Capital is ammunition, and wherever it is invested, it will become a battlefield.
Author | Xiao Ying
2021 has passed, let's take a look at it together, in the smart car and autonomous driving track, which segments have attracted the most money this year? Where will the most competitive battlefield be in 2022?
According to the incomplete statistics of Cybercar, in the direction of automobile intelligence, the cumulative investment and financing of the primary and secondary markets in 2021 will reach 159.19 billion yuan, and the investment hotspots are mainly in the fields of vehicles, autonomous driving solutions, chips, and lidar.
01
The top three consolidate their competitive advantage, and the second-tier camp catches up
The total financing in the vehicle field exceeded 83.12 billion yuan, accounting for more than half of the total amount of the whole year (including more than 55.3 billion yuan in listing and additional issuance), involving 10 automobile brands of Evergrande, Zero Run, Pole Star, Nezha, Xiaopeng, Extreme Krypton, Ideal, WM, Weilai and Avita.
The investment and financing actions of these enterprises can glimpse the market competition environment of the entire new car-making forces.
In 2021, Xiaopeng and Ideal have been listed again on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising HK$14 billion (about 11.48 billion yuan) and 11.6 billion Hong Kong dollars (about 9.51 billion yuan) respectively.
Although NIO's return to Hong Kong stocks due to the trust fund issue was blocked, its ability to raise funds remained undiminished, and it still issued an additional US$2 billion (about 12.74 billion yuan) in US stocks.
This year, the new energy vehicle market showed explosive growth, walking through the inflection point of 10% of the market share of new car sales and entering a new stage of rapid growth. The three new car-making forces have also successively broken through the mass production mark of 100,000 vehicles.
As of the end of the third quarter of this year, WEILAI, Xiaopeng and Ideal Cash Reserves reached about 47 billion yuan, 45.36 billion yuan and 48.83 billion yuan respectively.
Ammunition is sufficient, riding on the high-speed growth of the market, the three major forces of new car manufacturing are expected to further consolidate the first-mover advantage.
The new car-making forces in the second camp are also pursuing each other, and the three enterprises of Nezha, Weima and Zero Run have completed financing of 7 billion yuan, 4.52 US dollars (about 2.89 billion yuan) and 8.8 billion yuan respectively. All three are impacting Hong Kong stock listings, and who can take the lead in landing may be known in 2022.
Another wave of new car-making forces that deserve attention is the high-end electric vehicle brands incubated by traditional car companies, such as BAIC's Jihu, Dongfeng's Lantu, Geely's Extreme Krypton, Great Wall's Salon, Changan's Avita, etc.
For traditional car companies, the huge organizational inertia makes it difficult for them to quickly turn the rudder according to the direction of the wind, and the establishment of an independent new brand is their way of self-innovation.
Among these companies, some car companies choose to use their own funds to develop new brands, and some choose to access investors to share the risk.
It can be seen that Polar Star, Extreme Krypton and Avita have all introduced external capital, and in 2021, they will receive 550 million US dollars (about 3.5 billion yuan), 500 million US dollars (about 3.2 billion yuan), and 2.42 billion yuan of financing.
Evergrande Automobile received the largest equity financing in the automotive industry in 2021, with a total of HK$26 billion (about 21.58 billion yuan). The completion of such a large-scale financing reflects that the capital market was once very optimistic about the development prospects and investment value of Evergrande Automobile.
However, what investors did not expect was that with the macro-control of real estate, Evergrande Group became the largest gray rhinoceros in the year, and its automobile business sector was also seriously hindered. Liu Yongzhuo, president of Evergrande Automobile, previously said at the strategic partner conference that Evergrande Automobile is fighting a tough battle to ensure that Hengchi's first car will roll off the production line at the Tianjin plant early next year.
In addition, the two companies that want to be mentioned in the vehicle sector are Tesla and Rivian. Although these two companies are not domestic car companies, their influence in the capital market in 2021 is worth mentioning.
In 2021, Tesla's market capitalization will exceed $1 trillion, becoming the world's fifth trillion-dollar company after Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.
Of course, Tesla's value is not only reflected in the stock market, but also its benchmarking significance for the entire electric vehicle industry and the pull for the development of the entire industrial chain.
Another electric vehicle company that has to be mentioned is Rivian.
Rivian, a dark horse known as the Tesla Killer, landed on the NASDAQ in November 2021 and raised $11.934 billion. Rivian's IPO was the largest IPO of 2021 and the sixth largest in U.S. stock history.
At present, four of the top ten car companies in the world by market capitalization are electric vehicle manufacturers, namely Tesla, BYD, Rivian and Lucid.
It can be seen that the electrification and intelligent transformation of the automobile industry have no suspense, and this track will also be the investment outlet in the next few years.
02
Robotaxi's investment enthusiasm has declined, and trunk logistics has become the focus of racing
Autonomous driving solutions have become another investment hotspot after the whole vehicle, with 65 investments and financings in 2021, totaling 42.41 billion yuan.
Robotaxi was once the most active subdivision track in the field of autonomous driving, but from the perspective of investment and financing in 2021, it is far inferior to the trunk logistics track.
In 2021, there were 6 main robotaxi financings, involving 4 enterprises, with a total financing of 7.12 billion yuan. In contrast, there were 9 trunk logistics financings in total, with a total financing of 13.44 billion yuan.
It can be seen that the enthusiasm of the capital market for the trunk logistics scene has surpassed that of Robotaxi.
There are positive and negative reasons for this phenomenon, and the positive factor is the future listing of Tucson, an autonomous driving trunk logistics company, so that the capital market can see the possibility of faster technology landing.
The negative factors are related to the delay in achieving completely unmanned commercial operation of Waymo's autonomous driving business. The industry understands that Waymo is the vanguard of automatic driving, is the big brother of technology, if it is facing the dilemma of landing difficulties, other companies will be difficult to break through.
That judgment became more confirmed with the departure of former Waymo CEO John Krafcik, a news that once plunged the self-driving industry into pessimism.
In addition to Tucson's successful listing in the future, the other two leading companies in the trunk logistics track, Zhijia Technology and Wincher Technology, have also obtained good financing results, the former raising US$420 million (about 2.68 billion yuan) and the latter financing US$270 million (about 1.7 billion yuan).
At the same time, Robotaxi enterprises have also begun to lay out trunk logistics tracks, such as Baidu's DeepWay and Xiaoma Zhixing. In addition, there are players such as SAIC's Youdao Zhitu and Ali DamoYuan.
Another segment with high attention in 2021 is the terminal unmanned distribution, with 10 financings in the whole year, reaching a scale of 2.75 billion yuan.
Compared with the car companies that raise tens of billions of yuan, this financing scale may not be much, but compared with closed scenes such as ports, parks, and mines, it is already relatively sexy, especially the unmanned distribution at the end also occupies the advantages of low-speed operation, easier landing, and broad market prospects.
In addition to the three key scenarios of Robotaxi, trunk logistics, and terminal distribution, other scenarios raised a total of 3.53 billion yuan.
High-end intelligent driving on the car is a major trend this year, with the new car-making forces as the main driving force, is setting off a car intelligent ability competition.
In this context, autonomous driving technology companies for mass production vehicles have received more capital attention.
According to statistics, there were more than 20 autonomous driving technology companies for mass production vehicles in the whole year, and the cumulative financing reached 16.48 billion yuan. At the same time, it has also created some star enterprises, such as Momenta, Zhixing, Zhongmu Technology, etc., and the total financing of the three enterprises in the whole year exceeded 1 billion yuan. Among them, Momenta set a fundraising record in this field, with two rounds of financing combined to more than US$1 billion (about 6.37 billion yuan).
It can also be seen from these investment and financing cases that the deep binding cooperation between vehicle companies and autonomous driving technology companies is becoming a trend, SAIC led the investment in Momenta in the C round of financing, ANDD and Momenta established a joint venture company; Zhixing was originally an incubator of Great Wall Motors; And Zhongmu Technology reached a strategic cooperation with Changan Automobile.
This further shows that the "circle money" of automatic driving can no longer rely solely on PPT to talk about concepts, and whether the technology can land has become the focus of investors' judgment.
03
The computing chip unicorn appears, and the lidar is on the car to be verified
Autonomous driving hardware represented by chips and lidar is also the focus of investment in 2021, with a total investment and financing of 21.89 billion yuan in the whole year.
Among them, the chip reached 16.35 billion yuan, and the lidar received 3.79 billion yuan in financing.
Affected by the "lack of cores", the entire industry has a high degree of attention to automotive chips. The global chip supply is turbulent, and the domestic chip industry chain has ushered in an important period of development opportunities, especially high-computing chips for automatic driving.
Horizon is the darling of the capital market in 2021, with annual financing reaching 1.5 billion US dollars (about 9.56 billion yuan), setting a record for the highest financing amount except for several vehicle companies, and has also become the object of domestic OEMs competing for cooperation.
High computing power chips are similar to the intelligentization of automobiles, some are similar to power batteries to electric vehicles, and the development momentum of Horizon is also somewhat similar to the rise of the Ningde era. There is news in the market that Horizon may plan to go public in Hong Kong next year.
In addition to computing chips, domestic players in the direction of control chips, memory chips, sensor chips, communication chips, energy supply chips, etc. are also rapidly making up for shortcomings, and the cumulative investment and financing in the chip field has reached 20 throughout the year.
In the lidar market, Hesai Technology is still hot, with $370 million in financing throughout the year, but there are also some dark horse companies such as Sagitar Juchuang, and some latecomers are on top.
Different from Hesai Technology, which mainly faces the L4 market and produces radar products with higher performance requirements and higher prices, Sagitar Juchuang pays more attention to the mass production car market, and has successively obtained the front-loading fixed points of GAC Aean, WM Motors, And Krypton, and obtained strategic investment from BYD.
Yole Développement, a world-renowned market research and strategy consultancy, has released the 2021 Report on LiDAR Applications in Automotive and Industrial Sectors. The report counts the share of lidar R&D manufacturers in the automotive and industrial markets, including more than a dozen leading companies around the world.
Among them, Valeo accounted for 28% of the market, ranking first; Sagitar Juchuang market accounted for 10%, ranking second; Luminar, Lanwo, Denso, Continental, Ception five markets accounted for 7%; Ibeo, Innoviz two markets accounted for 4%, Velodyne, Huawei, Hesai, Tuttong four markets accounted for 3%.
From this ranking, we can also basically see the entire market pattern of lidar, and the development momentum of domestic innovative enterprises Sagitar Juchuang and DJI is relatively good.
In addition to chips and lidar, we also put millimeter-wave radar, vision sensors, and control-by-wire chassis in this section. At present, these areas have a certain degree of capital attention, but the heat is not high, and the financing amount is generally around 100 million yuan.
As a representative of domestic innovative enterprises in the field of wire control chassis, Nasen Technology ushered in a relatively large amount of financing in December 2021, reaching 500 million yuan.
In the direction of smart cars, there are two more areas worth paying attention to: smart cockpits and smart transportation. These two areas are not as active as expected, and the reason for the analysis may be that the smart cockpit is still firmly controlled by traditional suppliers, there is no disruptive technology or product, the value of smart transportation is just beginning to be concerned, and market opportunities need to continue to brew.
04
Write at the end
Reviewing the investment and financing of smart cars and autonomous driving tracks in 2021, it can be seen that the vehicle sector is still frantically sucking gold, and at the same time, the upstream and downstream of the supporting industrial chain have also begun to benefit from the intelligent transformation of automobiles.
Software-defined cars, autonomous driving solution providers of capital attention is very high, is the most active part of the entire industry chain innovation, at the same time, this field is also in the stage of barbaric growth, the head players in various segments of the field initially appeared, the need for further reshuffle.
The industrial support of automotive chips is far from enough, and more talents and resources are needed to invest in and strengthen the localization ability, and it is expected that this direction will become the focus of investment in 2022.
Lidar will be able to be launched on a small scale in 2022, and the market's feedback on technology will determine the capital attention of this track.
In addition, in the direction of smart cockpit and smart transportation, there may be new highlights, which is also a noteworthy investment track in 2022.
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