Wen | QianYanjun
Source| Bowang Finance
Last week, the stock price of "Ning Wang" fell sharply, and the market value evaporated by 100 billion yuan a day, and for a time there were many opinions. Among them, the most popular statement comes from an article in 36Kr entitled "Ningde Era: Cracks in the Trillion Battery Empire", saying that in the middle of this year, a dispute occurred in the headquarters building of the Ningde Era, and the two parties involved were Zeng Yuqun and He Xiaopeng - they were the founders of Ningde Times and Xiaopeng Automobile, respectively. At its most intense, Zeng Yuqun even withdrew from the conference room and calmed down for more than 10 minutes. He Xiaopeng intends to introduce a new main battery supplier, which will reduce the supply share of the Ningde era.
But what really angered Zeng Yuqun was that the main supplier of Xiaopeng Automobile was AVIC Lithium Battery. The article also mentioned that in addition to Xiaopeng Automobile, there are also car companies such as GAC motor that are also "escaping" the Ningde era and looking for other suppliers...
Will the performance of "Ning Wang" really have a significant negative impact due to the rumors of "abandonment"?
01 The choice of Xiaopeng Motors
The starting point of the problem began with why Xiaopeng Automobile switched battery suppliers. This point may be found in The answer to Xiaopeng Automobile's response to the Shanghai Securities News reporter on December 8: Due to the impact of the epidemic, the industry is facing an extreme shortage of lithium iron phosphate battery supply, which has also brought great uncertainty to the production of Xiaopeng P7 480E/N models, resulting in 480 model orders can not be delivered in time within the next timed expected delivery cycle.
In other words: the battery supply can not keep up, which seriously affects the delivery of Xiaopeng Automobile. This contradiction did not break out temporarily, it appeared as early as half a year ago. At the beginning of August this year, some media reported that He Xiaopeng, chairman of Xiaopeng Automobile, squatted for a week in the Ningde era, just for batteries. Xiaopeng Automobile may already encounter the challenge of battery shortage.
So the question is: since the supply of lithium iron phosphate batteries is insufficient, why can't Xiaopeng Automobile replace other batteries (such as ternary lithium batteries) instead of changing the battery supplier?
Compared with ternary lithium batteries, lithium iron phosphate batteries are superior in many aspects. First of all, lithium iron phosphate battery technology is mature and has advantages in safety, service life, cost and other aspects.
Secondly, from the stability of supply, lithium iron phosphate material is extremely rich, with natural advantages that ternary does not have. Ternary materials refer to the materials used in cathode materials, with nickel salts, cobalt salts, and manganese salts (aluminum) as raw materials, and the proportions of the three kinds can be adjusted according to actual needs. The key is that China's cobalt and nickel are very small, need a large number of imports, there is a hidden danger from the "card neck" of oil to the "card neck" of cobalt and nickel. In addition, due to the large-scale application of ternary materials to cobalt and nickel, the price of ternary materials is greatly affected by the price fluctuations of cobalt and nickel, which causes greater uncertainty to the production, sales and profitability of car companies.
In contrast, lithium iron phosphate has the advantages of a wide range of raw materials, stable supply, and low cost. Moreover, its moderate working voltage, large capacitance, high discharge power, fast charging and long cycle life, high stability in high temperature and high heat environment, and gradually become the representative of electric vehicle enterprises.
Comparison of properties of various cathode materials, Orient Securities Research Institute
According to reports in December 2020, the Xiaopeng G3 lithium iron phosphate version will be launched in 2021, becoming the first new head car-making force to replace the lithium iron phosphate battery. In November 2020, Xiaopeng G3 sold 1492 units, an increase of 59% month-on-month. After the use of lithium iron phosphate batteries, its vehicle cost is expected to further decline, which may be for xiaopeng G3 to strive for more room for price exploration.
The Aforementioned Postponement of Delivery of Xiaopeng Automobile's P7 Lithium Iron Phosphate Version was officially launched on March 3 this year, equipped with a lithium iron phosphate power battery provided by CATL, with a maximum power of 196kW (266 horsepower) and an endurance of 480km.
As the most important battery supplier of Xiaopeng Automobile, the number of lithium iron phosphate batteries in the Ningde era may not be able to meet the sales of Xiaopeng Automobile in the blowout period. If Xiaopeng Automobile wants to get more batteries, it can only seek new battery suppliers.
02 In the "abandoned" Ningde era, will the performance be greatly affected?
From the perspective of cost, technology, and production capacity, it will not.
There is a visible trend in the field of power batteries - the market concentration is gradually increasing. With the pursuit of high performance and low cost by downstream customers and the specification of safety performance by national policies, the trend of head concentration will be more obvious in the future, and low-end production capacity will be gradually withdrawn. In 2020, the number of power battery companies actually in production has been less than 50.
Leading enterprises like catheter have achieved rapid growth, and from 2017 to 2019, the market share of the CATL era has climbed rapidly from 29% to 51%. In 2020, after the cancellation of the power battery white list restrictions, overseas battery leaders entered China, LG Chem and Panasonic ranked third and sixth with market share rates of 6.5% and 3.5% respectively, although they seized part of the market, but catheter era still ranked first with a proportion of 50.0%.
2020 China market power battery enterprise share, source: Century Securities
As the boss of the leader, you naturally have enough confidence in the bargaining power. CATL has laid out the key resources of the entire industrial chain through shareholding, the establishment of joint ventures, and the signing of strategic cooperation agreements. Nowadays, there are generally multiple supplier choices in all links, and there is no excessive dependence on any single supplier, and the bargaining power and anti-risk ability are not generally strong. For example, because the procurement scale of the Ningde era is large, and the control of upstream technology is strong, it is also the ternary positive pole that accounts for the highest proportion of procurement in the cost, and the price discount of the NINGDE era compared to other customers in 2017-2019 is more than 10%.
Therefore, under the scale effect, the Ningde era can produce batteries at a lower cost. The market rumor that Xiaopeng will cooperate with AVIC lithium battery, in 2020, the domestic power battery market share of 5.6%, there is no obvious advantage in terms of scale, the cost is not as competitive as the Ningde era.
In terms of cost, the stronger "killing move" of the Ningde era lies in the forward-looking layout of "separation of vehicle and electricity". In 2020, the national new energy vehicle subsidy policy clearly affirmed the vehicle-electricity separation model based on power exchange technology, and electric vehicles with a price of more than 300,000 must have the ability to change electricity to enjoy car purchase subsidies; in the 2020 government work report of the two sessions, the replacement power station was included in the category of "new infrastructure" for the first time.
As a new type of electric vehicle energy supplementation solution, "vehicle-to-electricity separation" solves the two core pain points of electric vehicle endurance and charging time, and is becoming one of the main ways of electric vehicle energy replenishment, and more importantly, it can significantly reduce the purchase cost of new energy vehicles.
For example, if the user chooses the "Baas battery rental" form to buy the ES6, a popular model of Weilai with 70kWh of electricity, it will cost 70,000 yuan less, a decrease of nearly 20%, and the monthly rent of the battery pack is only 980 yuan, and the price attractiveness is greatly improved. In addition, the charging efficiency of the power exchange mode is amazing, the second generation of the replacement power station released by Weilai in January 2021, a single power exchange only takes 3 minutes, compared with most of the current fast charging mode can only achieve 80% of the power within 30 minutes, which can greatly improve the user charging experience, and also solve the user's concerns about battery capacity attenuation.
Of course, the power exchange mode also has higher requirements for battery life, product consistency and after-sales service capabilities, which is good for such head enterprises as the Ningde era. In August 2020, CATL, together with Weilai, Guotai Junan and Hubei Ketou, established a company to promote the development of the new business model of "separation of vehicle and electricity" in the new energy automobile industry. The promotion of the power exchange model will make the demand for power batteries grow faster than the sales growth rate of new energy vehicles, and help the Ningde era to open up new markets.
Second, from the perspective of production capacity, in 2020, the production capacity of the power battery system of the Ningde era is 69.1GWh, the output is 51.71GWh, the sales volume is 46.86GWh, the capacity utilization rate is 74.83% (affected by the epidemic), and the production and marketing rate is still as high as 90.58%, which can almost be said to be "full production and full sales". Under such a premise, Xiaopeng, which accounts for only 6% of the installed capacity of customers in the Ningde era, is looking for new suppliers, which has no impact on the delivery of existing battery orders in the Ningde era, and will hardly lead to a decline in the performance of the Ningde era.
Figure: Customer composition of the installed capacity of the Ningde era in 2020
Third, from the perspective of technology research and development, the number of patents in the Ningde era is relatively large, from cobalt-free cathode, silicon anode and lithium supplement, new electrolyte and coated separator, to solid-state batteries, structural design, intelligent manufacturing, etc., from the material system to the design and manufacturing of all aspects. And it is taking a "two-way lane" in the field of power batteries - lithium iron phosphate + ternary lithium dual system go hand in hand. From the perspective of loading capacity caliber, lithium iron phosphate accounted for only 32.5% in 2019, climbed to 38.3% in 2020, and further broke through to 40.4% in 2021Q1. In 2020, NINGDE Times (including Times SAIC) has a market share of 45.57% in ternary lithium batteries and 58.90% in lithium iron phosphate batteries, ranking first in both.
At present, the recognition of lithium iron phosphate batteries in the domestic mainstream market is improving, overseas companies LG Chem and Panasonic are mainly engaged in ternary lithium systems, and the Ningde era is a dual-system road, and the safety boundary is more solid.
epilogue
Whether it is the current or short-term future, whether it is cost or research and development, from which point of view, even if Xiaopeng really "abandons" the Ningde era, it will not have a substantial impact on the performance of the Ningde era. The author believes that the biggest possibility that the performance of the Cataline era will really affect in the short term is the price fluctuation of lithium battery raw materials. Price fluctuations directly affect costs, but this is a problem faced by the entire power battery industry, not a Ningde era.
The development of high-performance, low-cost new materials has always been a popular research direction for power batteries. A few days ago, some investors asked on the interactive platform what stage of the current research on sodium-ion batteries in the Ningde era is, and whether there are any breakthroughs? Will sodium ions replace lithium-ion batteries?
The secretary of the board of directors of CATL said that the company has launched the industrialization layout of sodium-ion batteries and will form a basic industrial chain in 2023.
In addition to the Current Ningde Era, there are not many sodium-ion batteries in China, in view of the core position of the Ningde Era in the entire industrial chain of power batteries, sodium-ion battery-related technologies (such as sodium-lithium hybrids studied in the Ningde Era) may be applied on a large scale earlier than solid-state battery technology, will this be the choice of new energy vehicle companies in the future?