Chinese smart-home firms seek to expand global reach

Chinese smart-home companies are broadening their overseas business from individual appliances to branded product lines spanning indoor cleaning, outdoor maintenance, mobility and service robots.

At the ongoing IFA 2026 in Berlin, Dreame Technology brought its four core businesses — smart home, outdoor gardening, mobility and embodied AI — together at an international exhibition for the first time, a move that followed the company's June announcement that it would sharpen its focus on the four core areas.

Rather than focus on product launches, Dreame used the show to present the shared technology behind its four businesses. The same sensing, decision-making and control capabilities are applied across home cleaning, garden care, mobility and industrial work, making the four businesses different applications of a common robotics platform.

The cross-category approach comes as global demand for household robots is rising. Global market consultancy IDC has reported that global shipments of home-cleaning robots reached 8.94 million units in the first quarter of 2026, up 36.7 percent year-on-year. Robot vacuums remained the largest segment, with shipments rising 29.4 percent to 6.56 million units. Within that segment, European shipments increased 81.4 percent to 2.32 million units, as Chinese vendors expanded local inventories and distribution.

Europe accounted for 49 percent of revenue in Dreame's smart-home business from January to July, while revenue in the region rose 64 percent from a year earlier, according to company figures, which followed its robot vacuums' global-first place in both unit sales and revenue in the first quarter.

Growth also came from other cleaning products. The manufacturer said its wet-and-dry vacuum revenue in Europe increased more than 50 percent in the first half, while cordless vacuum sales in northeastern and southwestern Europe more than doubled in the first quarter.

The same strategy is moving outdoors. IDC data showed that global robotic lawn-mower shipments jumped 97 percent in the first quarter, supported by advances in boundary-free navigation and AI-assisted vision. Shipments across the Dreame, MOVA and NexLawn brands exceeded 500,000 units in the first half, while their combined European market share was more than 40 percent, according to company data.