The market share of Samsung TV in China is far lower than that of the whole world. Can it be regained by AI？

After mobile phones, Samsung’s use of AI is extending to home appliances.

On the evening of March 17, Samsung released new TV products such as MICRO LED, Neo QLED 8K/4K series and OLED series, mainly using AI chips to improve the sound and image quality.

Taking the MICRO LED display technology promoted by Samsung as an example, the team added a MICRO AI processor, and its intelligent AI image processing unit can instantly analyze and optimize the content.

The Neo QLED 8K series equipped with Samsung NQ8 AI Gen3 chip emphasizes technologies such as AI dynamic enhancement, AI image enhancement and AI 3D depth of field enhancement. Specifically, through the processing of AI chip and convolutional neural network, 4K signal can be upgraded to 8K image quality; For some sports events broadcast with compressed signals, related technologies can also enhance the display effect.

According to Samsung, the neural processing unit (NPU) of the aforementioned chip is twice as fast as its predecessor, and the number of neural networks has also increased from 64 to 512.

In addition, Samsung’s AI applications in washing machines, refrigerators and other household appliances are mostly at the functional level, mainly including AI energy saving, interactive operation and intelligent management between devices with AI technology, etc. These functions can be operated through Samsung’s smart home open platform SmartThings.

Samsung’s attitude towards AI strategy is quite clear. Cui Shengzhi, president of Samsung Electronics Greater China, said that from Galaxy AI on mobile devices to display technology to smart homes, Samsung is integrating AI into internet technology.

Not only Samsung, but also a large number of domestic appliance companies are embracing AI in an all-round way, and have launched corresponding products or layout related technologies. Among them, Haier Zhijia launched HomeGPT, a big model of home furnishing industry, Midea connected to Baidu ERNIE Bot model, Hisense released self-developed Xinghai model products, Changhong released Changhong Yun Fan, a smart home appliance AI platform based on big models, and so on. Samsung has also reached a cooperation with Iflytek to optimize TV voice assistants through its Spark model.

"AI big model+smart home appliances" is becoming a fixed formula for the home appliance industry to seek new breakthroughs, and it shows two relatively obvious product trends, namely, the display technology upgrade promoted by AI chips and the intelligent interactive experience optimization promoted by AI big model.

For the former, Samsung emphasizes that its advantage lies in its own chip industry chain, which can achieve a more customized combination of software and hardware. However, in terms of intelligent interactive experience optimization, the current limitation of this Korean consumer electronics giant may be that it can only introduce domestic large model technology suppliers.

Samsung TV products have obvious advantages in the global scope, but they are hard to compete with domestic manufacturers in the China market, and most of them seek differentiated competition with high-end TV product lines.

The 2023 global TV shipment report jointly released by Counterpoint Research and DSCC shows that Samsung ranks first with 16% market share. In the domestic market, according to the data of Roto Technology, in 2023, the top seven brands in China market were Hisense, Xiaomi, TCL, Skyworth, Changhong, Haier and Konka, with a total market share of 92.2%.

However, considering that not all home appliance companies have the ability to develop their own large models, the technological gap between Samsung and domestic manufacturers will not be too obvious, and the company obviously hopes to seize more market share with AI.

Another lower-level proposition of AI home appliances is whether it has enough application scenarios.

Compared with the improvement of display technology by AI chips, the AI big model is a more intuitive experience for consumers to transform smart homes, but the frequency and value of user demand in this field have not been verified.

At present, many smart home interactions can be controlled through the central smart screen or smart phone terminal. Some dialogue application scenarios that rely on generative AI look fresh, but they are not just needed. In this context, the technology and application of layout AI big model need home appliance enterprises to further consume profits and prepare enough computing space for products. How much they invest may lead to different development results.

A good signal is that both AI mobile phones and AI computers have been given optimistic growth forecasts by market research institutions. For players in the field of AI home appliances, it is indeed the best window to make judgments and prepare for the troops.