(Yicai) Aug. 9 -- There are no signs of a ceasefire in the Chinese cleaning appliance market’s price war, even though major companies signed a self-regulatory convention on fair competition in March.

“The cleaning appliance market is still raging because of the fierce competition, especially in the floor scrubber segment,” Qian Zihan, an analyst at specialized data provider ChinaIOL, told Yicai.

China’s sales volume of floor scrubbers soared 24 percent in the first half of the year from a year earlier, while the sales value rose only 7 percent in the period, according to statistics from All View Cloud Data Technology.

The cleaning appliance segment was and is still one of the few in the home appliance industry with rising demand because of a low penetration rate among Chinese households. However, the surging demand led to more companies foraying into the market, resulting in fierce competition.

There were only 15 floor scrubber brands in China at the end of 2022, but the figure jumped to 127 at the end of 2022 and hit a peak of 143 last year, data from All View Cloud also showed.

But with the prolonged price war, many companies were forced to withdraw, with the number of floor scrubbing makers falling to just over 120 at the end of last year. In June, the figure had dropped to under 90.

Meanwhile, the price war in the robot vacuum cleaner segment was not as rough as in the floor scrubbing segment, as five leading Chinese robot vacuum cleaner firms occupied nearly 90 percent of the market share in the first half.

In addition to patent disputes with their domestic rivals, Chinese weeping robot makers are also facing troubles from intellectual property disputes with foreign peers as they are accelerating their overseas expansion.

For example, Chinese sweeping robot giants Dreame Technology and Ecovacs Robotics have filed more than 10 patent-related lawsuits against each other.

Meanwhile, Dreame also had IP disputes with UK consumer goods giant Dyson. Last year, the pair reached an agreement thanks to the mediation by the IP Court of the Supreme People’s Court of China.

The IP system is becoming mature, so companies are more willing to resort to IP law protection, with the number of IP lawsuits increasing year after year, the IP head at Roborock Technology, China’s second-largest seller of robot vacuum cleaners, told Yicai.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione