Faced with various challenges such as the COVID-19 epidemic, China's economy once again went upstream. On February 28, the official website of the National Bureau of Statistics released a communiqué predicting that our country's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) will be 72,447 yuan in 2020, an increase of 2% over the previous year. 

It has laid a stable economic foundation for my country's development. In addition, the total retail sales of social retail products are basically the same as before the epidemic, and the total export volume has increased significantly year-on-year, showing that consumers' shopping needs have gradually recovered.

Upstream raw materials are rising rapidly, and product cost pressures are increasing

"Due to rising raw material prices leading to rising product costs, we will be forced to increase prices." Recently, the most common words on the corporate side are that from the second half of last year to the first half of this year, all kinds of raw materials appeared because of the imbalance between supply and demand. Price increases of varying degrees, such as polyolefin, fiberglass, asphalt, copper foil, rubber, PCB, etc., are also a serious impact for home appliance companies, especially for many listed companies in the middle and lower reaches of the industry, their profits will be affected to a certain extent.

The uncertainty of the COVID-19 epidemic still exists, and the vaccine brings positive hope

Surrounded by foreign epidemics, domestic epidemics one after another, there is still a certain degree of uncertainty in the general environmental market, and the COVID-19 epidemic is likely to be "normalized" in the future. Fortunately, our country's COVID-19 vaccine has been developed in a timely manner and has gradually begun to be injected, which will bring positive help to the future market development.

Trend One: Product function integration

On the one hand, with the development of our country’s economy and culture, consumers’ demand for intelligent and technological products is an inevitable trend. On the other hand, most workers now living in first- and second-tier cities, whether renting a house or buying a house on their own , The housing area of most consumers is smaller, and integrated products have a smaller footprint and are more intelligent, making them the best choice for consumers.

Trend Two: Segmentation of long-tail categories

The fragmentation of time has promoted the gradual diversification of people's usage scenarios, and the continuous segmentation of the population has made consumer needs diversified, which will inevitably make some long-tail categories "fragmented".

Trend Three: Product Portability

With the increase in the number of travellers and the increase in the frequency of holiday travel, the convenience of product use has become a rigid demand for consumers.

Trend Four: Convenient product functions

Starting from the segmentation of the elderly, their population size is already very large, and their spending power has been further improved with economic development. Therefore, the convenience of product functions and product operations is an inevitable development trend of future development.

Trend Five: Product volume tends to be smaller

Since 2013, China's single population has maintained an annual growth rate of about 10-20 million, which is equivalent to adding a single dog of the size of a super city every year in China. The size of this group will continue to expand in the future. This also makes young people living alone more inclined to buy small-volume products to avoid tastelessness.

Trend Six: Healthy product development

Affected by the epidemic, consumers are more concerned about food hygiene and health, and this concept will only be strengthened but not weakened in the future. Therefore, products with disinfection function in the future will also be the mainstream direction of development. Corresponding categories are high-temperature sterilization pots, steam mops, sterilization lamp and so on.

Trend Seven: Stylized business operations

The market is limited and the threshold for consumer shopping is getting higher and higher. Traditional operating methods have little effect. The main reason is the differentiation of shopping needs caused by the segmentation of the population. Therefore, in the future, each business needs to set according to different preference groups. It is suitable for your own shop operation style to achieve better results.

Trend Eight: Content-oriented business marketing

There are diversified marketing channels for small household appliances. Private domain traffic such as social platforms is gradually occupying mainstream e-commerce traffic. Online development is very strong, and traffic competition is becoming increasingly fierce. Content marketing is a tool-based social platform with shopping as the main purpose. Utilizing customers’ social networks for promotion and drainage, endorsement by end-consumer customers, and in-depth exploration of potential customer traffic, this method better caters to the needs of current consumers.

Forecasting the overall market forecast of small household appliances in 2021

From the perspective of the overall scale of small household appliances, the development of traditional categories is close to the ceiling, and the future growth depends on the promotion of emerging categories. Consumers still have a large demand for small household appliances. From the perspective of channels, online e-commerce will develop rapidly in 2020, and demand for traditional categories will be relatively overdrawn to a certain extent in 2021. 

Offline development has encountered bottlenecks, and the development of new sales channels and sales models is urgently needed. From the perspective of average price, the increase in upstream raw material prices will inevitably increase costs and the average price. However, facing the fierce competition in the small home appliance market, especially the online market, the increase is expected to be small.