Jidu Automobile completed nearly $400 million in Series A financing, and the investors are still Baidu and Geely

On January 26, 10 months after Baidu's car boots landed, Baidu's smart car brand Jidu announced that it had completed nearly $400 million in Series A financing, which was jointly increased by Baidu and strategic partner Geely. After the financing is completed, Jidu will continue to accelerate the process of research and development and mass production, the first automotive robot concept car will be released at the Beijing Auto Show in April this year, and the mass production model will be launched in 2023.

Jidu Automobile is a joint venture initiated by Baidu and jointly invested by Geely, which was officially established in March last year and received more than 300 million US dollars of start-up capital. The parties in this round of financing are all from the original shareholders of Jidu Automobile, and there are no external independent new shareholders. A close person told the first financial reporter that the two original shareholders increased their holdings, which was intended to express their recognition of Jidu automobile products and development speed.

Jidu did not disclose the proportion of shares held by all parties after this round of financing. According to the enterprise investigation information, the registered capital of Jidu Automobile is 2 billion yuan. From the perspective of equity structure, the shareholders of Jidu Automobile include Dazi County Bairuixiang Venture Capital Management Co., Ltd., which is 100% owned by Baidu, and Shanghai Huapu Automobile Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Geely Holding Group, with a shareholding ratio of 55% and 45% respectively. Previously, a person familiar with the matter revealed to First Finance that Jidu Automobile Co., Ltd. has set up a total of 5 board seats, in addition to Xia Yiping, CEO of Jidu Automobile, there are 3 directors from Baidu and 1 director from Geely.

Jidu concept car, picture from Baidu

Mass production will deliver the first automotive robot in 2023

Auto robot is Baidu's judgment on the future of automobile development. At the end of last year, Baidu chairman Robin Li proposed that the future of car robots may not have steering wheels, pedals, no human driving, and intelligent configurations such as intelligent consoles. At that time, he also announced the latest progress of Jidu automotive robots: in the first half of 2022, Jidu will announce the first concept car, and in 2023, the first automotive robot will be mass-produced and delivered.

According to the plan, Jidu Automobile develops a pure electric vehicle based on the SAE architecture of Geely Automobile, and loads Baidu's automatic driving, intelligent cockpit and other functional systems on the electric vehicle. Xia Yiping, CEO of Jidu Automobile, calls Geely Automobile's SEA architecture an open hardware platform, through which Jidu Automobile "carries or lands the core technology of the entire Baidu Apollo".

Xia Yiping previously said in an interview with First Finance that Baidu is in a dominant position in Jidu automobiles. Jidu Automobile as a whole is responsible for end-to-end service, both software and hardware are led by Jidu Automobile, Geely Automobile, as a strategic partner, will cooperate with Jidu Automobile in terms of hardware and carry out related work with Jidu Automobile's product design requirements. He also revealed that Robin Li also attaches great importance to car manufacturing, whether it is a key node such as strategy, vehicle engineering or product design, he will participate in it.

A Baidu person told the first financial reporter that the cooperation model between the two companies was designed from the beginning to think of the problems existing in the traditional joint venture. Such a cooperation model can avoid problems such as low efficiency of traditional joint ventures, prevarication of decision-making, and conflict of ideas.

From the perspective of progress, Jidu Automobile completed the modeling design plan and entered the engineering development stage on the 128th day of its establishment, completed the wind tunnel experiment of the first model of the sludge model on the 180th day, and started the development of intelligent software related, intelligent auxiliary driving and intelligent cockpit function development on the 207th day. The company holds 3,472 automotive-related patents.

At present, the latest progress of Jidu Automobile is that Jidu's self-developed electronic and electrical architecture JET1.0, as well as SOA, automatic driving system, core computing power platform, and related sensors are iterating on the mass production state. In addition, the interior and exterior trim of Jidu's first automotive robot mass production vehicle, as well as the design of all parts, have gradually entered the stage of mass production mold development.

After the financing is completed, Jidu said that it will increase the introduction and training of cutting-edge talents in related fields such as high-level automatic driving, smart cockpit, and intelligent manufacturing; accelerate the construction of the system for the development and operation of users in the intelligent car market, and ensure the mass production of the first automotive robot product in 2023.

Can't build a car without 40 billion?

Behind the financing is the continuous raising of the threshold for new forces to build cars.

Last year, Weilai Automobile Li Bin said in an interview with the media: "The capital threshold that needs to be reserved for car manufacturing, a few years ago I said 20 billion, and now there is no 40 billion that may not be able to do it." In his view, the high investment in the automotive industry is not only in terms of fixed assets, but more importantly, in the research and development and service system, especially in the investment threshold of car research and development, service system and infrastructure.

Previously, Lei Jun, who announced that he had gambled on all the reputation of car manufacturing, intended to invest 10 billion yuan in the first phase, and the expected investment amount in the next 10 years was 10 billion US dollars, and he had invested and acquired a number of new energy vehicle technology and automatic driving technology related companies to lay out related industrial chains. From the perspective of the new car-making forces that have been listed, the research and development expenses of Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal are about 1 billion yuan in a single quarter. Xia Yiping previously told the first financial reporter that it is expected that Jidu will invest about 50 billion yuan in the next 5 years, in addition to Baidu's continuous support, Jidu also seeks external independent financing.

The salaries of car-builders have also risen. According to the "2021 High-end Talent Employment Trend Data Report" released by Liepin not long ago, the field with the highest year-on-year growth in new positions in 2021 is automobile transportation, with an average annual salary of 245,700 yuan and a salary increase of about 25%. In the field of artificial intelligence, the most growing number of new jobs is autonomous driving, with a year-on-year increase of 136.39%, and its average annual salary of recruitment is 368,100 yuan, ranking first.

The market landscape of the global automotive industry is also changing dramatically due to the influx of technology companies. In addition to the original "Wei Xiaoli" new car-making forces, in the latest car-making wave, Xiaomi Automobile Headquarters has settled in the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone in November last year, and chose to build its own factory. According to the plan, Xiaomi will build a xiaomi automobile headquarters base and sales headquarters and research and development headquarters in the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone, and build a vehicle factory with an annual output of 300,000 vehicles in two phases, and it is expected that the first car will be rolled off the production line and achieve mass production in 2024; after Nezha Automobile received 3 billion yuan of investment from 360 Group last year, Zhou Hongyi repeatedly spoke out for its platform, and the delivery volume rose; not long ago, it was reported that Luoke Automobile, the car-making project of Stone Technology founder and CEO Changjing, had completed a financing of 100 million US dollars at the end of last year, led by Tencent Group. In addition, state-owned car companies represented by BAIC Jihu, Dongfeng Lantu, SAIC Zhiji, Changan Avita, etc. have also begun to build intelligent electric vehicles through incubation outside the system.

For this wave of car-making boom, some insiders analyzed to reporters that in the future era of unmanned driving, the ultimate battle is still ecological competition. It's like the mobile phone industry has developed from the era of feature phones to the era of smart phones, and finally only five or six players occupy 80% of the market, and these players can be said to be "ecological players". Without strong hardware capabilities, OS capabilities, and a strong enough developer ecosystem, there is no way to compete with them on a smartphone now. The same is true of the automotive industry in the future, which will be a requirement for core capabilities such as high-precision maps, driverless driving, and cloud computing power.

Zhu Yi, senior managing director of Huaxing New Economy Fund, said in a previous interview with First Finance that electrification has indeed significantly reduced the threshold for car manufacturing, which is a prerequisite for technology giants to build cross-border cars. Under such a general trend, they may subvert everyone's definition of a good car, the weight of traditional indicators such as control and power may decline, and the attractiveness of intelligent configuration to consumers is getting stronger and stronger, especially when high-level automatic driving is realized, the time value of the driver in the car will be released, and there may be a lot of demand that we can't think of now, and these technology giants are good at tapping the consumption potential.