Robot vacuum cleaners are starting to draw the "kill line"

In the second quarter of 2026, the top five manufacturers (CR5) in the global robot vacuum cleaner market captured 75% of the shipment share and 82% of the sales revenue share.

The "market clearance" feature has begun to emerge in the domestic market. In just half a year, 11 brands and 73 product models have disappeared from online channels.

In the previous year, robot vacuum cleaners were the center of attention: DJI entered the track, Dreame grabbed the spotlight. Behind the hustle and bustle, industry concentration has risen across the board, and this high-growth market has entered a stock competition phase.

Small and medium-sized brands are squeezed out by leading players

After the trade-in policy was introduced in July 2024, all provincial-level regions independently included robot vacuums in the subsidy scope, with the maximum subsidy amount reaching 2,000 yuan in places like Beijing.

The total sales revenue of robot vacuums surged by 41.1% to 193.6 billion yuan in 2024, and exceeded 210 billion yuan in 2025. The subsidies concentrated and released a large number of replacement demands that should have been scattered over the next two to three years.

On December 30, 2025, the national subsidies were phased out. Although local subsidies continued in a few provinces and cities, their coverage and intensity were no longer as strong as the previous year.

The subsidies were equivalent to releasing demands in advance, and the "withdrawal reaction" after the phase-out was obvious. A source close to the home appliance supply chain told the media: "In March and April after the subsidy ebbed, dealers of many small and medium-sized brands directly stopped placing orders."

Data from Luo Tu Technology shows that online sales of robot vacuums in China reached 621,000 units from January to February 2026, down 22.2% year on year.

The chill at the terminal quickly spread to the upstream. According to reports, multiple suppliers of Dreame fed back that overdue payments started to appear intensively from the second quarter of 2026, with amounts ranging from tens of thousands of yuan to tens of millions of yuan. Even leading enterprises are facing cash flow and supply chain pressure, let alone small and medium-sized brands.

This difficult environment has accelerated the ongoing market differentiation.

According to IDC, in the second quarter of 2026, Roborock held a 23.7% market share, up 2.9 percentage points year on year. Dreame's share rose from 12.2% to 21.2%, a 9-percentage-point increase, while Ecovacs' share also increased by 2.7 percentage points. Meanwhile, the share of brands classified as "others" dropped from 38.3% to 25%, a decrease of 13.3 percentage points.

Leading players are seizing the market vacuum left by the exit of small trailing brands.

Most white-label and small & medium-sized brands are stuck in the gap between "functional enough" and "worth buying". Their product feature descriptions are almost identical: laser navigation, AI obstacle avoidance, automatic dust collection, hot water mopping pad washing, which have no essential difference from products two or three years ago. Facing competition from big brands, without differentiated market positioning and technology premium, it is very difficult for them to survive.

With the disruption of new brands such as DJI and MOVA (subsidiary of Dreame), even waist-tier manufacturers like Narwal have fallen into the "others" category, and the market survival threshold is increasingly converging with that of the broader home appliance market.

Overseas expansion is the main growth engine

As the domestic market enters the phase of stock competition and small & medium-sized brands are squeezed out, leading players do not fully stay in China to fight price wars. Instead, they bet their incremental growth on overseas markets. Overseas expansion is not the only path, but it is the most certain source of growth for leading enterprises at present.

Roborock's revenue in the first half of the year reached 10.084 billion yuan, up 27.60% year on year, and its net profit attributable to shareholders was 986 million yuan, up 45.60% year on year. Among the total revenue, overseas revenue reached 6.073 billion yuan, accounting for more than 60%, while this proportion was less than 50% in the same period of 2025.

In the first half of the year, the proportion of overseas revenue in the total revenue of all brands rose by 8.2 percentage points year on year to 49.0%, and exceeded domestic revenue for the first time in the second quarter, reaching 51.0%. Ecovacs' brand overseas revenue increased by 46.5% year on year, and its new category overseas revenue rose by 75.1% year on year. Ecovacs, once listed on the capital market as "the first stock of robot vacuum cleaners", is becoming a company dominated by overseas revenue.

The other side of the high growth in overseas markets is the structural decline of net profit margin.

Ecovacs' revenue in the first half of the year reached 10.341 billion yuan, up 19.18% year on year, its net profit attributable to shareholders was 1.248 billion yuan, up 27.4% year on year, while its non-recurring profit and loss deducted net profit attributable to shareholders decreased by 6.37% year on year. A considerable part of the profit came from the investment income of Seagull Intelligent's Hong Kong stock listing and RealMan Intelligent, and the two items contributed a total of about 406 million yuan. After deducting these non-recurring gains and losses, the profit of the main business is under pressure.

The strategic logic of these two companies is two sides of the same coin: Roborock exchanges channel expansion for scale, while Ecovacs exchanges category expansion for optimized business structure.

Roborock uses offline key accounts such as Costco and MediaMarkt in North America and Europe to rapidly expand sales volume, but the cost of these leading channels is relatively high.

Ecovacs, in addition to robot vacuums, has bet on lawn mowing robots, window cleaning robots and swimming pool robots. The overseas revenue of these new categories is growing rapidly, using new scenarios to hedge the growth ceiling of the single robot vacuum product. However, the current scale of these categories is still relatively small, and it remains to be seen whether this growth rate can be maintained at a larger scale.

Xiaomi's overseas expansion path for robot vacuums is different from that of Roborock and Ecovacs, which relies more on the Xiaomi ecosystem. Xiaomi's advantages in overseas expansion lie in its brand recognition and channel reuse capability, but robot vacuum is not its core category after all, and there is uncertainty about how much resources it can allocate to this business.

Overseas expansion is not a risk-free smooth road.

Policy risks are inevitable. In July 2026, the US FCC introduced new regulations. New models that meet the conditions of navigation and obstacle avoidance, internet connectivity, and total weight (including base station) over 2kg will find it difficult to obtain regular authorization, and need to go through the conditional review channel with higher thresholds. The more countries a company lays out in, the more diversified the policy risks will be.

From a broader perspective, the profit margin of overseas markets is constrained by channel costs, policy fluctuations and local operation capabilities.

From expansion to focus

Since the beginning of this year, the previous hustle and bustle has faded, enterprises have shifted from high-profile to low-profile operations, and the robot vacuum industry has gradually abandoned blind expansion.

Dreame is the most representative sample worthy of analysis in 2026. On August 28, 2025, Dreame Technology officially announced its entry into the new energy vehicle sector.

But one year later, on September 1, 2026, Dreame Technology confirmed to the media that it had abandoned the mass production plan of its automobile business, and only retained relevant technology reserves, with the related business incorporated into the Industrial Research Institute for management.

Reporters from Shanghai Securities News conducted on-site visits and found that there is no trace of car manufacturing in Dreame's Suzhou headquarters campus, the RV workshop at the Quanjiao factory in Anhui is completely dark, and the car manufacturing team has been reduced from nearly 1,000 people to less than 100 people.

Previously, Dreame's internal business units once expanded to more than 200, extending from robot vacuums to automobiles, mobile phones, chips and even milk tea, with the number of employees approaching 28,000.

In mid-2026, Dreame compressed more than 200 business units into four major sectors, only retaining tracks with high growth potential and technical synergy, and cutting off inefficient business units that have no technical correlation and cannot make profits in the long run.

The industrial implication of this move is very clear: in the stage of intensified competition in the main business, the second growth curve cannot drag down the core business.

The main robot vacuum business requires continuous R&D investment, channel construction and price system maintenance. If the organization's resources are excessively scattered to exploratory businesses that do not generate synergy, the competitiveness of the core business will be eroded.

Narwal is another typical case. Zhang Junbin once positioned himself as a "super product manager", taking engineering and product development as the core battlefield, and paying very little attention to marketing.

It was not until he personally took over the marketing system in the second half of 2025 that he realized that the relationship between product and marketing is not additive, but multiplicative logic — "If either of the two approaches zero, the result will be zero".

The cost of this cognitive shift is huge. Narwal failed to hit its 5 billion yuan revenue target in 2025, and the revenue in most months could not cover marketing and operating costs. The company only recovered briefly during the 618 and Double 11 shopping festivals, and remained in a loss state for the whole year.

Co-founder Wu Yihao stepped down from his management position on the eve of the company's IPO, and the team was streamlined from 1,600 people to 1,400 people. After organizational restructuring, Narwal's overseas revenue increased by nearly 50% year on year from January to April 2026, and the group's gross profit margin increased by more than ten percentage points compared with the period before Zhang Junbin took over the marketing system. This shows that after the organizational efficiency is restored, product strength can be converted into commercial results.

The practices of these companies point to the same direction: the fault tolerance space of the robot vacuum industry has narrowed, the "willful" decisions of founders and the extensive expansion of organizations need to be corrected. Focus, organizational efficiency and business closed loop jointly determine the competitiveness of enterprises.

Depth, Precision and Business Restraint

"Market clearance" is not the end, but the beginning of a new competition rhythm. The main competitors left are all leading players, and the cost of making mistakes is decreasing.

The depth of global operation determines the upper limit of growth. The proportion of overseas revenue of Roborock and Ecovacs has approached or exceeded 50%. Both companies are facing the same challenge: how to maintain a positive profit cycle in overseas markets with lower gross margins. "Revenue growth without profit growth" is a structural feature in the overseas expansion stage.

DJI provides a different reference: it does not pursue low-price sales volume. The ROMO 2 series saw a 217% year-on-year increase in online channels in the first week of its launch in Europe, and a 170% increase in offline channels. It entered more than 100 offline stores in France alone, with all products priced at more than 4,500 yuan at the high-end segment.

DJI's logic is "homologous technology": it redesigns the perception, obstacle avoidance and algorithm capabilities accumulated in the drone field and applies them to home scenarios, using its technology label to obtain pricing power in the high-end market.

This path is more difficult, but once it is successfully implemented, the profit margin will be much higher than that of low-price volume sales. DJI's overall scale in the robot vacuum market is still limited at present, and it remains to be verified by time whether its success can be replicated at a larger shipment volume.

The precision of organizational efficiency determines the lower limit of survival. Dreame compressed more than 200 business units into four major sectors, and Narwal streamlined its team from 1,600 people to 1,400 people, both of which are corrections to the extensive expansion in the past few years. In the stage of intensified competition, every redundancy in the organization is consuming the competitiveness of the core business.

Zhang Junbin told the media that Narwal's major organizational restructuring has been basically completed, the synergy loopholes between marketing and product teams are being fixed one by one, and the group's gross profit margin has increased by more than ten percentage points.

But Narwal's problems are also obvious. It is extremely difficult for the company to return to the leading competition sequence after the organizational restructuring. In the second quarter, Narwal's market share was even surpassed by MOVA, with its share falling below 4.5%, while it still had a 7.5% share in the first three quarters of last year, leaving little room for it to seize more market share.

The degree of restraint on the second growth curve determines the space for making mistakes. Dreame's abandonment of car manufacturing is a landmark event, which shows that even in the leading camp, resources are not unlimited, and the profit margin of the core robot vacuum business is not enough to support the exploration of multiple capital-intensive new businesses at the same time. A healthy second growth curve is category extension with technical synergy with the main business, rather than cross-border adventure starting from scratch.

Finally, back to the most simple question: when the competition pattern tends to be stable, what do the companies remaining in the game rely on to make consumers choose their own products?

The answer is not only in the parameter list. The source of differentiation is more likely to come from the in-depth understanding of home cleaning scenarios, and the ability to convert this understanding into stable product experience.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Shudu She", written by Hou Yu, and published with authorization from 36Kr.