Tech trends in Romania: Smart homes prepare for launch

The global smart home market is expected to grow from USD 47.0 billion in 2015 to USD 122 billion by 2022, on the wave of increasing demand for lighting, entertainment control and home healthcare, according to Research and Markets. In Romania, adoption is at niche level, with the only category of products that shines being smart TV.

Otilia Haraga

“If I were to play an imagination game, I would say one can recognize a smart home right from the entrance – with a surveillance camera connected to a mobile phone, daily set temperature that can be adjusted remotely, a smart lighting system which lights up even before you enter the room, and a sound system that greets you with your favorite music right from the door,” Cristian Neagu, product management director at Flanco Retail, tells BR.

The living room would be equipped with a smart TV and a remote that can change channels and modify the color of the ambient lighting or control the outer gate, while in a corner of the TV screen, the user could see the images transmitted by surveillance camera.

While the smart home owner is away, the washing machine would do the laundry, the drying machine would dry the clothes and the fridge would cool the champagne to the ideal temperature with just a simple command from the smartphone.

For safety reasons, a smart home can have movement sensors but also water and gas sensors which can warn the owner in the event of flooding or gas leaks, according to Neagu.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and smart appliances will completely change users’ way of life, Ionut Petrica, division manager, white & small goods, at Altex Romania, tells BR. The management of these devices will be simplified and integrated, costs will be much lower, and consumers will save time and energy.

“Users will have access in real time to what is happening around them and at home, and appliances will be doing their job like they are programmed and controlled to do: the vacuum cleaner and washing machine will start when they are programmed, and when users come home, they will be able to find warm food in the microwave or the electric oven,” Neagu tells BR.

“We are witnessing the outline of the first generation of smart homes, with smart devices in the living room, bedroom and kitchen. (…) However, we still cannot talk about an application or service that can integrate all the smart devices in the home into an ecosystem. I believe it’s only a matter of time until this happens, and that will be the zero moment for the global adoption of the smart home concept,” Lucian Radulescu, cluster head for Romania and Moldova at Sony Europe, tells BR.

For the time being, electronic products and home appliances are making it more and more often onto Romanians’ shopping lists, Petrica tells BR. “We at Altex and Media Galaxy believe that the five smart appliances that will top consumers’ preferences in the coming years will be air conditioning, washing machine, laundry drier, dishwasher and electric oven,” he predicts.

At the moment, he says that the smart appliances segment is a rather limited niche, with high growth potential. “Of course the weight in sales of these products will increase but we do not expect very high values, they will still remain niche. This trend is influenced by current consumption habits, which are more and more encouraged by digital progress and IoT,” Petrica tells BR.

The ratio of smart appliance sales differs depending on the category of products. In the case of TVs, 50 percent of all sales are smart TVs, while for other categories of products, the technologies are just being implemented, and the rate is under 5 percent, says Neagu.

While Romanians are now more receptive to smart TVs, he estimates that in five years more attention will be paid to home appliances such as vacuum cleaners, air conditioning devices, fridges and washing machines.

For the top five devices that will set the trends over the coming years he pinpoints smart TVs, with or without Android, audio-video systems, air conditioning, fridges, and smart watches.

Radulescu tells BR that portable projectors will turn walls into entertainment surfaces. Multifunctional devices such as LED light bulbs with audio functions or wireless speakers with illumination function will become more and more part of the modern living room. Last but not least, he expects the wearable gadgets and smart electronics in the house to communicate more easily and offer faster access to entertainment content.

However, with greater comfort come greater challenges in controlling the leak of personal information into the wrong hands.

“The more technologies are connected, the more information they will learn about the user. This is why it is extremely important that devices in smart homes have highly advanced security solutions. We are in an early stage of development of the smart home concept, but as this trend is developing, producers of smart devices for homes and companies specialized in security will be able to offer more complex security solutions to protect the data of the final user,” Radulescu tells BR.

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