In May 2026, the home building materials industry will usher in a truly “historic moment” – however, this is not a conference worth celebrating, but a cruel “revelation of the truth” and “crushing of giants.”
Oppein and Sophia have just handed over their worst report cards in the past 20 years, and the industry is wailing; on the other hand, JD.com, which announced its demise in March, has not had time to digest it. On May 15, Tmall once again dropped a “nuclear bomb” on the home decoration and building materials industry: it launched the AI home decoration operating platform “Tmall Designer” and entered the home decoration market strongly.
Two seemingly independent events collided, instantly tearing apart the last fig leaf of the traditional home building materials industry: the “era of making money while lying down” belonging to panel merchants and traditional stores was completely over!
1. Internet giants carried out cross-border “dimensionality reduction attacks”, and traditional giants fell from the altar
Let’s first take a look at what kind of “earthquake” the industry has experienced in just a few days in May.
The first heavy blow: the performance of the leading custom home furnishing company “avalanche”, hitting a new low in the past 20 years!
In mid-May, Oppein Furniture, the leading domestic customized home furnishing company, officially announced its first quarter report for 2026.
The report shows that Oppein achieved operating income of 2.65 billion yuan in the first quarter, a year-on-year decrease of 23%; the net profit attributable to the parent company was even more tragic, plummeting about 50% to only 160 million yuan.
This is not an ordinary “low season”, but a cliff-like decline.
What’s even more frightening is that Oppein is still the one with the “best grades in the class.”
Another major giant, Sofia, has directly turned from profit to loss in the first quarter, with a single-quarter net loss of 38 million yuan, a shocking 417% year-on-year decline!
In addition, companies such as Shangpin Home Delivery, Zhibang, and Gold Medal are also continuing to suffer losses or have their profits cut significantly.
The whole house customization industry, led by Oppein and Sophia, has suffered the most severe setback in the past 20 years.
The second blow: Tmall arrives with AI, and the home decoration industry welcomes the last “super player”!
In the same week that customized home furnishing giants collectively reported concerns, on May 15, Tmall officially announced the launch of the industry’s first AI home decoration operating platform – “Tmall Designer”.
This is not just an online software, it is a giant platform that integrates AI design, precise construction technology, direct procurement of all categories of supply chain, strict control of construction performance, guaranteed transactions, and a complete set of standardized capabilities.
In short, Tmall needs to use platform-level standards to directly replace all the core functions of traditional decoration companies and dealers.
If JD.com ended up with “self-operated home decoration” in March this year, it was just to level the price and standardize the construction.
Then, Tmall, which followed closely in May, aims to use AI to completely deprive traditional home furnishing practitioners of the “professional skills” on which they rely for survival – design.
These giants are using capital, traffic and AI algorithms to build a new home improvement ecosystem with “no middlemen making price differences”.
The living space of panel dealers and building materials dealers has been completely compressed!
These two things happened at the same time, revealing an extremely cruel industry signal: from whole-house customization to Internet platforms, both upstream and downstream are “disintermediating”, jointly squeezing the survival gap of the basic building materials industry (especially panels).
1. The upstream “whole house customization” has fallen, and the demand for panels has suddenly “run out”.
In the past, panel manufacturers had an easy time because there were a large number of downstream customized home furnishing companies (Sofia, Oppein, etc.) that were building factories and expanding production every day and purchasing huge quantities of raw materials.
What now?
These former large customers themselves suffered huge losses in the first quarter, and even began to close stores on a large scale (for example, Oppein lost a net of 468 stores in 2025 alone).
Demand from downstream giants has dropped sharply, and large orders have simply “disappeared.” This is a disaster for many sheet metal manufacturers that used to mainly do B-side business.
2. Downstream “Tmall and JD.com” will be eliminated directly, and even the retail market will be reshuffled
Many people think that customized home furnishings are no longer viable, and they can still survive by opening their own stores to sell panels, right?
Too naive.
The scary thing about Tmall and JD.com’s entry into home decoration is that they directly bring their own huge super supply chain of raw materials.
JD.com promises direct procurement from the source, and its more than 5,200 direct industrial workers directly replace project managers and contractors.
Tmall Designer allows independent designers and small foremans to access the platform for free and directly use the platform’s designated supply chain to place orders.
In the future, which brand of board to use and which brand of latex paint to use may all be “one-click recommended” by the platform’s AI based on big data and profit assessment. How can it be left to traditional agents and stores to collect money?
3. The deadline for the new national standard is approaching, and soaring costs are dragging down small and medium-sized manufacturers
There is also a “killing order” that may be ignored by most people.
The new mandatory national standard for the formaldehyde emission limit of artificial panels (GB 18580-2025), which will be implemented on June 1, 2026, has clearly included E0 level into the national mandatory standard for the first time.
The new regulations make it clear that products that do not meet standards are strictly prohibited from sale and circulation.
This means that those small and medium-sized plate factories with backward processes and still playing around with environmental protection will not only face a decline in sales, but will also have to incur a large amount of high formaldehyde-free process transformation costs before June 1.
Under a double blow, cash flow may break at any time.
The true words of the panel boss: The era of huge profits is over, and there are only three ways to survive in the future
When JD.com was dismissed, many panel bosses were still lucky and felt that e-commerce could not handle complex non-standard building materials.
But in May, with Tmall entering the market and Oppein plummeting, the overall environment has really changed.
Industry experts reviewed the review overnight and came up with three unforgettable survival advice:
Suggestion 1: Stop being a “plain board porter” and immediately transform into an “in-depth supporting service provider”
Are you still guarding the warehouse, waiting for the contractor or individual customer to pick up a few plain boards?
Wake up.
Customization giants no longer eat raw materials in large quantities, retail investors are blocked by Internet platforms, and the price of plain boards is severely suppressed by JD.com’s supply chain.
The only way out is to do deep processing and do difficult and complex process matching.
For example, we can immediately master the current high value-added finishing techniques such as synchronous patterning, PET excimer, and EB electron beam curing, and turn plain boards into designed decorative panels with thresholds and good looks.
When environmental protection becomes the standard, boards must focus on “aesthetics” and “texture”.
Only by upgrading from selling raw materials to selling “implementation effects” and “solutions” can you gain a foothold in the niche areas that the platform cannot take away.
Suggestion 2: Give up “big and comprehensive” and firmly grasp the capillaries of “old house renovation” and “partial transformation”
The big giants (JD.com, Tmall) are looking at large malls in 30 cities across the country, which are large-scale and standardized large-scale decoration orders.
What they look down on for the time being and will definitely not be able to do well is your last moat – the partial renovation and fragmented transformation of old communities.
More than 60% of the decoration demand in first- and second-tier cities comes from the secondary renovation of existing houses.
These businesses are extremely trivial and require 24-hour on-site, quick measurement, special-shaped cutting and personal services that come with immediate delivery.
The mechanized corps of the giants simply cannot fight this kind of “street fighting”.
Immediately give up the idea of fighting price wars with other dealers, turn your store into a “community home service station”, and use ultimate flexibility and acquaintance service to attract customers.
Suggestion 3: Accept the reality, actively access the platform, and become its “last mile” service provider
If you can’t beat it, choose to join.
Although Tmall and JD.com have AI design and centralized procurement, they will never be able to solve the “last mile” of door-to-door installation and after-sales maintenance.
Instead of waiting for customers to be snatched away by the low-priced and standard transparent packages on the platform, it is better to immediately apply to become an offline service provider on Tmall or JD.com.
Before the next round of cruel reshuffle comes, use your people, your cars, and your old skills to occupy a real position on this giant tank.
This wave of drastic changes in May has once again proved a truth: it is often not Lao Wang’s Home Building Materials City next door that kills your business, but the cross-border giants with the ability to change the track.
For traditional panel dealers and building materials practitioners, it is now time to truly “remove their skin and change their bones.” Although it is extremely painful, this is indeed the last time to save themselves before the storm comes.
