OWS Earphones and AI Smart Home: China's Breakout Categories in H1 2024

Executive Summary

OWS (open-wearable-sound) earphones were the audio category's defining story of H1 2024, growing +219.4% YoY on Tmall and expanding market share from 10.2% to 17.0% of the wireless earphone segment in a single year — while Shokz and Huawei's FreeClip established dominant positions in hook-ear and clip-ear formats respectively. In smart home, China's two platforms told opposite stories: Tmall's smart bathroom declined -35.7% YoY as post-renovation demand normalized, while Douyin's smart appliances surged +115.6% and smart aerial devices approached +250% growth — with Xiaomi accelerating its home appliance expansion on the content-commerce channel. Brands in both categories face a critical choice: invest in emerging formats now, or cede ground to first-movers who are building moats while the market is still forming.

OWS Earphones: A Format Transition in Real Time

The OWS (open-wearable-sound) earphone category demonstrated one of the most compelling format-transition stories in China's consumer electronics market in H1 2024. Unlike previous audio format shifts — from wired to wireless, or from in-ear to over-ear — the OWS transition is happening across two simultaneous design dimensions: hook-ear and clip-ear. Understanding both is essential to understanding where the category is headed.

On Tmall, OWS earphone revenue grew +219.4% YoY in Jan-May 2024. Combined monthly revenue across Tmall and Douyin scaled from approximately CN¥ 110 million in early 2023 to CN¥ 353 million in May 2024 — a 3.2x increase in 17 months. A critical market dynamics shift occurred during this period: in early 2023, Douyin generated larger OWS earphone revenues than Tmall (the platform's content-creator audience discovered the category first through influencer demonstrations). By early 2024, Tmall had accelerated ahead, driven by Shokz's product launch momentum and Huawei's FreeClip entry. Both platforms are now scaling rapidly and simultaneously — a signal that OWS earphones have achieved mass-market awareness rather than remaining a platform-specific niche.

The format's appeal is grounded in a genuine consumer problem: standard Bluetooth earphones create discomfort, hearing-occlusion concerns, and situational safety issues (blocking ambient sound during outdoor exercise). OWS earphones resolve all three through open-ear design while delivering competitive audio quality and Bluetooth convenience at falling price points. ^[1]

OWS Format Deep-Dive: Hook-Ear vs. Clip-Ear

The OWS category has bifurcated into two distinct design formats with different consumer profiles, brand dynamics, and price positioning.

Hook-ear OWS: Targets sports and active users. Shokz — which pioneered the bone conduction format before transitioning successfully to OWS — commands 12.2% market share on Tmall, a +12.1pp YoY gain. Shokz's average selling price on Tmall is CN¥ 1,101.9, and the brand's OpenFit and OpenRun Pro series anchor the CN¥ 1,000+ premium tier. The price distribution in hook-ear OWS shows a bifurcated market: the below-CN¥ 200 tier captures the largest revenue share by volume, while the CN¥ 1,000+ tier captures approximately one-third of category revenue. This bimodal structure is typical of format-transition categories where early premium adopters and price-sensitive mass-market consumers arrive simultaneously. Other notable hook-ear competitors include Bose (average price CN¥ 2,297.0, new entry), Skyworth's earopen brand (CN¥ 140.5 average price), and Cleer (CN¥ 1,645.4, though losing -20.5pp share YoY).

Clip-ear OWS: Targets casual and everyday wearers. Huawei's FreeClip — launched in late 2023 — entered Tmall's clip-ear OWS market and immediately captured 15.0% share (+15.0pp, new entry) at an average price of CN¥ 1,339.2. The FreeClip's distinctive c-shaped design became a viral social media object with strong aesthetic appeal, introducing OWS to consumers who might have dismissed hook-ear formats as too sporty. Sanag holds 9.0% share at CN¥ 267.2 average price, while Jinyun (7.9% share, CN¥ 90.6 average price) and Disney-licensed products (2.6% share, CN¥ 61.6 average price) compete at accessible price points.

Bone conduction earphones — the previous "open-ear comfort" alternative — lost -3.3 percentage points of wireless earphone market share over the same period, directly ceding ground to OWS formats. Their disadvantage is clear: OWS earphones match or exceed bone conduction comfort while delivering significantly better audio quality and wider distribution support from mainstream brands. ^[2]

What the OWS Growth Means for the Broader Audio Market

The OWS expansion from 10.2% to 17.0% of wireless earphone revenue in 12 months has several implications:

• Standard Bluetooth earphones remain dominant at 61.2% of category revenue but are losing share gradually. The pace of loss — approximately 2.7 percentage points per year — suggests continued erosion rather than sudden displacement
• Headband wireless headphones declined slightly (-0.7pp to 14.5%) — premium audio enthusiasts appear largely unaffected by the OWS trend, maintaining their preference for over-ear sound isolation
• The buddy camera category (earphones with integrated camera) posted +372.9% YoY growth on Tmall and +403% YoY on Douyin, indicating a parallel trend toward multi-function audio wearables
• Smart speakers continued structural decline, with the with-screen variant falling -31.5% YoY and without-screen -11.5% YoY — product homogenization and competition from learning tablets are the root causes

For brands in the audio category, the OWS trajectory signals an urgent imperative: develop OWS product capabilities now, while distribution slots are still available and consumer brand awareness is still forming. Brands that entered the bone conduction format early captured durable positions (Shokz being the clearest example). The OWS format is approximately two years into a similar trajectory.

Smart Home: Platform Divergence as Strategic Signal

China's smart home vertical produced the starkest platform divergence of H1 2024, with Tmall and Douyin posting nearly inverse growth profiles across key sub-categories. Understanding why requires examining the structural differences in each platform's smart home audience.

Tmall smart home dynamics: Tmall's smart home base is more established and renovation-linked. Smart bathroom products — smart toilets and motorized clothes drying racks — form the largest sub-category at CN¥ 6.8 billion, but declined -35.7% YoY as post-renovation demand normalized following elevated pandemic-era home improvement spending. Smart appliances fell -24.6% YoY on Tmall. The categories that grew were security-oriented and control-oriented: smart home security +35.2% (CN¥ 3.5 billion), smart home control systems +38.1%.

Within Tmall's smart home growing categories, network cameras led at CN¥ 2.4 billion (+37.1% YoY), driven by declining camera prices and improving AI features — facial recognition, motion detection, two-way audio. Robot vacuums maintained CN¥ 2.4 billion at +14.6% YoY, with the all-in-one base station now the de facto standard configuration. Floor washers approached parity with robot vacuums at CN¥ 2.3 billion (+10.8% YoY).

Douyin smart home dynamics: On Douyin, smart home is in an expansion phase that mirrors the content platform's broader journey into home categories. Smart appliances — the dominant Douyin category at CN¥ 2.6 billion — grew +115.6% YoY. Smart aerial devices (drones) surged approximately +250% YoY, reflecting Douyin's natural affinity for aerial content creation. Smart lighting grew +90.8%, with consumers adopting smart lighting as both a functional upgrade and an aesthetic prop for social media content. The "Other" smart home category grew +277% — indicative of broad platform expansion across numerous emerging product types that haven't yet warranted their own tracking taxonomy.

Xiaomi's Smart Home Expansion Strategy

Xiaomi's performance in H1 2024 illustrates how an ecosystem brand can leverage platform dynamics to extend its reach. On Tmall, Xiaomi's smartphone recovery (the core platform anchoring its ecosystem) provided the foundation, while Mijia IoT products and large home appliances drove incremental expansion. Refrigerators, washing machines, and kitchen appliances all outperformed — categories that extend well beyond Xiaomi's traditional 3C stronghold.

On Douyin, Xiaomi's home appliance presence accelerated meaningfully. The brand's Douyin flagship store became a venue for product discovery among younger urban consumers who had not previously been part of the Xiaomi ecosystem. This matters because Douyin's smart home audience is structurally different from Tmall's: younger, more urban, more susceptible to discovery-driven purchase decisions, and more likely to share purchases as lifestyle content — creating organic marketing loops that reduce acquisition costs for subsequent launches.

The strategic implication is clear: brands that build Douyin-native content strategies for smart home products — rather than repurposing Tmall-oriented SKU listings — will capture disproportionate share of the platform's rapidly growing smart home audience.

About the Data

This analysis is based on Moojing Market Intelligence's proprietary e-commerce transaction data covering Jan-May 2024 across Tmall and Douyin platforms. Revenue figures are presented in Chinese yuan (CN¥). YoY comparisons reference the equivalent Jan-May 2023 period. OWS (Open Wearable Sound) earphone data tracks hook-ear and clip-ear format designs that use speaker proximity and directional audio rather than bone conduction or in-ear canal insertion. Smart home category definitions follow Tmall and Douyin platform taxonomy. All data sourced from the Moojing Five Verticals Review H1 2024 report.

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• Footnotes

^[1] IDC China, "Wearable Device Market in China, 2024 Q1 Forecast," April 2024. The OWS (open-wearable-sound) format encompasses any earphone design that delivers audio via proximity to the ear canal without insertion, including hook-ear (air-conduction sports design), clip-ear (c-shaped clip design), and tilt-ear designs. Market analysts project the OWS format to represent 25-30% of wireless earphone revenue by 2025 if current growth trajectories continue.

^[2] Strategy Analytics, "China True Wireless Stereo Earphones Market Tracker," Q2 2024. Bone conduction earphone brands face a structural challenge as OWS audio quality has improved to near-parity with bone conduction at competitive price points, while OWS designs offer superior comfort and more mainstream aesthetic appeal for non-sports use cases.