Dividend payout of 32.4 billion yuan, planning to invest 60 billion yuan in R&D over the next three years. How far along is Midea's transformation story?

High dividends combined with high revenue and net profit growth, leading home appliance giant Midea Group (000333.SZ; 00300.HK) delivers its 2025 performance report.

According to the annual report, the company achieved revenue of 458.5B yuan last year, a year-on-year increase of 12.11%; net profit attributable to shareholders was 43.95B yuan, up 14.03% year-on-year. Based on this, Midea Group continued its high-dividend strategy: planning to distribute 38 yuan per 10 shares as cash dividends, plus an interim dividend of 5 yuan per 10 shares, totaling 32.4 billion yuan in cash dividends for the year.

With such profitability and generous dividends, on March 31, Midea Group closed at 76.35 yuan per share, up 5.89%, with a market value exceeding 580 billion yuan.

Under the leadership of Fang Hongbo, Midea is attempting to change the external perception of it as a traditional home appliance company. In the 2025 annual report, Midea Group explicitly mentioned AI for the first time in its shareholder letter, defining the “AI technology wave” as an “unprecedented impact.” Previously, at the 2026 whole-house smart strategy launch conference, Midea also announced that over the next three years, it would invest 60 billion yuan, focusing on AI, embodied intelligence, and new energy, to truly advance home appliances toward intelligence and AI.

However, on the path of downplaying the “home appliance company” label and shifting toward an “AI + global technology group,” this transformation has yet to form a clear external perception.

From the product and technology perspective, Midea Group is building concepts such as “home brain” and “factory brain” around smart home, intelligent manufacturing, smart office, and industry empowerment scenarios. But these layouts still show some dispersion.

On one hand, Midea has not yet released a self-developed foundational large model; its AI capabilities are more reflected in scenario integration and system engineering, still lagging behind the “core capability output” typical of tech giants. On the other hand, in the humanoid robot field, although the company has launched multiple products and entered some scenarios, it has not yet entered the mainstream industry rankings in terms of shipment scale or industry position.

This has also led to cautious judgments about its “tech attributes”: internally, AI is more seen as an efficiency tool and home appliance upgrade method; externally, it has yet to produce industry-influential products or platform-level outputs.

On March 31, the Times Weekly reporter contacted Midea Group regarding related business issues via phone and letter, but had not received substantive responses as of press time.

AI transformation still climbing

The overall home appliance industry is currently under pressure.

According to AVC (All View Cloud) data, the domestic home appliance (excluding 3C) retail market size in 2025 is projected at 893.1 billion yuan, a decline of 4.3% year-on-year. Against this demand slowdown, Midea Group delivered the above-mentioned performance results.

In comparison, non-traditional businesses seem to be the areas Midea hopes to emphasize.

From the annual report, it can be seen that Midea’s AI strategy is more about “embedded upgrades” to its existing home appliance system. On one hand, by covering different price ranges and consumer groups through multiple brands, it continues to strengthen penetration into home scenarios; on the other hand, by using the “Meiju” app and “XiaoMei AI Home Assistant” as core entry points, it reconstructs interaction experiences, offering voice, multimodal, and other control methods, attempting to shift from “device control” to “scenario understanding.” In offline channels, Midea combines design tools with AI to improve whole-house solution output and delivery efficiency.

Technologically, Midea integrates its self-developed “Meiyan” and external large model capabilities, introduces multimodal reasoning, and constructs an intelligent agent framework for the home appliance industry, forming a closed loop of “perception—learning—decision—execution,” and applying it in systems such as air, water, and cooking. Official data shows that this system has served over 20 million users, with nearly 30 million daily interactions, and an intent recognition accuracy of 95%.

However, from user experience and industry reality, the so-called “intelligentization” still mostly remains at remote control and preset scenario linkage; active services based on understanding and reasoning have not yet become widespread, and device collaboration is mostly trigger-based rather than continuous decision-making.

In terms of path choice, Midea has diverged from platform-type players.

Tian Feng, director of the Quants Think Tank, told Times Weekly that Huawei (HarmonyOS Smart Home) and Xiaomi (Full Ecosystem for Vehicles and Homes) have underlying OS-level coordination capabilities. In contrast, traditional white and black home appliance giants often operate independently, lacking the software engineering genes to connect underlying APIs across brands and protocols.

But on the other side, this “shortcoming” also corresponds to different business possibilities.

“Centered on home appliances, Midea’s whole-house smart path has advantages in a complete product matrix, deep channel coverage, and mature delivery services, which can directly solve the pain points of affordable, installable, and reliable products,” said Ding Shaojiang, chief analyst at GKURC Industry Think Tank. Compared to Xiaomi and Huawei’s platform models, Midea’s hardware entry points and after-sales services are more “heavy” and controllable.

He believes that Midea’s ceiling is not necessarily lower than platform players, but is limited in ecosystem expansion and system-level experience. If it can connect efficiently with third-party systems, its hardware path also has long-term vitality.

Further, this difference is essentially a trade-off between “platform capability” and “scenario delivery ability.” “Midea’s core strength lies in its deep delivery capability for real-life scenarios,” said Liang Zhenpeng, a senior industry economist, who noted that Midea covers multiple systems such as air, water, cooking, and energy, with a complete product chain, enabling integrated linkage in specific scenarios like kitchens, balconies, and bathrooms—something that models relying on ecosystem cooperation like Xiaomi and Huawei cannot easily match.

However, as competition shifts from “device linkage” to “active service,” deeper constraints begin to emerge. Tian Feng believes that active services require massive end-cloud collaborative reasoning power, and traditional home appliance companies are accustomed to one-time hardware sales, severely lacking the business closed-loop capability to support high-frequency token consumption over the entire lifecycle.

Notably, in May 2025, Midea Group Chairman Fang Hongbo publicly stated, “I still firmly believe that great companies will emerge in the home appliance industry; the possibility of creating high-tech companies is nonexistent.” This judgment creates some tension with its current strategy of emphasizing AI and robotics.

In response, Ding Shaojiang believes that Fang Hongbo emphasizes that home appliances themselves are unlikely to produce high-tech companies, but Midea’s current strategic core has shifted toward AI, robotics, and automation as foundational capabilities. Essentially, this is about using home appliances as a platform for technological implementation. “From making home appliances to reshaping home appliances with technology, this transformation does not deny the home appliance business but empowers the traditional main business with high-tech, while also opening up B-end growth.”

Early completion of business closed-loop

Since acquiring German robot company KUKA, robotics and automation have always been key pillars in Midea’s “de-home-appliance” narrative.

In 2025, Midea’s robotics and automation revenue reached 31.01B yuan, up 8.05% year-on-year; gross margin was 21.31%, a slight decrease of 0.69%. According to MIR Industrial Intelligence, in 2025, KUKA’s domestic market share of industrial robots increased to 9.6%, ranking among the top three; in heavy-load robots, KUKA’s domestic sales share for 300kg+ payload robots reached 47.4%.

Compared to complete industrial robot systems, components have become another certain growth path. In robot parts, Midea focuses on servo motors, precision transmission products (such as gear reducers), and humanoid robot joint modules. In 2025, servo motor shipments exceeded 70k units, and precision gear reducers shipped over 30k units.

In the high-profile humanoid robot sector, Midea also maintains continuous investment. By 2025, Midea has developed three generations with a total of five humanoid robot products, and has begun pilot applications in internal and commercial scenarios.

Among them, the industrial humanoid robot “Meiro” has entered Midea’s Jingzhou washing machine factory; the commercial scenario robot “Meila” is expected to be officially launched in Midea’s offline stores in 2026, providing guiding and home appliance operation demonstration services; the high-performance bipedal full humanoid robot “Meila X” has full terrain high-dynamic movement capabilities, capable of climbing slopes, stairs, running, dancing, etc., and can learn actions via video in as little as 2 hours.

However, from industry comparisons, its commercialization progress remains limited.

According to Omdia’s “General Humanoid Robot Market Radar” report, Midea’s humanoid robots are not listed, and Tesla, at the bottom of the list, shipped 150 units annually. This may indicate that Midea’s humanoid robots are still in scenario validation and technology polishing stages, without mass production or commercial shipment.

In the robotics field, Midea may have formed a relatively clear strategy: build a foundation with industrial robots and core components, and reserve humanoid robots as a long-term technological backup. But in the short term, its “robot story” may not meet the explosive demand for humanoid robots.

Next, as Midea treats ToB (business-to-business) as its second growth engine, it will face tests amid different industry competition landscapes.