2021 is a year of uncertainty: important variables such as regulation, layoffs, the pandemic, and U.S.-China relations have profoundly impacted the business world in which we live. In 2022, these variables will introduce greater uncertainty. Tiger Sniff attempts to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and uncertainties that lie ahead in 2022 by summarizing the annual series of 50 star companies and discovering the core issues they are about to face in 2022. The annual series is divided into three parts, covering big consumption, hard technology and financial real estate.
This article will interpret the 22 core problems encountered by 22 hard technology-related companies.
Produced | Tiger Sniff original
Authors| Thor, Zhang Bowen, Wang Xiaoyu, Master Zi Nan, and Utada
Design | Wang Nannan
After Huawei, which mobile phone brand can really challenge Apple?
01 Apple: Invincible is the loneliest?
The whole of 2021 should have been a carnival year for the domestic mobile phone industry; I did not expect that the final benefit was not the domestic mobile phone manufacturers, but Apple.
In 2021, iPhone sales finally got rid of the decline in recent years and hit another peak. This is due to apple's lack of Huawei's suppression and successful recovery of the Chinese market. In the second and fourth quarters of 2021, Apple grew by more than 80% in Greater China; even in the third quarter, when growth rates were lowest, it also grew by more than 50%. Moreover, Huawei has given up its share of high-end mobile phones, increasing the average selling price of Apple's mobile phones from an average of $700 to $850.
Apple eats Huawei's share and eats a lot, but has Apple lived a good and happy life ever since? No.
With the mainstream mobile phone market, including China, already saturated, Apple has ushered in the first fiscal year of year-on-year decline in nearly 15 years since 2016, "Apple is doomed" has become the main theme of the media at that time, and "lack of innovation" has also become synonymous with Apple.
At the same time, although Apple still maintains slight growth in most of the global market, it has been hit hard by Huawei in the domestic market, and in the 20 quarters of the five quarters from 2016 to 2020, Apple has recorded a year-on-year decline in the Chinese market for 12 quarters. Huawei beat apple at home, on the one hand, making it impossible for Apple to open up the world's second largest mobile phone market, but on the other hand, it also covered up Apple's inability to find a new performance engine other than the iPhone.
By 2021, Apple stood on top of Huawei's corpse and suddenly found that looking across the entire high-end mobile phone market, there was no opponent, nor any potential high-end market space. Apple wants to continue to grow, or together with domestic mobile phone manufacturers, soaking in the low-end mobile phone market with a "comprehensive hardware profit margin of less than 5%", or looking for new markets, such as Apple services, AR glasses, or Apple cars?
In other words, "eating Huawei" only alleviates Apple's current growth dilemma, but does not fundamentally solve the problem of "smartphone market saturation". On the contrary, as Apple was forced to open up the channel of "in-app purchases" in the EPIC Games lawsuit, threatening the fundamental source of income of Apple's service sector; the high-profile "Apple Car" and "Apple Glass" could not be mass-produced, making It impossible for Apple to find new revenue points.
Apple is really "invincible and the loneliest" in the mobile phone market, but if they are still "lonely" in 2022, Wall Street is estimated to let Apple "die" again.
02 Huawei: Not to survive, but to exist
Huawei's sanctions have been further escalated in 2020, and both mobile phones and chip businesses have been hit hard. In 2021, Huawei's performance will plummet like a roller coaster.
However, Huawei is Huawei after all. In contrast, Huawei was sanctioned by the United States for three years, at least still alive, first hoarding a large number of chips, then selling glory, and then selling the x86 server department, in exchange for a large amount of money, for a time can not see Any danger of Huawei.
In 2022, Huawei does not have an urgent "survival" problem at present, and the real problem they face is that the "sense of existence" is gradually weakening.
In terms of mobile phones, Huawei's share has finally won from the original to become a short-term "global first", falling to the top five in China. Moreover, although market research company Omdia said that Hongmeng OS is strongly three points with Android and iOS, in statcounter statistics, Android and iOS account for more than 99% of the entire Chinese mobile phone market, and Hongmeng has to share less than 1% of the remaining share with other systems. At present, the shipment volume of China's mobile phone market has reached hundreds of millions of units per year, and the current ownership rate of Huawei mobile phones alone is by no means enough to maintain the market position of Hongmeng OS.
In order to brush the presence of Hongmeng, Huawei not only gave users' old Huawei mobile phones memory to continue their lives, but also reluctantly launched a new P50 image flagship in 2021, and borrowed corpses to return the soul through "Huawei's personal selection" to launch the "nesting doll" version of Huawei mobile phones. At the same time, Huawei's sense of existence has simultaneously brushed into smart homes, in-vehicle systems, and various other fields.
Despite Huawei's efforts, after all, the annual shipments of China's mobile phone market are not comparable to the shipments of smart homes and in-vehicle systems. Moreover, the popularity of smart homes and automatic driving is far less than that of mobile phones, which cannot bring enough industry influence to Huawei in the short term.
At the same time, Huawei has also been hit hard by sanctions on base stations and cloud services, and although the business is still developing rapidly, its growth momentum has been greatly affected. At present, they have to push forward in the direction of digital society and launch various digital coal mines, digital agriculture and other solutions; but in the same way, the development path of these industries is far from mature, and they need to develop in the long run of 5 to 10 years, which is not enough to solve Huawei's "existence" needs in the short term.
Another more pressing "presence" problem with Huawei is the supply of chips. They hoarded a large number of chips in response to sanctions in 2020, which are expected to be used for about two years; then Huawei has been saving on use and barely survived 2021. By 2022, these chips have lagged behind others by two generations, Huawei can no longer use these chips to launch first-class products, should they take out the chips at once and finally brush a wave of presence? Or continue to save and use it for a few more years?
To be or not to be, that is a question。
The sense of presence is the most urgent problem for Huawei in 2022.
03 Glory: How far can the biggest spoiler go?
The biggest surprise of the mobile phone industry in 2021 is the rapid rise of Glory.
When the giant Huawei fell, domestic mobile phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi, OPPO and Vivo rushed to harvest Huawei's remaining market. But although these mobile phone manufacturers all say that they want to "stand firm at the high end" and grab Apple's high-end market, they are very clear in their hearts that they can't beat Apple, and they can sell a few more high-end mobile phones to make money, and they have not set too many dead targets in the high-end market.
But Huawei's remaining low-end market is completely different, which is where the ban on domestic mobile phone manufacturers lies. Although at the end of 2020, the glory of Huawei's low-end sub-brand suddenly became independent, but other friends also thought that glory would come back to grab old users, at least redeploy it for a year. Unexpectedly, Glory did not take a few months to come back to life, and the Glory 50 launched in the middle of the year was a big seller, which not only quickly recovered the market that originally belonged to Glory, but also suddenly became a nightmare for various mobile phone companies.
It is true that after Huawei was heavily sanctioned by the United States in 2020, various manufacturers increased chip inventory on the one hand to avoid time to time; also in order to grab Huawei's share, they also increased shipments and greatly expanded stores and sales channels. Unexpectedly, when Glory suddenly rose rapidly and quickly became the top three in China's mobile phone market, disrupting their production and distribution: in the case of Xiaomi, their finished product inventory increased sharply from 14.6 billion in the same period last year to 21.3 billion last year, and also increased by 34% from 15.9 billion half a year ago.
It can be seen that the rapid return of glory has made a number of domestic mobile phone manufacturers into seven meats and eight vegetarians, and glory has suddenly become the biggest spoiler in China's mobile phone market.
However, all they can do at the moment is to stir up trouble. The rapid rise of Glory, although they can quickly return to the normal pace of delivery, did not give the opponent too much time, but according to Sohu Technology report, Glory originally had channel business holdings, deep binding of interest relations, plus Glory also provided more commissions for channels, so it was supported by more sales channels. In other words, Glory's rise is not because of their hard power, but because of the exchange of profits for market share.
But more importantly, in 2021, they will only recover the low-end market share that originally belonged to Huawei's sub-brand "Honor", rather than completely recycling all the mobile phone markets that originally belonged to Huawei.
Glory, still glory, they are not Yet Huawei. They did not have the Baron base belt, no Kirin chip, no Hongmeng system, and no Ren Zhengfei and Yu Chengdong. Although Honor also launched an offensive against the 7,000 yuan market, it ultimately failed to recover market share that originally belonged to the P series and Mate series; these high-end users would rather wait for two weeks to buy an iPhone 13 Pro Max than spend money to buy the Magic 3 series that looks like the Mate 40.
Honor is indeed not Yet Huawei.
Therefore, Honor's biggest task in 2022 is to prove that it is no longer Huawei's low-end brand, but the next Huawei.
04 Xiaomi: Everything (should) be wonderful
Xiaomi's 2021 should have been wonderful..... At the very least, that's how the opening is.
2021 is a big year for domestic mobile phone manufacturers, Huawei is not ok, three domestic mobile phones, a group to grab Huawei's share. Because of this, Xiaomi has adopted a rather aggressive strategy. Xiaomi, which is famous for "playing monkeys", stopped playing monkeys last year and greatly increased the stock volume; Xiaomi, which started online, launched the "thousand stores open together" plan in 2021 to lay offline channels on a large scale.
Xiaomi also recorded a year-on-year increase of 64.8% and 86.6% respectively because of its aggressive layout, and seized the throne of the second place in the global mobile phone market shipments, successfully harvested Huawei's leeks, and became the best performer of the three major factories of "rice, O and V" in the first quarter.
But unexpectedly, at the beginning of the second quarter, Xiaomi faced the glory of its old enemy who quickly returned to the soul in China, and suddenly there was chaos; coupled with the outbreak of the epidemic in Southeast Asia, it directly affected Xiaomi, which is developing rapidly in emerging markets. At that time, even Shen Yiren, a former executive of OPPO, complained that Xiaomi was "overstocked" and had a large backlog of inventory; there was also news that Qualcomm was cut by Xiaomi, and its share fell from 80% to 55%.
Although Xiaomi still has no inventory backlog as usual, and also denies a large cut order; but the fact is that Xiaomi gave up the throne of the second largest share of the world that has not yet warmed in the third quarter, and even shipments have fallen sharply from the previous month, and more ironically, Xiaomi's shipments have actually fallen by 4.6% year-on-year.
Yes, Xiaomi is also the only one among the three domestic manufacturers of "rice, O, V" to record a year-on-year decline in 2021.
Similarly, this year should also be a big year for Xiaomi, after all, Xiaomi announced the construction of cars in 2021, catching up with this major hot spot of investment; at the same time, Xiaomi's self-developed ISP chip was listed, once again proving Xiaomi's research and development capabilities.
It should have been nice, but their luck wasn't really good, and they had too many accidents.
The news of Xiaomi's car, although it makes fans excited, but did not expect investors to be quite cold, Xiaomi's stock price actually did not rise but fell; in the second half of the year, the meta-universe wave suddenly rose, Xiaomi wanted to borrow electric vehicles to further speculate on stock prices, it is more and more difficult. In addition, shortly after Xiaomi announced the launch of self-developed chips, even OPPO announced the launch of self-developed chips, and the launch of artificial intelligence chips (NPUs) that sound more stylish and more propaganda value; in contrast, Xiaomi's ISP suddenly became very low.
Xiaomi in 2021 is extremely aggressive and has done everything they can, but they also put the trump card that they can play (Wang Eight Fists?). All gone. By 2022, what big moves are left?
After all, the domestic mobile phone market continues to roll inward, Glory still threatens its market share, the epidemic in emerging markets is still serious, the growth of the IoT market with high hopes has slowed down, and the rise of the high-end has suddenly come to naught. Are they still only able to start with Qualcomm Snapdragon in 2022, selling a folding screen mobile phone with a low cost performance, and continuing to lay out Xiaomi cars with doubtful competitiveness?
Or: Are they still hiding unexpected aces?
05 vivo: Can you break the fate of "accompanying runners"?
I have to say that last year vivo was the most stable company among many domestic mobile phone manufacturers.
Before 2021, everyone said vivo, always the last place in the "Hua, Mi, O, V"; when it comes to backgammon mobile phones, OPPO is always in front, and vivo is always the second oldest.
Vivo is such a Buddha.
When Huawei is not working, Xiaomi and OPPO are expanding wildly, and special stores have opened one after another; however, they have to develop their own chips at one time, and they are clamoring to build cars at the same time. However, vivo did not shout "a thousand stores open together" like Xiaomi; nor did it secretly leak "car-making" messages like OPPO to test the water temperature; it did not engage in 7,000 yuan mobile phones to rush to the high-end like Glory.
Vivo is just like the "Buddhist system" in the past, no quarrel or quarrel.
And then in 2021... The Buddhist vivo quietly won the throne of the first domestic market share.
But can we say they didn't move in 2021? Again, it's not. Since last year, Vivo has quietly cooperated with Samsung to customize Exynos chips, and has also quietly launched its own ISP chips last year, and quietly launched several high-end mobile phones. However, this well-behaved student of the Buddhist department can only sit on the sidelines in 2021, looking at the bully named Apple in vain, harvesting all of Huawei's high-end market.
Why did the Buddhist vivo suddenly reach the top in 2021? It is also because they are very Buddhist, not too aggressive when Huawei is not working, quietly watching old opponents such as Xiaomi and OPPO make mistakes one after another, and then pick up leaks in the rear (Note).
At some point, you don't need to be better or stronger than others, you just need to make fewer mistakes than others to win.
(Note: IDC calculates the sales of Redmi into Xiaomi and iQOO into Vivo; but due to the structural relationship of realme, it does not count in the sales volume of OPPO, which makes the sales of the OPPO brand a little lower.) If you count the sales of realme into the OPPO system, OPPO shipments are higher than vivo. ）
In this way, the Buddhist vivo eventually surpassed the impetuous millet and OPPO and became the first in the domestic market. However, vivo, which is currently standing at the peak position of domestic mobile phones, relies solely on this set of Buddhist taijiquan to represent domestic mobile phones against Apple, which is not dead and golden, can it really be male? Similarly, Xiaomi, OPPO and Glory, which are lagging behind, will also regard vivo that is suddenly ahead as a mortal enemy and beat it to death. Vivo relying solely on a set of Buddhist cloud hands, can it resist the counterattack of domestic mobile phone manufacturers?
Last year, the "Buddhist system" made Vivo no longer a companion for thousands of years.
But in 2022, is the "Buddhist system" enough for Vivo to get rid of the fate of "accompanying runners"?
New energy vehicles have completely changed the competitive landscape of the automobile market
06 Tesla: Becoming more and more like Toyota?
In 2021, Tesla's excellent sales and delivery performance mask all the negative events that don't seem to be in harmony.
At the beginning of the year, the female owner of the Shanghai Auto Show had been fighting a roof rights lawsuit until the end of the year, and the quarrel and controversy of "brake failure" for most of the year did not have a final conclusion. But none of this has affected Tesla's continued sales in China, and Tesla's highly productive Factory in China continues to supply new cars to Europe.
In this year, almost all car companies have come up with products that are directly benchmarked tesla Model 3 or Model Y from product positioning to pricing, but none of them have ever sold Tesla. In the face of the Chinese market, Tesla seems to be very Buddhist, either there is no competitor, selling cars steadily, this duty is delivered, or there are more competitors, consumers seem to want to run, then reduce prices, and then attract consumers back, and then continue to sell cars steadily, telling consumers to queue up to pick up cars.
But the problem that Tesla China has to face is always there, and China's Tesla, more and more like Toyota, provides cost-effective pure electric vehicles, and is getting farther and farther away from the positioning of the Tesla geek in the United States. The most intuitive appearance is the enhanced version of the automatic driver assistance function priced at 32,000 yuan and the fully autonomous driving capability at 64,000, which has a very low penetration rate among the Chinese car owner group. Tesla's research and development on autonomous driving can launch multiple test versions a year in the US regulations and road environment, and the progress is rapid, while Chinese car owners can experience it, and it is still not much different from the performance of two years ago. According to Tesla's official website, the activation and use of these features will require an argument of billions of miles traveled to achieve reliability far beyond that of human drivers, as well as administrative approval (which may take longer in some jurisdictions).
The directivity is obvious.
In the field of intelligence, which Tesla has become a benchmark as soon as it appears, in the Chinese market, competitors are gradually surpassing Tesla, and even some segmented experiences have done better than Tesla. Even the original Model S and Model X are positioned as million-level high-end pure electric vehicles, because the domestic choice not to import new models, and the market is handed over to Porsche and some new domestic brands.
What Tesla China wants to achieve is only to sell cars, and the more you sell, the better.
Of course, in essence, what consumers need is only an electric vehicle with strong performance, convenient energy replenishment, and reliable experience, and intelligence is only the icing on the cake. But in 2022, Tesla's road to selling cars, because of the emergence of more and more competitors, will never be as smooth as 2021.
07 Ningde Era: From "Ningmao" to "Ningwang"
In 2021, CATL achieved a comprehensive victory in the capital market, and in the new energy vehicle market, the release of growth potential was higher than expected. In 2021, the stock price of CATL doubled. The total market value has continuously surpassed that of China Construction Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, jumping to the second place in A-shares, second only to Moutai.
In the long run, the market share advantage of the Ningde era is almost impossible to shake. The domestic basic disk is stable, and the supply agreement with the head new energy vehicle company Tesla has been renewed until 2025. Cataline Era will continue to enjoy the dividends brought about by the increase in the penetration rate of new energy vehicles.
In 2022, the Ningde era still grasps the huge advantage. The suspense is whether companies can continue to cash in on their expected growth potential and high net margins to capital markets. In 2022, the Ningde era will continue to go to sea, and whether it can break into the supply chain of multinational giants such as GM and Volkswagen is the biggest variable in the Ningde era in 2022.
In 2022, there are two challenges in the NINGDE era. One is the rise in the price of lithium battery raw materials. In Q3 2021, in the case of lithium battery raw materials continuing to hit record highs, the profit margin of the Ningde era rose slightly compared with Q2.
However, in 2022, whether the Ningde era can withstand the pressure brought about by the rising price of lithium battery raw materials still needs to be questioned.
In the early stage of development, the Ningde era did not focus on the layout of lithium ore and other resources upstream of lithium batteries. In the second half of 2021, CATL began to compete with Ganfeng Lithium and others for lithium mines on a global scale. The results were not ideal, and the Ningde era gained very little. In 2022, such a situation will not fundamentally improve.
Another point is the development and commercialization of next-generation lithium battery technology. 2022 will be the year that semi-solid-state batteries are installed. Whether CATL can come up with a reliable semi-solid battery solution in 2022 will determine whether it is in a dominant position in the next stage of market competition.
The risks brought about by the technical route switch are unpredictable, which may be the "Achilles heel" of the Ningde era.
08 BYD: Does increasing revenue increase or increasing profit?
BYD, which was not pure in the "bloodline" of new energy, completed a fundamental reversal of the product system in 2021.
From January to November 2021, BYD's new energy vehicle sales accounted for 80% of its total sales, compared with 43.4% last year. As of November 30, BYD's cumulative annual sales of new energy models reached 500,900 units, of which 272,400 were pure electric models and 228,400 DM hybrid models were sold.
In addition to the explosive models, BYD's own supply chain system is also the key to the growth of its new energy model sales. Due to the production capacity of self-sustaining power batteries and automotive semiconductors, BYD has not been significantly affected by the chip shortage in the automotive industry in the second half of 2021.
Driven by the increase in sales of new energy vehicles, BYD's own supply chain businesses such as power batteries and automotive semiconductors have benefited a lot. Since 2021, BYD's power battery installed capacity has reached 12.1% of the global market share, and the growth rate is far beyond Panasonic and LG Chem.
However, due to the poor external supply of self-sustaining power batteries and semiconductor businesses, BYD's two businesses cannot obtain better scale effects. This makes BYD fall into the strange circle of "increasing revenue without increasing profits" in 2021. While the gross profit margin of the automotive business remains at 20%, BYD's net profit in the first half of 2021 is only 1.17 billion yuan, and the net profit margin is 0.4%.
The automotive business needs to continue to occupy the market, BYD needs more profit margins, and the solution is to supply the power battery and semiconductor business to obtain more profits.
In order to supply the supply chain business, BYD will make a multi-point layout for the power battery and semiconductor business in 2021. Among them, the semiconductor business is packaged and listed separately, and the power battery business is constantly expanding its production capacity to prepare for the war. According to BYD's previous statement, by the end of 2021, BYD's power battery production capacity will reach 85GWh. BYD's automotive business can only consume about half of its production capacity, and the remaining power battery capacity is both an opportunity and a risk for BYD.
In 2022, BYD's sales will be further released with production capacity. But in addition to the sales of new energy vehicles, two other things worth paying attention to are the listing of BYD semiconductors and the external supply of BYD's power battery business.
The progress of these two businesses will have a profound impact on BYD.
09 Geely Auto: Am I most anxious?
Among the top three independent brands in the past, Geely's 2021 is the most anxious. This anxiety does not come from the revenue pressure of the company itself, but from the uncertainty of the future trend, not so calm.
Since January last year, Geely has begun busy cross-border cooperation, first establishing a joint venture with Baidu and Foxconn to help cross-border players enter the automotive industry. Then, Geely himself also played a cross-border, and Li Shufu announced his entry into the field of high-end mobile phones. But behind the buzz created by these news is the anxiety of Geely's transformation in the field of electrification.
In April last year, Geely Holding Group's pure electric vehicle brand "Extreme Kr" was officially established, and the first model , Extreme Kr 001 , was also released. However, the world is unpredictable, and the continuous turmoil in the global supply chain has seriously dragged down the mass production rhythm of Extreme Kr 001, resulting in the earliest batch of delivered products that failed to meet user expectations.
We would like to call it, the pain of transformation. Compared with the other two independent brands BYD and Great Wall Motors, which developed in the same period, Geely's electrification transformation road is not smooth. BYD's monthly sales of new energy vehicles last year have approached the mark of 100,000 vehicles, while Great Wall Motors' two major sub-brands, Euler and Sharon Motors, have focused on the high and low ends of the market. Geely Automobile's new energy vehicle brands Geometric Automobile and Geely New Energy have performed mediocrely in the market, while Extreme Krypton is regarded as an important step taken by Geely on the road of electrification and high-end transformation.
Product is king, is the Jinke law of the automotive industry. But the market feedback is only the appearance, from the bottom point of view, Geely has entered the "technology Geely 4.0" architecture car manufacturing era, with CMA, BMA, SPA, Haohan (SEA) four major modular architecture, officially entered the era of comprehensive architecture car manufacturing. In 2022, what we should expect is that Geely will continue to build new cars that are higher than user needs and higher than the industry level on the basis of these four major architectures.
On October 31, at the Hangzhou Bay Research Institute of Geely Automobile, Gan Jiayue, CEO of Geely Automobile Group, released the "Smart Geely 2025" strategy: by 2025, the company's market share will rank first in China, and sales will reach 3.65 million vehicles, of which the sales volume of smart electric vehicles will account for at least more than 30% (including extreme Krypton cars). By 2025, Extreme Krypton's market share of high-end electric vehicles will rank among the top three in the world, and the number of sales is expected to reach 650,000 units.
As for what will happen to Geely in the future? As Gan Jiayue said: "Geely wants to maintain the leading position in core technology, we have to think about what kind of car the future car is, and in the future we have to do this thing, the core is to explain the real logic behind it." ”
10 Roc Motors: Repositioning the Explorer
In November last year, Xiaopeng Automobile won the monthly sales of new car manufacturers with 15,613 units. In the third quarter, Xiaopeng Automobile surpassed NIO and Ideal Automobile in the same period with 25,666 deliveries.
As the saying goes: it is easy to attack a city and it is difficult to defend a city. Xiaopeng Motors, which stands at the top of the sales list, does not mean that it can sit on the mountain and eat the sky. Unlike Weilai's "service is king" and ideal car's "product is king", Xiaopeng Automobile has achieved a stage victory in this round of sales competition, relying more on its differentiated route of "intelligence is king".
It is true that Xiaopeng continues to invest highly in research and development, so that its products have achieved advanced user experience in the field of intelligent driving and intelligent cockpit. By the end of the third quarter of 2021, Xiaopeng's R&D team had more than 4,000 people. From the perspective of technology landing, the high-speed NGP automatic navigation assistance driving system and the VPA parking lot memory parking have been ahead of the industry level. The P5 model equipped with two lidars is scheduled to be NGP in the upper-tier cities this year.
2022 will undoubtedly be the year when new lidar cars emerge. Xiaopeng, which has a first-mover advantage, although this year will have two models equipped with lidar , the P5 and G9 , and deliver them to the market in large quantities. However, how to give full play to the hardware value of lasers is still the direction of the current passenger car market exploration.
As Xiaopeng's second model equipped with lidar, the G9 will also carry the task of Xiaopeng's upward exploration in the high-end electric vehicle market. On the G9, it uses Xiaopeng's latest electronic and electrical architecture, an 800V high-voltage silicon carbide platform that can achieve "5 minutes of charging and 200 kilometers of endurance", and more importantly, the G9 is the first model developed by Xiaopeng for the world.
Intelligent, high-end, globalization - is the "new three modernization" goal of Xiaopeng Automobile in 2022, and it is very likely to become a new label on Xiaopeng.
11 Ideal Car: Can High Investment Translate into High Sales?
Using "three years of eating a bowl of rice" to describe the ideal car would be slightly superficial. Different from the "car sea tactics" of traditional car companies, Ideal Auto has gone through 6 years since its establishment in 2015, but Li Xiang, founder and CEO of Ideal Auto, is more willing to spend three years and only do a good job in the ideal ONE product.
In May last year, Ideal Auto officially released the ideal ONE's modified model - the 2021 ideal ONE. With the help of the new model, in November last year, Ideal Motors announced the delivery of a total of 13,485 Ideal ONEs, although it achieved a monthly sales of more than 10,000 units after a two-month delay than originally planned. However, it can still be called the "explosive model" in China's new energy vehicle brands.
The bullish trend of ideal ONE sales has made the industry's attitude towards "range extender technology" slowly change from the original scorn to the rush. In 2021, some new car brands want to take advantage of the traffic dividend of the ideal ONE to get a piece of the pie by cutting into the market segment of "range-extending technology". It's hard to copy the ideal ONE, it's harder to copy the ideal car.
Li xiang wrote the latest brand mission in the 6th anniversary manual: to create a mobile home, to create a happy home. In fact, auto companies have put themselves in a market with extremely niche user portraits, which is extremely rare throughout history. This not only means that the products you launch will be uniquely differentiated from mainstream products, but also that the functions, services, and even the organizational structure of the enterprise must be tilted for this segment. Of course, this is also the tip of the iceberg in the ideal ONE blockbuster cheats.
Can the momentum of the blockbuster continue? Standing at the node of 2021, it is still unknown. In 2022, Ideal Will release its second product, a new large luxury SUV, benchmarking the BMW X7 and Mercedes-Benz GLS. The internal codename is X01 and uses a second-generation extender platform. The existing ideal ONE's three-cylinder generator was eliminated and replaced with a four-cylinder engine.
What is more difficult than making a blockbuster is the mountain of research and development that needs to be crossed. Taking the third quarter of 2021 as an example, the R&D expenses of "Wei Xiaoli" were 1.193 billion yuan, 1.264 billion yuan and 889 million yuan, respectively. Ideal Car has always existed in the capital market with the image of "cutting the door", but from this year, Ideal Car needs to invest in research and development or grow exponentially.
L4 level autonomous driving, 800V high-voltage silicon carbide platform, the launch of two pure electric models in 2023... These are the big money burners on Lee's "wish list." The more challenging question is whether high investment translates into high sales. This is not only what Li wants to solve, but also what all car companies need to think about in this smart car industry.
12 NIO: Where is the new "cash cow"?
It is difficult for WEIlai to complete the target of 100,000 vehicles per year set in early 2021. As of the end of November, NIO's cumulative delivery volume last year was 80,375 vehicles, which was 20,000 short of 100,000 vehicles.
Although it has crossed the threshold of 10,000 units sold per month, due to the shortage of chips and product discontinuation, WEILAI's delivery data fluctuated sharply in the second half of 2021. Weilai's deliveries fell to 5,880 units in August, followed by 3,667 vehicles due to production line renovation and upgrading in October, only one-third of September deliveries (10,628 vehicles).
When handing over this result, Weilai only has three old cards with ES8, ES6 and EC6 that are not leading in technical indicators and ET7 that has not yet been delivered, and there is no real "cash cow" model.
In addition, as the scale of users has grown, the user community that WEILAI is proud of has begun to have side effects. In the second half of 2021, in the event of an autonomous driving accident controversy and a seating issue, cracks began to appear in the originally harmonious user community.
However, Weilai is seeking a breakthrough. On Q2's earnings call, Li Bin confirmed NIO's plans to launch low-end sub-brands. Just like Toyota and Lexus, NIO offers a similar path - let the original NIO maintain high-end positioning, let low-end brands go to the volume.
In terms of user services, Weilai did not have much adjustment, still treating users as friends, Li Bin still sent red envelopes to users every day. This way, while bringing cost pressure and public opinion crisis to Weilai, has gradually become a moat for Weilai.
As the scale of users expands, the cost of maintenance increases day by day, and rigid expenditures such as R&D investment are superimposed, NIO's cash flow will continue to be tested. There is also a question that has always accompanied new forces such as Weilai - when to make a profit.
2022 will be a big year for NIO's products. Nio ET7 will start deliveries at the end of March and ET5 in September. If the development goes well, the 150-degree solid-hybrid battery will also be loaded in Q4.
"NIO is now like tesla in 2017, in the pre-model 3 stage of mass production," said Li Bin, CEO of NIO, after the release of the new model NIO ET5. Tesla relies on a Model 3 to kill the story of the global new energy vehicle market, and Weilai wants to reproduce it through ET5.
Under the blessing of the power exchange network, high-end positioning and user service systems, whether ET7 can tear open its mouth in the high-end market and whether ET5 can become a "cash cow" is the biggest highlight of Weilai in 2022.
For this question, Li Bin once gave optimistic expectations: "Delivery volume is expected to maintain 100% growth in 2022."
13 BMW: What does the luxury brand's electric experience look like?
Among the three most mainstream luxury brands in China, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi, BMW is the most attentive to new energy vehicles.
The official price reduction of the iX3 and the compensation of the old owners in the middle of the year allowed Chinese consumers to experience the sincerity of luxury brands in electric vehicles for the first time.
In the face of China's fiercely competitive electric vehicle market, BMW's strategy is very obvious, so that new energy models, more cost-effective than its own fuel models, more standard technology configurations, plus purchase tax reductions, can attract stable consumers. Not only is the iX3 medium-sized pure electric SUV priced in the range of 300,000-400,000, but the flagship pure electric medium and large SUV iX, which was launched at the end of the year, is also the same product strategy.
These initiatives close to the Chinese market have made BMW the most successful luxury brand in the process of electrification transformation. In 2022, BMW will deliver more new energy models in China, fulfilling its commitment to the Chinese market.
Of course, BMW still needs to think of an important answer to an important question in today's highly competitive new energy market: when electric vehicles make the performance and sports labels that luxury brands once proud of cheaper and cheaper, when the user-oriented service system created by new brands makes the sales logic of traditional dealers of luxury brands more and more outdated. How can luxury brands support the high price and high brand added value in the field of electric vehicles?
In addition to the most basic endurance and energy replenishment experience, Chinese consumers' demand for electric vehicles is becoming more and more intelligent, and whether new cars can bring themselves a "different" experience from traditional cars.
In a sense, the "right to choose" that BMW has been emphasizing before is contrary. What BMW wants to do is to maintain the existing product matrix and provide as much as possible power combination options, and even for the sake of the "decentness" of fuel vehicles, it will limit the product power of electric vehicles to a certain extent. But the fact is that electric vehicle consumers, and fuel vehicle consumers, are not the same consumer group, electric vehicle consumers, want more new things, not just the power mode, from fuel to electric.
The answer to all this may depend on BMW's "new generation" (Neue Klasse) model in 2025. Chiptzer, the current chairman of the BMW Group, said: "When you look at the independent platform electric models on the market today, they all look like. I don't think BMW customers want the cars they buy to be too similar. ”
BMW is well aware that what underpins luxury brands has always been a product that is ahead of the times and meets the needs of consumers, not the brand's history.
The biggest challenge for domestic chips is still to survive
14 Intel: Profits rise and stock prices weaken
2021 is an unprecedented year for Intel, while 2022 is a year in which Intel continues to catch up with TSMC and try its best to save the weak market value.
In 2020, due to the obvious lag of the process process behind TSMC, resulting in the transfer of the monopoly position of chip manufacturing from the United States to the hands of Taiwan, the decline of capital and mass markets for Intel continued to increase, and Intel's long-term hovering stock price of $200 billion made it slightly embarrassed in front of Nvidia and AMD.
Therefore, throughout the lack of cores in 2021, Intel, whose profits have been increasing steadily but whose stock price has been weak for a long time, quickly adopted a series of thunder strategies:
Change the coach, invest tens of billions of dollars in research and development of advanced processes and the establishment of new fabs (IDM2.0 plan), release the 12th generation of Core and other products of the new architecture, and even in December began to rub the meta-universe heat, publicly announcing that it will provide higher chip computing power for the meta-universe virtual world.
This means that 2022 will be a year of continuous enhancement of Intel's capital expenditure and a year of regaining confidence in the capital market.
According to Intel's Q3 2021 financial report, the company plans to increase capital expenditures in 2022 to $25 billion to $28 billion, which means that Intel will enter a huge capital expenditure cycle. And a large proportion of this will be invested in the expansion plan of the wafer factory -
According to a public statement from Intel at the end of the year, although the company announced half a year ago that it would build at least four new factories in Europe and the United States, the total investment (within 10 years) will be as high as $200 billion. But construction was delayed until early 2022.
Another capital action that cannot be ignored is that Intel will promote the spin-off and listing of its assisted driving chip company Mobileye in 2022. Monetizing some of its assets will be the only viable option for Intel to respond to weak stock prices and raise new capital for various spending programs.
As a small giant of self-driving chips with a market share of up to 70%, Mobileye has been "living" under Intel's aura since it was acquired by Intel for $15.3 billion in 2017, and its valuation is more than a little bit different from the market value of Nvidia, another chip company with autonomous driving business (of course, the latter has multi-line revenue such as games, data centers, and mining).
A chip analyst estimated that Mobileye's market capitalization should exceed $60 billion based on a valuation model established and Mobileye's financial data. Therefore, the listing is very beneficial for Intel to unlock the hidden market value for shareholders.
15 Nvidia: How to eat ARM smoothly?
Under the triple effect of the epidemic, chip shortage and the booming demand for computing power in electronic consumer goods, NVIDIA's market value in 2021 is approaching $800 billion, and data centers, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving and metacosm have given the global gpu overlord unlimited vitality in the future market.
In the first three quarters of fiscal year 2022 (ending October 31, 2021), NVIDIA revenue increased 65% year-over-year, driven by the superior performance of GPU products in the "Gaming" and "Data Center" businesses.
But in 2022, we expect Nvidia to make more substantial progress at other business levels – autonomous driving (automakers) and metacosmities.
As the first chip company to publicly cater to the potential market of the meta-universe virtual world, in April 2021, a video of Huang Jenxun's "virtual person" was screened on major social platforms because he used "virtual person" as a stand-in, but because it was too realistic, no one noticed.
The rendering technology of this virtual person comes from omniverse, a computer graphics and simulation platform officially released in 2019. At the GTC conference in December 2021, they continued to cut into the metaverse market through "rendering technology", launching Omniverse Avatar, a technology platform for generating interactive AI avatars.
In fact, the core component of Omniverse is the powerful rendering engine capability, which is actually widely used in game development. In the metaverse, if enterprises and the public want to try to travel between the real world and the digital virtual world, they really need an interactive platform.
Therefore, whether it is hardware financial strength, software ecological strength or aesthetic ability, 2022 is undoubtedly still a year in which giant companies such as NVIDIA are leading the way in meta-universe software technology.
On the other hand, as L2+ and L3 autonomous driving continue to be popularized on more models, "high computing power" is included in the car brand power, whether it is a gimmick or not. Therefore, Nvidia's sphere of influence will smoothly transition from a high-level autonomous driving circle to an automotive industry circle from 2020 to 2021.
Among them, although dozens of car brands claim to use NVIDIA's computing platform, their in-depth cooperation with mainstream car companies such as Mercedes-Benz in the research and development of intelligent vehicles will have an important impact on the technology trend of the automotive industry after 2022.
Of course, NVIDIA is by no means "absolutely smooth sailing". They have encountered many obstacles in the acquisition of ARM, and the results in 2022 are almost useless - the United Kingdom and China are not very good at the deal, and earlier this month, the US Federal Trade Commission also intervened: to prevent stifling innovation and harming consumers, formally sued Nvidia to block the $40 billion acquisition of British chip giant ARM.
16 Horizon: How do you convince people with a "product"?
In a year of extreme shortage of automotive chips, in 2021 Horizon was fortunate to embrace domestic OEMs such as SAIC and Great Wall, selling hundreds of thousands of chips, from a startup with continuous bad news to a hot Unicorn of China's self-driving chips.
However, in fact, we can not simply associate "missing cores" with "AI chips". Because the most lacking is the MCU and other low-process automotive traditional chips. In fact, in an interview with Horizon Technik marketers in May last year, they said that the "lack of core" in themselves was very, very inconspicuous;
It can only be said that Tesla, the wave of automatic driving and the lack of cores have brought profound lessons to car companies, so that the latter finally paid full attention to chip companies in 2021. In 2022, in addition to continuing to ride the wind, like most Chinese chip startups, Horizon needs to solve mainly product-side problems.
According to the current situation of the automatic driving computing platform on the market, a high-level autonomous driving hardware engineer of a large factory told Tiger Sniff after the test that from the perspective of stability and comprehensive performance, NVIDIA's automatic driving platform is still the best choice, and on the other hand, Huawei's MDC is also a good performance in the test. He would not comment on Horizon's products on self-driving capabilities.
Therefore, if you want to do a high-computing power autonomous driving computing platform that undertakes large-scale computing tasks, Chinese companies still have a big gap with the world giants; but from the market side, Horizon's current generations of products can meet some edge computing needs of car manufacturers.
17 Cambrian: Living on the edge
As the "first stock of AI chips" in China, Cambrian, which was founded in March 2016 and listed in July 2020, is indeed the earliest LISTed AI chip startup in China.
However, in the nearly 1 and a half years after the listing, Cambrian soared 290% from the opening, the market value once exceeded 110 billion yuan, and then fell again and again, the market value continued to evaporate, and now the market value is about 36.5 billion yuan.
To a large extent, the plummeting market value does not represent the technical strength of a company, however, this AI chip company has certain problems in technological breakthroughs, sales channels, customer expansion and track direction.
An industry insider believes that Cambrian needs to broaden its product line the most in 2022. Although the core competitiveness of the First Cambrian is the self-developed AI acceleration core, it is difficult to find large customers with a separate IP license after HiSilicon, so it is difficult to get a large order by IP authorization alone.
In the cloud server market, now domestic manufacturers are inclined to develop their own self-use acceleration cards, keep the profits to themselves, and the application scenarios of single software and hardware are also well adapted, so there are Cambrian orders, but not much.
A chip industry person told Tiger Sniff that Cambrian programmable dedicated AI training chips, benchmarking Nvidia's high-end chips, there are instruction sets customized specifically for AI computing, Gflops/W compared to Nvidia's GPUs, from the parameters point of view, there are advantages, but the feedback on the market is relatively miserable, in addition to state-owned companies will purchase, rarely hear private manufacturers buy.
In fact, Cambrian has more opportunities at the marginal end, because of the mass production status of Huawei's HiSilicon advanced process, Cambrian has actually obtained alternative opportunities. In the past 5 years, Cambrian has accumulated certain technologies in IP, cloud and edge, and needs to do in-depth expansion to tracks such as automatic driving, and the company did start to develop intelligent vehicle chips in 2021, and established in-vehicle business units in Nanjing and other places.
"The wave of autonomous driving will be a key opportunity in Cambrian." An industry insider said.
18 Biling Technology: The Fatal "Talent Problem"
In the words of an investor, China's high-end GPU unicorns such as Biling Technology would have been absolutely afraid to invest if they had been placed three years ago. Now, the Chinese chip company, which has accumulated more than 5 billion yuan in financing in less than 2 years, has not only been endorsed by first-line investment institutions, but also attracted front-line R&D talents from many giants, including NVIDIA and AMD.
In addition to Biling Technology, similar startups such as Moore Thread, Muxi Technology, Tianshu Zhixin and other companies have also obtained hundreds of millions of financing, known as "burning money to have products" of the high-end GPU track, in a short period of time squeezed into so many enterprises, it is indeed necessary to "grab money" and "occupy the pit position".
But in terms of products, because it is a startup, the current market can not do any feedback on the product; but history and industry cognition tell us that the domestic generic products want to benchmark NVIDIA, the time will not be short (when I did not say the alternative).
In October 2021, the first general-purpose GPU chip BR100 of Biling Technology was officially delivered to TSMC for production, and is expected to be released to the market in 2022, and they also mentioned that "the future will replace Nvidia's CUDA to build its own software ecology", which is indeed a bit bragging.
An industry insider told Tiger Sniff that the time node to test the real product strength of enterprises is about the second half of 2022: "At that time, how the product is, data centers and other market customers will have a general understanding." ”
However, in addition to the problem of tape-out and mass production, in fact, for companies like Biling Technology, the bigger problem is actually the "talent problem".
Compared with the "shortage of artificial intelligence talents" that has always been publicized in the market in recent years, the urgency of the shortage of chip technology talents is absolutely 10 orders of magnitude higher.
"It's hard to believe that now a low-end chip company recruiting a 211 master's degree graduate, the annual salary is more than 500,000." An industry analyst feels that for startups such as Biling Technology that seize the opportunity on the GPU track, in addition to talent cost expenditure, recruitment and team formation will be a continuous problem in China.
"At present, this piece of talent that can get started can basically dig up from the first-line big factories, and the talent gap is the gap with the technical strength of the giants." So how to expand the scale of the R & D team, how to cultivate the next generation of chip talents, is an urgent problem to be solved. ”
In addition to resources, technical capabilities determine how far new energy companies can go
19 LONGi shares: price and size double kill
In 2021, the photovoltaic industry in the A-share trend is very eye-catching, once independently rising. Under the background of double carbon, photovoltaics, as the main power mode of renewable energy, have developed the most rapidly and have huge market dividends.
LONGi is currently the first echelon leader in the global monocrystalline silicon wafer and component links, with obvious competitive advantages. Since the beginning of 2021, LONGi has successively signed long orders for the supply of silicon materials and photovoltaic glass and long orders for the sale of silicon wafers, ensuring good supply chain control and sales.
At present, all links of the photovoltaic industry chain are expanding production, prices have begun to loosen, upstream silicon materials have entered the price reduction channel, silicon wafer companies in order to avoid hoarding and falling prices, but also in order to reduce prices.
Brokerage companies expect that in 2022, the global installed demand for photovoltaic capacity will be about 220GW, a year-on-year growth rate of about 40%, corresponding to about 254GW of photovoltaic module demand. For LONGi, a major problem that may be faced is that the silicon link will be dispersed in the short term due to the relatively low technical threshold and the large number of new players. If LONGi can resist the price war, and other small and medium-sized and low-end production capacity withdraws in the fierce market competition, it can further increase the market share. At the same time, the component size battle between LONGi 182 and Central 210 will also be decided in 2022.
In terms of breakthroughs, relying on the manufacturing capabilities and technical strength of the module side, LONGi is actively entering the BIPV (Building Integrated Photovoltaic Photovoltaic Building Integration) business that deeply combines photovoltaic and green buildings, and seeks new growth poles.
BIPV began in the 1960s, is the photovoltaic technology into the roof building materials, so that the building can be both residential, but also can generate electricity, from "energy consumption" to "production capacity", but due to technical and cost problems, it has not been really promoted for many years. Until recent years, the photovoltaic industry has become increasingly advanced, and BIPV has ushered in development opportunities.
LONGi cross-border acquisition of the first domestic metal building enclosure company listed on the main board of the company Sente shares, and became its second largest shareholder, while signing an agreement with Almaden to cooperate in the development of 1.6mm ultra-thin glass for BIPV, a series of actions are the embodiment of the integration of industrial chain resources to the downstream multi-application scenario extension and expansion, the actual landing of low-carbon buildings may see the dawn this year.
20 Yangtze River Power: Relying on the sky to eat, how to change your life?
Yangtze River Power is the world's largest and the highest domestic A stock market value of hydropower companies, over the years, has successively managed and operated Gezhouba, Three Gorges, Xiluodu, Xiangjiaba 4 giant hydropower stations, the total installed capacity of 45.6GW, accounting for 12.32% of the country's total hydropower installed capacity, last year also announced the continued acquisition of Wudongde, Baihetan 2 hydropower stations, the overall performance is stable, the return of conscience, in flood control and dredging, ecological water replenishment also took into account social responsibility.
The growth of the hydropower business is mainly reflected in two aspects, one is to increase the installed capacity through investment and acquisition of hydropower stations, and to earn power generation income through efficient operation; the other is to increase the power generation generated by the enhancement of the dispatching capacity of the river basin. Under the constraints of external conditions such as rainfall and abundant dry period, yangtze river power has little room for development of other connotations, which is the core problem affecting the continued advancement of Yangtze River power.
Previously, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Energy Bureau jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on carrying out the Integration of Wind, Photovoltaic, Water, Fire and Storage" and "Integration of Source Network, Load and Storage" (Draft for Solicitation of Comments), which clarified the integrated implementation plan for the nearby bundling of new energy power.
The wind and photovoltaic power stations of complementary projects are built nearby around the hydropower station, saving land costs and having cost advantages; in the process of operation, the existing hydropower channels are used to bundle the Internet and optimize operating expenses, and the overall rate of return is higher than that of conventional new energy projects.
Under the background of the obvious increase in the importance of the policy side, Yangtze River Power is also trying to break the operation mode of traditional hydropower companies and open a multi-dimensional growth path. Due to the natural investment advantages in the field of "water and wind", Yangtze River Power takes the hydropower base as the core to carry out integrated construction and operation of new energy power generation such as wind power and photovoltaics in the surrounding areas, and the transformation to a comprehensive clean energy platform with complementary water and wind will be an important breakthrough in the future.
21 Goldwind: Is a technological breakthrough the final salvation?
As the industry leader in wind power equipment, Goldwind has the largest market share in China for many consecutive years. With the continuous parity of onshore wind power and offshore wind power in the past two years, the industrial chain has entered a new stage of market-oriented development.
After the parity of onshore wind power in 2021, the large-scale unit size has promoted the trend of cost reduction. The increase of single machine capacity can significantly reduce the cost and cost of fan materials, the number of fans that need to be installed in the same place is reduced, the investment in the fan foundation, transmission lines, construction and installation and design costs will be reduced, and the supply chain pattern will be further optimized.
For Goldwind, the overall technology update speed of the wind power industry is slow, and the equipment cost is high, especially the price of metal raw materials such as alloy steel, carbon steel and stainless steel is expensive, and the cost reduction is far less than that of photovoltaics. At the same time, competitors Tianshun Wind Energy and Yunda shares are also doing homogeneous products, how to improve the competitiveness of wind turbine products through continuous technological progress, to avoid being driven down by the price war, is the most core problem of Goldwind Technology.
With the energy efficiency of onshore wind turbines approaching the bottleneck, in the future, higher power offshore wind opportunities will become products with greater commercial potential, but offshore wind turbines are more difficult to build than onshore wind turbines, and the technical challenges in aerodynamics, shipbuilding and fluid mechanics are greater.
China's offshore wind power is rich in resources for development, the eastern offshore provinces belong to the power input area, the development of wind power just to make up for the demand, according to Clarkson research institute data show that in October 2021, China for the first time surpassed the United Kingdom has become the world's largest offshore wind power market.
At present, the 14th Five-Year Plan for Energy issued by coastal provinces such as Guangdong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang has taken offshore wind power as the key direction for the future. Securities companies expect that in 2022, the installed capacity of new wind power in China will be about 53GW, with a year-on-year growth rate of about 33%. The installed capacity growth rate will benefit goldwind and other complete machine enterprises, and the trend of offshore wind power parity will bring incremental space to the industrial chain.
22 Ganfeng Lithium: Where is the ceiling of lithium prices?
Ganfeng Lithium is the world's largest producer of lithium metal and the largest producer of lithium compounds in China, and the company has formed a vertically integrated business model that runs through upstream development, midstream processing and downstream manufacturing and recycling.
After experiencing the trough of the past two years, new energy vehicles ushered in the initial outbreak in 2021, lithium battery volume and price rose together, and Ganfeng Lithium fully enjoyed the premium dividend of ore reserve resources.
At present, the core problem of the industry is that the pricing mechanism of lithium products is not transparent, a unified price standard has not been formed, and the price difference and fluctuation of the transaction are large. The lithium mine auction pricing model led by Australian lithium mine Altura also directly changes the rules of the game, which may stimulate the ceiling of lithium prices to be pulled up again.
As new energy vehicles begin to exert their strength in Europe and the United States, Biden has successively issued a number of green energy policies after taking office, and Europe has introduced car purchase subsidies, tax credits and fines for carbon emissions exceeding the standard, and lithium prices are expected to continue to remain high in 2022.
However, historical experience tells people that once a raw material is caused by a shortage of rising prices to form a long-term resource bottleneck, it will inevitably force technological upgrading, or reduce the amount of use, or develop alternative materials. Therefore, from a longer-term perspective, lithium will not control the lifeblood of the industry for a long time, and Ganfeng Lithium industry cannot be proud of "lithium" and ignore the layout of other growth points.
In addition, ganfeng lithium downstream battery business involves consumer batteries, TWS batteries, lithium iron phosphate energy storage batteries and solid-state batteries and other fields, based on the different types of batteries, its subsidiaries have laid out production bases in Guangdong, Jiangsu and other places, although the scale is not as good as the Ningde era, but can play the upstream lithium resource advantages.
Solid-state batteries are considered to be the next-generation battery technology with the most promise of mass production, which can solve the current endurance and safety issues very well. Ganfeng Lithium released a hybrid solid-liquid lithium-ion battery in early December, and revealed that it is developing a second-generation all-solid-state battery using a high-nickel ternary cathode and a metal-containing lithium anode material, with an energy density of more than 360Wh/kg. As an industry giant, the commercialization process of solid-state batteries is worth looking forward to.