Midea's 31st Science and Technology Month: Shifting from Parameter Rat Race to Originality Competition

Every year, the Technology Month is a moment for Midea to flex its technological muscles. The awards under the spotlight are dazzling, but what truly deserves attention is often the R&D logic hidden behind the products. The 31st Technology Month sent a clear signal: Midea's innovation focus is shifting from "parameter involution" to "originality competition."

At the award ceremony, Fang Hongbo, Chairman and President of Midea Group, emphasized: "Without investment in and accumulation of technology, there would be no Midea today; we must upgrade from homogeneous competition to originality competition."

This statement is not a slogan for the occasion, but the underlying logic of the Midea R&D system's evolution over many years.

Outsiders looking at Technology Month are used to counting awards, viewing new products, and noting patent numbers; but what truly deserves to be recorded is the invisible things behind the medals—how a technology starts from a user's minor inconvenience, passes through laboratories, production lines, cross-ocean teams, and years of silence, and finally lands in a product that others are willing to pay for.

The starting point of product innovation is specific scenarios

In the past, the narrative of home appliance innovation often involved improving energy efficiency by a few points, reducing noise by a few dB, or changing the exterior to a new generation of materials. But the starting points of several award-winning projects this year were not parameters, but a specific person and a specific trouble.

The origin of the refrigerator Autofill series was the awkwardness of American users holding a cup to get ice water. You had to press once for water and again for ice, holding the cup the whole time, and ice cubes would splash.

The Chinese and American teams divided the work accordingly: the U.S. side was responsible for user insights and compliance verification, and the Chinese side for structural design and engineering implementation. The final product simplified the operation of getting ice water into one step through cup-height recognition, ice-surface sensing, and anti-splash shutdown. The value of this kind of innovation lies not in stacking sensors, but in translating real overseas usage habits into mass-producible mechanical and algorithmic solutions.

The dual-engine three-dimensional surface wave heating from the Microwave and Oven Division also started from the same logic.

The pain point of traditional microwave ovens is "hot in the middle, cold at the edges," rooted in standing waves: energy is like a spotlight, hitting only a few fixed points. Midea did not continue adjusting power within the standing-wave framework; instead, it introduced surface wave technology from the satellite communications field into the sealed cavity, changing microwave energy distribution from a "spotlight" to more uniform coverage. The project lasted five years, achieving industrialization from a mechanism breakthrough to a dual-engine system architecture, and won the only second prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award in the microwave industry.

The refrigerator sideboard product is also scenario-driven. Targeting the scenario of limited installation space for sideboards, the R&D team restructured the cooling layout through a vertical center-mounted cooling system, supporting the new category of sideboard refrigerators, with the X90 platform architecture covering brands such as Midea, COLMO, Toshiba, and WAHIN. The difficulty lies not in making the exterior thin, but in the spatial restructuring of the cooling system.

The commonality of these projects is clear: the starting point of innovation is user scenarios, the endpoint is engineering implementation, and the technical difficulty is hidden in invisible places.

"Three Generations" is the shock absorber for enterprises against short-sightedness

The reason these projects could cross long R&D cycles and ultimately land does not rely on the flash of insight of a certain engineer, but on the "three generations" R&D system that Midea has run for years: research one generation, reserve one generation, develop one generation.

The value of this mechanism lies in allowing the enterprise to breathe with three rhythms at the same time: developing one generation solves current product delivery, reserving one generation solves platform continuity, and researching one generation addresses technological variables over a longer time dimension.

The path of blue oxygen technology is typical. The R&D team did not follow parameter involution, but returned to first principles: how to match the catalyst? How to develop and manufacture the catalyst in-house? How to mount it on washing machines? Achieving a stable electrochemical concentration is actually not difficult; what is difficult is matching the complex scenarios of washing machines—achieving manufacturability and reliability for different clothes and different programs while meeting consumer needs.

More critically, blue oxygen did not stop at washing machines. It leveraged the group research institute level to connect to dryers, small household appliances, and kitchen and heating products, with the goal of a "unified module across all categories" from 0 to 1 and then to N.

This is precisely the dividend of platform-based R&D: an underlying breakthrough no longer depends on the life cycle of a single product, but grows into a technology ecosystem. A unified underlying architecture supports multi-brand, multi-category products and reduces duplicate development. For manufacturing enterprises, the significance of platformization is not only cost reduction, but also precipitating a single technological breakthrough into reusable R&D assets.

When Fang Hongbo emphasized "originality competition" at Technology Month, the essence is that while the industry is still competing on parameters, Midea chooses to push R&D one step forward and define the next generation of technical principles and platform architecture in advance.

From core components to smart factories, original technologies take root

Among the Technology Breakthrough Awards at this year's Technology Month, there is another project that is easily overlooked by consumers but carries great weight: the heavy-load RV reducer.

RV reducers are core components of industrial robot joints and have long been monopolized by foreign countries. Midea's project path was not procurement and integration, but a positive closed loop from structural design, processing and manufacturing, to testing and evaluation, overcoming long-standing difficulties restricting the localization of heavy-load RV reducers, with durability test life reaching 8000h and achieving independent controllability of core components.

After industrial robots scale up, reducers directly affect precision, lifespan, and delivery costs. Mastering core links in one's own hands means the domestic robot industry is no longer constrained by external supply chains and can also feed validated component capabilities back into domestic industrial manufacturing.

The Jingzhou washing machine agent factory is currently uniformly scheduled by a "factory brain" across 14 agents, covering 38 core production scenarios such as R&D, supply chain, planning, manufacturing, quality, and logistics. Public data shows that first-article quality inspection time has been compressed from 15 minutes to 30 seconds, scheduling response speed has increased by 90%, and average efficiency has improved by more than 80%. On the execution side, the Meiluo humanoid robot undertakes standardized tasks such as first inspection delivery of the rear tub and fire patrol inspection, while the Yutu AI patrol robot completes panel status recognition and autonomous start-stop of experimental units, with patrol frequency significantly improved compared with manual two-shift operation once per hour.

On the home side, Midea is more restrained. Xu Yi of the Midea AI Research Institute judges that home robots will not arrive immediately. If any link fails—hardware reliability, generalization in open spaces, or breakpoint experience—user perception is zero. Therefore, Midea chose "industry first, home slow fire": first train embodied intelligence thoroughly in semi-structured industrial scenarios, then flow it back to the home side.

Epilogue:

Public information from the 31st Technology Month shows that Midea's cumulative scientific research awards exceed 600 million yuan, global patent applications exceed 170,000, and it has participated in the formulation and revision of more than 2,500 external standards. Behind these numbers is an organizational mechanism that allows technology to be incubated over the long term.

Surface wave technology was tackled for five years, blue oxygen technology was adapted to different water quality and clothing scenarios, and the V9 installed electricity meters into multi-split units... The commonality of these projects is not "more advanced," but "closer to real needs." The significance of Technology Month lies not in short-term display, but in verifying whether this mechanism can continuously produce such projects.

For manufacturing enterprises, the biggest risk of technological investment is not failure, but abandoning long-term tracks under short-term performance pressure.

Midea's current choice is to continue increasing investment in the R&D system itself, rather than merely chasing single-product hits. The effectiveness of this strategy will gradually emerge in market competition over the next three to five years.