In order to address issues such as product homogeneity and to increase overall competitiveness, companies should take Hikvision and Dahua’s lead and turn toward research and development for innovations that can help with product differentiation and portfolio diversification.
In order to address issues such as product homogeneity and to increase overall competitiveness, companies should take Hikvision Digital Technology and Dahua Technology's lead and turn toward research and development for innovations that can help with product differentiation and portfolio diversification. "The reason for Hikvision and Dahua's success lies in their huge investments in research and development as well as huge investments in marketing and quality control. Companies that want to be as successful as them have to learn this lesson," said Joe Qiu, Overseas Sales Director at
TVT Digital Technology.
Many companies have started to allocate a significant part of their annual sales figures toward product development. The investments of companies that participated in this article ranged from at least 10 to as high as 16 percent, with research teams and facilities created to further the process along.
Improved Product Offering
There are many different approaches a company can take to make their products and services distinct from others and make themselves more attractive to a specific target market.
The focus could be on improving the overall user experience, making it easy for them to deploy and implement products. "Recently, our company's focus in research and development has been on ease of use. We are bidding farewell to old-fashioned user designs and are committed to creating a 'foolproof' operating system for the next generation of IP products and solutions,' remarked Johnson Jiang, Overseas Sales Manager of
Hanbang Technology.
"For Uniview, focusing on understanding the actual problems that different end markets may have and providing innovative technologies and solutions to solve their problems is more important than offering simple 'supermarket-style' products," said Ximen Yan, VP of
Uniview Technologies.
Solutions and Niche Technologies
Some companies also leverage their knowledge and experience in certain market segments to provide tailor-made products and solutions. "Currently, KEDACOM's core business revolves around public safety projects, the prosecutor's office, courts, prisons, and the military," commented Sher Ye, New Media Marketing Director at KEDACOM. "Faced with these types of customers, our company launched a full range of solutions such as for safe cities, intelligent transportation, remote interrogation, and arraignment."
Certain Chinese companies are now also shifting their focus from merely producing products to producing solutions. "Bluesky provides customers with a full range of quality products tailored for banking customers. For instance, the company design its own video management platform to create one-stop solution for small-, mid-, and large-sized enterprises," said Benny Gu, Overseas Sales Director at BlueSky Technologies.
Other times, it's about analyzing the industry and positioning the company in a yet under-tapped market to possibly develop a niche for itself. "We think we are doing different things from others. We have many high-end intelligent video surveillance products. Recently, we released intelligent IP cameras with cognitive capability. Different from the current ones highlighting tripwire and forbidden area detection, KEDACOM's intelligent IP cameras can think and make judgements just like humans," said Ye.
"The key is the video analytics which can generate descriptions of people, vehicles, and objects based on video content. Through the descriptions, the camera can do further video capture and transmit the information directly to back-end big data and cloud computing platforms for data analysis and mining. This type of cognitive intelligent IP cameras are fundamental for smart cities which features big data application," continued Ye.