of large appliances.
As for Lumi and EZVIZ, one is stepping on thin ice to rush into the capital market, while the other is holding on to his own land and playing steadily. With completely different attitudes, they have become the few survivors in this cruel knockout competition.
Real estate ebbs: companies tied to channels are the first to collapse
Set the time back to 2022, and the smart home industry has ushered in an unexpected “late spring cold”. At that time, China’s real estate industry was experiencing an unprecedented
Due to the deep adjustment, the delivery volume of new homes fell off a cliff, and the centralized purchasing orders for smart home furnishings with fine decoration evaporated almost overnight. For those smart home companies that are deeply tied to real estate channels, this is tantamount to draining the bottom of the cauldron. Oribo is the most typical example.
In the early years, Oribo rose rapidly by relying on real estate centralized procurement, and once became the company with the largest financing scale in the smart home industry. It won smart home centralized procurement contracts from many leading real estate companies at a price far lower than the industry average. It also used this to propose the Star Plan of “Thousands of Stores in Three Years” to build large-scale offline stores, which made it famous for a while.
However, the real estate trend receded faster than everyone expected. After a large number of real estate companies exploded in 2022, a large number of centralized purchasing orders signed by Oribo turned into bad debts. Not only were orders lost, but they were also faced with the risk of default due to the inability to reduce costs and the inability to deliver goods on schedule. In the end, they hurriedly switched to the air-conditioning track, with a large loss of dealers and a heavy hit to the brand’s reputation. It became the most painful footnote of the “real estate dependence” in the smart home industry.
Respective bottlenecks: the pain of transformation under the cold wave of the industry
In sharp contrast to Oribo, Lumi and EZVIZ have escaped from this storm because they have never been deeply tied to real estate channels. However, “escaping a disaster” does not mean “living well”. In 2022, the two companies will also face their own development bottlenecks.
As a star company that grew up in the Xiaomi ecological chain, Lumi was going through “weaning pains” at that time: Although it received a huge number of orders for Xiaomi in its early years, its gross profit was only a dozen points, and its brand recognition was firmly welded to the “Xiaomi series” label.
In 2021, Lumi decided to proactively reduce the proportion of Xiaomi channel sales and increase the construction of its own brand Aqara. Although the strategic direction is correct, it paid a heavy price in the early stage of implementation: a large number of original Xiaomi ecological stock users were lost, and it was difficult for its own high-priced products to penetrate the mass market in the short term. The net loss in 2023 was 159 million yuan, and the net loss in 2024 further expanded to 231 million yuan.
As a smart home brand incubated by Hikvision, EZVIZ was also facing growth difficulties at the time: competition in the core business of smart security cameras was fierce, and Internet companies such as Xiaomi, Huawei, and 360 were entering the market. EZVIZ products were professionally oriented towards security, and their consumer experience and Internet ecology were relatively lagging behind. The C-end brand had weak brand awareness, a single category, and a conservative online channel layout. It missed out on the dividends of the explosion of online traffic for home smart hardware.
In 2022, EZVIZ’s revenue growth declined in its first year on the market, ending the high growth of over 30% in the previous three years. The annual revenue only increased by 1.61% year-on-year, and the net profit attributable to the parent company fell by 26.10% year-on-year. The problem of “increasing revenue without increasing profits” became prominent.
Differentiated breakthrough: Lumi embraces overseas ecology, and EZVIZ deeply cultivates service monetization
Difficulties are often the beginning of a turnaround. Lumi took the lead in finding its own breakthrough direction: fully embracing the Apple HomeKit ecosystem starting in 2021, while laying out the underlying technology of the Matter protocol in advance.
Unlike Xiaomi users who pursue cost-effectiveness, Apple users are willing to pay a premium for experience and ecology. After accessing the Apple ecosystem, the overseas gross profit margin of Lumi’s own brand Aqara can be stabilized at around 50%. As one of the few companies in the world that participates in the full life cycle development of each Matter version, Lumi has also established its own technical advantages in the field of global smart home interconnection.
In recent years, Lumi has shifted its main battlefield overseas. From 2023 to 2025, the overseas revenue of the Aqara brand has soared from 380 million yuan to 629 million yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 28.7%. The proportion of overseas revenue has increased from 42.2% to 66.5%. The overall gross profit margin has steadily increased from 29.7% to 38.4%, with a cumulative increase of nearly 9 percentage points in three years.
In terms of sales volume, Lumi ranks first in Amazon’s U.S. smart gateway category and Amazon’s German smart sensor category.
If Lumi relies on changing its overseas ecology, EZVIZ relies on strategic self-awareness and restraint: it has never blindly pursued the grand concept of “whole house intelligence” and has always maintained the basics of smart security cameras. In 2025, EZVIZ will continue to be the world’s largest consumer camera shipments, with a shipment market share of 13.2%, ranking first in the world.
EZVIZ’s real breakthrough path is to realize the software services hidden behind the hardware.
Around 2022, EZVIZ began to accelerate the commercialization of the IoT cloud platform. It initially provided basic functions such as video storage and remote viewing for its own hardware, and gradually opened it to third-party developers, forming a “PaaS+SaaS” service model.
By 2025, EZVIZ consumer-side value-added service revenue will reach 529 million yuan, and industry-side developer customer service revenue will reach 675 million yuan, totaling 1.205 billion yuan. The startup advertisement of the EZVIZ Cloud Video APP alone can bring in more than 100 million yuan in passive income a year.
The profit margin of software services far exceeds that of hardware. The 2025 financial report data shows that the gross profit margin of EZVIZ IoT cloud platform is as high as 71.05%, while smart home hardware is only 37.41%.
The hardware is sold once and the service is continuously charged. This is the profit moat made by EZVIZ. In 2025, the company’s net cash flow from operating activities will reach 1.12 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 104.30%.
At the same time, EZVIZ is also accelerating its expansion into overseas markets. In 2025, its overseas business revenue will be 2.338 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22.27%, and overseas revenue will account for close to 40%. Relying on Hikvision’s global marketing network, it is also deploying cross-border e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and large offline supermarket chains, using overseas increments to hedge against domestic inroads.
Above Thin Ice: Survivors’ Concerns and Challenges
Surviving does not mean sitting back and relax. Behind the glorious figures of the two companies, their respective shortcomings and risks are also clearly visible.
For Lumi, which is about to enter the capital market, the first thing it faces is the problem of revenue ceiling: from 2023 to 2025, Lumi’s revenue was 1.439 billion yuan, 1.489 billion yuan and 1.472 billion yuan respectively, stuck at around 1.5 billion for three consecutive years. In 2025, it even dropped slightly by 1.1% year-on-year. The rapid growth in overseas markets was completely offset by the weakness of the domestic market.
At the same time, its losses continue to expand, with a net loss of 322 million yuan in 2025, and its dependence on Xiaomi has not been truly resolved. Xiaomi still contributed 32.4% of orders to Lumi in 2025, and is also its largest core component supplier.
The problems faced by EZVIZ are more hidden: First, there is the category ceiling. The market penetration rate of cameras is already very high, and the industry growth rate is slowing down. Although EZVIZ tries to expand new categories such as smart door locks and robots, from the perspective of revenue structure, cameras still occupy the absolute main force, and there is still great uncertainty about whether new categories can be mass-produced.
Secondly, there are geopolitical risks in overseas markets. The “Haikang” label may still become a potential obstacle to its overseas expansion. Especially in the European and American markets, privacy and security issues involving cameras are inherently sensitive, and the interference of political factors cannot be ignored.
The smart home track is still advancing rapidly. The global smart home market has reached US$169 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow to US$385 billion by 2035. This is a knockout match with no ending. Lumi’s submission of its prospectus and EZVIZ’s submission of a solid annual report are just the beginning of a new round.
For other participants in the industry, the development paths of the two companies also give the simplest inspiration: Only by finding a clear user positioning and sustainable profit sources can we survive through the cycle and go further.
