From "chicken ribs" to performance boosters, the car camera module industry under the Tesla dividend era

Jiwei Network News On January 26, Baidu's smart car brand "Jidu" announced that it has completed nearly $400 million in Series A financing. It is reported that this round of financing is jointly increased by Baidu and strategic partner Geely. After the financing is completed, Jidu will continue to accelerate the process of R&D and mass production, the first automotive robot concept car will be released at the Beijing Auto Show in April 2022, and the mass production model will be launched in 2023.

Jiwei Network learned that Jidu has now begun to cooperate with the upstream and downstream supply chains to develop parts and components for new models. "Although there is still a long time before mass production, compared with the product development cycle of traditional car companies, the domestic smart car brand has been quite short, and the development progress of the parts we provide so far is relatively smooth." An in-vehicle image module supplier said to Jiwei Network.

The other party also said: "The rise of domestic electric vehicle brand power not only shortens the development cycle, but also further increases the demand for on-board image modules." ”

In fact, before the emergence of Tesla, the market prospect of on-board image modules can almost be described by the word "depression". Compared with the highly talked about automotive CIS chip, it also seems "unattended".

Tasteless

Most of the demand for cameras in the traditional automobile market comes from rearview mirrors, driving recorders and other components, of which most of the driving recorders still belong to the aftermarket, and the real product demand is not large; coupled with the fact that most of the models of several years ago used radar to do object monitoring solutions, the requirements for cameras in function are almost zero.

Industry insiders told the author: "A few years ago, we just contacted the car market, and the camera specifications that often appear in the solutions we see are very low, basically using VGA pixels, because the rearview reversing scheme with radar does not require imaging." The only thing that requires an image effect is a dashcam. ”

At that time, the global camera module industry has entered a stage of rapid development driven by the smart phone market, not only the demand is large, but the product premium brought by front-end technology is also more considerable. Obviously, such low-end products on the vehicle are not attractive to the module factory itself.

The industry source said: "Because the specifications of such products are very low, so the production process is not difficult, some products may not be used in the process of CSP, and can be made with SMT." Therefore, at that time, almost no module factory would do the on-board products sold separately, and even if they did, the sales would not be very large. Usually in the form of packaging with other products to push to customers, such as: car machine system, panel, etc., the early suppliers are mainly foreign companies and Taiwan, and several large-scale tier1 car camera modules in foreign countries are even self-produced and sold. ”

However, in the ever-changing technology industry, this situation quickly changed.

The emergence of Tesla marks the rise of the era of electric vehicles; and the "pure visual autonomous driving solution" it has been advocating has also become the most powerful boost engine for the growth of the in-vehicle camera module market. In 2016, Tesla launched Autopilot Hardware 2.0, which is equipped with 8 camera sensors in this set of solutions, which has become an important hardware support in its automotive intelligent solutions and has formed a certain demonstration effect on the industry.

As the industry knows, Musk has been holding high the banner of "pure visual solution" on the road to achieving automatic driving. Because of this, Tesla also first put forward the demand for purchasing a single material for the in-vehicle image module industry.

The waters rise

According to supply chain manufacturers, Tesla decided to outsource the camera module order to a professional module factory at the beginning of the implementation of the pure visual program, and Zhishen Technology is also the first manufacturer in China to supply tesla with a car camera module; for the experienced Apple supplier Zhishen Technology, the difficulty of ordinary car camera modules is not large, so the company's cooperation with Tesla was soon established.

"From the perspective of Tesla's concept, the parts it makes itself basically have the characteristics of high technical barriers and high profits, and for materials that are relatively marginal and not profitable, even if they have the ability, they will not do it themselves." The reason why we chose to purchase an on-board camera module is because the benefits brought by Tesla's self-built production line are not large. The above-mentioned suppliers said to the microgrid.

Nowadays, global car companies are trying to divide the cake of the electric vehicle market, and have launched a variety of electric vehicle models, the penetration rate of visual solutions has continued to increase, and the market demand for camera modules has also risen. Despite this, most tier1 manufacturers still use the same outsourcing method as Tesla, and the reason is related to the return on investment.

The camera functions in the visual solution are becoming more and more abundant, and higher requirements are put forward for pixels, volume, power consumption, reliability, etc., and the improvement of specifications also means that the process and equipment should be upgraded, combined with the low threshold of component products and easy to have problems such as price competition, investing a lot of money to optimize the production line is obviously more than worth the loss for tier1.

The aforementioned suppliers also admitted that "compared with the early days of the rise of the automotive market, the current module price has indeed begun to decline, especially some ordinary specifications of products, gross profit margins have declined rapidly." Even so, the profit is still better than the mobile phone market, especially some of the more front-end products, the price is still very good. ”

The other party pointed out that the price of components in the car camera is very high, and these products need to spend a lot of money even if they have been certified by the car regulations, so the price of these components is destined to remain at a certain level. If it is not a malicious bargaining, the price of the module naturally cannot be too low.

In the past two years, the electric vehicle styles on the market have blossomed, and in order to achieve the ultimate goal of automatic driving and ensure driving safety to a greater extent, more and more terminals have implemented lidar, or radar + vision solutions, while Tesla under Musk's leadership has always believed in its own concept.

It should be noted that the demand for cameras for either scheme continues to grow.

CICC pointed out in the report that we judge that the wave of automotive intelligence will further increase the amount of on-board cameras, and the centralized architecture will drive product prices down, which is conducive to achieving faster promotion. We estimate that by 2025, the domestic car camera market will reach 22.7 billion yuan, and the CAGR in 2020-25 will be 30%. We are optimistic about the head domestic manufacturers in the industrial chain of CIS, optical components and module packaging. (Proofreading/Sara)