"Don't say charging in the service area, even entering has become difficult. If the new energy vehicle owner insists on waiting in line here (Changzhou Fangmaoshan Service Area, towards Shanghai), it is estimated that the waiting time may exceed three hours..." On February 7, at the peak of the Spring Festival return, Cao Yang, a deep user of electric vehicles, was on social forums, busy sharing the experience of driving electric vehicles for long-distance travel to other users.
Spending more energy on planning routes and avoiding charging queues than fuel car owners, Liu Ming (pseudonym) is also the same when he returns from his hometown in Hubei to Guangzhou, the difference is that Liu Ming's identity is still the head of a local charging pile operator in Guangzhou. However, the heat of new energy vehicles and the above charging queue are more separated, when accompanying the "China Business Daily" reporter to visit the charging station of his company, he is worried about the company's profitability, "the supply of charging piles is greater than the demand for cars", he judged that many small and medium-sized charging pile operators will be shuffled out in 2022.
From the perspective of big data, just behind the growth inflection point of domestic new energy vehicles in 2021, according to the statistics of the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance (hereinafter referred to as the "Charging Alliance"), the growth rate of domestic public charging facilities in 2021 is not equally bright, and the ratio of new piles to vehicles (here only refers to public charging piles) has fallen rapidly. Li Kang, director of the comprehensive department of the Charging Alliance, told reporters, "The industry does have the status quo of overall oversupply and unprofitable." ”
On the one hand, the charging queue that arouses attention every holiday, and often triggers onlookers to question the electric vehicle when public opinion ferments, on the other hand, the overall supply of the industry is oversupplied, and the enthusiasm for building piles under unprofitable declines, which undoubtedly forms a meaningful scene in the charging pile market.
"Two Energy Replenishment Systems"
"You have to run long distances every day, and you don't have to come out with depression for 3 months." Liu Ming, who drives a pure electric vehicle, was ridiculed by friends when planning a route for long-distance travel, and it takes extra energy to plan the route and find piles for pure electric vehicles.
The long-distance travel scenario is a short board in the use of pure electric vehicles, so is there a solution at present? As the person in charge of the charging operator, Liu Ming believes that the reason for restricting large-scale piling in some remote cities and high-speed scenarios is still the problem of low charging demand. Under such circumstances, Liu Ming believes that under the background that the charging stations in large and medium-sized cities are still losing money and the business model of the industry is not running through, it is not cost-effective to invest in piles to bear greater losses in cities with lower penetration rates of new energy vehicles and lower utilization rates.
Li Kang said in the communication that although the charging pile on the highway was exposed to the charging queue during the holidays, the usual utilization rate was low, and the overall loss situation was more serious. For the above-mentioned charging queuing phenomenon, Huang Shan, co-founder of "Electric Vehicle Observer", who has long been concerned about the development of charging piles, said, "In fact, it is a temporary imbalance between supply and demand and a mismatch between time and space." ”
However, the uneven layout of charging piles in sinking cities, remote cities, and some high-speed scenes is indeed a "roadblock" for some consumers who buy cars for the first time to buy electric vehicles. The person in charge of Xiaopeng Automobile overcharge told reporters that the construction of moderately advanced charging infrastructure, especially the supporting construction in remote areas and underdeveloped areas, is very beneficial to promoting the sustained, rapid and healthy development of the new energy industry, and the growth of charging piles in areas with relatively tight local resources cannot catch up with the growth of new energy vehicles, which will cause a shortage of supply, and at the same time, the reverse restricts the development of new energy vehicles in these areas.
He took Xiaopeng Automobile as an example, in 2021, the company's overcharging network accelerated layout, and as of now, it has achieved the industry's first charging network covering all 333 prefecture-level cities and 4 municipalities directly under the central government, and opened up the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao and Beijing-Shanghai high-speed travel supercharging lines. However, he also said that as a basic supporting facility, the "national team" will play a more important role in it, and Xiaopeng Automobile will contribute as a car company.
Pulling the gaze back into the urban scene, in terms of the current electric vehicle habits, when communicating with reporters, Cao Yang, who has about 10 years of driving experience in fuel vehicles, 3 years of pure electric vehicle driving experience, and has long recorded new energy travel experience in major forums under the name of "Big Bun Beaver", said that according to his observation, the current users are actually mainly traveling in the city.
It is worth noting that Cao Yang believes that electric vehicles and fuel vehicles are two different sets of energy systems, and cannot be compared too simply and rudely, but on the basis of respecting their respective characteristics, they are looking for solutions.
Specifically, Cao Yang believes that compared with the centralized and rapid refueling of refueling, the charging that takes a long time is decentralized energy, such as in addition to private charging piles, it also has a large number of public charging piles in shopping malls and other areas. Although charging in the transitional stage of development is bound to take more time, some users can seek the optimal solution for daily charging and energy replenishment through the adjustment of living habits.
Cao Yang further said that after adapting to the refueling method, the transition to charging energy requires a process. He takes long-distance travel as an example, many new energy owners are not willing to charge at high speed, and are obsessed with waiting for charging at high speed, thinking that the latter way is faster, but because charging is slower than refueling, there are the characteristics of decentralized energy replenishment, and high-speed charging is often a better way.
Tan Fengqian, general manager of Guangdong Huaneng Hi-Tech New Energy Development Co., Ltd., believes that refueling and charging are actually two sets of energy replenishment systems, each with its own characteristics that need to be adapted by users. He further said that even if the charging speed of electric vehicles is constantly increasing iteratively, the relatively slow energy replenishment speed of pure electric vehicles still brings users the time costs that they are bound to bear. For the wave of domestic car companies to launch ultra-high-power charging models in 2021, some even want to control the charging time at about 10 to 15 minutes, he said that from the operator's point of view, it is more of an exploration stage.
Liu Ming believes that the charging time of electric vehicle fast charging is controlled at 30 to 60 minutes, and many models currently running in the market are about 1.5 hours, and further growth in time will affect the user experience. Huangshan said that the configuration of super-power charging piles for rapid charging means that the load on the power grid increases sharply, and the current grid conditions in the fixed area, how many high-power charging piles can be built is capped.
Supply the remaining profit problems
In Huangshan's view, the profitability of charging piles is the result of intensified internal competition under the overall oversupply of the industry.
In communication with reporters, Liu Ming said that the company has 40 charging stations and about 1500 charging guns in Guangzhou. According to its introduction, the development of the charging pile industry has previously experienced a bubble period, with the volume of new energy network ride-hailing vehicles around 2017, the profitability in the industry was once better, but as a low-threshold industry, the charging pile industry has subsequently poured in a large number of foreign investors, and it is becoming more and more difficult to make profits in the industry under the disorderly price war.
Tan Fengqian's statement is similar to Liu Ming's. Tan Feng's former company has 6 charging stations, which can basically maintain revenue balance without calculating the depreciation of charging equipment, and the company has made plans in 2021 to temporarily stop expanding new charging stations. In terms of construction costs, according to the data introduced by Liu Ming and Tan Fengqian, if the cost of parking spaces, labor, equipment depreciation and other costs is evenly shared, the investment cost of each charging gun in Guangzhou is about 90,000 yuan, and the current profit recovery method is basically only a service fee, the electricity bill is handed over to the power supply party, and the profit method is single.
"Investments are measured in tens of thousands of yuan, but the income is calculated on a gross basis." Huangshan summarized this current situation.
So what is the trend of investment and construction in the industry from the timeline? From the data point of view, from the annual increase in public charging piles and the increase in new energy vehicles, the smaller the value, the lower the heat of charging pile investment in the case of fixed increments of new energy vehicles. Specifically, in 2018, the value was 1:14.6, 1:6.52 in 2019, 1:4.70 in 2020, and 1:10.36 in 2021.
From the comparison between the expansion speed of domestic public charging piles and the sales growth rate of new energy vehicles, the data of the Charging Alliance shows that the year-on-year growth rate of domestic public charging piles from 2018 to 2021 is 40.1%, 55.9%, 56.4% and 89.9%, respectively, and the sales growth rate of domestic new energy vehicles in the same period is 61.7%, -4.0%, 10.9% and 157.5%, respectively.
So what is the profitability of the industry's leading enterprises? According to the performance disclosed by Telai new energy Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Tlaedian"), its net loss in 2019 was 111 million yuan, and its net loss in 2020 was 0.78 billion yuan. In fact, the expansion rate of Star Charging and Special Call, which is the head, is significantly lower than that in 2020, and the number of equipment of the State Grid in 2021 only slightly increased from 181,500 units to 196,500 units.
It is particularly noteworthy that while the industry's old players are in a profit difficulty, the industry is also pouring in new players.
According to Huangshan's observation, starting in 2020, the charging pile industry is entering a new stage of development, and energy companies, car companies, and local urban investment companies seeking transformation are rapidly developing, and these entrants are different from the cross-border investors who have less capital in the early days, they are powerful players with a large amount of capital or land resources, which is bound to stir up the competitive landscape of the charging pile industry.
Taking Xiaopeng Automobile as an example, its overcharge layout will accelerate in 2021. At the end of 2020, the number of its supercharging stations was 159, 172 at the end of the first quarter of 2021, 231 at the end of the second quarter, and 439 at the end of the third quarter. According to the information disclosed to reporters by Xiaopeng Automobile a few days ago, by the Spring Festival in 2022, the Xiaopeng brand supercharging station has accumulated 813 seats.
It is worth noting that the person in charge of Xiaopeng Automobile Supercharging said that Xiaopeng Automobile's supercharging system does not intend to do a completely closed system, and it hopes to take the lead in investing in the construction of charging stations in these cities, not only to serve the owners of Xiaopeng, but also to gradually open the resources of the supercharge station to local new energy car owners.