Replacement brand EVOGO
On January 18, the battery exchange market ushered in a heavy player. CATL released the power exchange brand EVOGO and the overall solution of combined power exchange. It is suitable for passenger cars and logistics vehicles from class A00 to class C, and can be adapted to models developed by 80% of the world's pure electric platforms that have already been listed and will be launched in the next three years. The EVOGO battery swap service will be launched in 10 cities in the first batch.
Yuan Jiancong, chief analyst of the new energy automobile industry at CITIC Securities, believes that under the general trend, power exchange has become an inevitable form of promoting the popularization of new energy vehicles in all scenarios, and is an effective supplement to charging. The report predicts that under the improvement of policy, capital and its own product strength, 2022 is expected to become the first year of the rapid development of the power exchange industry, and it is expected to add more than 3,000 new substations throughout the year, and the new industry is expected to increase by more than 10,000 in 2025, with ten times + space in five years.
The overall solution of power exchange is another breakthrough in the Ningde era.
According to the Red Weekly Wealth List, Zeng Yuqun of the Ningde Era in 2021 topped the list with a net worth of 334.823 billion yuan, more than 100 billion yuan higher than the net worth of SF Holdings Wang Wei, who ranked second.
From a rural teenager to a billionaire, Zeng Yuqun's life experience is legendary.
Son of a farmer
Phoenix Mountain, Ningde
20 kilometers south of ningde city in Fujian Province, there is a Phoenix Mountain with an altitude of 1048 meters, named after the peak of the mountain. There is a small village in front of the mountain, which is called Lankou Village because it is located in the Phoenix Pass.
Lankou, most of the villagers with the surname of Lankou, and most of them moved in from neighboring Luoyuan County in the early Qing Dynasty. Now there are only a few hundred families here, and the village is mostly Christian.
In March 1968, Zeng Yuqun was born in this small mountain village.
When Zeng Yuqun was a child, his family was poor, there were many brothers and sisters, and his parents were ordinary local farmers with little culture. But Zeng Yuqun is very diligent and has been doing well.
Zeng Yuqun, who graduated from junior high school, was admitted to Ningde No. 1 Middle School, one of the first batch of key middle schools in Fujian Province, and Huang Shilin, vice chairman and president of the Ningde era, was his classmate in Ningde No. 1 Middle School.
In 1985, he graduated from Ningde No.1 Middle School and was admitted to the Department of Naval Architecture Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
This year, he was 17 years old. Although Zeng Yuqun was a science student in college, his interests and hobbies were also extensive. Not only do he like martial arts novels, but he also likes poetry and song, and often goes to the Next Door China Normal University to participate in dances, and he can be seen in many campus activities.
Practice hard
In 1989, after graduating from the Department of Naval Architecture Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, he was assigned to a state-owned enterprise in Fujian, and within three months of work, he resigned and went south to Dongguan, Guangdong Province, to join a foreign-funded enterprise.
The company is called ST Electromagnetics, and its parent company SAE is a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan's TDK in Hong Kong. ST specializes in producing heads for computer hard drives, and at the time more than 70 percent of the world's hard drive heads were supplied by it, with annual revenues of $1 billion.
During his work, Zeng Yuqun met the first noble person in his life, his direct supervisor Chen Tanghua. Chen Tanghua, a Chinese-American who graduated from the Department of Chemistry at National Taiwan University in his early years, worked at IBM for many years, specializing in the development of magnetic materials for disk plates.
Zeng Yuqun's outstanding professional skills and hard work spirit were all seen by Chen Tanghua, who was determined to focus on cultivating this young man.
Therefore, under the careful cultivation of Chen Tanghua, Zeng Yuqun has visited foreign countries many times, and during the inspection, he also came into contact with the world's most advanced battery production technology, laying the groundwork for his future battery entrepreneurship.
In this way, under the promotion of his boss and his own efforts, Zeng Yuqun was promoted to the engineering director of THE ST Electromagnetic Factory in 1999, and the first mainland director of the foreign-funded company.
This year, Zeng Yuqun was 31 years old, and it was also the tenth year of working in xinke.
03 Resigned to start a business
Although Xinke achieved the position of director, Zeng Yuqun slowly found his own bottleneck. In this foreign-funded company, he has reached the ceiling of his career as a mainland national.
Just when Zeng Yuqun felt confused, the second noble person in his life quietly appeared, that person was Liang Shaokang, the CEO of SAE, the parent company of ST Electromagnetic Factory.
SAE was originally a Hong Kong-funded enterprise, the full name is "Hong Kong Xinke Industry". Leung, who graduated from HKU with a master's degree in industrial engineering, was hired by the company.
Later, SAE was acquired by japan's TDK Group, and Liang Shaokang followed suit, and in 1999 he was promoted to president of SAE. It was under his leadership that SAE became the world's largest independent supplier of hard drive read-write heads and became the flagship subsidiary of the TDK Group.
In 1997, when the world's first MP3 came out, Liang Shaokang was keenly aware of new opportunities, a revolution in battery technology was coming, and the company should develop new product lines.
So Liang Shaokang put Zeng Yuqun in charge of inspecting a battery project.
Subsequently, Zeng Yuqun went to Shenzhen to talk with battery experts and wrote a report to demonstrate the feasibility of battery manufacturing. However, after the report was sent to the head office without approval, Liang Shaokang retreated and decided to get involved in the battery industry himself.
However, if you want to break through the battery industry, you must have an excellent team. Therefore, Liang Shaokang approached Zeng Yuqun, the director of engineering, indicated that he attached great importance to his technology and ability, and invited Zeng Yuqun to start a battery company with him.
But Zeng Yuqun did not immediately agree, because at that time, a headhunting company was digging him to go to a large company in Shenzhen as a general manager, and the salary and treatment were very good, and Zeng Yuqun was very impressed. And How could Liang Shaokang, who was preparing to do a big job, watch the future generals leave? At this time, he thought of Zeng Yuqun's old boss, Chen Tanghua.
Liang Shaokang approached Chen Tanghua and hoped that Chen Tanghua, who was still in the United States at the time, would retain this technical backbone who was about to leave.
Under the persuasion of Chen Tanghua, Zeng Yuqun gave up the high-paying offer in Shenzhen and decided to join Liang Shaokang and Chen Tanghua, and the three of them started a business together to make batteries.
So, in the fall of 1999, the three-person new energy technology limited (ATL) was incorporated in Hong Kong.
Zeng Yuqun served as president and CEO.
04 Try your hand for the first time
ATL's early team
In the early days of ATL's establishment, the competition in the battery industry was already a red sea, and japanese giants had long gained a foothold. The hard-shell round and square batteries they produce are highly automated, reliable, and highly performant, and dominate the mainstream of the market, and it is difficult for start-ups to compete with them in this area.
ATL's initial goal was clear, to manufacture polymer soft-pack lithium batteries. Because consumer electronics products have very different requirements for the specifications of batteries, the biggest advantage of soft pack batteries is that they are relatively free in form.
After determining the direction, Zeng Yuqun flew to the United States to buy a patent for a polymer lithium battery from Bell Labs. Zeng Yuqun did not go early, at that time, more than 20 institutions had obtained authorization from Bell Labs.
However, when Zeng Yuqun tried to make batteries according to Bell Labs' patented formula, he found that there was a fatal problem with the product - after a period of use, it would expand due to the decomposition of the internal materials and release gas, resulting in the risk of explosion of the battery and could not be used.
At the juncture when the entrepreneurial funds are about to run out and the entrepreneurial project is about to fail, atL people found that there is a problem with the electrolyte formula in the battery, the reactivity temperature is too low, and it is easy to decompose to produce gas. After trying dozens of electrolyte formulations, ATL finally solved the problem of battery flatulence and the product was successfully produced. It is worth mentioning that among the institutions that received the authorization from Bell Labs, ATL was the only team that solved this problem at that time.
In 2001, ATL was inaugurated in the factory area of Baima, Dongguan, and the shipment volume reached 1 million batteries that year, mainly for Bluetooth headsets and other products. The value of technological breakthroughs is indispensable, but at that time, Zeng Yuqun and his entrepreneurial partners did not realize how much prospects this technological breakthrough would bring in the future.
In 2003, Apple, which was worried about the iPod's battery life, found ATL, hoping that the latter would customize a high-performance battery for the new generation of iPods - both to meet the special form to be placed in a compact iPod, but also to have high capacity to improve battery life, but also to ensure safety. These needs are all in the arms of ATL technology. After successfully developing a special-shaped polymer lithium battery for the iPod, ATL received an order from Apple to supply 18 million iPod batteries.
After this battle, ATL successfully entered Apple's supply chain. This relationship has also become a strong endorsement for ATL to leverage more resources and orders in the future.
At a time when companies are growing rapidly and expanding, ATL has introduced too many venture capital funds, and the shareholding ratio of the founding team is very small. Later, after the fierce competition in the battery market, the three highest-holding institutional shareholders of Handing, Carlyle and 3i all chose to withdraw.
In 2005, the three major investment institutions jointly proposed to withdraw funds, and ATL had to find new investors. In the end, Zeng Yuqun's old owner, Japan's TDK Group, acquired a 100% stake in ATL for $100 million.
This creates the embarrassment of today's ATL identity: a company founded Chinese and Chinese-led, but controlled by Japanese companies.
However, the equity change has no impact on the rapid development of ATL, and the list of ATL customers is increasing, including industry giants and star companies such as Samsung, Huawei, VIVO, and DJI.
From 2012 to 2020, ATL accounted for the world's largest shipment of polymer batteries for 9 consecutive years.
Zeng Yuqun took this as a profound lesson, and when he founded the Ningde Era in the future, Zeng Yuqun emphasized a completely Chinese background and maintained the founding team's absolute control over the company.
Start again
In the past ten years of the battery industry, Zeng Yuqun has seen the development momentum of the new energy industry and believes that his spring is coming.
In 2011, Zeng Yuqun, Huang Shilin and others founded Ningde Times New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. in his hometown of Ningde, Fujian Province.
Shortly after the establishment of the Ningde era, BMW Brilliance came to the door, BMW Brilliance plans to launch a pure electric vehicle noo 1E, they hope to use domestic power batteries, but there are not many suitable batteries on the market.
Originally chose a northern battery company, but their battery efficiency is too slow, and finally go around, this olive branch was thrown to the Ningde era.
Because Zeng Yuqun originally provided batteries for Apple, it means that its single cell is stable enough, which is exactly what BMW Brilliance wants.
To tell the truth, at that time, the Ningde era had not yet been able to produce the battery that BMW wanted, when BMW Brilliance handed over an 800-page full German power battery production standard to Zeng Yuqun, who was stunned.
However, BMW Brilliance believes in the Ningde era, so it also sent a senior engineer to the Ningde era to support research and development.
The Ningde era grew rapidly during this period, and two years later, the battery was successfully developed, and BMW Brilliance's new energy vehicles sold well, so the Ningde era dipped its joy and quickly became popular in the electric vehicle industry.
From its establishment in 2011 to the first time it topped the global power battery system ranking in 2017, the Ningde era took only 6 years.
In three and a half years, the "lithium king" Ningde era rose 15 times
From 2018 to the present, the leading edge of the Ningde era has been further expanded.
At the end of 2021, the research institute SNE Research released the global power battery installed capacity ranking for the first 11 months of the year, and 6 Chinese companies in the top ten were selected, of which CATL ranked first, with a share of 31.8%, which was the sum of the second place LG (20.5%) and the third Panasonic (12.5%). The Ningde era is a great place in the field of power batteries.
The other five Chinese companies are BYD in fourth place and China Innovation Airlines, Guoxuan Hi-Tech, Ewell Lithium Energy and Sunwoda in seventh to tenth places.
The strong market position has brought about rapid growth in revenue, and the annual revenue of CATL in 2021 exceeded 100 billion yuan, and the net profit exceeded 10 billion yuan, doubling year-on-year.
With the development of the enterprise, Zeng Yuqun's personal wealth has also risen. After CATL landed on the GEM in 2018, in the selection for four consecutive years, Zeng Yuqun, the actual controller of NINGDE Times, has never left the top ten of the wealth list.
Challenges and pressures
Although it is in the throne, scale is not a core competitiveness that cannot be copied. In 2021, all head power battery manufacturers have launched an aggressive expansion mode. In the next 1-2 years, the tight supply situation in the market will initially ease. After the significant improvement of competitors' delivery capabilities, the decline in competitive advantage in the Ningde era was inevitable, and the operating pressure was doubled.
The battery industry is the intermediate link of the new energy industry chain, once the loss of a strong market position, upstream and downstream reactions follow. In order to cope with these risks, CATL has devoted itself to technology research and development. Develop sodium battery technology to deal with the risk of tight supply of raw materials upstream. Research and development of standardized battery pack products, C2C chassis battery technology, to provide more OEMs with standardized battery assemblies, to avoid the risk of individual major customer changes.
In addition to the challenges from upstream and downstream, it is also facing huge competitive pressure in the era of Ningde in the global market. In the previous few years, the rapid growth and leading position of the CATL era mainly came from The global dominance of China's new energy vehicle market. However, with the launch of the European and North American markets, overseas markets will become an important part of the future power battery competition. The NINGD era will face a head-on duel from international opponents.
However, in the next 1-2 years, potential risks will not be able to shake the status of the Ningde era. The advantages of production capacity and delivery capacity have cast security barriers for the Ningde era.
Although the "King of Ning" has a lot of long-term worries, he has no near-term worries.