"Easy to maintain and difficult to iterate", home appliance giants still need one more transformatio

After exploring in 2020 and 2021, the entire home appliance industry gradually discovered that the path of intelligent transformation for enterprises is not as smooth as imagined. Even industry giant Haier Smart Home still needs to prove itself to the capital market.

When going public in Hong Kong, Zhang Ruimin once proposed three goals for Haier's transformation: "shareholder first, becoming human value first, transforming from a home appliance brand to an ecological brand, and transforming from diminishing marginal returns to increasing marginal returns." At that time, some believed that in the face of the capital market, Haier seemed to want to tell a more imaginative "intelligent story.

According to the Tianyancha app, Haier Smart Home went public in Hong Kong in December 2020, with a transaction amount of 696 million RMB at that time. Now that more than a year has passed, the capital market seems to be not buying into the "smart story" of home appliance brands.

Home appliance giants "easy to maintain, difficult to iterate"

At the end of March this year, Haier Smart Home released its 2021 financial report, during which the company's revenue increased by 8.5% and the net profit attributable to listed shareholders increased by 47%. After the financial report was released, institutions such as Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Chase, and CMB International retained their "buy" and "hold" ratings, but lowered their target prices.

Interestingly, apart from institutional evaluations, the secondary market also seems to have received relatively little response to this financial report.

After the release of the 2021 financial report, the stock price of Haier Smart Home in Hong Kong rose to 25.65 yuan. As of April 12, the stock price of Haier Smart Home still hovered around 25 yuan. It is worth noting that on March 31st, Haier Smart Home announced that the company plans to repurchase shares for RMB 1.5-3 billion.

The dual positive news of financial report growth and share repurchase announcement seems to have failed to arouse enough enthusiasm in the secondary market, which may mean that Haier Smart Home's next path to intelligent transformation will be even more difficult.

Institutional investors tend to judge the granularity of a company's value more precisely, relying more on data analysis results rather than subjective market assumptions.

From the actions of multiple institutions maintaining ratings but lowering the target price of Haier Smart Home, it can be seen that on the one hand, it is a recognition of the company's fundamentals. This means that maintaining the existing market share structure and its own advantages is not difficult, and on the other hand, it may also be due to insufficient expectations for future growth.

In a nutshell, it is easy to preserve, but difficult to iterate.

The underlying growth logic of the home appliance industry has two main lines: synchronous growth brought about by macroeconomic growth, and growth brought about by technological iteration. The former relies on the release of demographic dividends to drive market demand growth, while the latter relies on technology+product replacement.

From this perspective, the market may be pessimistic about the future of home appliance enterprises due to the following reasons:

1. The combination of the old cycle's downward trend and the new cycle's upward trend has encountered setbacks

The periodicity of socio-economic development is a basic law, and the length of cycles varies in different industries. Some industries have a quarterly cycle, which is commonly known as the off-season peak season, some have an annual cycle, and some industries have a ten-year cycle span. But fundamentally, it all boils down to two cycles: the demographic dividend cycle and the technological dividend cycle.

For the home appliance industry, whether in the past