Yu Hao, the firebrand CEO of Dreame Technology, has opened a new front in China’s high-stakes smart home wars. In a series of provocative posts on Weibo, Yu explicitly told consumers to disregard any reviews of Dreame products on Xiaohongshu, the country’s premier social-commerce platform. This outburst represents more than just a corporate spat; it signals a volatile shift in how Chinese tech leaders manage public perception during an industry-wide slowdown.
Known for his "madman" persona, Yu is no stranger to hyperbole. Earlier this year, he claimed the Dreame ecosystem would eventually become the first "hundred-trillion-dollar" company in human history—a figure that would dwarf the market caps of giants like Nvidia and Apple combined. Such rhetoric has become his trademark, a calculated move to capture "traffic" in an increasingly crowded and competitive hardware market where visibility is survival.
Beneath the bravado lies a sobering market reality for the robot vacuum industry. While Dreame is growing, it remains a distant third in China’s domestic market, trailing behind leaders Ecovacs and Roborock. With the industry currently facing a double-digit decline in both sales volume and revenue, the pressure to maintain growth is pushing executives toward more aggressive, and often erratic, public relations strategies to claim a larger slice of a shrinking pie.
Yu’s attack on Xiaohongshu stems from his allegation that competitors are employing "water armies"—paid internet trolls—to smear Dreame with fake negative reviews. However, critics argue that this defense is a blanket dismissal of genuine consumer grievances. Reports from local media and consumer complaint platforms suggest a rising number of quality issues, ranging from hardware failures to poor after-sales service, which the company frequently labels as organized sabotage.
This approach stands in stark contrast to other Chinese tech titans like Xiaomi’s Lei Jun or the legal team at BYD. While these companies also combat disinformation, they typically differentiate between malicious rumors and legitimate user feedback. By declaring war on the platform itself, Yu risks alienating the very demographic—young, middle-class urbanites—that drives the premium home-appliance market in China's digital ecosystem.