Cure stubborn diseases, overcome difficulties
New energy vehicle industry chain: run up, but also stronger
"It's logical that the market has grown faster than expected this year." This is the summary of the domestic new energy vehicle market this year by Ouyang Minggao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, at the media communication meeting of the China Electric Vehicle Hundred People's Association held recently. In his view, technological progress, product abundance, policy support are the three major elements of this year's new energy vehicle market outbreak, according to the "S-shaped curve" theory, global automotive electrification has broken through the critical point and entered a period of steep growth.
Despite the general pressure on the supply chain, the domestic new energy vehicle market is still "soaring". According to the data of the Association of Automobile Associations, the cumulative sales of new energy vehicles in China from January to November this year were 2.514 million units, an increase of 178.3% year-on-year; the retail penetration rate of domestic new energy vehicles in November was 20.8%, and the overall penetration rate from January to November was 13.9%, which was significantly higher than 5.8% in 2020.
The substantial growth of terminal sales has driven the entire industrial chain forward steadily, the power battery industry has run out of "acceleration", auto parts companies have stimulated "new kinetic energy", and smart cars have pressed the "fast-forward button" for the quality improvement of the industrial chain. Reversing the situation of "big but not strong" independent parts and "unobstructed" traditional supply chains is not only the key to "climbing over the hill" of the new energy automobile industry chain, but also the "battle to attack the strongholds" of the construction of an automobile power.
Curing stubborn diseases: tempering new strength of competition
At the end of the year, Huayou Cobalt opened the bargaining window period of the power battery industry with 3 purchase agreements.
On December 2, Huayou Cobalt signed a Strategic Cooperation Agreement with Fu Neng Technology, agreeing to supply the latter with 161,500 tons of ternary precursors from December this year to the end of 2025. According to the NCM811 battery 1 GWh corresponding to 1400 tons of precursor calculation, the order corresponds to ternary lithium battery shipments of about 100 GWh. Previously, Huayou Cobalt has signed cooperation agreements with Ronbay Technology and Dangsheng Technology respectively, and the total supply of 3 orders has been locked in 641,500 tons to 926,500 tons of ternary precursors, corresponding to battery shipments of more than 400 GWh.
For the power battery industry, which is accelerating into the Taiwawh era, 2021 is a key year to expand production capacity and grab resources; and high-frequency words such as "full production and full sales", "production and sales are booming", "volume and price are rising" also declare the high prosperity of the power battery industry chain.
When CICC looks forward to 2022, it will increase global power battery shipments to 656 GWh, an increase of more than 90% year-on-year; it is expected that the global demand for power batteries will reach 1789 GWh in 2025, and the demand for energy storage lithium batteries will also exceed 200 GWh. Based on the capacity planning announcement of listed companies in the power battery industry, the new effective supply from 2021 to 2024 is still slightly lower than the new demand, or in a tight balance; from the existing planning point of view, the capacity gap in 2025 is about 244 GWh.
With the large-scale expansion of production, the improvement of quality and efficiency of the supply chain is becoming a new industrial competitiveness.
Zeng Yuqun, chairman of CATL, recently called for the four major competitiveness of the supply chain to be built as soon as possible in terms of scale, cost, quality and low carbon. He introduced that through artificial intelligence analysis, edge computing and cloud computing and other technologies, CATL can produce 1 battery every 1.7 seconds, with a defect rate of only one billionth, and increase labor productivity by 75% and reduce energy consumption by 10%. "Don't look at how much battery manufacturers invest in research and development, the most impact on survival is manufacturing safety." R&D is competitiveness, manufacturing is viability, and both are equally important. Wei Yimin, director of the Digital R&D Center of catheter times 21C Innovation Lab, said.
In the view of Chen Qingtai, director of the China Electric Vehicle Hundred Association, it is China's unprecedented attention and investment in new energy vehicles, industrialization is one step ahead, "The history of China's electric vehicle development for more than 10 years tells us that the bottom of the automobile power is the parts power." Ouyang Minggao also believes that from the perspective of supply chain, China not only has a complete power battery industry chain, but also has 70% of the world's production capacity. "The industrial competitiveness of China's power batteries is difficult to shake in a short period of time."
The crux of the matter: stimulate new momentum in the industry
If the power battery industry is strong from scratch, then the auto parts industry has stimulated new kinetic energy in the process of getting rid of the traditional fuel vehicle era.
"Domestic enterprises have advantages in the subdivision of aluminum alloys, such as wiper systems and steering systems, but there is still a gap between the body and chassis structural parts and the advanced level." After Tesla was domestically produced, several companies that cut into the supply chain earlier had an obvious amount, which also drove the whole industry to accelerate its layout in the field of lightweight structural parts. The market leader of a company in the industry said that the process and equipment of aluminum alloy structural parts have new requirements, and the research and development and fixed-point cycles are relatively long, but there will be a batch of structural parts mass production within two or three years.
Lightweight is a small hot spot in the general trend of electrification, that is, under the premise of ensuring the overall strength and safety performance of the car, through the use of a large number of lightweight body parts, reduce the quality of the equipment of the whole vehicle, thereby improving power and reducing energy consumption.
For pure electric vehicles with one-third of the vehicle equipment quality being power battery packs, the role of weight reduction and consumption reduction of body weight is particularly obvious. For example, the body of WEIO Automobile ES8 with an aluminum rate of 95.8% is about 40% lower than that of traditional steel body, and the final body-in-white weight is only 335 kg; Tesla Model S also adopts an all-aluminum alloy body design.
According to the lightweight target preset by the Strategic Advisory Committee on the Technology Roadmap for Energy-saving and New Energy Vehicles, the amount of aluminum and magnesium alloy used in bicycles will exceed 350 kg and 45 kg in 2030, the use of carbon fiber will account for 5% of the vehicle weight, and the weight of the bicycle will be reduced by 35% compared with 2015. In this context, industry leaders such as Xusheng Co., Ltd. and Tuopu Group have prepared to expand production.
The same changes are happening in other areas of auto parts.
The person in charge of a domestic automotive wiring harness company said that the company's new energy vehicle projects account for more and more high, and will be intensively put into production in the next two or three years, "this year's new energy vehicle business growth is faster, in the second half of the year there will be several projects successively batch production, and the value of new energy vehicles' single wiring harnesses is higher, it is expected that the new energy vehicle business will account for 40% of the annual revenue."
Overcoming the difficulty: meeting new opportunities for change
With Qualcomm announcing at the 2021 Investor Conference that BMW will use the Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride self-driving platform from 2025, Mobileye, a chip leader in ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), has lost another important customer after Tesla.
In the past 20 years, Mobileye's "algorithm + chip" solution has helped car companies achieve crash alarm, emergency braking, adaptive cruise and other functions, making it possible for the rapid landing of L2-level driver assistance systems and becoming a leader in the field of ADAS. However, in the face of higher-level driver assistance systems and the technology leaders flocking to the track, Mobileye is gradually losing its advantage. At the end of 2020, the eyeQ5 chip launched by Mobileye hash rate of 24TOPS, and the single hash rate of NVIDIA Orin chip in the same period was 254TOPS, which is 10 times that of the former; the chip of the Ride platform launched by Qualcomm can reach up to 60TOPS, and the overall computing power exceeds 700TOPS through multi-chip combinations and other solutions.
More and more car companies choose to leave Mobileye - Tesla's self-developed FSD chip, New models such as Weilai Automobile and Zhiji Automobile are equipped with NVIDIA Orin chips, and the first mass production cooperation intention users of Horizon "Journey 5" include SAIC, Great Wall Motors, BYD, Changan Automobile, etc.
The decline of Mobileye shows that smart cars not only spawn a new industrial chain, but also become the key to coordinated development due to cross-application in multiple fields. Li Bin, chairman of Weilai Automobile, believes that as more and more technology companies pour into the track, the intelligent electric vehicle industry has once again become the commanding heights and integrators of scientific and technological innovation, "only by continuing to increase investment in innovative research and development can we ensure that we will not be left behind in the competition."
Behind the expansion of chip computing power, is the car companies around the intelligent car competition to carry out the hardware "arms race", only the number of lidar mounted from the beginning of the year Xiaopeng P5 2, to the middle of the year of the extreme fox Alpha S 3, and then to the end of the year Salon car "mecha dragon" 4, the increase in the number of chips put forward higher computing power requirements, but also reflects the fierce competition of smart cars.
McKinsey predicts that by 2030, the global smart car software and electrical and electronics market will reach $469 billion, almost twice that of 2020; the number of intelligent connected cars in the world will grow by more than 40% for four consecutive years from 2018, and sales will exceed 70 million in 2022.
The emerging intelligent and connected car industry chain has not only ushered in apple, Google, Huawei and other technology leaders, but also found a good opportunity for domestic auto parts companies to develop and grow. Xu Songyun, deputy general manager of Qingdu Technology, said: "Auto parts are the 'waist' of the chip, is the carrier, if China's auto parts can successfully break through, the large-scale application of domestic chips is just around the corner." ”
