On June 9, Midea Group held the "Digital Beauty 2025" strategy conference in Guangzhou. Midea Group proposes to build a digital brain of Midea to provide real-time and efficient digital experience for hundreds of millions of home users and millions of enterprise users. Fang Hongbo, Chairman and President of Midea Group, Yin Bitong, Senior Vice President, Wang Jianguo, Vice President and International President of Midea, Zhang Xiaoyi, Vice President and CIO, and Guan Jinwei, Vice President and President of Building Technology Division, attended the launching ceremony of "Digital Beauty 2025".
Touch the digital brain of the future and reconstruct the world of beauty
In 2012, "Midea Digitalization" was still a hardware service provider's vision of digital technology. Just ten years later, Midea Group has planted flags in the fields of smart home, smart buildings, and smart logistics, and has an interconnection ecology based on the prototype of DTC (direct to consumer) digital platform, AIoT device interconnection, and industrial human-machine interconnection.
"Today, 10 years later, digital beauty reflects the process of gradually approaching our users from manufacturing." Zhang Xiaoyi, vice president and CIO of Midea Group, introduced the overall goal of "Digital Beauty 2025": The overall goal of "Digital Beauty 2025": business digitalization, building a DTC digital platform, and achieving 100% online business; Data business, data-driven operation to reach 70%, intelligent decision-making to achieve 40%, the core indicator system is 10 times the current one; Digital technology maintains the leading edge in the industry, fully integrates digital decision-making technology with business, and the Internet of Things middle platform reaches 1 billion connection capabilities; AIoT, smart home is the first choice in the global industry; Develop digital innovation business and incubate 1-2 listed companies.
From these five goals, it is not difficult to see the confidence of "Digital Beauty 2025" to reconstruct the real world. The AI Innovation Center, the Midea Software Engineering Institute, the Midea Cloud Data Center, and the Privacy Computing Joint Laboratory were established...... A series of big moves represent that Midea's digital exploration has entered the "deep water area".
In the past, whether it was providing users with home appliances, core components of new energy vehicles or medical equipment, Midea Group was a traditional hardware sales. But by 2023, Midea Group wants to use digital solutions as a differentiated selling point for hardware sales. In the future of 2025, Midea Group hopes that digital solutions can drive hardware sales, and hardware is an option for solutions.
At that time, whether it is an individual user or an enterprise user, Midea Group will have a unified, reliable, safe and efficient digital foundation in the fields of smart home, smart building, smart energy, smart travel, smart medical care, smart logistics, and smart manufacturing of the "Big Dipper". , providing an exclusive data cockpit and an exclusive intelligent decision-making assistant. Liu Xiangyang, President of the Software Engineering Institute of Midea Group, is full of confidence in the construction of Midea's digital base: "The digital base capabilities we have carefully built can not only serve the digital business of various business divisions of Haomei Group, but also our digital base can be exported to the outside world in the future to empower Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises." ”
This means that Midea Group is no longer just a manufacturing company, but a leading technology group in the era of the Internet of Things, providing digital solutions that combine software and hardware for all users through Midea's digital brain.
The high standards from scientific research strength, technology accumulation, industrial fullness, product and service market share, etc., also explain why Midea Group is currently one of the few service providers that can find real needs in the field of Internet of Things, accurately develop technologies and application solutions, and effectively implement new product and service innovations in multiple industries. "Ten years ago, Midea Group had only more than 300 digital talents, mainly concentrated in IT and operation and maintenance, but at the end of last year, this number has reached more than 5,000, distributed in the group's IT, digital office, Meiyun Intelligent Digital, various research institutions and product divisions." Zhang Xiaoyi said.
Symbiosis of virtual reality and a "digital world" that takes into account 2C and 2B
"Digital Beauty 2025" includes home digitalization and industrial digitalization. In Zhang Xiaoyi's description of the future home, artificial intelligence will be the image of a "housekeeper", managing the needs of life including water, air, health, energy consumption, ingredients, etc. for users, from a digital twin that can realize functions such as automatic payment, to a more intelligent digital brain, integrating the advantages of reality and virtuality, so as to help users feel the beauty of life technology.
This "housekeeper" has a lovely entity. On the day of the press conference, Midea Group officially launched the home service robot brand "WISHUG" and the first generation of home service robot products. Tang Jian, Chief AI Officer and General Manager of AI Innovation Center of Midea Group, said: "This new AI species will serve as an AI butler, home assistant, security guard, technology playmate, etc., providing convenience and more technological experience for family life, relying on technological innovation in the future, or setting off a revolution in home intelligent technology." ”
Midea's first home service robot Xiao Wei was officially unveiled, meet for the first time, open the manual of AI, and get to know Xiao Wei!
Sun Tao, Chief Technology Officer of Meizhi Zongheng, also released the home AI health cleaning robot W12 smart cleaner and the digital store smart shopping guide robot R10 Hospitality Jun。 Among them, W12 Smart Purifier is based on the third-generation AI heterogeneous computing platform to realize multi-scene AI recognition and semantic navigation, completely realizing a hands-free and barefoot-free home life for users. R10 searches Midea's cloud digital marketing map and recommends suitable new products for users. At the same time, R10, as the entrance to the DTC traffic of offline digital stores, can continuously optimize the service process and help the stores refine their operations.
In terms of industrial digitalization, Midea Group's business scope will further deepen from smart home to industrial technology, building technology, digital innovation and many other fields, and empower customers and partners within the sustainable value system for millions of enterprise customers, so as to build a new digital ecosystem.
With science and technology as the core driving force, Midea Industrial Technology has laid out four major fields: consumer appliances, smart transportation, industrial automation, and green energy, from the underlying components and components to the provision of system-level solutions and the construction of industrial ecology, helping to consolidate China's industrial foundation in an all-round way. "With industrial automation, energy digitalization and new energy vehicle solutions, Midea's industrial technology will empower the transformation and upgrading of subdivided industries and become an innovative force to accelerate the high-quality development of China's economy." Xu Chengmao, vice president of the industrial technology business group and president of the Industrial Technology Research Institute of Midea Group, said.
"A fully perceived, always-on life organism with a self-evolving intelligence platform for the brain." This is the requirement of Midea Building Technology for the iBUILDING digital platform in the era of the Internet of Things, and it is also the future evolution direction of artificial intelligence from the perspective of users. "iBUILDING applies the capabilities of data intelligence, such as artificial intelligence, knowledge graph, and cloud computing, to HVAC, elevators, building control and other fields, bringing digital transformation to more industries." Guan Jinwei, vice president of Midea Group and president of Building Technology Division, introduced.
In the field of intelligent manufacturing, Jin Jiang, President of Meiyun Zhishu, said that Meiyun Zhishu has always focused on value creation for customers, and will focus on digital intelligent manufacturing and industrial interconnection under the premise of "bounded and promising", with industrial software and cloud services as the core starting point. In the just-completed 2022 national double-cross-platform selection, Meiyun Zhishu's "Meiqing Industrial Interconnection Platform" was successfully selected. "Meiyun Intelligent Data will use this platform to create a new digital ecology across industries and fields, and provide services to more manufacturing enterprises, especially waist and small and medium-sized enterprises, in a platform-enabled way, so as to maximize the social value of Midea Group's intelligent manufacturing and digital capabilities."
In 2022, the proportion of external business is expected to exceed 60%, and by 2025, it is expected to exceed 80%. According to Liang Pengfei, President of Ander Zhilian, Ander Zhilian will be based on digital technologies such as big data, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence, so that the daily operation and element configuration of logistics will become "visualized + quantifiable + optimized", so that logistics can "think" and be more efficient. "I believe that digital intelligence represents advanced production factors or productivity, as long as we are firmly invested, Ande Zhilian will help the entire industry explore and reconstruct new production relations and even business models in the continuous overlapping process of business digitization + data commercialization." Liang Pengfei said.
In the sustainable value system for hundreds of millions of home users and millions of enterprise customers, Midea Group will provide more systematic digital solutions in the fields of smart home, smart building, smart energy, smart travel, smart healthcare, smart logistics, smart manufacturing, etc., reconstructing the real world into a digital world and providing more possibilities for a better life in the future.