"Ning Wang" is dominant, and car companies are somewhat "unable to look at it".
On February 24, battery manufacturer Sunwoda received an investment, jointly increased by 19 companies and capital institutions, with a total amount of 2.43 billion yuan. After the completion of the capital increase, sunwoda's registered capital increased by 1.237 billion yuan to 6.325 billion yuan. Nineteen investment companies acquired a total of 19.55% of the shares. Some media estimate that the valuation of Sunwoda will reach 12.4 billion yuan.
An unknown battery dealer was pushed to the front of the stage because the investor lineup of The capital increase of Sunwoda is luxurious, not only gathering "Wei Xiaoli", but also a number of head traditional car companies.
Among them, Jiangsu Chehejia Automobile Co., Ltd., an affiliate of Ideal Automobile, invested 400 million yuan to become the lead investor, holding 3.218% of the equity of Sunwoda. Another investor, Sky Top LLC, is Xiaopeng Motors, which also invested 400 million yuan and acquired a 3.218% stake. WEIRUI, an affiliate of NIO, invested and increased its capital by 250 million yuan.
In addition to "Wei Xiaoli", Sunwoda's investors also include SAIC Jinshi, Guangqi Xindian, Xinzhifeng/Dongfeng BANKCOM, which are related to SAIC, GAC and Dongfeng Motor respectively.
You know, the main battery suppliers of these car companies are the Ningde era. Among them, CATL is even the only battery supplier of Weilai and Ideal.
After the news came out, Sunwoda's stock price rose 5.11% at one point. On February 25, CITIC Securities released a research report to predict Sunwoda's 2021 annual net profit, with an estimated valuation of 860 million yuan.
Sin wanda, which has been losing money for years, seems to be in a hurry.
With the entry of second- and third-line power battery manufacturers into the vision of car companies, will the era of "Ning Wang" flourishing end?
Why Sunwoda?
Wang, who has worked in the lithium battery industry for many years, defaults to that although Sunwoda ranks low in the field of power batteries, compared with other second-tier camp battery vendors, in the field of mobile phones and traditional consumer 3C lithium batteries, Sunwoda is a "very head enterprise", "along the PACK of consumer batteries, to achieve the PACK of power batteries, it still has a technical foundation."
From the perspective of technical route, Sunwoda automotive batteries adopt the strategy of heV, BEV and PHEV. In January 2020, Sunwoda launched a power battery solution that "only smokes, no fire".
Looking back on the road to growth, there is no lack of similarities between Xinwanda and the Ningde era.
Prior to 2011, CATL was the power battery division of New Energy Technology Group (hereinafter referred to as "ATL"). ATL started by making mobile phone batteries and was once a major supplier to Apple.
Founded in Shenzhen in 1998, Sunwoda also made its fortune in the mobile phone business. Its founder, Wang Mingwang, was known as the "man standing behind Lei Jun."
On the right is Wang Mingwang, the former chairman and general manager of Sunwoda, and on the left is Wang Wei, the current chairman and general manager Of the picture Source: Sunwoda
In 2010, Lei Jun took the cost-effective Xiaomi mobile phone as the starting point for his re-entrepreneurship, and launched the Xiaomi Mi 1 a year later, which harvested 4 million orders in two years. Sunwoda is the supplier of Xiaomi Mi 1, helping the phone achieve the effect of "80% of 10 minutes of energy replenishment".
Subsequently, Sunwoda became a deep partner of Xiaomi, and public information shows that the company oem more than 98% of the sweepers for Stone Technology with extremely low gross profit, and supplied batteries for Xiaomi drones and other products.
In addition to having the technical basis for making batteries, in fact, in Sunwoda, there do not seem to be many better options.
Leaving aside the Ningde era, the relationship between several other top-ranked battery companies and car companies is intertwined. For example, Volkswagen is the largest shareholder of Guoxuan Hi-Tech, holding 26.47% of the shares, Honeycomb Energy is an independent new energy enterprise born from Great Wall Motors, and it is not so easy for other car companies to "want to insert a foot".
In addition, "Sunwoda's expansion in recent years has been very aggressive", the financial report shows that as of the end of September 2019, Sunwoda has 1 billion yuan of construction projects on its account, corresponding to the power battery plant under construction and the expanded consumer battery PACK.
After August 2021, Sunwoda has established joint ventures with the Nanchang Economic and Technological Development Zone Management Committee, Geely Group and Zhejiang Jirun Company, investing 20 billion yuan and 5 billion yuan respectively to establish power battery production base projects in Nanchang and Zaozhuang, Shandong. Among them, the Geely Xinwanda power battery project will build 3 BEV and 7 HEV power battery production lines, and it is expected to achieve an annual output of 800,000 sets of hybrid batteries after reaching production.
And car companies are struggling to find battery "production capacity", "Wei Xiaoli" and several traditional car companies have bet on Sunwoda, it is not difficult to understand.
In the field of power batteries, compared with the Ningde era, Sunwoda can be described as "getting up early and catching up with a late set".
As early as 2008, Sunwoda began to lay out the field of power batteries. However, the Soochow Securities report pointed out that it was not until 2015 that Sunwoda established the Power Battery Research Institute, and in 2018, Sunwoda achieved cell self-sufficiency. In April 2019, Sunwoda received an order from Renault-Nissan, its first major customer in the automotive sector. Compared with the Ningde era in late 2011, it was seven years late.
Although several years late, Sinanda's ambitions were not small.
In January this year, Liang Rui, vice president of Sunwoda, admitted in an interview with "Materials of Great Powers" that "in the future, I hope that (power battery business) will reach the same scale as the consumer battery business, and the goal is to achieve the top three in China."
Entering 2022, Sunwoda power battery shipments show signs of improvement. According to the data of the Power Battery Application Branch, in January 2022, Sunwoda's power battery installed capacity reached 232.4MWh, ranking 8th, an increase of 409.1% year-on-year, not only the growth rate is far ahead, but also the only company in the top 10 with a growth rate of more than 400%.
Draft: Future Automotive Daily
However, Sunwoda is favored, and in the short term, it will not have much impact on the pattern of the power battery field.
Wang tacitly agreed, "In the short term, the position of King Ning will not be shaken." Over the years, Sunwoda has been transforming into an automotive power battery, and an important reason for the delay in success is that "the core technology is not enough (hard core)". "Sunwoda mainly does the packaging link of the battery, which accounts for a relatively low proportion of the value in the battery, which also leads to a huge difference in the market value of the Ningde era."
At the same time, the power battery business, Sunwoda's performance is under pressure. From 2018 to the first half of 2021, the non-net profit of Sunwoda's power battery business was -146 million yuan, -305 million yuan, -607 million yuan and -403 million yuan, respectively. "The first few years of doing power batteries must have lost money, and now this investment can make Sunwoda short-lived."
Bitter "King Ning" for a long time?
"Wei Xiaoli" boosted the back of Sunwoda, reflecting the battery anxiety of car companies.
"2022 is a year of full competition in the new energy automobile industry," Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the Association, once commented. The Association expects that the sales of new energy vehicles are expected to exceed 6 million units in 2022, with a penetration rate of about 22%.
Electric vehicles are rising well, as the "heart" of electric vehicles, there is a huge gap in battery supply. Yang Hongxin, chairman and CEO of Hive Energy, has said that the current capacity gap of power batteries is 30% to 50%, and predicts that the production capacity of power batteries will be relatively tight until 2025.
Even as a "power battery overlord", the Ningde era is difficult to meet the needs of many car companies.
At a shareholders' meeting, Zeng Yuqun, chairman of CATL, complained that "customer rushing makes him almost unbearable.". Weilai, which has established an exclusive supply relationship with CATL, is "deeply suffering", and Weilai founder Li Bin bluntly said in the 2021 Q3 earnings call that battery supply is the "ceiling of delivery" of WEILAI.
Sichuan Times Power Battery Phase I Project Source: Ningde Times Official
The industry concentration is high, and the head battery supplier naturally holds the right to speak.
In order to successfully get the battery of the Ningde era, the car company even needs to pay a huge advance payment in advance. Yang Tao, who is in charge of sales work in the Ningde era, revealed to the Future Automobile Daily that the way to distribute battery production capacity in the Ningde era is that the main engine factory spends a whole production line with a wallet, and who has money production capacity belongs to whom, "If the main engine factory is not rich enough, the battery cannot be bought."
In addition, "when production capacity is tight, who to supply and who not to supply in the Ningde era has its own standards", which makes car companies collectively fall into the anxiety of core components being out of stock.
"More than 50% of the market share makes the Ningde era have too much power, and car companies are very passive in terms of production order and price, which is not a situation that car companies are happy to see." Zhang Xiang, a researcher at the Automotive Innovation Research Center of North China University of Technology, believes.
The supply of batteries cannot be guaranteed, and the procurement is subject to "Ning Wang", and car companies have to find other partners.
On January 28, according to the late Late Post report, Sunwoda will become a version of Xiaopeng Automobile's G9 A supply, and the supply share is more than 50%. The Gaogong Lithium Battery (GGII) report pointed out that AVIC Lithium Battery benefited from its increase in the penetration rate of the main model battery of GAC Aean to achieve a significant increase in installed capacity and market share; Hefei Guoxuan and Penghui Energy supporting the explosive model Wuling Hongguang MINIEV achieved a significant increase in the installed capacity of LFP batteries in passenger cars.
With the continuous expansion of the new energy vehicle market, the cooperation between car companies and second-tier battery manufacturers will become more and more frequent, and Sunwoda, which is touted as the favorite of the group, may be the first, but it will not be the last.
(At the request of the interviewees, Wang Mo and Yang Tao are pseudonyms.) ）
The author | Wu Xiaoyu
Edit the | Li Huanhuan