A star robotic vacuum cleaner company with a revenue of 600 million yuan collapsed on the eve of 2025 | Focus Analysis

Author | Ye Danxuan

Editor | Yuan Silai

On December 15, the cleaning appliance company Roidmi Technology announced on its official website that it will cease the operation of the "ROIDMI Roidmi" brand in one month. At that time, after-sales services such as product repair and return will also be halted simultaneously.

Roidmi Technology, founded in 2015, once received an investment from Shunwei Capital, founded by Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi. Benefiting from the investment and incubation of the Xiaomi Ecosystem, it successfully transformed into a cleaning appliance product company that researches and develops wireless vacuum cleaners and sweeping robots in 2017. In April 2018, the Roidmi handheld wireless vacuum cleaner was launched on Xiaomi Crowdfunding, with 12,000 orders and a crowdfunding completion rate of 6141%. INDIEGOGO shows that the crowdfunding for the Roidmi EVA sweeping robot exceeded 1.2 million US dollars.

A set of comparable data is that during the Double Twelve in 2018, Dreame Technology's wireless vacuum cleaner crowdfunding on Xiaomi Youpin was launched, with a crowdfunding completion rate of less than 4000%. In March 2019, the completion rate of the first Mijia handheld wireless vacuum cleaner jointly developed by Roborock Technology and Xiaomi was only 999%.

It can be said that Roidmi was the well-deserved star product in the handheld wireless vacuum cleaner category at that time.

The prospectus of Xingdesheng Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. mentioned that Wuxi Roidmi achieved an operating income of approximately 600 million yuan in 2022.

However, Roidmi, which also experienced "de-Miification", did not gain a firm foothold in the cleaning appliance market during the most booming years like Dreame and Roborock, becoming a leading industry brand. Instead, it gradually disappeared and became the "Shang Zhongyong" of domestic vacuum cleaner brands.

Until the day of its cessation of operations, the brand name of Roidmi still bears a deep imprint of the Xiaomi Ecosystem enterprise. As a "non-typical" Xiaomi Ecosystem enterprise, Roidmi does not have a strong supply chain foundation and wants to take the high-end route in a fiercely price-competitive track, ultimately leading to today's outcome.

01 A High-End Brand with an Unconventional Start

The development path of Roidmi is different from that of the mainstream cleaning appliance brands in the industry.

When it was founded in 2015, Roidmi started with automotive tool products, mainly including car chargers, magnetic mounts, and car cushions, with a customer unit price basically below 100 yuan, showing no sign of vacuum cleaner products. It was not until 2018 that Roidmi released a new car air purifier with a crowdfunding price of 699 yuan, vaguely revealing the brand's ambition to increase prices and profits.

The update of Roidmi's automotive products also stopped in 2018, and then the brand completely transformed into a high-end cleaning appliance brand, entering the market with handheld wireless vacuum cleaners.

The several brands that later grew into the "Four Little Dragons of Sweeping Robots" are all from a "professional" background: Ecovacs started from traditional vacuum cleaner ODM/OEM; Narwal did not launch products in the first three years after its establishment but was researching and developing industrial technologies for cleaning robots; and Roborock Technology and Dreame, which are also Xiaomi Ecosystem enterprises, started by OEMing the Xiaomi series of cleaning appliances.

Industry insiders disclosed to Yingke that the early vacuum cleaner products of Roidmi were OEMed by Lexy Electric Appliance Co., Ltd., and the key components of the vacuum cleaner products also came from Lexy. Public information shows that Lexy Electric Appliance Co., Ltd. is a well-known domestic household vacuum cleaner OEM factory, mainly engaged in OEM sales. Among them, the brushless high-speed motor of Lexy Electric Appliance Co., Ltd. is in a relatively leading position in the industry.

According to Tianyancha information, Ni Zugen, the chairman of Lexy Electric Appliance Co., Ltd., invested in Roidmi Technology in August 2017 and was one of the early investors of Roidmi, and withdrew in September 2021. The aforementioned industry insider said that the high level of Roidmi's early products was largely due to Lexy's mature OEM level.

The changing relationship between Roidmi and Lexy can also be glimpsed from the products released by Roidmi. In 2018, Roidmi participated in the CES International Consumer Electronics Show in the United States and globally launched the ROIDMI handheld wireless vacuum cleaner. In the same year, it appeared at the IFA Consumer Electronics Show in Berlin and the Hong Kong Autumn Electronics Fair, and won several awards such as the German iF International Design Award and the Red Dot Design Award. In October 2021, the official website indicated that a new product was about to be released, but it has not yet been launched. A meaningful "coincidence" is that in the same year, Lexy Electric Appliance Co., Ltd. withdrew from Roidmi.

However, Roidmi, with a brand name with a strong Xiaomi flavor, became popular on Xiaomi Youpin. However, the relationship between Roidmi and Xiaomi is not pleasant. In July 2023, Tianjin Jinmi Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership), an important investment entity of Xiaomi Ecosystem enterprises, sued Roidmi for equity transfer disputes. Subsequently, Roidmi was renamed Wuxi Ruilan Intelligent Technology Company, and only the main brand ROIDMI Roidmi still retains its original name.

In addition, Roidmi's awkward positioning is also an important reason for its halt. Due to its high-end positioning, Roidmi's handheld vacuum cleaner product is priced at 2699 yuan, and the full-featured sweeping and mopping robot EVA released in 2021 has a launch price of 3999 yuan. According to the "2022 Cleaning Appliance Industry Research Report", the average selling price of wireless vacuum cleaners is 1408 yuan, and the average selling price of floor washers is 2822 yuan. The market awareness cannot keep up with the pricing, and Roidmi's high-end positioning can only stop in the brand introduction.

02 Caught between Two Challenges

In the announcement on the official website of Roidmi Technology, the reason for the termination of operations is attributed to "changes in the market environment and adjustments to the company's business strategy".

In recent years, the cleaning appliance market has indeed experienced significant and dramatic changes. GFK data shows that in the ten years from 2012 to 2022, the scale of the Chinese cleaning appliance market has expanded 12 times, from 2.9 billion yuan to 34.8 billion yuan. However, since 2022, the sales growth rate has begun to enter a declining stage, further dropping to approximately 10% in 2023, and the number of machine retail units has decreased by 4% year-on-year.

At the same time, with the completion of technological innovations in map recognition and other aspects of sweeping robots, the handheld wireless vacuum cleaners that Roidmi Technology bets on have begun to gradually withdraw from the household cleaning appliance market. The "2022 Cleaning Appliance Industry Research Report" shows that in 2021, the sales share of sweeping robots reached 38.8%, which is significantly higher than the 26% of wireless vacuum cleaners. In addition, the sales growth rate of wireless vacuum cleaners is -7%, which is the only category with negative growth in cleaning appliances.

Under the background of a saturated market demand and weak growth, cleaning appliance brands have turned their attention to overseas markets. According to the Harmony Huiyi Research Report, the overseas sales volume of vacuum cleaners has basically stabilized at around 85 million units, with no obvious growth in the past ten years, while the sales volume of sweeping robot categories has grown rapidly overseas.

Roidmi, which released its first sweeping robot in 2021, not only missed the bonus period of the market opportunity explosion but also missed the window period for technological accumulation in the field of sweeping robots. At that time, it had been 13 years since Ecovacs released China's first sweeping robot, Dibao 7 Series, and Roborock, Dreame, and Narwal had also released several generations of products.

GFK data shows that in terms of cumulative retail share, The concentration of the top 5 brands in the online market of sweeping robots in 2023 is as high as 93%. That is to say, Roidmi, which did not enter the top five, has a very limited remaining competitive space.

In addition, in the case of intensified involution in the intelligent cleaning appliance track, the cycle of new product launches and technological iterations is further shortening. Since 2021, Ecovacs has maintained a rhythm of following up with new technologies of more than one per year. Dreame and Roborock Technology are even more aggressive in the rhythm. Roborock follows up with more than two per year. As of 2023, Dreame has updated a total of 4 products. Roidmi has thus fallen behind.

Roidmi not only missed the bonus period of the sweeping robot explosion but also was optimized and cleared out of the Xiaomi Ecosystem.

Xiaomi disclosed in its Q3 2021 earnings report that the number of IoT ecosystem enterprises invested by Xiaomi has exceeded 300. Among them, 210 were invested and incubated in 2019 and before. In 2020, the growth rate of Xiaomi IoT  consumer goods dropped sharply to 8.57%, and Xiaomi immediately began to optimize the SKU of Xiaomi Ecosystem enterprises and transfer the investment projects of the Xiaomi Ecosystem to the semiconductor and automotive manufacturing fields.

Roidmi, which is increasingly marginalized by Xiaomi, once tried to change its appearance and seek the protection of a giant again. Tianyancha shows that Wang Zhiqiang, the founder of Roidmi Technology, also serves as the executive director and general manager of Wuxi Qingyi Wisdom Technology Co., Ltd. According to public reports, Qingyi Wisdom Cleaning is a cooperative enterprise of Huawei Honor hilink Ecosystem in the smart home appliance - cleaning field.

This cooperation seems to have not aroused much splash. The last update in the official WeChat public account of Qingyi Wisdom Cleaning stopped on June 19, 2022.

Missing the time window for development and lacking a powerful supporter, Roidmi finally cannot continue. It has its own shortcomings and has chosen the wrong path at some critical junctions. However, there is still a part of Roidmi's exit that makes people feel nostalgic: It has experienced the most glorious moment of the IoT industry, but in 2024, the picture outlined by this story has lost all its glory. After saying goodbye to high growth, the bloody price war has become the most distinctive feature of the cleaning robot industry in this era.