Guojin Securities: Home Appliance Industry Nuggets European and American Garden Economy Chinese Pool Robot Brands Accelerate Overseas

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Guojin Securities released a research report saying that the product power revolution is driving an increase in penetration rate, and pool robots have achieved rapid market size growth through their “economic+reliability improvement”. Under the cable-less/intelligent trend, Chinese manufacturers rely on the speed of technological iteration and the depth of the supply chain to build core competitiveness. Online and offline channels are fully promoted, and it is expected that the industry's blue ocean opportunities will be fully grasped.

Guojin Securities's main views are as follows:

Industry Overview

A swimming pool cleaning robot is an automated swimming pool cleaning device that can walk automatically in the pool to clean sand, impurities and dirt from pool water, pool walls, and bottom of the pool. The biggest advantage is the autonomous underwater cleaning function. Its structure includes structural parts, transmission parts, control parts, and cleaning parts. It realizes intelligent targeted movement underwater through multi-sensor fusion algorithms, and realizes the cleaning function of the bottom pool wall of the pool pool through the cooperation of components such as motors, water pumps, and cleaning rollers.

The size of the industry

Global pool size is growing steadily, leading to an increase in cleaning spending. The total number of swimming pools worldwide in 2024 is about 32.9 million, and is expected to further increase to 39.3 million by 2029, with a CAGR of 3.6%. Pool cleaning spending increased from $9 billion in 2019 to $12.9 billion in 2024, and is expected to reach $16.7 billion by 2029.

“Economic+reliability improvement” is expected to drive rapid growth in the pool robot market

Global shipments of swimming pool robots have reached 4.5 million units in 2024, with a market size of about 2.48 billion yuan and a penetration rate of 26.2%. The core of demand-side growth in the industry is to replace manpower. Global pool robot shipments are expected to reach 6.6 million units in 2029, an increase of nearly 50% over 2024. Among them, cable-free pool robots have the advantages of no manual operation, convenience and flexibility, and have structural opportunities compared to cable-type products.

The racetrack head effect is obvious, and Chinese brands are rising

Currently, the industry pattern is highly concentrated, and TOP5 manufacturers together account for more than 70% of the market share. The competitiveness of overseas manufacturers, such as Maytronics, is slowing down, and their market share is declining year by year, from 48% in 2022 to 34.8% in 2024. Meanwhile, Chinese brands are going overseas at an accelerated pace, gaining breakthrough growth in market share and influence through technological innovation+supply chain advantages. There are representative manufacturers in the high, middle, and low-end markets on the racetrack. The products are all iterative in the direction of cable-free and intelligent, but there are differences in the specific path and depth.

The main Chinese players are divided into the following categories

Leading professional brand of swimming pool robots represented by Wangyuan Technology and Yuanding Intelligence. Wangyuan Technology has full-stack R&D capabilities integrating software and hardware. It has formed a product matrix covering a full range of cable-free, cable-free, and handheld swimming pool robots, and mainly promotes cable-free products. In recent years, technological breakthroughs have been achieved in key fields such as accurate underwater acoustic positioning and underwater AI vision. Yuanding Smart operates under the brand Aiper. In 2024, the company's revenue scale is about 3 billion yuan, making it one of the fastest growing smart cleaning brands in the world. Xingmai Innovation has always focused on the high-end user market, promoting technology development and product iteration around the four core directions of intelligence, mobility, cleaning ability, and user experience. The product focuses on the AquaSense series; companies represented by Siotuo focus on ODM foundry for pool robots; Siotuo focuses on manufacturing cost-effective underwater cleaning robots, and the product line focuses on the low- and mid-range cost-effective markets under $500. The core feature of the product is to achieve “technological cost performance” by focusing on self-developed core components and extreme cost control; in addition, home cleaning robot manufacturers represented by Chase Technology, Covos, and Stone Technology have crossed borders into the pool circuit.

Risk warning: International trade risk, increased risk of market competition, risk of product development and market acceptance falling short of expectations, risk of exchange rate fluctuations.