IFA Live Coverage: Chinese Hardware Is Conquering the Last High Ground in Europe

As one of the world's top three leading consumer technology exhibitions, IFA has never been short of innovative highlights.

In 1930, radio was still an emerging breakthrough technology that had not yet been popularized among the public. At that time, IFA invited Einstein, the most prestigious scientist in the world back then, to serve as the opening keynote speaker. The first words he said were: "Liebe Anwesende und Abwesende!" ("Dear everyone present, and everyone absent!"), which was transmitted in real time to hundreds of thousands of listeners through radio waves, making people feel the shock that "the future has come" for the first time intuitively.

In that on-site speech, Einstein reminded people to maintain reverence and insight towards technology. "Those who enjoy the wonders of science and technology but never think about the knowledge behind them should feel ashamed — it is just like a cow enjoying plants without knowing anything about botany," he said. This remark established the near-century-old temperament of IFA: it not only showcases the evolution of technology, but also records how technology reshapes people's lifestyles and social forms.

In the following hundred years, many world-class innovative technologies chose to make their debut at IFA. In 1931, the world's first public demonstration of all-electronic television transmission was held; in 1963, Philips released the world's first cassette tape at IFA; in 1981, CD discs made their global debut at IFA......

Einstein attending IFA in 1930

The 102nd IFA arrived as scheduled, and Xiaguang She traveled all the way to Berlin, Germany for on-site coverage. The theme of this edition is "The Future Is Now". Leif Lindner, official CEO of IFA, pointed out when explaining the theme that this slogan represents a change in mindset: technologies that seemed unreachable and only existed in demo PPTs a few years ago have now truly integrated into and changed people's daily lives.

This also seems to show the German attitude towards building a future vision: don't make us look forward to tomorrow forever, the available functions of products right now matter more. The perfect collision of "rigor and pragmatism" and "future innovation" can find the most perfect interpretation at the exhibition site.

Some exhibitors feel the show is more lively, because Chinese enterprises' attention to IFA is rising. This is the year with the highest proportion of Chinese enterprises participating in the exhibition. According to official statistics from IFA, among the approximately 1,900 global exhibitors this year, the number of Chinese enterprises reached 932, accounting for about 49%. Compared with the scale of about 700 Chinese exhibitors in 2025 (accounting for about one third), the number of Chinese enterprises participating in 2026 has increased significantly by about 35%. However, since the official statistics are actually based on the country marked by the brand entity, the number of Chinese enterprises perceived by Xiaguang She is actually even larger.

From this perspective, it can be simply understood that the European market wants to showcase the world's most practical innovative products, and half of them come from China. Therefore, a Chinese national who has lived in Berlin for a long time told Xiaguang She, "After entering the venue, the concentration of Chinese exhibitors is so high that I feel like I am back home." Some participating exhibitors also said, "I have met countless old domestic friends in Berlin, and we always meet at domestic exhibitions."

Some other exhibitors feel a little deserted. This is not surprising. In terms of visitor flow, IFA expects to welcome 220,000 visitors during the exhibition. This number is not surprising, because as early as 2015, IFA attracted 245,000 visitors and 1,645 exhibitors.

In addition, compared with some exhibitions that focus more on showing off skills and demonstrating technological advancement, IFA seems a little less fancy.

As one of the countries with the highest savings propensity in Europe (the household savings rate in Germany has long remained above 10%-11%), Germans rarely pay for pure showing off, and they attach great importance to product durability, functionality and after-sales guarantee.

Therefore, most manufacturers will display two types of products: one type is already on sale, posted with basic information such as technical parameter cards, prices, application scenarios, etc. Purchasers usually compare several units, try them out, and then calculate the cost performance; the other part is product prototypes that are not yet on sale but are planned to be launched on the market. If customers are interested in placing pre-orders, they can get a pretty good discount.

The technologies exhibited at the exhibition site are no longer distant pre-research for the next few years, but real technologies that consumers can place orders for today and use in their living rooms and daily lives soon. An exhibitor told Xiaguang She that pragmatism is the real source of business operation and sales. Spending a lot of money to show off technologies may only get a glamorous appearance, but result in zero sales in reality.

What is more noteworthy is that Leif Lindner, CEO of IFA, said that most visitors at this edition of IFA are under 35 years old, so this will be a platform for "the next generation to meet the next generation of technologies". "We need to understand what these technologies mean to us, because 'trust' cannot be downloaded. Trust is built on practice and trial, which is exactly what the Berlin exhibition presents."

Innovation for people, which is perhaps the most unique charm of IFA for exhibitors.

01

Who is new？

This is Xiaomi's first official participation in IFA.

The exhibition hall of more than 3,000 square meters covers Xiaomi's full business lines of people, vehicles and homes, covering more than 380 products. According to Xiaomi staff, in the eyes of European consumers, they still regard Xiaomi as a mobile phone company. This time, Xiaomi brings its full ecological product line to show that Xiaomi's products are no longer limited to automobiles.

Lu Weibing, Partner and President of Xiaomi Group, said in an on-site interview, "IFA is an exhibition of consumer electronics plus home appliances, which is closely related to the rapid development of our IoT business and large home appliance business in the past few years. Our arrival at IFA is also a milestone, because a very important thing next year is that our automobiles will also come here, which is our general rhythm arrangement."

In his view, Xiaomi's arrival at IFA is also an external display of Chinese technology, ecology and business model at IFA. Among the products exhibited this time, Xiaomi's first flagship foldable phone Xiaomi 18 Fold made its global debut, and Xiaomi's humanoid robot was also exhibited overseas for the first time.

In terms of home appliances, this is Xiaomi's smart home brand Mijia officially announcing its large-scale entry into Europe at IFA. In the "AI Today" exhibition area, Xiaomi brings AI capabilities into living spaces such as kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms and studies, showing local consumers the experience of collaboration between AI, smart home and personal devices;

At the end of September last year, Xiaomi also officially opened its first official retail store in Germany at the Limbecker Platz shopping mall in Essen, Germany, covering an area of 99 square meters, displaying products such as smartphones, TVs, vacuum cleaners, mopping robots, kitchen appliances and electric scooters.

Compared with home appliances, Xiaomi's automobile products will enter the European market one year later. Three models, Vision Gran Turismo concept car, SU7 Ultra and SU7 Max, are displayed at the on-site booth. Since March, SU7 and SU7 GT models have been tested in France, Poland, the Netherlands and other places. It is reported that Xiaomi plans to launch commercial sales in Europe in 2027.

Xiaomi Auto exhibition hall at IFA

IFA is a key step for Xiaomi Auto to face the European market. The European automobile industry itself has strong local brands and the most competitive market, which is exactly the key reason why enterprises choose Europe as the first stop for their automobiles to go overseas. According to data disclosed by Xiaomi, this year's IFA has signed contracts with 8 top German dealers to prepare for the entry of automobiles into Europe in 2027.

In addition to mobile phones, home appliances and automobiles, Xiaomi also brought its three newly released Xuanjie chips O3, O100 and D100, which were just launched in China not long ago, to European users, and these three chips will become the computing power base of Xiaomi's "full ecology of people, vehicles and homes" in the future.

Another interesting new product comes from AI diet management brand ODYSS, which first showcased its upcoming AI diet management necklace ODYSS N1 at IFA. For a long time, wearable devices have been quite mature in sleep and sports tracking, but diet management has always been the missing piece in the personal health management puzzle. The launch of ODYSS N1 breaks this deadlock.

ODYSS N1 collects eating data in real time to complete the user's full health panorama. It will generate three diet scores: nutritional quality, energy supply and eating regularity; and analyze the specific impact of each eating session on the body's energy, fatigue recovery and sleep quality. It runs quietly in the background and becomes a nutrition partner that seamlessly integrates into users' daily lives.

Xiaguang She experienced it on site. After putting on the necklace, you will find that the advantage of the necklace is that it is light enough, with a weight of only tens of grams, which can realize all-day non-inductive wearing. Equipped with a low-power visual perception camera module, it solves the pain point that traditional wearable devices cannot accurately capture "diet data".

In addition, in Europe, where privacy security is particularly valued, ODYSS also specially pointed out its emphasis on privacy protection. It has a dedicated physical switch that can turn all sensing functions on or off with one click; the "sleep mode" will automatically reduce the operation intensity when the user is not eating. At the software level, ODYSS only processes food-related information, automatically filters irrelevant content, blurs faces and personal features in images, and deletes original images after processing. The all-round protection mechanism allows users to wear it with peace of mind without worrying about privacy leakage.

Odyss also won the 2026 IFA Innovation Award this time.

Hypershell, a leading enterprise in the consumer exoskeleton field, also moved its new product launch venue to IFA. The core breakthrough of its new generation flagship product Halo is that it elevates the assistance dimension from a local part to the entire lower limb. By integrating 4 coordinated control assistance motors on the left and right sides of the hip joint and knee joint, Halo realizes true full-leg power coverage for the first time, making it the world's first ultra-flagship full lower limb exoskeleton.

Compared with the mechanical logic of the previous generation products or traditional exoskeletons that only provide single-point assistance at the moment of "lifting the leg", Halo tries to reconstruct the power compensation of the entire movement cycle. From leg lifting, landing, downhill to squatting, its control system can dynamically switch at the millisecond level based on the real-time posture of the human body. Whether it is the pulling force when climbing a steep uphill, or the buffer impact when landing downhill, the power follow-up can achieve seamless connection.

In order to reduce the physical threshold and cognitive barrier of such hardcore equipment, Hypershell also installed a "large model brain" for Halo: it is built with the exoskeleton industry's first AI Agent "Shelly". Users do not need to switch between complex physical buttons or APP parameters tediously, and can complete assistance mode setting, route planning and real-time sports guidance only through natural language dialogue; even when wearing it for the first time, Shelly can provide hands-on interactive guidance, minimizing the getting-started cost for zero-based users.

Hypershell exhibition hall

Previously, Hypershell's first-generation product Hypershell X has cumulatively delivered 30,000 units globally in 2025.

At the IFA site, compared with the popularity of wearable devices in the Chinese market, this is the category with the thinnest lineup at the exhibition. Garmin, Apple, Fitbit, Huawei, Oura and Polar are not on the list of exhibitors. However, this also gives more attention to the brands present. The staff of RingConn at the site told Xiaguang She that this IFA is a formal self-introduction to European consumers.

02

Who is hot？

At this year's exhibition, consumer-grade robots are the category with the strongest sense of commercialization urgency and the highest on-site crowding degree.

In the product display session, all brands showed their own robots' "stair climbing" ability on site to demonstrate their product performance. Different from other tech exhibitions that prefer to play exquisite concept rendering videos, IFA has always been famous for displaying hardware products with clear selling prices and delivery dates rather than just playing concept videos, which makes it an excellent platform to evaluate whether robots are still stuck in the laboratory or can truly step into the living rooms of the public.

It is obvious on site that more cleaning robots are moving towards multi-category directions, instead of being limited to a single scenario.

For example, Ecovacs also brought the window cleaning display of its Winbot series to IFA, with non-stop real window cleaning throughout the day, allowing European consumers to intuitively see the real effect of the product. The latest data shows that Ecovacs window cleaning robots rank first in the global market, with a domestic market share of over 65%.

Ecovacs booth

As for the courtyard scenario, almost every Chinese cleaning robot enterprise has built a small artificial swimming pool and green lawn on its booth. The selling points of various products' presentations have evolved into how steep the limit slope the lawn mowing robot can challenge, and whether it can overcome the high-difficulty edge scenario of "lawn edge trimming". The A4 AWD PRO lawn mowing robot released by Dreame focuses on coping with extreme terrain such as 42° steep slopes, and achieves 0cm edge trimming; Eufy, a sub-brand of Anker Innovations, released the S2 Max lawn mowing robot, which is directly equipped with a retractable and rotating robotic arm on the body, specially designed to solve the edge trimming problem of complex courtyard boundaries.

At the other end of the exhibition hall, Chinese embodied intelligence enterprises including Unitree, AgiBot/EngineAI and Deep Robotics also collectively brought their own embodied humanoid robots to the site.

According to on-site exhibitors, the popularity of robots at IFA is also the result of the market "changing track".

On July 28 this year, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) included foreign-made advanced robot equipment in its "Covered List". The list covers mobile equipment weighing more than 4.4 pounds (including the base), with the capabilities of movement, navigation and obstacle avoidance, and can be operated remotely. Cleaning robots also fall into this category.

Products that have been certified before this date can still continue to sell their existing inventory; but if new flagship models are to be introduced into the US market, an exemption must be applied for, and the application conditions include the commitment to move the production line to the United States.

Therefore, as a grand event for overseas consumers, these enterprises turned their attention to Berlin. This also changed the