In recent years, the Chinese companies that have been in the spotlight are either real estate tycoons or internet giants. People remember Jack Ma, Robin Li, Richard Liu, and Lei Jun. Gree made headlines because Dong Mingzhu and Lei Jun had a bet, while home appliance companies like Midea, Haier, and Hisense, which were once thriving, seem to have been forgotten.



In people's impression, Gree and Midea are air conditioner manufacturers, Haier makes refrigerators, and Hisense makes TVs. They seem far removed from the internet, and even more unrelated to big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.



Recently, the author was invited to visit Hisense's R&D center and discovered an unexpectedly innovative Hisense.



The Silent Innovator



In traditional perception, Hisense is just Hisense TVs and white goods. Although Hisense has three brands: Hisense, Ronshen, and Kelon, they are all home appliances. In communications, Hisense's mobile phones also seem less prominent compared to Xiaomi and Huawei.



However, beyond the traditional image, Hisense has been quietly focusing on innovation. In the commercial sector, Hisense continuously combines new technology with applications, developing new products in multiple fields, capturing the commercial market, and achieving excellent results.



Hisense's advantage lies in multimedia equipment like TVs, and hospital medical diagnostic systems also require good display devices. Thus, Hisense entered the medical display market, producing high-brightness, high-gray-scale display devices that can view medical images, capturing the medical market.



3D scanning and display are widely used in industry, and Hisense combines 3D forming scanning with medicine. By scanning patients, it creates three-dimensional images of internal organs and blood vessels, assisting doctors in simulating surgeries and determining surgical plans.



Using Hisense's medical assistance system, doctors can even control the rotation of 3D human images in the air through gestures during surgery, guiding the operation in real-time and reducing bodily harm. With this technology, the affiliated hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai successfully separated a pair of conjoined twins.



In the commercial sector, Hisense's POS machines and cash registers have already captured a huge market.



In the field of optical communications, Hisense develops its own chips, and its broadband optical module products rank first in the country and fifth in the world.



In the field of intelligent transportation, Hisense has also achieved the industry's number one position.



In the fields of cloud computing and big data, Hisense has established cloud computing center solutions for government use.



Through these innovations in the commercial sector, Hisense has opened up a vast market beyond home appliances.



In 2016, Hisense Group's B2B revenue accounted for 26.28% of total revenue, while profits accounted for 38.69%. Beyond home appliances, Hisense has already become a giant in the commercial sector, with a layout comparable to Siemens. The outside world knows little about this; Hisense seems silent but is actively innovating in a down-to-earth manner.



Sci-Fi Level Hisense Smart Transportation



Among Hisense's many commercial fields, intelligent transportation is the most eye-catching. Hisense's intelligent transportation has ranked first in the country for eight consecutive years. Among the 39 largest municipalities, provincial capitals, and cities with independent planning status, 28 use Hisense's intelligent transportation systems.



And the R&D level of Hisense's intelligent transportation system has reached the level of science fiction movies.



On major urban roads, Hisense's intelligent transportation system embeds geomagnetic sensors at intervals to sense the geomagnetic changes caused by passing vehicles in real-time and count traffic flow.



Because different vehicle sizes and shapes cause different geomagnetic changes, Hisense can effectively identify vehicles through waveform analysis, thereby adjusting algorithms based on traffic flow data to optimize signal light timing and phasing, maximizing urban road utilization and reducing congestion.



Through cameras遍布城市 and efficient database retrieval, as long as a violating vehicle is driving with a license plate, the system can lock onto the vehicle within seconds. At the same time, the system can optimize and adjust signals to control the violating vehicle at the nearest red light intersection, facilitating police inspection and arrest.



At pedestrian crossings, using infrared thermal imaging detectors, the system can identify the number of people in real-time and optimize pedestrian crossing signals.



We are accustomed to discussing Baidu's deep learning and facial recognition, Alibaba's cloud computing and smart cities. Hisense, however, directly turns these high technologies into mature solution products and sells them to departments in need.



In the future, following the national Belt and Road initiative, Hisense will also sell intelligent transportation technology to Southeast Asian and African countries, and Chinese enterprises will lead the standards of global intelligent transportation in the future.



Inspiration from Hisense



Traditionally, we always believe that innovative high-tech lies in the hands of internet companies. We applaud Google's driverless car exploration and marvel at the dazzling technologies of BAT and JD.com.



But when we see Hisense's sci-fi level intelligent transportation, we have a subversive feeling.



Baidu's artificial intelligence is world-class, with facial recognition and speech semantic recognition reaching high levels, even being selected by MIT as one of the world's top ten technological breakthroughs.



However, the industrialization of Baidu's AI only began to take action after Lu Qi arrived this year.



Companies like Hisense do not have world-class AI scientists like Andrew Ng, but Hisense is solid and steady, turning mature technologies into solutions, combining software and hardware to create tangible products. Turning laboratory technologies into solid commercial solutions, Hisense's technology can withstand various unexpected situations, pass various safety and reliability tests, and bring immediate benefits to customers.



Perhaps Hisense may not lead in certain technology competitions, but Hisense's approach has solidly changed our cities and our lives.



In this process, Hisense has collected valuable big data, obtaining foundational data for future applications.



And intelligent transportation is only part of Hisense's smart city planning. This sci-fi level performance of intelligent transportation will also be applied to property management (Hisense smart buildings), public safety, integrated utility tunnels (sewers also managed through intelligent technology), smart healthcare, smart communities...



Almost all fields involving public management can be solved by Hisense with intelligent integrated software and hardware solutions. In this process, user management efficiency is greatly improved, Hisense gains substantial economic returns, and more importantly, Hisense obtains big data covering all aspects of the city. Mining this big data will be a veritable gold mine.



With the popularization of Hisense's smart cities, Hisense's big data will cover an increasingly wide range, and the imagination space contained in this data is enormous.



Jack Ma said that the future resource is data, and the true big data owners in the future may not be today's internet companies, but companies like Hisense that can provide solutions and cover products in public management fields worldwide. This future will be subversive to people's cognition.



Apple was founded as a computer company, and now it is a world-leading technology giant.



Hisense's predecessor, Qingdao TV Factory, was founded only a few years apart from Apple. What will Hisense's future be? Let's wait and see.