Online education companies are having a hard time these days.
Online education, which was hot in 2020, will be dead in 2021. It’s July, which would have been a good time for major platforms to recruit students with great fanfare, but not a single online education company has advertised for students. Compared to last year’s barrage of advertising brainwashing, this year’s silence feels unreal.
When the dividend brought by the epidemic in 2020 faded away under the gradually stricter regulatory environment, the online education industry has entered the rest stage.
Unlike the current situation of online education, education intelligent hardware, which belongs to the education track, is thriving. In the first quarter of 2021, Netease Youdao recorded a record high growth rate, among which the revenue of intelligent hardware sector surged year on year.
Under such an opportunity, for the birth of a short time of great intelligence, great significance. Can Bytes-owned brand, which broke into education with a learning lamp, make a difference in this opportunity?
How is strength tempered?
Educational hardware is many years older than online education. From dictionary pens, reading machines, to learning machines, intelligent lamps, education hardware has been constantly innovating.
2020 is also the education hardware industry in recent years a draught. Under the impact of the epidemic, the demand for intelligent education hardware has been stimulated and there has been an explosive growth.
According to QuestMobile, the education hardware industry completed 56 investment and financing deals in Q1 in 2020 alone. The fact that capital markets are so bullish on educational hardware is a recognition of the potential value behind it.
When the market is large enough, it will naturally attract a lot of capital. Bytedance, one of the Internet giants, has entered the education market with educational smart hardware.
Much like old rival Tencent, bytedance’s first foray into education was through Maimaimai.
Bytedance has invested in a number of companies since 2016 and conducted preliminary exploration in 2018. In 2020, on the eighth anniversary of Bytedance’s establishment, Zhang Yiming proposed to take education as the future direction of education, and announced the launch of “Dali Education” as the first publicly released independent business brand in the education sector, and took over all the education products and businesses of Bytedance.
In this press conference, it only took more than 20 minutes to introduce the layout of Byte education, and the rest of the hour, Byte’s first educational hardware product “Dali Intelligent Tutor Lamp”, occupied the rest of the time.
Energetically intelligent with its desk lamp, was given high hope undoubtedly. In March 2021, At bytedance’s ninth anniversary celebration, Zhang yiming listed Great Power Intelligence as one of the company’s seven most promising businesses.
Market changes are always invisible, and no one knows what will happen next. At the beginning of 2021, after the craze of online education in 2020, many online education institutions have been named and criticized by regulators, and even found the same “actor” to represent them.
After this, the online education industry was focused on supervision, from multiple channels to regulate online education enterprises, and finally made the share price of a leading online education enterprise led by Who to learn, good future, New Oriental plummeted. The decline of online education has attracted more attention to educational hardware. Homework Gang and New Oriental have begun to turn to hardware projects, and the educational hardware industry seems to usher in a new upsurge.
But is it really a good thing for CAI Vigorously, a fledgling?
After the lamp, where will Dali go?
If an industry is worth entering, the premise is whether its future development space is huge. The educational hardware industry fits the bill.
According to the “2021 China Education Intelligent Hardware Trend Insight Report” recently released by Tencent Research Institute and other institutions, it is estimated that in 2020, the market size of education intelligent hardware is 34.3 billion yuan, is expected to expand to 45.3 billion yuan in 2021, and by 2024, this figure is expected to be close to 100 billion yuan; According to duojing Capital Education Research Institute, the market size of K12 education intelligent hardware will reach 57 billion yuan by 2022.
It can be seen that we have chosen a direction with great development potential by entering the education industry through educational hardware. But, the direction that chooses with other manufacturer place is different, what intelligence chooses energetically is the intelligent desk lamp of relatively minority.
In fact, as a subdivision of educational hardware category, lamp products actually already exist in the market.
As early as 2000, Hasbro launched the concept of eye-protecting table lamp in the domestic market, and similar eye-protecting table lamp products became the favorite educational products of parents in China at that time.
As intelligence begins to become the focus of The Times, the role of desk lamp is no longer limited to protect the eye only, some intelligent desk lamp that can have simple interaction with the child appears on the market. In 2016, IFLYtek launched the “Aladdin” eye-protecting lamp, which not only has the most basic eye-protecting function, but also can realize simple online chat and interactive supervision functions.
And nowadays, the intelligent desk lamp that energetically intelligent place rolls out, more resemble “protect eye lamp + mobile phone” combination. In terms of its functions, in addition to the most basic lamp function, the intelligent learning assistant can assist children in learning, while providing a series of functions such as remote tutoring for parents.
At first glance, great power intelligent learning lamp seems to have many functions, but in actual experience, can it really meet the needs of users?
On Zhihu, a netizen said: “The help for children’s study is very limited, and it is not as good as parents’ companionship.”
Take the lamp’s built-in learning AIDS, for example, from checking homework, calculating big adventures and looking up words with your fingertips. These functions have actually been covered by mobile learning apps. In addition, its built-in teaching materials are not rich enough, such as English only translated forest edition. At the same time, in its advertised homework guidance function, due to the poor identification of the problem stem, ultimately lead to problems in the problem solving process.
In summary, as a product that has been put on the market for sale, energetically intelligent learning lamp still has many problems. Although it can be improved and optimized through subsequent system upgrades, it will become a hidden danger to affect its future sales if users are patient in the early stage.
For great intelligence, education intelligent lamp is its first product into the education hardware track, there are problems beyond reproach. But the point is to clarify what the value of educational hardware is.
The core of educational hardware, whether it is educational intelligent lamp or educational tablet, is to be able to connect and reach users for a long time, and these users will be potential customers of educational paid content in the future.
The existence of energetically intelligent learning lamp, its purpose is to deeply reach the user group, the ultimate goal is to achieve through this media to complete the later related business promotion. But obviously, only a lamp, and can not complete the mission.
Take the domestic education hardware manufacturer Better Life as an example. Since the era of repel machine, BETTER Life has built a huge education hardware network, such as reading machine, learning machine, and now learning tablet. Better Life has built a strong ecological barrier in the education hardware ecology.
What can foresee is, desk lamp is not the only category that can be future of intelligence energetically, but seize ecology of this one hardware, it is its at present place must want to do.
Do content vigorously, can produce miracle?
In 2021, online education is in the ebb tide, but online education has a certain scale for the consumer market and consumption habits. As online education slows down, does this mean that educational smart hardware with similar functional attributes can help to break the ice in the field of education?
Although the whole industry seems to be very prosperous, but if you carefully analyze the intelligence itself, you will find some clues.
As the forerunner of intelligent learning desk lamp, the gap between great intelligence and latecomer is being shortened gradually. Just from the product point of view, a large number of similar products have begun to appear in the market. Because of their lack of technology, there is little difference between these products.
Today, the barrier to entry in intelligent learning is not high. Several of the most basic functions of intelligent desk lamp, such as voice interaction and dot graph query, are no longer competitive in technology. Related technology, there have been manufacturers to provide a complete set of service solutions. Sonnet, a real-time interactive cloud service provider, has launched a complete set of solutions for intelligent learning lights, which can realize complete voice interaction and image recognition.
All of these mean that educational intelligent hardware, the final direction of the competition or return to the content.
Education industry, no matter which segment of the track, is essentially inseparable from content and services. While hardware can bring in some variables, it ultimately just provides a tool property and educational scenario.
Compared with competitors such as Tujibang and New Oriental, which have been working on educational content for many years, Dendai relies on the entire education sector of Bytedance, but byte itself has few advantages in the field of education, which makes it unable to compete in high-quality content.
As a sub-brand of Great effort education in the education intelligent hardware, its lack of content also shows the shortcomings of byte in the education plate.
For the Internet giants, a new product is likely to succeed as long as it brings in a huge amount of traffic. However, for education, flow is no longer the secret of success, how to seize the hearts of parents, effectively solve their needs, is the main reason to determine the success of the product.
“Chicken baby” is a new word that has been searched for many times recently. The birth of this hot word is the inevitable result of the continuous internal volume of domestic education. In the past, it was only the nature of parents to expect their children to be successful and their daughters to be successful. Until now, no “chicken baby” is not a qualified parent.
As competition intensifies, parents’ hopes for their children’s success reach their peak in this basic environment. But at the heart of getting parents to pay is improving their children’s grades.
So, no matter how bullish the education hardware business is today, the destination is back to content. The reason why online education platforms are so keen on famous teachers is that good teachers can actually improve students’ grades and attract parents to buy them back.
In a word, educational hardware may be a supplement to the educational process, but it is not realistic to completely replace it.
No matter the education tablet or the current learning lamp, only when it is integrated into the whole education scene and retains the traditional habits of education as far as possible, can it have the chance to go further by carrying out secondary upgrading and iteration on this basis. At the very least, the lack of educational content resources will make it difficult to continue in the future in this crowded education industry, which may be the key point that Powersmart and even Bytedance need to think about.
Author Squirrel Fish
Article | pine cones of finance and economics (songguocaijing1)