White Rhino founder and CEO Zhu Lei
Titanium Media Note: "Exploring the Way 2022" is a year-end planning topic of Titanium Media, inviting TOP entrepreneurial leaders in various industries to review the industry changes and corporate growth in the past year, while talking about new logic and looking forward to 2022. This article is a summary of the industry's past and future prospects for White Rhino CEO Zhu Lei's dialogue with the Titanium Media App "Pathfinding 2022".
Unmanned distribution at the end is entering a period of rapid development.
During the epidemic period, because the unmanned delivery of the "last mile" can replace the manual delivery work to a certain extent, the demand for the "unmanned economy" scene has been continuously expanded.
In addition, since 2019, the express delivery industry has set off a "price war", which directly leads to low profits in the express delivery industry, high work intensity, high turnover rate and difficulty in recruiting workers at the end of the outlet.
At the same time, self-driving technology trapped in mass production and commercialization also urgently needs to find a scene as a breakthrough, tearing open an opening into the real world.
As a subdivision track in the field of autonomous driving, unmanned distribution has become the focus of attention in the capital market.
As a new player in the field of unmanned delivery, although white rhino has only been established for more than two years, it has completed four rounds of financing successively, and has completed two consecutive rounds of financing in the second half of 2021 alone. In the dialogue between Titanium Media App and White Rhino CEO Zhu Lei, he reviewed the development trend of the industry in the past two years and the outlook for the future.
Although autonomous driving has suffered a capital winter in previous years, there are constant entrants in the subdivision track. Zhu Lei said that he had "got the last ticket or two for automatic driving." In his view, entrepreneurship must first choose a way to survive, and terminal distribution is just an application scenario that can land and is large enough.
Cut into the autonomous driving track with unmanned distribution
Before founding White Rhino, Zhu Lei was the founder of Baidu's L4 system integration team, from 0 to 1 to build Baidu L4 software and hardware system integration engineering system, in December 2017 he left Baidu unmanned vehicle, and then founded White Rhino.
Another founder of the company, Xia Tian, is the former chief architect of Baidu's autonomous driving business unit and the head of visual perception direction technology.
Their previous work experience in Baidu has made them more aware of how to do autonomous driving on urban roads. After choosing to do autonomous driving on open roads, technology landing also faces different dimensions of choice: fixed route or free route, low speed or high speed, passengers in the car or no passengers.
From the perspective of business logic, when considering the size of opportunities and commercialization speed of each landing scenario of automatic driving, in addition to the technical dimension, there are issues such as right of way and legislation. The simpler the road environment and the more standard the operating process, the more it can land the autonomous driving system in batches, bringing cost and scale benefits.
The speed of the unmanned delivery vehicle at the end is relatively low, so there is more time to ensure the accuracy of the perception positioning and planning algorithm.
The passenger experience does not need to be considered, and the technical investment in vehicle comfort can be reduced, and there will be no personnel safety problems.
At the same time, according to the "Research Report on the Terminal Unmanned Delivery Track" released by Chentao Capital, the market space of the terminal unmanned delivery exceeds 100 billion, and the track will usher in an outbreak in 2023.
Therefore, after consideration and judgment from all sides, the white rhino finally took the terminal distribution as the entry point and entered the track of automatic driving.
There are three main scenarios of unmanned delivery at the end of The country: express delivery, takeaway and fresh supermarkets. Although the essence is to complete the short-distance delivery of goods from merchants to consumers in a specific time, the scene needs and difficulties are not the same.
For a startup, is it all about doing it or focusing on a niche scenario? According to the Titanium Media App, the first choice of white rhinos is takeaway delivery. However, after a period of operation, Zhu Lei and his team found that there were multiple difficulties in takeaway delivery.
For example, takeaway is N to N scene, that is, there are N merchants and N consumers in an area, the upstream merchants are more scattered, the required routes are complex, the scope of the required right of way is larger, and it is more difficult to obtain the right of way permit; the takeaway delivery is time-sensitive, generally need to arrive within 30 minutes to 1 hour; once there is a problem in the unmanned delivery process of takeaway, the delivery efficiency and quality will directly affect the user's satisfaction with the takeaway.
In Zhu Lei's view, choosing a scene needs to meet two aspects at the same time, on the one hand, the current technology can be applied to solve the problem in the scene; on the other hand, the customer is willing to pay for the new technology, including the customer's demand for reducing costs and costs, and also including the customer's knowledge and understanding of the technology in the early stage of technological development.
Since the current combination of multiple factors can not fully meet the needs of the takeaway scene, white rhinos began to look for other directions. Compared with takeaway delivery, the unmanned delivery of fresh supermarkets is less difficult.
Beginning in the autumn of 2020, White Rhino, in cooperation with Yonghui Supermarket, has successively launched ten unmanned delivery trolleys near Yonghui Supermarket in Anting, Jiading, Shanghai. With fresh supermarkets as the center, we provide terminal delivery services for communities 3 to 5 kilometers near supermarkets.
At the same time, White Rhino is also expanding the boundaries of services, and at the end of July 2021, White Rhino and Dada Group reached a cooperation to jointly build an unmanned delivery platform.
At present, The White Rhino is operating nearly 100 vehicles, and its unmanned delivery fleet has been routinely tested and operated in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Shenzhen and other cities, with a daily active capacity of dozens of units.
White Rhino unmanned delivery vehicle
After 5 years, it will reach 5,000 unmanned vehicles per day
"When starting a business, the judgment of anything has a time dimension, the three-year final and five-year finals are different, and what the white rhino has to do is to figure out what to do in the next 3-5 years." Zhu Lei told titanium media app.
At the end of 2021, Zhu Lei made a challenging "five-year plan" for the white rhino: starting in 2022, the white rhino plans to have 5,000 daily operating unmanned vehicles on the public road within 5 years.
Zhu Lei believes that this goal is mainly based on the prediction of technology, policies and costs.
According to Zhu Lei's introduction to the Titanium Media App, at present, in terms of technology, the relevant software algorithms of white rhinos are all self-developed, and the initial unmanned distribution operation at the end can be realized. However, the large-scale development of terminal delivery unmanned vehicles also needs to continuously improve the algorithm capabilities in testing and operation to adapt to more complex scenarios and road conditions, as well as to ensure the consistency and stability of autonomous driving software and hardware systems in operation.
In terms of policy, following the release of the country's first unmanned delivery vehicle management implementation rules in the Beijing High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Changsha, Wuhan and other cities are also stepping up their efforts to study corresponding management measures, and more cities may open open open roads for unmanned delivery vehicles to test in 2022.
In terms of cost, although the development of unmanned distribution is still in its early stages, the maturity of the supply chain is far from enough, but with the gradual scale of the industry, Zhu Lei believes that the cost of the car will continue to decline. Some industry reports show that the cost of unmanned delivery vehicles has dropped significantly, from the initial between 300,000-500,000 yuan to 100,000-200,000.
Unmanned distribution at the end has not yet reached the stage of grabbing the market
Before the establishment of White Rhino, domestic Internet giants such as Meituan, JD.com, and Ali began to lay out unmanned delivery in 2015 and 2016.
This is also the two major player types in the current terminal unmanned delivery market:
One is the Internet giant, with an early layout, deep pockets, and its own scene;
The other type is the startup companies including white rhinos, and the founders of the enterprises have a background in autonomous driving research and development and technology, and the landing is relatively focused.
It is precisely because of the different nature of enterprises that business models are also different.
At present, most of the Internet giants are mainly based on the internal needs of service groups, such as Ali serving Cainiao and Ele.me, JD.com serving JD Logistics, and Meituan serving Meituan's takeaway and retail business. Startups, on the other hand, are focused on selling, leasing, and providing solutions.
When asked whether he would worry about the situation of competition with giants, Zhu Lei admitted that the current terminal distribution is still default to human distribution, and the whole society gradually needs the joint efforts of more people in the process of transforming into unmanned distribution, and it is not yet time to grab the market. In his view, the next 3-5 years will not reach the level of competition to grab the market.
Although the current competition of various players to layout does promote the development of the terminal unmanned distribution industry, the technological progress and industrial synergy brought about by the support of capital and policies are also emerging. But for companies like White Rhino that focus deeply on one scenario, will it hinder White Rhino from expanding into other scenarios in the future due to differences in data systems and operation methods between scenarios?
Zhu Lei said that by deeply cultivating a scene, accumulating resources and capabilities, and most importantly, exercising a very good organization, so that after a scene is understood, if there is still organizational ability overflow, it will try other scenarios.
At present, the white rhino is facing the process of commercialization, constantly solving technical problems, considering policy rights of way, changing user perception and industrial chain structure.
"The development of unmanned distribution is still in its early stages, and there are still many aspects that need to be explored." Zhu Lei concluded at the end of the interview. For the companies involved, they can only explore while participating. (This article was first published on the Titanium Media App, written by | Han Jingxian, editor| Zhang Min)