Building Intercom

     As a safety and security component for real estate projects, building intercom systems are inextricably linked to the real estate industry. On the one hand, the government's strong push for economic and affordable housing has significantly increased sales of low-to-mid-range building intercom products. On the other hand, with the active promotion of smart communities and smart homes, the demand for high-end building intercom equipment is also gradually becoming apparent, and the entire building intercom industry is showing a trend of polarized development!

     A building intercom system is a management system used in multi-story or high-rise buildings to enable communication between visitors, residents, and the property management center, facilitating information exchange and controlling access to the community's security entrances. Since entering the Chinese market in the early 1990s, it has achieved rapid development. Domestic enterprises have made significant strides, leveraging their understanding and grasp of the diverse needs of the Chinese market to take the lead in the building intercom market, occupying over 80% of the market share.

     As an important security subsystem of the "Safe City" initiative, building intercom systems are mainly used in residential areas, villas, hospitals, prisons, banks, transportation hubs, and campuses—areas with high population density. Some regions have mandated the installation of building intercom systems in newly constructed residential buildings, including them in project acceptance criteria. This has led to the most widespread application of building intercom systems in residential areas. The core function of a building intercom system is "intercom." For residential communities, the ability to conduct video calls, verify visitor identities, and open doors is the primary requirement. For banks, prisons, and campuses, the main requirement is to facilitate the public's response to emergencies. In the event of any unusual situation, relevant personnel can quickly connect with security guards, police, or even the public security department through the intercom system, using emergency alarm buttons to alert relevant management departments, enabling a rapid response and enhancing the safety of public places.

Intertwined Destinies: Real Estate and Building Intercoms

     As a safety and security component for real estate projects, the building intercom industry is closely linked to the real estate industry, sharing its fate. Compared to the tightening policies of 2014, in 2015, the government actively intervened to rescue the market, relaxing various real estate policies, especially the easing of loan restrictions in first-tier cities. This released a lot of mid-to-high-end improvement demand, bringing market demand and opportunities for digital intercoms and smart home products. The development model of the real estate market has also shifted from the past mass housing construction to address supply and demand imbalances to more refined construction and more reasonable layouts, moving towards higher standards, greener, and cleaner development. This shift in model has also placed stricter energy efficiency and emission reduction requirements on building intercom manufacturers.

     On the other hand, with the government's strong push for the construction of affordable rental housing and affordable housing, many real estate developers choose to reduce the price or lower the grade of building intercom products to control costs, or choose more economical products and solutions. This market environment has directly driven the increase in sales of low-to-mid-range building intercom products. At the same time, the large-scale launch of government-subsidized housing such as economic and affordable housing has further increased the sales of low-to-mid-range building intercom products. Therefore, the overall application of building intercoms shows a trend of polarized development between low-end and high-end products.

However, due to various regulatory measures, real estate development is gradually becoming more rational, with an increasing number of real estate projects designed to meet the needs of specific consumer groups, such as education-related real estate, senior housing, tourism real estate, cultural real estate, and youth apartments. These real estate projects have clear targets, and their supporting intelligent equipment must maximize the fit with the application needs of the target users. Therefore, for building intercom companies, meeting the personalized needs of real estate development is also an important direction for current development.

Internal and External Challenges: Development Bottlenecks in the Building Intercom Industry

    With the performance of smartphones and PCs becoming increasingly similar, the popularization of 3G/4G networks, and the continuous advancement of triple-play convergence, smartphones, after integrating embedded operating systems, have functions very close to those of home computers. The widespread adoption and maturity of mobile internet devices and technologies mean that the core functions of building intercoms, such as intercom and unlocking, can now be fully implemented through software. The anytime, anywhere accessibility of smartphones and other terminal devices, regardless of time and geographical limitations, extends smart homes from indoors to outdoors, from within the community to outside the community, and even allows control of everything at home from thousands of miles away. As a result, the overlapping basic functions and the development of intercom and access control functions in smartphones pose a threat to the development of building intercoms. To enhance their competitiveness, the transformation and upgrading of building intercom companies has become an unavoidable issue.

     On the other hand, the intensified market competition in the building intercom industry has led to a serious problem of product homogeneity. Currently, domestic building intercom manufacturers generally have weak independent innovation capabilities, especially in some high-end information core technologies such as Internet of Things applications, detection and sensing, feature recognition, and the combined application of information, communication, and security technologies. These "bottlenecks" have become difficulties hindering the development of domestic building intercom companies. In addition, the influx of numerous low-cost, small workshops has intensified disorderly competition in the industry, leading to product homogeneity and inconsistent quality, which has significantly affected the overall image of industry enterprises.

     In addition to resisting competitive pressure from within the industry, the influx of external "intruders" from the smart home sector is gradually forming a competitive force. After the digitalization of building intercoms, smart homes have become an important trend in the development of building intercom companies. With the rapid development of mobile internet technology in recent years, many companies from other fields have also joined the competition in smart homes, such as home appliance companies like Haier, IT giants like Apple and Google, and emerging smart hardware manufacturers. Therefore, building intercom companies face broader competition and challenges, and their competitors pose a greater threat.

Exploring Opportunities: The Transformation Path for Building Intercom Manufacturers

Renovation of Old Buildings: An Important Market

     Over the past two decades, building intercom systems have undergone changes, evolving with the development of electronics and communication technologies. They have gradually transitioned from analog to digital systems, from non-visual to visual, from black and white to color, and from a trendy import to an indispensable part of people's daily lives. In the past two decades, a large number of communities with installed building intercom systems have become outdated due to disrepair, and their functions no longer meet the daily needs of users. For many older communities without building intercom systems, the restrictions on residents' daily safety and convenient living have remained unresolved. Therefore, renovation measures for older communities have become a new market for building intercom systems. With the improvement of people's living standards, this demand will continue. Therefore, the renovation of old buildings is an important future market for building intercoms, and it also places demands on building intercom companies for product stability, reliability, easy upgrades, and flexible installation.  

The Next Big Thing: Smart Homes and Smart Communities

      Building intercom systems bear the important responsibility of safeguarding homes and communities. Because they are installed inside homes, are on 24/7, occupy a prominent position in the living room, and are located at the entrances of communities and homes, they have a certain user stickiness. They have a natural advantage in carrying out smart community and smart home applications.

      The ability of building intercom systems to support smart home and smart community functions relies on the development of digital and internet technologies. The development of the building intercom industry towards smart home and smart community industries is an inevitable trend. Behind smart homes and smart communities is a rich industrial chain, including hardware products, software products, wearable devices, O2O services, etc. Therefore, cross-industry integration and development will become an important direction for the future development of building intercom companies.

      For smart home scenario applications, to improve user convenience during installation and use, self-assembled modular home intelligent control systems are currently mainstream, such as Welbell's Zhihui Jia series of smart home products, is a leading home intelligent control system platform that achieves cross-product and cross-brand interoperability. It is compatible with WiFi, ZIGBEE, Z-WAVE and other technical protocols. It includes seven major systems and supporting products: smart lighting, smart windows and doors, smart audio-visual, smart locks, smart security, smart sleep monitoring, and smart appliance control, allowing users to achieve interoperability, unified management, and intelligent linkage of smart devices of various brands on a unified interactive platform. It creates a more comfortable, safer, and more energy-efficient home living environment for users.

     In terms of specific function implementation, in order to better meet users' needs in smart homes, building intercom manufacturers generally integrate home control, video surveillance, and security alarm system functions into a single device. Through technological implementation, the dual needs of home control and home security are perfectly integrated. The home control part can realize practical functions such as lighting control, dimming control, curtain control, appliance control, background music control, central air conditioning control, fresh air system control, and scene mode control. Through infrared, illuminance, temperature and humidity, PM2.5 and other environmental sensor perception and control, a safe and comfortable home environment is created; the video surveillance part can remotely access home network cameras and built-in cameras of smart terminals via mobile clients to obtain real-time video images of the home; the security alarm part can realize remote arming and disarming operations and obtain real-time security alarm information. Through the linked video surveillance function, video image information of the alarm scene can be remotely obtained.

      Welbell Currently, with the vigorous development of mobile internet and Internet of Things technologies, and the country's strong advocacy for "Internet +", using building intercom system equipment as a medium to build a community-wide smart community management system has become an important direction for the development of the building intercom industry. In recent years, many companies have launched related products, such as Yunjiang's smart community cloud service system, Yunjiang's The company's smart community platform integrates "cloud intercom, smart home, smart business district, smart property" as one, with the concept of "smart life, smart community." Through big data, cloud platforms, and mobile internet technologies, it brings a new, digital, and intelligent management system to community residents and property management.

      In the future, building intercom companies will still have great potential in high-end, personalized real estate projects and the renovation of old communities. By actively cooperating with the national network power strategy, national big data strategy, "Internet +" action plan and other policy orientations, open integration, building intercom companies should make every effort to prepare, introduce cutting-edge technologies such as face recognition, Internet of Things, big data, mobile payment, and O2O, transform and upgrade, and position themselves at the forefront of the industry.