On September 8th, Midea Group and Alibaba Group announced the results of their strategic cooperation - the Midea smart refrigerator "OS Jizhi" built on the YunOS intelligent operating system. Recently, the chairman of Midea Group, Fang Hongbo, who has rarely appeared in public, also took this opportunity to talk about smart homes and smart manufacturing. Fang Hongbo's unique perspective as a corporate leader reveals the deep logic behind the "dual intelligence" strategy being implemented by Midea Group.

Chairman of Midea Group, Fang Hongbo

Chairman of Midea Group, Fang Hongbo

The following is a transcript of Fang Hongbo's speech:

Smart home requires human-machine interaction

Midea proposed the "dual intelligence strategy" (smart home+smart manufacturing) two years ago. Over the past two years, we have invested a lot of resources to explore, and although we have taken many detours, we have also learned many lessons.

Midea is the enterprise in the world's home appliance industry that produces a large number of home appliance products every year. Last year, it was 270 million pieces, and this year it will exceed 300 million pieces, which means 300 million Midea products will enter thousands of households.

So, smart home must first transform all future home appliances from a cold machine to a human-machine interactive system. Therefore, first and foremost, it is an intelligent single product, and on this basis, there must be intelligent systems, including all hardware, software, and cloud systems.

What we need to do today is to further explore the smart ecosystem based on individual products. Ecology has a wider extensibility upstream and downstream. Although we don't know what kind of products will be in the future, we must explore and explore.

The essence of intelligent manufacturing is the connection of all businesses based on data

Intelligent manufacturing is a bigger issue, as it is a part of the Internet of Things. The core of intelligent manufacturing is essentially the connection of all businesses based on data. Taking Midea as an example, all business processes, from research and development, planning to supply chain, manufacturing to logistics, channels, to consumer homes, and consumer use, used to be physical.

A machine with many components, workers, vehicles, warehouses, and offline stores. The essence of intelligent manufacturing is to turn all business processes into data, use data for operation, storage, interaction, integration, analysis, calculation, and intervention, and then restore the value-added terms proposed by data analysis to existing business management for business transformation. For example, if there are more product models, they need to be reduced; if there are more supply chain manufacturers, they need to be reduced; if the production cycle is longer, it needs to be shortened; and if there are more product logistics links to consumers' homes, they need to be solved.

On the basis of business transformation, further data analysis and integration should be carried out to promote the reform of a user centered model. For example, in the past, the vast majority of Midea's home appliance products were sold offline, but now they are sold online. Is the online richness sufficient? Insufficient personalization? All of these require reform.

So the essence of intelligent manufacturing is to restore and interconnect all business models based on data, transform business processes, and then change the old model of selling our products to consumers. It used to be very long, but now it has become very short; Previously it was large-scale, now it is personalized; Delivery used to be slow, now it's fast; This is intelligent manufacturing.

Whether it's smart homes or smart manufacturing, home appliance companies cannot fight alone

Whether it is smart home or smart manufacturing, home appliance companies obviously cannot dominate. Home appliance companies cannot become a platform based enterprise, you cannot become a platform enterprise for the operating system of smart home, let alone a platform for the Internet of Things. And what we can do is to be open, collaborative, and integrated, which is the basic premise and foundation of our cooperation with Alibaba.

We already have a very extensive cooperation with Alibaba. The smart refrigerator released today is such an achievement that we need to deepen cooperation with Alibaba in many aspects in the future. The intelligent operating system we just talked about is going to cooperate with Alibaba. We are a part of the Internet of Things in intelligent manufacturing, and there are many IoT application technologies that we need to cooperate with Alibaba. For example, big data, cloud computing, operating systems, and service systems, all of which require us to cooperate with platforms like Alibaba.

Whether it is smart home or smart manufacturing, it is not something that a single enterprise can fight alone. It must be all enterprises that adhere to the basic genes of open collaboration to jointly build a platform for the Internet of Things.

In the field of smart kitchens, refrigerators are a very good connection point

The smart refrigerator released today is a good start. Among all the systems of smart home appliances, we believe that smart kitchens are a visible application scenario in the future. Smart kitchens have more practical applications than other energy, nutrition, security, air and other systems, so Midea has now placed itself in smart kitchens.

A few months ago, Midea established a research and development institution in Silicon Valley, specializing in projects related to artificial intelligence and overall intelligent kitchens. In the field of smart kitchens, refrigerators are also a very good connection point, which has more advantages than all other kitchen appliances.

So today's cooperation with Alibaba is a good start, although we don't know what application scenarios smart homes and smart refrigerators will be in the future, and how the ecosystem will extend, which is unpredictable. However, we must start exploring and exploring from today.

Regardless of the form of exploration and release today, whether it is in the direction of future intelligence, it doesn't matter. We need to learn some lessons through continuous trial and error. Today marks the beginning of the collaboration between Refrigerator and Alibaba. In the future, we will increase our efforts to explore and explore more scenarios and smart ecosystems together with Alibaba. (Ming Yanhua)