The smart home industry is undergoing a fundamental identity transformation.
This is not an ordinary product upgrade, but a shift from a consumer electronics market divided by brand walls to a digital infrastructure based on interconnection.
The release of Matter 2.0 is the official diagnosis of this transformation.
On the smart home test sheet, several indicators are already very clear.
The cross-brand device combination rate has changed from a marginal data to a key indicator: data from Lumi Aqara shows that the cross-brand device combination rate of Matter users has reached 42%, while only 15% of non-Matt users have; user satisfaction has increased by 37%.
Product time to market is shortened by 30% – this is not an increase in efficiency, but a reallocation of R&D resources.
The scale of China’s smart home terminals has reached 323 million households. This volume no longer allows it to remain in a fragmented state of single-product intelligence.
These numbers point to the same conclusion: users no longer pay for a single brand ecosystem, they buy cross-brand synergy capabilities.
What is the cause?
The external factors are obvious: consumers’ patience is running out—no one wants to switch between three different apps just to turn on the lights in the living room and the air conditioner in the bedroom.
But the real fatal factor is the internal factor: the business model of the smart home industry in the past ten years has essentially used interconnection technology to create barriers to interconnection.
Brands have locked up the protocol, closed the ecology, and tried to bind users with hardware.
This is not a technical issue, but a business logic issue.
Matter 2.0 cuts right to the heart of this internal cause.
It is not another new standard to replace the old standard, but a unified application layer framework based on IP that decouples underlying protocols such as Wi-Fi, Thread, and Bluetooth Mesh. As long as the device complies with the Matter standard, it can break away from the constraints of a single platform.
Huawei Hongmeng SmartLink 5.1 has built the Matter protocol stack into the system level, reducing the device pairing delay to less than 1 second.
This means that the protocol is no longer a commercial weapon, it has become a basic function.
Look at the specimen.
Midea’s MevoX AI housekeeper has a semantic understanding accuracy of 98.7%. What it does is no longer connecting the air conditioner to the Internet, but actively predicting needs based on user habits.
Lumi Aqara adopts Zigbee + Matter dual-protocol strategy, and the device disconnection rate is less than 0.5%. It is solving the stability problem rather than “can my device connect to your ecosystem?”
What these companies are doing is getting rid of the burden of multi-protocol adaptation and shifting R&D resources to AI algorithms, proactive services, and system integration.
This is the true state after the cause of the disease is eliminated: the focus of competition has completely shifted from “who can lock users” to “who can serve users well.”
The prognosis of energy management functions needs to be viewed hierarchically.
For the power grid system, this is a clear signal of structural upgrades.
Sichuan Ziyang Virtual Power Plant aggregates 284 distributed resources through Matter, including 90 charging piles and 17 energy storage power stations, with a total regulation capacity of 110,700 kilowatts, helping to reduce the overall electricity price of connected enterprises by 1.6%.
The Hangzhou Virtual Power Plant brings together 550,000 charging pile users and has adjustable resources of up to 1.7 million kilowatts, which is equivalent to the adjustment capacity of a large coal-fired unit.
These are not technical tests, but business cases that have already been completed.
For the user side, Matter’s energy management function is giving rise to a new “power manager” model.
Smart thermostats, charging piles, and energy storage batteries can automatically charge and store energy when electricity prices are low and release electricity during peak hours through unified energy consumption reporting and dynamic load balancing.
The space for optimizing household electricity bills is changing from a concept to a quantifiable number.
But the key to the prognosis lies in a premise: China is leading the way in this field.
The State Grid has connected with the Connection Standards Alliance to discuss standards synergy, and China Mobile has cooperated with Haier Smart Home to promote the compatibility of the “Guoqiang Standard” local hub gateway with the Matter architecture.
The European and American markets are currently more in the technical testing stage.
This means that in the next 3 to 5 years, the outbreak of the virtual power plant operation market will be dominated by the Chinese market, and the domestic market size is expected to exceed 50 billion yuan by 2027.
For small and medium-sized brands going overseas, Matter 2.0 has given a clear survival route: abandon the self-developed protocol stack and purchase third-party Matter communication modules.
Huapu Micro’s HM-MT2401 series solutions cover both Matter over Thread and Matter over Wi-Fi lines.
For Chinese lighting companies that want to enter the EU market, the advice of industry experts is very straightforward – give priority to replacing the D4i certified drive power supply to solve the entry qualification problem, and then solve the networking function through external standardized communication modules.
This is the cheapest and fastest way to go overseas.
The Govee Matter outdoor lamp post is a typical specimen: with Matter compatibility, it is priced at $259.99 on Amazon, a 40% reduction, and has become a popular product for smart garden lighting in North America.
The prognosis of this industry is: it is not a periodic fluctuation, but a structural transformation.
Vendors that continue to spend their R&D budgets on multi-protocol adaptation will find themselves spending money on basic problems that others have already solved.
And manufacturers that are turning their focus to AI algorithms, active services, and energy management are getting tickets for the next round of competition.
The difference is that the former is solving a problem that has been eliminated by Matter, while the latter is creating a market that Matter has just opened.
