Number one in global market share! Chinese companies are selling smart security products worldwide.

Industry Analysis: Security and Smart Cameras

Author: Xiao Chuang

This article contains 2158 words and is estimated to take 6 minutes to read.

1. "If you don't go abroad, you're out of the game."
According to Statista's estimates, the global security market was expected to recover after 2024 and reach US$330.6 billion by 2026.

In recent years, many emerging overseas markets have experienced rapid growth, and several giants in China's complex security industry have been pursuing new growth through international expansion. Among them, Ezviz Networks has achieved particularly outstanding results.

Ezviz is a subsidiary of Hikvision, a leading company in China's security industry.

In 2023, Ezviz sold more than 18.84 million smart cameras, accounting for about 20% of the global market share, and was hailed as the "first smart home stock".

Compared to the 30% surge in exports of China's "new three pillars"—electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and photovoltaics—Ezviz Networks' overseas revenue has grown year after year, showing a counter-trend upward trend.

Given the negative impact of current global geopolitics and the high level of importance placed on information security abroad, how exactly has Ezviz achieved growth against the trend?

II. Focus on "Research and Development"
Over more than a decade, Ezviz has steadily developed from a single product into a product portfolio, and from a single application into an ecosystem. In 2013, its first home camera, the C1, won a German Red Dot Design Award. Products such as the C2S, F2 and S1 followed, with new releases regularly attracting market attention.

This success is entirely due to Ezviz's substantial investment in technological research and development. According to Ezviz's publicly disclosed report, as of the end of December 2023, Ezviz had 1,352 R&D personnel, accounting for 31.94% of the company's total employees. Ezviz holds 219 authorized invention patents and 83 software copyrights. Ezviz's R&D expenditure reached 731 million yuan, a 21.18% increase year-on-year, accounting for 15.10% of the company's operating revenue. How does this figure compare domestically? According to relevant data, among the top ten private enterprises in terms of R&D expenditure in 2022, only Baidu had an R&D-to-revenue ratio exceeding 15%.

Even compared with many industry leaders such as Inspur, BYD, and CATL, Ezviz Networks has a significantly higher R&D expenditure ratio of over 10%.

II. Region-Specific Website Operations
(1) A large volume of targeted traffic
Ezviz's leading global market position is reflected in the monthly organic traffic to its brand website, ezviz.com :

In July alone, the brand website's organic search traffic reached a staggering 434.1k, almost matching six months of visits to many emerging Chinese brands' websites.
Meanwhile, its business website has an average visit duration of 6 minutes and 20 seconds and a bounce rate of 40.90%, both of which are quite excellent.
This suggests that organic visitors to Ezviz's brand website are highly relevant. Its third-largest organic search query for ezviz.com is "ezviz pc", while the fifth is "ezviz for pc".

This comes from Ezviz's other major sector besides smart home products: "Software Services," namely the IoT cloud platform . "Software empowers hardware," and Ezviz's whole-house smart system achieves interconnectivity and a 3D visualization end-to-end closed loop.

This brings consumers into the company's app, allowing them to extend the lifespan of hardware products and increase user stickiness by providing more value-added services. According to Ezviz's publicly disclosed financial reports, in 2023, revenue from its IoT cloud platform reached 850 million yuan, accounting for 17.5% of total revenue. Judging from the revenue figures, Ezviz's "software-enabled hardware" model has undoubtedly proven successful.

(II) Targeted Conversion by Region: For different countries and regions, Ezviz has established corresponding business websites to conduct targeted operations across multiple global sites, such as North America, Japan, and the Middle East. In terms of website visual presentation, in addition to using the local language as standard, Ezviz designs almost every site individually according to local mainstream aesthetics, even including banners, to better gain the trust of local consumers and encourage orders.

From left to right: The website operation strategies differ across regions—the United States, Canada, Japan, and the Middle East—as can be seen from ezviz.com business websites in various countries. Firstly, the homepage layout differs; in North American countries like the United States and Canada , the leftmost section is dedicated to promotional information .

In France, the homepage not only removed the store entrance but also added "Devenir un Revendeur" (Become a Revendeur). In the Middle East, to better suit local consumers' reading habits, Ezviz reversed the beginning and end of its website logo and removed the store and reseller entrances.

Furthermore, I also discovered that the featured products in each region's section are not the same. Ezviz will place the most popular products in the most prominent places according to the needs of consumers in different regions.

This not only makes it easier for local consumers to find the products they need, but also effectively improves the conversion rate of the brand website. From the various details of the Ezviz brand website, it's clear they deeply understand the Google SEO "best practice" requirement of "conversion and targeted traffic".
It is therefore understandable that the brand led the global smart-camera market in 2023 and achieved revenue growth against the market trend.

III. Epilogue: A Note from Xiaochuang

Overall, there are relatively few companies in the market that can acquire users by selling hardware and then attract users to subscribe to software for secondary payments. Ezviz can be considered one of them.

Ezviz Networks has successfully achieved best-selling status for its smart security products in the global market thanks to its technological innovation, market insight, and effective global expansion .

Brand websites play an indispensable role in this process. By building business websites in different regions, Ezviz has been able to conduct refined operations for local consumers , effectively ensuring the delivery and conversion of targeted traffic.

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