After being unveiled earlier this month in Germany, the Ecovacs Deebot X11 OmniCyclone robotic vacuum featuring a bagless design and promising a quick power recharge for “perpetual” cleaning runs is out in Singapore.
The premium robot vacuum, launched in Southeast Asia at a regional event yesterday, aims to win over users who seek more than the basic cleaning functions offered by cheaper and more common mid-range products today.
Ecovac’s new vacuum makes use of GaN (galium nitride) charging, common on mobile phones today, to ensure that the robot is quickly juiced up a little each time it goes back to the station during a cleanup.
So, instead of running out of battery and requiring a long time docked at the station, the Ecovacs Deebot X11 OmniCyclone can keep going until it has cleaned a room completely. This is because it gets about 6 per cent of its battery charged up every time it has to go back to get a cleanup at the station for a few minutes.
Besides this, the new robot vacuum also promises easier maintanence and more sustainable usage over time, by doing away with dust bags.
Using a “cyclone” cleaning design that incorporates a 75 degC hot wash, it just requires you to empty the dust container after several cleanups, plus adding clean water for the mopping function, to keep things going. There’s the occasional cleaning of the filters, which might get dirty, but the promise is simpler maintenance than before.
There are a host of other premium features, which Ecovacs hopes will make people splurge for the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone instead of cheaper models from fellow Chinese manufacturers such as Xiaomi and Roborock.
For example, a quieter suction feature that provides up to 19,500Pa is not only powerful enough but also more thorough in cleaning up small items, such as crumps and dust particles, the company says.
As competition heats up and many basic cleaning features become common, Ecovacs wants to go past the comparison of basic specifications for its high-end products, said Chris Ma, the company’s regional head for Southeast Asia.
While mid-end products today can meet most needs, there are consumers who care about an elegant design and new features, such as the intelligence built into robot vacuums, he noted.
An advanced AI detection feature, for example, lets the latest Deebot X11 OmniCyclone identify, say, dog poo and avoid it, instead of trying to clean it up, which would be a “disaster”, he told Singapore reporters in Vietnam yesterday.
With Ecovacs’ early entry in the country’s retailer shops before the arrival of e-commerce sites, Vietnam has become the company’s largest market in Southeast Asia, followed by Thailand and Singapore, he said.
Singapore is a market for high-end products and is very competitive, he explained, because the country’s sales channels are mature and it attracts new entrants that see the Republic as a beach head to enter the region.
He said the market value may be high in Singapore but brands are also “aggressive” in investing to generate sales, which may not prove healthy in the long run. Ecovac is ranked “top three” in Singapore, despite being tops in Vietnam and its home market China.
One example of intense competition is how the new Deebot X11 OmniCyclone is sold across markets. In Vietnam, it was launched yesterday at an agressive 26 million VND (S$1,274); while in the United States, partly due to uncertain sanction impacts, it is listed at US$1,499 (S$1,922).
In Singapore, the sticker price is currently a high S$2,499 on online stores such as Lazada and Shopee. However, if you can wait, expect it to be on sale from October 9 – its official Singapore launch date – for much lower at S$1,699. Yes, that’s quite a discount.
