Casarte defends its position, COLMO chases, and Samsung exits: Among the five major high-end home appliance brands, who will have the last laugh?

After a decade of hype around smart home appliances, standardized regulations are finally being established.

The two national standards for smart home appliances implemented this May classify smart home appliances into L1-L5 levels based on two dimensions: "smart capability" and "scenario effect". Before this grading system was introduced, the home appliance industry was often plagued by the phenomenon of "pseudo-intelligence".

The "Smart Home Appliance Consumption Survey Report" released by Jiangsu Provincial Consumer Rights Protection Committee states that 60% of respondents reported that the function utilization rate of their smart home appliances is less than 30%. Exaggerated features, complicated operation, and poor interconnection have become the three main problems of smart home appliances.

After the release of the new national standards for smart home appliances, the "pseudo-intelligence" phenomenon will be effectively curbed. This also means that only products meeting the L4 level and above standards can be defined as high-end home appliances. Against the backdrop of reshaping industry rules, the five leading brands — Casarte, COLMO, Siemens, Panasonic, and Samsung — each have their own competitive strategies.

Casarte: Market Dominance and Perceptual Cracks

As a leading domestic high-end home appliance enterprise, Casarte maintains an unshakable market position.

Casarte's proudest R&D achievement is its L4-level active smart technology. The company's Conductor series products were the first to obtain the L4-level smart home appliance certification tested and certified by China Household Electrical Appliances Research Institute, marking the first related case in the high-end home appliance industry.

This series of products is equipped with the "AI Eye 2.0" system, realizing an upgrade from the "passive command-based" to "active perception-based" service experience. The smart refrigerator in the suite can automatically identify ingredients and recommend recipes to users.

Casarte takes a full-category original technology matrix as its core advantage, with core technologies including MSA oxygen-controlled fresh-keeping, zoned washing and care, and double-tower soft airflow. To date, it has accumulated more than 3,000 patent applications, led the formulation of 82 international standards and 402 national standards, forming a non-replicable full-category technology matrix.

Casarte follows the trend of "home integration" in design. Its TV products feature the exclusive "Guanqiong Gray" color scheme with micron-level precision photolithography texture, and the entire product line supports a fully flat embedded installation method, which is more in line with the current minimalist home decoration aesthetic.

As the company's scale expands, Casarte also has certain management blind spots.

Deficiencies exist in quality control and after-sales system. Through consumer platforms such as Black Cat Complaint, it can be seen that some of Casarte's high-end models have problems including core hardware failures and untimely after-sales responses. In addition, since the after-sales service system is integrated into Haier's general service network, some users feel that Casarte's service standards do not match its product pricing.

There is no fully unified pricing system. There are certain price differences between Casarte's online e-commerce platforms and offline dealers. Some products use different names to distinguish configurations, and some discounted products flow into the third-party market, which undermines Casarte's high-end positioning and user trust.

COLMO: AI Newcomer and the "Sandwich Layer" Dilemma

COLMO is a high-end sub-brand of Midea Group, focusing on "new technology luxury" and taking AI technology as the core entry point to create a differentiated high-end smart experience.

The industry's first AI Agent intelligent system is COLMO's biggest advantage. In 2025, the company launched the "COLMO AI Brain". Relying on Midea's self-developed "Meiyan Large Model", after more than 100,000 hours of family scenario learning and millions of levels of home training data, the "COLMO AI Brain" achieves a user intention recognition accuracy of over 95% and a device control accuracy of over 90%, enabling active management and seamless interaction of the entire house's home appliances.

Full-scenario intelligent collaboration is the breakthrough point of COLMO's experience. In terms of scenario collaboration, COLMO connects five living systems: air, water, energy, diet, and washing and care. More than 1,000 smart devices can be connected, and a single command can trigger the collaborative response of 20 devices. Its full-scenario interconnection capability is in the first echelon of the industry.

Extreme rational aesthetic in appearance is the principle that COLMO adheres to in design. After the company insisted on the "Bauhaus" rational aesthetic style and adopted a flat embedded process for product appearance, many of its products have won international design awards such as the German Red Dot Award and iF Design Award.

As an emerging brand, COLMO also faces growing pains.

The brand positioning is in an awkward "sandwich" state. COLMO cannot shake international luxury home appliance brands such as Miele and Gaggenau upward, and cannot impress entry-level consumers due to its high pricing. Some consumers also believe that COLMO is a "rebranded Midea" because its core components share many channels with Midea, and cannot justify its premium.

In addition, COLMO has a low degree of external openness, making it difficult to integrate with mainstream interconnection ecosystems such as Xiaomi, and the compatibility with cross-brand devices is poor. Moreover, it extensively uses Midea's distribution network at the channel end, and store displays lack pertinence, which weakens the brand's high-end positioning to a certain extent.

Siemens: Adherence and Conservatism of German Craftsmanship

Siemens is a century-old industrial giant with a reputation for stable quality in the high-end market, and it also occupies an important share in the 10,000-yuan refrigerator market.

The product has good stability and reliability, which is an important manifestation of "German craftsmanship". Although Siemens no longer provides butter paper packaging as a gift, its products still have a low failure rate and solid workmanship. Its core home appliance technologies such as zero-degree biological fresh-keeping and iQ series variable frequency motors are all developed around product durability.

A strong brand image endorsement is one of Siemens' key advantages. As a global technology giant, Siemens' business covers industry, healthcare, energy and other fields, and its products have technical heritage and credibility endorsement. For users who pursue stability, Siemens is a reliable brand.

German design is simple and restrained, which makes Siemens' brand tonality more prominent. In terms of appearance, Siemens' home appliance products are designed to be simple and unassuming, closely follow the embedded trend, and focus on the balance between functionality and aesthetics. Its "Aurora" series is a typical example.

However, as a foreign brand, Siemens has not fully kept up with the pace of the Chinese market.

The relatively slow development of software intelligence is an obvious signal. According to the 2026 smart home appliance grading evaluation results from China Household Electrical Appliances Research Institute, most of Siemens' mainstream high-end models only reach the L2 level of intelligence. Its Home Connect interconnection system can only realize basic functions such as remote control and status query, without active intelligence capability and a complete scenario ecosystem. As a result, its appeal to young high-end users continues to decline.

In terms of marketing, Siemens also shows an overly conservative trend. Its brand focuses too much on technical parameters and quality promotion, lacks lifestyle marketing and emotional value transmission, and fails to break away from Chinese consumers' stereotypes of German enterprises.

Panasonic: Refined Breakthrough in Niche Tracks

As a representative of Japanese brands, Panasonic's domestic home appliance business has shrunk in recent years, but with the technical accumulation in specific categories, it still occupies a place in the high-end market.

Panasonic uses refined health technologies to embark on a differentiated niche track. Its exclusive technologies such as nanoe purification and foam cleaning accurately hit users' psychological needs for safety in the post-pandemic era, building a clear user mindset in the healthy home appliance track.

Excellent space utilization and humanized design are another major advantage of Panasonic in the home appliance field. Due to the generally narrow living space of Japanese people, Panasonic has accumulated a lot of experience in small-sized apartment products. Its high-end refrigerator products have excellent internal zoned design and reasonable ergonomic operation logic, which are deeply loved by sophisticated family users.

Due to its pure Japanese heritage, Panasonic has prominent shortcomings in the high-end home appliance field.

The lack of a smart ecosystem is the key contradiction. The weak intelligent R&D capability of Japanese enterprises is a common problem. Panasonic's smart home appliances are mostly limited to single-category function optimization, lacking cross-category active intelligent interconnection capability, which shows obvious limitations in the high-end smart home appliance market where integrated product sets are popular.

The shrinking market presence and channels are also one of the pain points of Japanese companies such as Panasonic. After domestic manufacturers increased their efforts in the high-end market, Panasonic's home appliance business in China has been squeezed, and offline experience outlets have decreased, leading to its recognition among young consumer groups being gradually diluted by domestic brands.

Samsung: Fashionable Design and Localization Growing Pains

Korean brands used to be important players in China's high-end home appliance market, but after the company previously announced the withdrawal of its full-category home appliance business from the Chinese mainland market, Samsung is currently facing a major transition.

Highly recognizable fashionable design is Samsung's forte. Leveraging avant-garde and bold appearance designs, Samsung's high-end home appliances have created a unique brand label. The appearance styles of products such as its Bespoke series refrigerators and QLED series TVs have unique visual impact, which are deeply loved by trend-loving young high-end users.

Samsung also has certain accumulation in the fields of display and interconnection technologies. Many of Samsung's high-end home appliance products can form a seamless interconnection ecosystem experience with its own mobile phones, tablets and other terminal devices, and have certain collaborative function advantages in the ecosystem of Korean technology enterprises.

However, times have changed, and Samsung is facing huge challenges in China's high-end home appliance market.

Affected by the geopolitical landscape, Samsung Group has carried out strategic contraction. Previously, Samsung terminated its home appliance business in the Chinese mainland, which caused it to lose the direct support of local supply chains, offline channels, and after-sales systems, and its market influence has declined significantly.

At the software level, Samsung's home appliances have insufficient localization adaptation. Its SmartThings ecosystem does not support China's mainstream interconnection platforms such as HarmonyOS and Mijia, and cannot adapt to the voice control and device interconnection habits commonly used by Chinese consumers, which makes consumers prefer more convenient domestic brands.

Future Trends of High-End Smart Home Appliances: Three Judgments in the Reshuffling Period

Standing at the industry turning point of the new national standards' high requirements, the competition logic of high-end smart home appliances is being completely reshaped. Four industry trends will determine the future market pattern and final direction.

Trend 1: The core of competition shifts from "involution of parameters" to "active service", and L4-level intelligence becomes the entry threshold for high-end products.

The implementation of the new national standards gives a unified quantitative scale for the intelligence level. L4-level native active intelligence has become the threshold for high-end home appliances. AI large models learn users' living habits, make scenario predictions and independent decisions, and finally realize the smart experience of "service finding users".

Trend 2: Ecosystem openness and interconnection are inevitable, and closed ecosystems will continue to face pressure.

One of the biggest pain points in the current smart home industry is that cross-brand devices cannot connect to each other, and users cannot freely combine products from different brands. To solve this problem, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has launched the formulation of smart home interconnection-related standards. The interconnection of cross-brand and cross-protocol devices has become an inevitable trend in the industry, and brands that adhere to the closed ecosystem route will see their market space continue to shrink.

Trend 3: High-end brands are currently on the eve of a "service stress test", and the pseudo-high-end model will be eliminated by the market.

The premium of high-end home appliances comes not only from the products themselves, but also from exclusive service experiences and full-cycle user guarantees. Many "pseudo-high-end" brands with unstable quality control, shared after-sales systems with mass brands, and chaotic pricing systems will gradually weaken after consumers' rationality returns, and eventually be eliminated by the market.

The market pattern presents a state of "one superpower with multiple strong players", and cross-border participants may reconstruct the value system.

The current market as a whole shows a competitive pattern of "one superpower with multiple strong players". Casarte takes the leading position with full-category layout and deep channel advantages, while traditional brands such as COLMO, Siemens, and Panasonic occupy niche markets with their own differentiated positioning.

However, the entry of cross-border giants may reconstruct the value system of home appliances. Technology companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi enter the home appliance industry with whole-house smart solutions. They build unique late-mover advantages through open ecosystems and extreme cost advantages. The right to define high-end home appliance brands may change in the future.

So here's the question: which brand of smart home appliances do you think is more reliable? Feel free to share your opinions.