Author| Pan Tao Editor| Luo Lijuan
The day before the Spring Festival in 2022, the lithium battery industry sent out heavy news, Andsun wanda will become a version of Xiaopeng Automobile's G9 A supply, and the supply share is more than 50%.
Xiaopeng Automobile responded to this, this information is not the official information of the enterprise, the preparation of the vehicle and the selection of suppliers are an important part of the business plan, and the specific information filed by the Ministry of Vehicle Industry and Information Technology shall prevail.
Unveiled at the 2021 Guangzhou Auto Show, the Xiaopeng G9 is the fourth model of Xiaopeng Automobile, and according to the plan, the G9 will start delivery in the third quarter of this year. Mass production is imminent, and the battery supplier that the new car will finalize is naturally also attracting much attention. Prior to this, Sunwoda was nothing more than a Pack supplier of Xiaopeng G3 batteries.
Xiaopeng G9 Source: Xiaopeng Automobile
In the customer list of Sunwoda, in addition to domestic car companies such as Xiaopeng Automobile, Geely, GAC, and Dongfeng, international customers such as Renault and Nissan are also among them, and many mainstream car companies have been included.
However, from the perspective of market share, Sunwoda's market share in domestic power batteries is not high. According to the data of China Automotive Power Battery Industry Innovation Alliance, Sunwoda's market share in China ranked only tenth in 2021, with an annual loading volume of 2.06GWh and a market share of 1.3%.
This is not unrelated to the development path of Sunwoda.
Founded in 1997, Sunwoda was mainly engaged in the production of consumer lithium-ion battery modules in the early days of its establishment, and made a fortune with this, and is currently the leading consumer battery packaging manufacturer in the world, and is the main supplier of head mobile phone brands such as Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, and OV. In the global market, its mobile phone module shipments are more than 20%.
After 2014, Sunwoda began to lay out power batteries. Compared with the Head Enterprises such as Ningde Times and AVIC Lithium Battery, it is late.
If you can catch the Express train of Xiaopeng G9, it is crucial for Sunwoda. This not only means that the binding with the new forces of the head is deeper and the downstream channels are guaranteed, but also that the G9 itself is positioned higher, and the price may be more than 300,000 yuan, which will also enhance the brand influence of Sunwoda.
From small factories to "faucets"
Thanks to its unique economic position, Shenzhen in the 1990s was a paradise for consumer electronics, with a large number of emerging electronic devices gathered here.
Because of the background of working in lithium battery companies, Compared with others, Wang Mingwang saw the opportunity of battery entrepreneurship earlier.
In 1994, with his younger brother Wang Wei and several classmates, he opened a business in a private house in Shenzhen and began to engage in lithium battery processing of communication products such as mobile phones and pagers. Wang Mingwang grasps production, and Wang Wei is responsible for promotion.
In the early days of entrepreneurship, the company's name was unknown, in order to promote products, Wang Wei once carried a backpack full of big brother batteries and ran to Huaqiang North to sell.
Although the domestic mobile phone industry has just sprouted at this time, the profit margin is quite amazing, and in the first year of entrepreneurship, this small processing plant actually achieved a profit of 1 million yuan.
In 1997, the brothers who tasted the sweetness officially established Sunwoda and began to produce and sell nickel-metal hydride batteries and lithium-ion battery modules. As a new player, it is not easy to open up a larger market, and the feasible way is to find a powerful downstream customer and quickly establish brand power.
Konka became a key customer for the rise of Sunwoda. In 1999, the brothers accidentally learned that Konka planned to produce its own brand mobile phone, so they took the initiative to try to establish cooperation with each other.
"Try it, anyway, don't suffer losses", many years later, Wang Wei recalled that in order to win Konka, Sunwoda's battery price was 30% cheaper than the average price of other products.
With the experience of cooperating with Konka, well-known enterprises such as Philips, ATL, NEC, haier and so on were quickly included in the "circle of friends" by Sunwoda. Among them, the cooperation with ATL has also allowed Sunwoda to smoothly enter the Apple supply chain. At that time, in the battery supply of iPhone3, iPod and other products, Sunwoda accounted for up to 20%.
In 2012, with the launch of the iPhone 4, Apple abandoned Sunwoda in favor of choosing The Desai battery, and did not cooperate with Sunwoda again until 2014 due to large shipments.
At the same time, coinciding with the rise of domestic mobile phone brands, the emergence of millet filled apple's absence and became the new nobleman of Sunwoda. Many Xiaomi products, including notebooks and sweepers, have chosen to cooperate with Sunwoda.
At present, among the top five mobile phone manufacturers, in addition to Samsung, which mainly supplies its own batteries, the other four supply chains have Sunwoda's figure; in terms of laptops, Sunwoda has also reached a supply relationship with first-line manufacturers such as Huawei, Lenovo, Dell, and HP.
Strong downstream customers, let Sunwoda sit in the position of consumer battery module leader.
According to Ping An Securities, Sunwoda's module business revenue increased from 310 million yuan in 2008 to 20.98 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate of 42% during the period, successively surpassing competitors such as Xinpu and Desai. It is precisely by seizing the rapid increase in smartphones after 2010 and the soft bag replacement of notebooks after 2015 that Sunwoda has achieved a rapid rise.
At present, the revenue of mobile phone digital and notebook computer products is still the core of Sunwoda's revenue, and the 2020 annual report shows that these two parts of revenue account for 55% and 14% of the company's total revenue, respectively.
Other intelligent hardware businesses, products involving sweeping robots, electronic pens, smart travel and smart speakers, accounted for 21% of revenue in 2020.
Bet on the power battery
As the mobile phone market becomes increasingly saturated, Sunwoda has also begun to look for a new growth engine, and power batteries are the focus of its bets.
Today, the penetration rate of electric vehicles is growing rapidly. According to the data of the Association, the domestic retail penetration rate of new energy vehicles in 2021 was 14.8%, which was significantly higher than the penetration rate of 5.8% in 2020. Among them, the domestic retail penetration rate of new energy vehicles in December 2021 was 22.6%. Soochow Securities expects domestic electric vehicle sales to reach 6 million vehicles (including exports) in 2022, an increase of more than 70% year-on-year.
This has created a huge market gap in the battery industry. Market research firm SNE Research predicts that global demand for electric vehicles for power batteries will reach 406 GWh by 2023, while supply is expected to be only 335 GWh.
This provides an opportunity for new players such as Sunwoda to cut in.
In fact, as early as 2008, Sunwoda began to lay out the power battery, but there was substantial action, but it had reached 2014. This year, Sunwoda established the Power Battery Research Institute, which can be regarded as officially stepping into the field of new energy. During this period, the Ningde era, which was founded in 2011, has become a hit with cooperation with BMW.
In recent years, the development of electric vehicles has not been smooth, subsidies have declined, user education is still insufficient, there is still a lack of core and lack of electricity, and market fluctuations have increased the uncertainty of upstream battery manufacturers.
And the sense of distress often makes Wang Wei hang "I am very anxious" on his lips. The hesitation to judge the outlet made Sunwoda miss the opportunity to develop power batteries. In order to enter, Sunwoda still chose a more stable way of playing, mainly based on Pack products before 2018, and related technologies have been fully accumulated in consumer batteries.
Compared with the core cell of the battery, the technical content of Pack products is slightly inferior, and Sunwoda's batteries were previously mainly purchased from companies such as Japan and South Korea. In order to improve the gross profit margin and enter the core of the industry, Sunwoda tried to layout more upstream, and after 2018, its batteries gradually began to be self-sufficient.
According to Ping An Securities, the models cooperated by Sunwoda in 2018 mainly include Dongfeng Liuqi Jingyi S50EV, Yundu π1/π3, Geely Emgrand PHEV, etc., with an installed capacity of about 0.26GWh. In 2019, driven by the main customer Geely, Sunwoda's installed capacity has increased significantly, and its domestic installed capacity has reached 0.65GWh, entering the top ten of the industry for the first time.
However, its market share situation is still unstable, falling out of the top ten in 2020 and not returning to the position until 2021.
At the same time, the revenue capacity of Sunwoda's power battery business is also in a state of volatility, after peaking in 2018, it has fallen into two consecutive declines in the following two years, and the revenue of this business has dropped from 990 million yuan in 2018 to 430 million yuan in 2020.
The same is true of gross profit margin performance, the gross profit margin in 2018 and 2019 was 13.44% and 11.31% respectively, and in 2020 it fell to -14.85%, and it was only in the first half of 2021 that it was re-positive, with a gross profit margin of 6.76% during the period.
Source: Ping An Securities
Compared with the industry head, the gap is obvious. According to the annual report, the gross profit margin of the power battery system in the Ningde era in 2019 and 2020 was about 25%, and even reached 34.1% in 2018. Even compared with the second-tier guoxuan hi-tech, Sunwanda has a distance. In 2019 and 2020, the gross profit margin of Guoxuan Hi-Tech Power Lithium Battery was 33.37 and 24.72%, respectively.
At the same time, Sunwoda's power battery business is in a perennial state of loss, and the non-net profit of the business from 2018 to 2020 is -1.46, -3.05 and -607 million yuan, respectively.
Source: YY Ratings
On the one hand, there is a loss, and on the other hand, there is a heavy bet on Sunwoda. According to YY rating data, from the perspective of Sunwoda's investment plan in the past 5 years, the total amount of its investment in power batteries has reached 52 billion yuan.
Leaping Dragon Gate?
With the rise of the Ningde era, BMW played a very important role. It is with the cooperation with BMW that the Ningde era can quickly make a sign, Ningtong Bus was previously a customer of AVIC lithium battery, and it was during this period that it switched to the NINGDE era.
Today, the cooperation between Sunwanda and Xiaopeng seems likely to stage a similar story.
Sunwoda's current market share is not large, so for Xiaopeng Automobile, cooperation with the "big guy" Ningde era, and cooperation with Sunwoda, the latter cooperation Xiaopeng may have a greater right to speak. This is good both for technical requirements and cost control.
And since last year, like the lack of cores, the lack of electricity has become another major problem in the industry. G9 delivery is imminent, with the ramping capacity, Xiaopeng electricity demand will become larger and larger, expanding the supply chain is also a consideration for the safety of the industrial chain.
For Sunwoda, its power battery business is still in the catch-up stage, whether it is technical reserves or production capacity scale, compared with the industry head, there is a significant distance. Binding a head car company like Xiaopeng can not only obtain stable downstream orders, but also have a positive impact on improving its technical level.
In the early development of consumer batteries, Sunwoda has gained rapid development from cooperation with Konka.
If the Hand-in-Hand Xiaopeng G9 is true, this is most likely the inflection point of the rise of Sunwoda power batteries. But there are also many difficulties that need to be faced at the moment.
Funding is a top problem. In recent years, in the consumer battery business, Sunwoda's revenue and net profit are in a state of steady growth, but compared with the investment of tens of billions of yuan in power batteries, its own hematopoietic capacity is still far from enough.
From 2016 to 2020, Sunwoda's net profit was only 3.284 billion yuan. In the second half of last year alone, Sunwoda announced two power battery investment projects with a total investment of 20 billion yuan.
To this end, Sunwoda can only increase leverage, and its asset-liability ratio has been at a high level in recent years. According to Wind data, its asset-liability ratio was above 70% in 2016-2020, and it rose to 77% in 2020. Many of them are interest-bearing liabilities, which has led to the rapid growth of Sunwoda's financial expenses, which have reached 500 million yuan in 2020, compared with only 13 million yuan in 2016.
Investment is still increasing. According to Baoan Daily, in 2021 alone, Sunwoda announced a number of power battery expansion projects, with a total investment of 45 billion yuan.
And production capacity is another problem. Attracted by the new energy vehicle outlet, both the head and the second-tier manufacturers have accelerated the expansion of production in the past two years. However, in terms of the scale of expansion, Sunwoda has no advantage in comparison.
According to the statistics of the starting point lithium battery big data, the new capacity of the Ningde era is planned to reach 306GWh in 2021, 223GWh for China Innovation Airlines, and 90GWh for Sunwoda's expansion plan. According to the plan, by 2025, the production capacity of Sunwoda will reach 140GWh, the capacity planning target of the same period of the Ningde era is about 600GWh, and the capacity planning target of China Innovation Airlines is 500GWh.
With the increasingly fierce market competition, the cost advantage brought by scale will become the key to the survival of the industry. In recent years, battery prices have experienced a sharp decline, and the price may be further reduced in the future.
At the same time, in the context of the "electric shortage", the upstream raw material lithium ore price of lithium batteries soared, in order to improve the gross profit margin and grasp the supply of raw materials, the head enterprises began to probe the tentacles to the upstream of the industrial chain, including Ningde times, Guoxuan Hi-Tech and other enterprises have launched a layout for lithium resources.
Its degree of burning money is no less than that of expanding power batteries. For example, CATL plans to invest in the construction of a new lithium battery manufacturing base in Yichun, Jiangxi Province, with an investment amount of about 13.5 billion yuan. The Ningde era is looking at Yichun's rich lithium ore reserves.
Binding Xiaopeng, Sunwoda is expected to go to a higher level, but can it subvert the industry pattern and complete the dragon gate leap? Funding problems, capacity scale, and increasingly scarce upstream resources are all obstacles that must be solved first.
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