Sharp Europe to Expand Smart Home and Consumer Electronics Business with Tuya Smart

As a world-class brand, Sharp Europe has been a visionary leader in the field of smart home and consumer electronics, collaborating with Tuya Smart (NYSE: TUYA), a global IoT development platform service provider, to expand its AIoT ecosystem. It may surprise you to know that Sharp was the first company to use the term ‘AIoT’. In fiscal year 2020, its sales totaled 21 billion USD with over 46,000 employees worldwide.

Nick Chen, Chairman Of The Board of Sharp Europe, recently shared insights on the new digital landscape, created by IoT technologies, in the European consumer market in the online forum, Global Smart Connectivity: Sharing, Openness, Opportunities.

Sharp Europe’s AIoT ecosystem and localization strategies revolve around making people’s lives healthier and happier, creating a smart lifestyle. While Sharp is known for its innovative TV technology and hardware, it mission now is to expand into other smart home devices. In the Pan-Europe region, Sharp has only 725 local employees which is considered a slim company compared to its much larger Japanese electronics counterparts. Sharp Europe knew it would need to find a partner to fulfill its AIoT ecosystem goals to stay competitive.

Understanding the European market was starting to embrace voice control and AI, it needed a partner with strong industry alliances, an established IoT platform, open ecosystem, and the capability to easily integrate and control many different product types. Working with Tuya will allow Sharp Europe to release products quickly and save on development costs. The Tuya solution can control multiple devices with just one app, allowing Sharp Europe to rapidly grow sales and to also align with Shopify. Sharp’s hardware expertise combined with Tuya’s IoT platform creates a complementary bond moving forward.

Since the start of the pandemic, European consumers have placed more emphasis on personal outdoor transportation, smart home devices, and entertainment. Sharp Europe, with the help of Tuya, is meeting these demands by introducing smart e-scooters, performance speakers, robot vacuums, and air purifiers with Plasmacluster Ion technology. Sharp is also using its social media channels to attract younger consumers and female consumers who have increasing buying power. In addition to smart devices, Sharp is expanding into AIoT services via its COCORO smart life app.

Other European growth trends Sharp Europe is seeing is in automotive EV which will drive its LCD panel sales. Autonomous driving technology will also create additional smart entertainment device opportunities in the future. Chen also observed that the ‘O2O’ (Online to Offline) shopping trend will ebb and flow for years to come. He feels that offline stores will grow again, but the boundaries will be blurred. There will be more focus on live streaming shopping experiences which is becoming popular with the younger generation in Europe.