Looking back at 2021, the new energy automobile industry properly β market, but due to the huge increase in the entire sector in the past year, most people believe that new energy vehicles will enter the α market this year. Auto parts, due to the increase in material prices last year, resulting in a reduction in profits, etc., and this year's raw material prices fell, the profitability of auto parts companies will be improved.
Under this logical line, the auto parts sector has risen by more than 20% since October last year.
However, there are many subdivisions in the auto parts sector. In various segments, intelligence is considered to be an extension of the main line of automobiles, and last year, due to the shortage of automobile chips, car sales also declined. According to Auto Forecast Solutions, in 2021, the cumulative production reduction in the global automotive market due to chip shortages is about 10.2 million units. In 2021, North America will reduce production by 3.178 million units, Europe by 2.954 million units, China by 1.982 million units, other asian regions by 1.74 million units, South America by 355,000 units, and the Middle East/Africa by a total of 62,000 units.
With the gradual easing of the lack of cores in automobiles, automobile sales are also expected to rebound. Intelligence is taking over electrification as the development direction of the next stage of the car, and high-end automatic driving equipped with advanced sensors is the focus of domestic independent manufacturers to overtake with the help of intelligent curves.
The intelligent penetration rate of automobiles has increased, bringing a broad space for lidar
At present, smart cars can generally meet the requirements of L2 intelligent driving, the industry penetration rate has reached 15%, Guorong Securities is expected to increase rapidly to 45% in 2025, and is expected to reach 55% in 2027. At the same time, mainstream car companies began to launch models with L3-level intelligent driving functions, such as L3-class models of Xiaopeng, Changan, SAIC and other related car manufacturers began to gradually mass-produce.
As "progressive" intelligent car companies gradually realize the leap from L2 assisted driving to L3 autonomous driving, the penetration rate of automobile intelligence will be further improved.
In addition, technology giants have also joined the ranks of car manufacturing, Huawei, Apple, Millet, Baidu and other technology giants have entered the smart car, and the layout in the field of smart cars has gradually entered the key time node of landing. Among them, Huawei Polar Fox Alpha has announced mass production, Apple Apple Car will be released as soon as September next year, Baidu also announced on Create 2021 that it will release the first concept car in the first half of 2022, Xiaomi car landed in Beijing Economic Development Zone, is expected to be mass production in 2023, and the start of smart cars of technology giants will greatly accelerate the development process of the automotive intelligent industry.
With the gradual realization of the leap from L2 assisted driving to L3 automatic driving, the demand for lidar loading has ushered in a climax, and it will enter the stage of centralized loading, and passenger cars will also become the main battlefield of lidar in the future. Sullivan Research expects that by 2025, the size of the new fleet will exceed 600,000 vehicles, bringing a broad downstream space to the application of lidar, and the two will jointly drive the lidar market to usher in prosperity.
With a five-year compound growth rate of 64.5%, the global lidar market will reach 100 billion
Lidar technology routes are diverse, mainly including mechanical lidar represented by Velodyne, semi-solid-state lidar represented by Luminar, Valeo, DJI, Huawei, etc., and solid-state lidar with superior performance but still in the bottleneck period of technology.
Compared with leading manufacturers such as Tesla, in the context of backward software and algorithms, other OEMs are more inclined to choose lidar + high-precision maps as a solution for L3 level autonomous driving. With the entry of cross-border players such as Huawei and DJI, the performance of lidar has been greatly improved, the cost will also be reduced to less than 10,000 yuan, and the willingness of automakers to install lidar fronts will continue to increase.
Lidar is mainly divided into four parts: laser transmission module, scanning system, receiving module and information processing system. According to the Heart of the Car, the transmit and receive modules account for about 60% of the cost of lidar.
From the perspective of market space, the lidar market space is vast. The downstream application areas of lidar can be mainly divided into unmanned driving, high-end assisted driving, service robots and the Internet of Vehicles industry. With the advancement of lidar in the field of vehicles, the lidar market for testing and high-precision mapping will usher in the peak, and mass production of passenger car front-loading will become the main development direction in the future. According to Frost & Sullivan' forecast, advanced assisted driving, unmanned driving, connected vehicles and service robots accounted for 34.64%, 26.30%, 33.81% and 5.26% of the total lidar market size in 2025. The global lidar market size will reach 13.54 billion US dollars (equivalent to nearly 100 billion yuan) in 2025, and the CAGR in 2019-2025 will be 64.5%.
At the same time, Kaiyuan Securities has counted the models that have been explicitly announced to be equipped with lidar in recent years, and found that 2022 will be the peak of mass production of on-board high-line lidar, and then the demand for lidar will enter a period of rapid growth. Considering that the penetration rate of high-end automatic driving is still low, and the application demand in the fields of unmanned aerial vehicles and internet of vehicles is expected to continue to be released with the decline in the cost of lidar, it is expected that the mainland lidar market will exceed 100 billion in the future.
In terms of technology path, lasers, as one of the core devices of the vehicle-mounted lidar launch system, are evolving from EEL to VCSEL. At present, common lasers mainly include semiconductor edge emitting lasers (EEL), semiconductor vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSEL) and fiber lasers.
EEL as a light source has the advantage of high luminous power density, but the EEL laser luminous surface is located on the side of the semiconductor wafer, and the process steps of cutting, flipping, coating, and re-cutting in production can often only be integrated with the circuit board through a single one-by-one placement. At the same time, each laser needs to be independently manually installed, which is more dependent on the manual loading and adjustment technology of the production line workers, and the production cost is high and the consistency is difficult to guarantee.
Different from EEL, the light source emission direction of VCSEL is perpendicular to the chip, on the one hand, it can be directly tested on the wafer, the test cost is lower than EEL, on the other hand, VCSEL mostly uses direct modulation, cavity length, low integration difficulty, performance and mass production capabilities in the field of sensing are more prominent.
Zhitong Finance APP learned that in recent years, a number of domestic and foreign VCSEL laser companies have developed multi-layer junction VCSEL lasers, according to the prospectus of Hesai Technology, multi-layer junction VCSEL lasers will increase the luminous power density by 5 to 10 times. In the future, VCSEL is expected to gradually replace EEL as a mainstream laser component.
Related companies
Sunny Optical Technology (02382): The company has been deeply engaged in the field of optics for nearly 30 years, covering optical components, optoelectronic products and optical instruments, of which the company's market share of automotive lenses has ranked first for nine consecutive years since 2012.
In addition to on-board cameras, optical technology has many applications in smart cars, Sunny Optical Technology also targets HUD, lidar and headlight lighting products, using its deep accumulation in the field of optics to provide customers with optical solutions. The company provides a variety of core optical components including lenses, windows, and scanning optical components for a variety of lidar products such as prism mechanical scanning and 3D Flash.
In addition, the company also provides design and industrialization solutions for lidar optical systems. Previously, the company announced a partnership with Leddar Tec, Canada's leading solid-state Flash lidar solution provider, which will provide vehicle-grade design and industrialization capabilities in optical systems, as well as manufacturing services for optical components, and cooperate to create first-class lidar solutions. As of the first half of 2021, the company has completed the research and development of lidar optical windows and rotating multi-variable prisms and entered the small batch production stage, while establishing a mass production line of transceiver modules and putting them into use.
Torch Technology (688167. SH): The company is a manufacturer of solid-state lasers, fiber lasers and scientific research institutes, medical beauty equipment, industrial manufacturing equipment, and core components of lithography machines. Products are widely used in advanced manufacturing, medical and health, scientific research, automotive applications, information technology five major fields.
The automotive business as an emerging business cultivated by the company in recent years, in recent years has shown good growth, the company and the German continental group in the field of intelligent driving lidar technology cooperation, the total amount of the framework agreement is expected to be about 400 million yuan, benefiting from this, in 2020, the company's automotive business revenue of nearly 0.3 billion yuan, an increase of 28%.
In addition, the company has also expanded its core capabilities around lidar, intelligent cabin driver monitoring system (DMS) and other automotive innovative application scenarios, and its main products include lidar surface light source, lidar line light source, lidar light source optical components, etc. As of the end of September 2020, the company has reached cooperation with many well-known enterprises in North America, Europe and Asia, including Velodyne, Luminar, Ford's well-known driverless company Argo AI, and Continental Group of Germany.
The beam diffuser and high peak power solid-state lidar light source module for the lidar surface light source have been mass-produced in 2020, and the high peak power solid-state lidar area light source has signed a volume supply contract with continental Germany and entered the mass production stage.