Mobileye, which once called the wind and rain in the field of self-driving technology, may be about to usher in its end.
With the growing of the intelligent car market, the number of autonomous driving technology suppliers has also grown in a spurt, and various autonomous driving technology companies at home and abroad have emerged in an endless stream, which means that the autonomous driving industry, which is in a "hidden" state most of the time in the traditional automobile era, has ushered in the largest wave of development in history.
In such a fierce wave of development, for the participants, it is natural that there are "a few joys and a few sorrows". Even though some established companies have developed for many years and achieved a very good market share, with the influx of capital and the entry of first-class technology companies to reduce the dimension of the blow, many established self-driving companies have a deep understanding of the phrase "kingship has no eternity".
Among them, the most notable case is Mobileye, once a leading company in the field of autonomous driving, in 2017 with excellent operating income and technological superiority, was acquired by Intel for a huge amount of $15.3 billion, nearly double its market value premium, causing a surprise inside and outside the industry - the era of autonomous driving is coming!
However, after being acquired by Intel, Mobileye did not show much competitiveness in the increasingly fierce competition in the industry, but was defeated by backward companies. What is the reason for this, and where will mobileye go in the future?
Arrogant Mobileye
In 2016, because of a car accident caused by autopilot, Mobileye, as a technology provider, broke up with Tesla. At that time, Tesla was far from having a strong position in the smart car market today, and Mobileye held the ADAS cooperation orders of Audi, BMW, General Motors, Hyundai and other first-line car companies, so in the face of Tesla's "breakup", Mobileye had grain in its hands and did not panic at all.
In the following years, Mobileye's self-developed EyeQ chip shipments also went all the way up, from 6 million in 2016 to 19.3 million in 2020, so for Mobileye, the break with Tesla is really nothing, at least not any splash on the company's operating conditions.
However, since last year, China's new car-making forces Weilai, Ideal and Xiaopeng have invariably said that they will abandon Mobileye on new models, switch to NVIDIA Orin chips, and start to develop their own chip plans. Just when everyone thinks that these three new car-making forces have chosen to abandon Mobileye and strengthen self-developed chips, but in order to imitate Tesla and increase stock prices, more and more car companies have begun to choose to give up Mobileye, including well-known car companies such as Audi, Great Wall and Volvo.
A few days ago, Qualcomm announced at the investor conference that BMW will use the Snapdragon Ride autonomous driving platform in 2025, which means that Mobileye's most well-known allies have also "betrayed" it, and Mobileye, which originally held the cooperation of major car companies, has reached the point of "rebellion".
For Mobileye, which already has a high market share in the autonomous driving market, why did it fall to where it is today? Obviously, it is a very puzzling thing, but when we take a closer look at mobileye's technology development progress and attitude towards car companies in recent years, we will know that all this is "The Present World".
In 2007, Mobileye released its first self-driving chip, EyeQ1, which was immediately applied to production models by BMW, GM and Volvo, and the first victory was the best appreciation for the EyeQ1 chip. As mentioned above, in the following years, the shipment of EyeQ series chips also increased, and such a strong market performance also contributed to Intel's acquisition of it.
But after being acquired by Intel, Mobileye's technology research and development speed is as if it was infected by Intel's "squeezed toothpaste" disease, and in its most brilliant years, Mobileye chose to focus on how to sell more EyeQ chips instead of promoting the research and development of autonomous driving technology.
As we all know, cars want to achieve a high level of automatic driving needs a chip with extremely strong computing power to process and analyze visual information, so almost all autopilot chip manufacturers are currently focusing on improving the computing power of chips, but Mobileye does not think so, and its attitude is extremely negative.
In 2014, Mobileye's mass-produced EyeQ3 chip hashrate of 0.256TOPS, and Mobileye, which has massive R&D funds after being acquired by Intel, only achieved mass production of EyeQ4 chips with a computing power of 2.5TOPS in 2018, not to mention the EyeQ5 chip with a mass production capacity of only 24TOPS this year.
At the same time, Mobileye's nemesis Tesla has released and mass-produced the FSD chip with 72TOPS hashrate, achieving revenge on Mobileye, and Nvidia, which has been sitting on the mountain and watching the tiger, has also launched a Xavier chip with a computing power of 30TOPS, which has achieved a comprehensive surpass of mobileye EyeQ series chips, and Mobileye has completely lost its leading position in the market.
In addition to the negative attitude towards technology research and development, Mobileye's attitude towards partner car companies is also somewhat foresighted.
Different from Nvidia, Horizon and Qualcomm, Mobileye requires car companies to buy chips, they must buy a complete set of automatic driving solutions, and can not obtain the data collected by the Mobileye camera on the car, can not install cameras to collect data, and can not want to develop self-developed automatic driving chips and algorithms.
It is clear from these overlord clauses that although Mobileye is positioned as a solution provider in the automotive industry, it is clearly in the upper hand in cooperation with car companies, and Tesla, which was in its infancy, was also forced to accept such unreasonable requirements, so that tesla Vision's self-driving technology project was almost killed by Mobileye.
In addition, Mobileye's "watch people get off the dish" is also intolerable to many car companies.
Previously, when Mobileye cooperated with WEILAI, because they wanted to occupy more market share in the Chinese autonomous driving market, they only gave WEILAI 50,000 sets of autonomous driving systems throughout the year, and most of the remaining systems were given to Geely cars with larger scales and higher sales, which naturally annoyed Weilai, so Weilai's next model, ET7, switched to NVIDIA Orin chips instead of continuing to cooperate with Mobileye.
Self-conscious Intel
Although Mobileye sold a total of 19.3 million EyeQ chips last year, with the increasing competition in the field of autonomous driving, the slow pace of technology research and development has offended many car companies, and whether Mobileye can continue to maintain its existing market position is obviously a question mark.
With the transformation of the automotive industry from traditional cars to smart cars, the size of the autonomous driving market has also grown violently, and Mobileye, which occupies a first-mover advantage in this field, has greatly increased the shipment of EyeQ series chips with mature, easy-to-use autonomous driving solutions, which is not a new thing.
From the number of EyeQ chip shipments and market share, Mobileye seems to have gained a foothold in the market, but from the growth rate of EyeQ chip shipments, Mobileye's situation is not optimistic. At a time when the autonomous driving market is in a period of market expansion, rather than stock, the growth rate of EyeQ chips has not increased with the growth of the market, but has fallen sharply, from 45% when it was acquired in 2017 to 10% in 2020.
Such an abnormal decline in the growth rate shows that with the continuous efforts of latecomers such as Nvidia, Qualcomm, Huawei and Horizon in the field of autonomous driving chips, the first-mover advantage of EyeQ chips in technology has ceased to exist, and from the current technology gap, Mobileye has not only confirmed that it is behind, but also the probability of achieving overtaking in the future is not large.
Not only that, Mobileye, which cost Intel $15.3 billion, has performed unsatisfactorily in terms of revenue. Although Mobileye's chip shipments are high and it has established partnerships with many car companies, its revenue is very small, and its proportion of Intel's total revenue is a very small part.
In 2020, Mobileye's total revenue is less than $1 billion, while Intel's total annual revenue reached $78 billion, and mobileye's revenue is calculated to account for about 1% of Intel's total revenue. If Mobileye is still an experimental project, such a financial situation is still reasonable, but for commercial companies that have been established for more than 20 years and have been acquired by Intel for 4 years, this revenue capacity is naturally unsatisfactory, not to mention that Mobileye also needs Intel to invest a lot of money in research and development technology every year.
If it had been a few years ago, Intel might have been raising a mobileye that was not very profitable and developed slowly, but at present, Intel, which is too busy to take care of itself, may not have much time for Mobileye to develop freely.
Unlike the previous posture of calling the wind and rain in the market, today's Intel situation in the market is also embattled.
In the field of PC processors, Intel's old rival AMD salted fish turned over, to achieve counterattack, high-performance, low-power Zen architecture with TSMC's advanced process technology to catch Intel off guard; in the field of servers and supercomputing, Nvidia and AMD use more powerful GPU technology to compete with Intel in general-purpose computing, Nvidia also surpassed Intel to become the most valuable American chip manufacturer; the field of mobile computer processors, but also by many years of partner Apple with M1 series chips to surpass and abandon.
It can be said that now Intel has reached the worst time, the failure in the technology, the market is bound to make it face performance pressure from investors, so Intel is likely to sell mobileye like the previous selling of the poor performance of the baseband department, to save the ugly financial report data.
In general, the reason why Mobileye has been abandoned by car companies one after another, the core reason is in its arrogant, unenterprising attitude, so that it has lost the trust of car companies both in the product and in the market, and with the efforts of latecomers such as Nvidia, Qualcomm and Horizon, Mobileye's position in the market will continue to decline, and it is also very difficult to achieve technical overtaking in the future.
For Intel, which is in deep trouble and self-care, mobileye, which was once bought at great expense, has become a hot potato that affects revenue, and it is also a bottomless pit for research and development investment.
Perhaps, the resolution to "move the knife" against Mobileye has been placed on the table of Intel's board of directors, after all, Intel really does not have time to continue to wait for Mobileye to grow slowly in arrogance.