Recently, some netizens posted a "whole process of the robot biting dog incident" on social platforms**. Monitoring** shows that a Samoyed was caught by the tail of the cloud whale J4 sweeping robot at work, and the dog was so frightened that it curled up and barked, trying to stand up and break free, but the sweeping robot did not let go until the owner came to the rescue.
Although Yunjing's official apology attitude is good, its reputation for advanced perception technology, as well as the lack of product functionality and innovation in the low threshold of the market and homogeneous competition, have also been revealed with this accident.
Dead innovation is both praise and burden", this is a sentence said by Zhang Junbin, founder and CEO of Cloud Whale, in an interview with **, and now it has also become the judgment of Cloud Whale, the "dark horse" of the industry born in innovation and trapped in innovation, and the ups and downs in the market.
2024 is the second year of Cloud Whale's "second 7-year" plan, after implementing the multi-category development strategy, enriching product lines, and realizing multi-segment layout in the previous year, what kind of answer will Cloud Whale hand over if it chooses to continue to "die and innovate"? Can it still gain the trust and love of consumers?
According to the description of netizens, there was no one at home at that time, and after seeing the monitoring, it took about half an hour to get home to help the dog get out of trouble. During the period,Cloud WhaleJ4 did not stop working,The mobile phone APP did not receive any abnormal status reminder,The product introduction said that it was "millimeter-level obstacle avoidance",But the dog's tail could not be recognized。
A few days later, the netizen posted a follow-up note on the same platform, saying that the sweeping robot brush used at home is silicone, without blades, and his dog was not injured. While apologizing to the dog owner and the dog and providing free replacement services, Yunjing sent apology gifts including dog toys and dog snacks.
Yunjing's positive and sincere apology attitude won the affirmation of users and netizens, and the accident ended with the brand taking responsibility for compensation. But at the same time, the obstacle avoidance and object recognition functions of the cloud whale sweeping robot still suffered a lot of negative evaluations, and the security of smart home devices has once again become a hot topic on social networks.
Before the "sweeping robot obstacle avoidance" accident, Cloud Whale's quality control problems were already frequent visitors to the complaint platform. Many consumers have reported that there are still serious quality problems after repeated repairs of the cloud whale sweeping robot, not only frequent errors, abnormal noises, and even scratched floors, water supply and water system blockages and other problems.
It is worth noting that the Yunjing J4 sweeping robot that has problems this time is the flagship new product launched by the Yunjing brand in August 2023. According to reports, this product is equipped with Narwal IPS 4The 0 whale inspiration system can realize autonomous driving-level obstacle avoidance through the method of "hardware recognition + software calculation".
According to Yunjing insiders, since the start of the pre-sale of Yunjing J4 on all platforms, as of the first sales day (September 16, 2023), the number of bookings on the whole network has exceeded 20,000 units, ranking first in the omni-channel sales and sales list including Tmall, JD.com, Douyin and other platforms, and it has also topped the list of multiple platforms during the "Double Eleven" period in 2023.
Not long ago, this product also landed on the annual cutting-edge technology product list of the 2023 Edge Awards Global Innovation Selection, and was even praised as a "pet treasure" by netizens. With the "overturning" of the intelligent obstacle avoidance function, the technological innovation of Cloud Whale "dead" may once again become a question point in the market.
According to public information, the Cloud Whale brand was established in October 2016 and belongs to Cloud Whale Intelligent Innovation (Shenzhen)** based on the field of household robots, committed to the research and development of revolutionary scientific and technological products.
In fact, the timing of cloud whale entering the sweeping robot industry is not "coincidental", the market segment at that time has gone through many rounds of competition, Baole, Silver Star, Zhiyi and other companies are gradually declining in the big waves, and in the same period, there are new brands such as Mijia and Dreame entering the game, and the old player Ecovacs has occupied "half of the country" in the market.
After market research, Yunjing found that most of the existing sweepers in China focus on sweeping functions, but the floor materials of Chinese families are mainly hard floors such as tiles and wooden floors, which have higher requirements for mopping than carpets. Therefore, consumers' demand for mopping function has become an opportunity for many manufacturers to break through.
In 2019, Yunjing launched its first integrated robot for sweeping and mopping, Yunjing J1, which pioneered the "automatic cleaning and mopping" cloth function, redefining consumers' perception of cleaning robots. The resonance of supply and demand has brought the dividends of category innovation, and as the "first person to eat crabs", Cloud Whale quickly became well-known in the market.
Yunjing J1 was officially launched in 2019 "Double Eleven", with sales of about 20 million yuan that year, and total sales of more than 800 million yuan in 2020. Not only is it popular on the consumer side, Cloud Whale once became the darling of the capital market, and it has received three rounds of financing in the first half of 2020 alone, and the development speed is not fast.
It is worth noting that the cloud whale, which became famous in the first fight, did not immediately roll out the product chain to drive new growth, but chose to create a "super single product" in a single category. In 2021, Yunjing further launched the sweeping robot Yunjing J2, which "doesn't even need to change water", innovatively modularizing the automatic water loading and unloading function to upgrade the user experience.
On the first day of sales on Double 11 in 2021, Cloud Whale J2 achieved sales of more than 100 million in 1 minute and 200 million in 7 minutes, and during the "618 Shopping Festival" in the following year, the product won the top 1 in sales of all categories on multiple platforms, and the GMV of Cloud Whale Omni-channel exceeded 400 million, detonating the consumer market.
Zhang Junbin also publicly said, "Compared with the ten product lines are the tenth in the industry, it is more valuable and meaningful to make one or two product lines the first and second in the industry first, and the idea of cloud whale insisting on product innovation and streamlining product lines has not changed", and the determination to deepen the vertical field of subdivision is self-evident.
It is true that the "explosive logic" of relying on functional innovation to create the core selling point can undoubtedly grab the attention of consumers for a period of time. However, compared with brands in the same industry, the single-plank bridge spirit of Cloud Whale in the upgrading and research and development of a single series of products has also laid the hidden danger that its innovation is not as good as market expectations.
In the product introduction, Yunjing said that J3 has functions such as "automatic mop washing, water changing, automatic drying mop, switching sweeping and mopping mode, adding detergent" and "whale spirit hosting" to achieve one-stop intelligent automatic cleaning and help users further free their hands.
However, in the same period, the stone G10S and Dreame S10 have been equipped with automatic dust collection functions, which are indeed "further" than the Cloud Whale J3 at the level of "hands-free". In addition, the above two products have adopted the "3D structured light + AI visual camera" obstacle avoidance scheme, while the cloud whale J3 is still using the infrared induction obstacle avoidance scheme, and has not been improved.
It is worth noting that in the case that some of the hard power is not as good as the products of friends in the same period, the initial price of Yunjing J3 is 4699 yuan, which is higher than the starting price of stone G10S and Dreame S10 products of 4399 yuan. Although Cloud Whale claims to pay more attention to the overall experience of users, the hard wounds on the ** still "dissuade" many consumers.
Although Yunjing J3 still gives a lot of innovative upgrades, but in the intelligent cleaning industry dividends peak, brand ** sinking market compatibility environment, its overall performance obviously failed to satisfy the market, and even because of its slow replacement speed, single product line and was once questioned "left behind" and "Jiang Lang is exhausted".
Aowei cloud network data also shows that the online market share of cloud whales from 2021 to 2023 is. 38%, the trend is obvious year by year. All indications show that Yunjing's style of "sharpening a sword for three years and working slowly and meticulously" does not seem to be suitable for the sweeping robot track of "machine sea tactics".
In fact, Zhang Junbin once revealed that the speed of cloud whale products in recent years has not been fast enough, and it has indeed been questioned a lot, but the problem is not in innovation, but in the development system.
Zhang Junbin introduced that the company scale and R&D system of Cloud Whale in the early stage were difficult to support the parallel of multiple categories, and it was not until 2022 that the R&D department began to fully centralize the platform to achieve the simultaneous development of multiple products, and the delivery speed reached 2-3 times that of 2021. According to Bedo Finance, Cloud Whale has faced the problem of shortage for a long time shortly after the listing of J2.
However, Zhang Junbin does not agree with the cloud whale "left behind" statement, he emphasized in an interview that cloud whale's three mopping robot products have stood firm in the top three sweeper market, and the current sweeper business is still in a booming period, cloud whale has enough spillover resources to develop the second curve business.
In April 2023, Yunjing released the first intelligent floor scrubber Yunjing S1, featuring 2% maximum suction power and 180° lying down technology, waving the banner of "light and powerful, clean to the end" to take the first step in expanding the category of clean electrical appliances. However, this time, the doubts faced by Yunjing have evolved from "market feedback" to "official complaints".
It is reported that after the launch of the Cloud Whale S1 floor scrubber, Yu Hao, the founder of Dreame Technology, who has been laying out the floor scrubber subdivision track for a long time, posted in the circle of friends, saying, "We eliminated the unused plan three years ago, why did we enter the game at this time and there was such a backward product", pointing to the backwardness of Cloud Whale technology.
A closer look at Cloud Whale's R&D capabilities, although the company publicly introduced that it spans multiple fields such as SLAM, three-dimensional perception, AI object recognition, robot structure technology, and big data applications, it has made breakthroughs in many directions, and has applied for more than 800 technical patents, but the total number of patents entered in Tianyancha is only 574.
In addition, Yunjing filed a patent infringement lawsuit with Ecovacs, but the final result was that all three of Yunjing's patents were declared invalid by the State Intellectual Property Office, because the core technology points involved in the lawsuit are widely used in the field of service robots and do not have inventiveness.
The "moisture" in the patent grabbing battle for sweeping robots is still unknown, but from this dimension, the technical expertise claimed by Cloud Whale is not only from the degree of R&D and upgrading, product iteration speed, but also the actual content of science and technology, there is a lot of room for growth.
In the author's opinion, the "differentiation strategy" anchored by Cloud Whale lacks technical barriers, and in the full-featured involution environment of the intelligent cleaning industry, Cloud Whale's technical advantages are easy to be supplemented or even surpassed by the head brand, and it is difficult to build an irreplaceable brand image in the hearts of consumers, and it is even more difficult to strengthen the cognition of category leaders.
It is not a long-term plan to be complacent and bury your head in the car, claiming that "you will never consider whether you enter a certain market late, but whether the product can create more differentiated value for users", and you need to work harder on the thickness of the brand's technical perception and technical safety.