Haier
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Haier Group Corporation (海尔集团) is a Chinese multinational home appliances and consumer electronics company headquartered in Qingdao, Shandong, China. Founded in 1984 by Zhang Ruimin, Haier has grown to become the world's largest home appliance brand, a position it has held for more than 12 consecutive years as measured by global retail sales volume. Beyond appliances, Haier has expanded aggressively into robotics and artificial intelligence since 2018, building out a portfolio that now includes the wheeled humanoid HIVA Haiwa, a strategic partnership with Leju Robotics on the Kuavo (Kuafu) humanoid platform, a controlling stake in industrial robotics maker Shanghai STEP Electric, and an AI smart home agent called HomeGPT built on DeepSeek models.[1][2][3][4]
Haier's origins trace to 1984, when Zhang Ruimin was appointed director of the Qingdao Refrigerator Factory, a struggling collective enterprise in Shandong. Under Zhang's leadership the factory entered a technology partnership with German appliance manufacturer Liebherr, and the company name was eventually derived from the last two syllables of the Chinese transliteration of "Liebherr." The Qingdao Refrigerator Co. was renamed Qingdao Haier Group in 1991 and simplified to Haier Group in 1992.[1]
By the close of the 1990s, Haier had become China's largest home appliance brand, capturing over 30 percent of the domestic refrigerator market. International expansion followed through the 2000s, with manufacturing operations and sales networks built across Asia, Europe, and North America. From 2009 onward, Haier has ranked first globally in major appliance sales volume each year.[1]
Haier's growth has been shaped by a string of large overseas acquisitions that built its global appliance footprint.
| Year | Target | Country | Approximate value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Fisher & Paykel | New Zealand | NZ$927 million |
| 2016 | GE Appliances | United States | US$5.6 billion |
| 2018 | Candy Group | Italy | EUR475 million |
| 2024 | Carrier Commercial Refrigeration | Multiple | US$775 million |
Sources: [1].
Haier began service robot work around 2018, but its strongest moves into robotics came in three waves between 2023 and 2025. First, in late 2023 it announced a strategic cooperation with Leju Robotics of Shenzhen to co-develop humanoid systems for home scenes. Second, in 2025 it acquired a controlling stake in Shanghai STEP Electric (002527.SZ), a publicly listed industrial automation and elevator control maker, gaining a path into industrial robotics. Third, also in 2025, it unveiled its own branded humanoid robot, the HIVA Haiwa, at the Appliance and Electronics World Expo (AWE) in Shanghai.[2][3][5][6]
In late 2023, Haier Smart Home reached a strategic cooperation agreement with Leju Robotics (乐聚机器人), a humanoid robot developer founded in 2016 with backing from Tencent, Sequoia China, and others. The partnership focused on bringing humanoid hardware into Haier's smart home scenarios and developing service robots that can use, rather than just sit alongside, ordinary Haier appliances.[2][7]
At AWE 2024 in Shanghai (March 2024), the two companies co-exhibited the bipedal humanoid robot Kuavo (also branded Kuafu, 夸父), described at the time as China's first general-purpose humanoid robot designed for home scenes. Kuavo demonstrated washing clothes, watering flowers, arranging cut flowers, and hanging laundry, alongside dynamic motions like jumping. Specifications reported by Haier and Leju at the show include:[2][7]
| Kuavo specification | Value |
|---|---|
| Height | About 160 cm |
| Weight | About 45 kg |
| Walking speed | Up to 4.6 km/h omnidirectional |
| Jump height | Up to 20 cm |
| Arm degrees of freedom | 28+ |
| Joint torque | Up to 360 Nm |
| Operating system | KaihongOS (based on Huawei HarmonyOS) |
| AI integration | Imitation learning, multimodal large model support |
Leju went on to raise about US$200 million in pre-IPO funding in October 2025 to fund mass production and expand its work with partners that include Haier, Huawei, Alibaba Cloud, China Mobile, China Telecom, FAW Group, and Tencent.[3][7]
Haier introduced its own-brand humanoid, the HIVA Haiwa, at AWE 2025 in Shanghai on 28 July 2025. The Chinese press nicknamed it the "housework terminator" (家务终结者) because of its focus on cleaning, laundry, and kitchen tasks. Unlike the bipedal Kuavo, the HIVA Haiwa rolls on a wheeled mobile base. Key specifications reported by Haier and covered by appliance and robotics outlets:[5][6][8]
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Height | 165 cm |
| Weight | About 70 kg (with battery) |
| Total degrees of freedom | 44 |
| Dexterous-hand DOF | 12 per hand |
| Vertical reach | Up to 2 m |
| Mobility | Wheeled base (omnidirectional) |
| Perception | Machine vision, tactile sensors, IMU, indoor SLAM |
| Control method (2025) | Teleoperation by engineers, used to gather training data |
| Connectivity | Integrates with Haier U+ smart home appliances |
Demonstrated tasks at AWE 2025 included sweeping floors and picking up debris, removing laundry from a washing machine, ironing and folding clothes, opening and closing oven and refrigerator doors, pressing appliance buttons and turning dials, and basic cooking such as heating and stirring. Haier was explicit that the robot is not yet autonomous: the demo runs were teleoperated, and the company is using the teleop data to train an end-to-end policy for autonomous operation in later releases.[5][6][8]
The HIVA Haiwa is positioned less as a standalone product than as an extension of Haier's existing connected-appliance ecosystem. Because it speaks to Haier refrigerators, washers, ovens, and air conditioners through the U+ platform, it can operate buttons in the physical world and also send IoT commands to the same appliance through software, which simplifies parts of the task model.[5][8]
On 16 February 2025, Haier Group signed an agreement to acquire a controlling stake in Shanghai STEP Electric Corporation (002527.SZ), a Shenzhen-listed maker of motion control systems, industrial robots, and elevator control electronics founded in 1995. The transaction, worth about 2.5 billion yuan (around US$343 to 345 million), gave Haier 10 percent of STEP's shares and 19.24 percent of voting rights initially, with a planned new-share subscription lifting Haier's eventual ownership to 26.83 percent and making it STEP's actual controller.[4][9]
The deal pulled Haier directly into industrial robotics for the first time. STEP's three core lines (control and drive systems, industrial robots, and elevator controls) complement Haier's existing factory automation work at COSMOPlat. STEP later disclosed that it was collaborating with Haier Smart Home on components for embodied intelligent robots, although that part of its revenue remained small at the time of the announcement.[4][9]
Long before its consumer humanoid push, Haier had been deploying industrial robots inside its own factories. COSMOPlat (also written Kaos), launched by Haier in 2017, is an industrial internet platform that connects factory equipment, suppliers, and customers. In 2018 it was certified as China's first national-class industrial internet platform by the National Development and Reform Commission. More than 100 Haier factories run on COSMOPlat, and its interconnected ("lighthouse") factories in Qingdao use orange six-axis manipulators on production lines, augmented with IoT, AR-assisted operation, and AI visual inspection.[10][11]
COSMOPlat is widely reported to be preparing for a separate IPO, which would carve out Haier's industrial-internet and robotics work into its own listed entity.[11]
Haier's appliance AI strategy is built around the U+ platform, launched in 2014 as one of China's first open smart home platforms. U+ provides interconnection between appliances, a cloud service, and a big-data analytics layer; it currently manages more than 140 product categories, claims more than 130 million connected smart devices, and reports more than 50 million users worldwide.[12]
In 2025, Haier introduced HomeGPT, a smart home agent that combines U+ device control with a large language model layer. Public demonstrations have used DeepSeek models (R1 and V3) as the underlying reasoning engine. HomeGPT can take a single high-level instruction (the example used in Chinese state media was "I want to watch the movie Ne Zha in the living room") and translate it into a chain of appliance actions: adjusting lighting, closing curtains, switching on the TV, and changing the air-conditioner mode.[13]
Haier CEO Zhou Yunjie has publicly framed appliance intelligence as a five-stage progression from mechanical intelligence through control, data, cognitive, and finally environmental intelligence. He places Haier's current product line at the data-intelligence stage, with cognitive intelligence as the next target enabled by large language models and HomeGPT.[13]
On the patents side, Haier Smart Home topped the 2024 Global Smart Home Invention Patent Ranking for the twelfth consecutive year with 5,582 published applications, which gives some sense of the breadth of its appliance-AI R&D pipeline.[13]
Beyond Leju and STEP, Haier Smart Home has also brought in Qingdao Taber Robotics (青岛塔波尔机器人), a domestic vacuum and floor-care robot maker, as part of its broader effort to fill in service robot categories below the humanoid tier. These investments together give Haier a multi-layer robotics stack that includes industrial arms (STEP and COSMOPlat), wheeled service robots, dexterous humanoids (HIVA Haiwa and Kuavo), and connected appliances that act as the robots' working environment.[2][4]
Haier's appliance business runs under multiple regional brands; the robotics and AI brands sit alongside them rather than replacing them.
| Brand | Region | Products |
|---|---|---|
| Haier | Global | Refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, water heaters |
| Casarte | China (premium) | High-end built-in appliances |
| Leader | China (mass market) | Entry-level appliances |
| GE Appliances | North America | Full appliance range, acquired 2016 |
| Fisher & Paykel | Australasia | Premium appliances, acquired 2012 |
| Candy / Hoover | Europe | Washers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, acquired 2018 |
| AQUA | Japan, Southeast Asia | Refrigerators, washing machines |
| HIVA | Global (robots) | Humanoid robots, debut 2025 |
| COSMOPlat / Kaos | Industry | Industrial internet platform, factory robotics |
| U+ / hOn | Software | Smart home platform and consumer app |
| Metric | Details |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1984 (as Qingdao Refrigerator Factory) |
| Founder and former chairman | Zhang Ruimin |
| Current CEO (Haier Group) | Zhou Yunjie |
| Headquarters | 1 Haier Road, Qingdao, Shandong, China |
| Employees | Around 110,000 (Haier Smart Home, 2021 filing) |
| Global revenue (Haier Group, 2024) | About 286 billion yuan (around US$39.5 billion) |
| Stock listings | Shanghai (600690), Hong Kong (1169), Frankfurt (690D) |
| Market position | World's #1 home appliance brand, 12+ consecutive years |
Haier's robotics push is one of the clearer examples of a Chinese white-goods maker repositioning itself as a humanoid platform company. Three things make it distinctive among appliance giants.
First, the multi-form-factor bet. Haier is backing both a bipedal humanoid through Leju Robotics (Kuavo) and its own wheeled humanoid (HIVA Haiwa), rather than committing to a single morphology. The bipedal route maximizes long-term flexibility but is harder; the wheeled route is closer to deployable today inside flat indoor homes.[2][5]
Second, the appliance ecosystem advantage. A humanoid robot in a Haier home does not need to figure out a generic stove or refrigerator from raw vision. It can ask, over the U+ network, what state the appliance is in and what it can do, then either press a physical button or send an API call. That cuts a non-trivial slice of the perception and planning problem, although it only works inside the Haier ecosystem.[5][12]
Third, vertical integration through the STEP acquisition. With control over an industrial robotics and motion-control supplier, Haier in principle controls more of the parts stack (joints, drives, controllers) than a competitor that buys everything from outside vendors. Whether this translates into a real cost or quality advantage depends on how tightly STEP's industrial expertise can be retargeted at humanoids.[4][9]
The broader context is the wave of Chinese appliance majors moving into humanoids around the same time, including Midea (which owns KUKA and is developing its own MIRO humanoid), Changhong, Hisense, TCL, and Gree. Several reports class Haier as one of the front runners in that group on the strength of the Leju partnership and the HIVA Haiwa launch.[14]
None of Haier's humanoid demonstrations to date have shown end-to-end autonomous task completion in a customer home. The HIVA Haiwa AWE 2025 runs were openly teleoperated, with Haier framing teleop as a data collection step rather than a product feature. Kuavo's home demos have similarly relied on scripted or teleoperated routines rather than open-world autonomy. Haier has not given a firm commercial release date for either platform as of late 2025.[5][6]
The HomeGPT layer depends heavily on third-party models, primarily DeepSeek, which means Haier's appliance intelligence is exposed to changes in those underlying models. Haier has not announced its own from-scratch foundation model in the way Huawei (Pangu) or Baidu (ERNIE) have, although it does retain substantial proprietary data from the U+ network that could be used to fine-tune partner models.[13]