Recently, Tesla ushered in a "happy big Pu Ben" thing. Authorities in the German state of Brandenburg announced that Tesla's gigafactory in Greenhead, a suburb of Berlin, Germany, has received final approval. It is understood that the opening ceremony of Tesla's Berlin Gigafactory will be held on March 22 or March 23, local time, and the ceremony includes the first delivery of the German-made Model Y.
It is worth mentioning that although tesla's Berlin gigafactory in Germany has an annual production capacity of up to 500,000 vehicles, which can not only increase local taxes, but also create up to 7,000 jobs for the local area, the production of the factory has been repeatedly postponed due to the epidemic, complicated approval procedures and opposition from local environmental organizations.
According to Tesla's original plan, the Berlin Gigafactory in Germany is expected to start producing electric vehicles in July 2021. However, as Tesla changed its investment plan and increased the production department of power batteries, it led to doubts about whether the power battery factory would pollute water sources.
For this reason, the factory has been delayed until recently to obtain the production qualification. Compared with the Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory, which took only 11 months from the foundation laying of the factory to the official delivery of the first car, which is a miracle in terms of production speed, the production of the Berlin Gigafactory in Germany can be described as a twist and turn.
So what can the Berlin Gigafactory in Germany, which tesla has painstakingly put into production, bring to it?
The Berlin factory was put into operation, allowing Tesla to be full of firepower
In Xiao Lei's view, with the production of the Berlin Gigafactory in Germany with an annual production capacity of up to 500,000 units, Tesla's production capacity pressure in the Asian and European markets will be greatly reduced.
You know, Tesla's market size in Europe is far less than that of the Chinese market. In the whole of last year, Tesla sold a total of 484,100 vehicles in China, and the annual sales volume in the European market was 167,900 units, and the annual sales volume in the European market was only 34.68% of the Chinese market.
It is worth mentioning that Tesla's two flagship models produced in the United States, Mdoel S and Model X, sold only 24,980 vehicles worldwide last year, less than 3% of annual sales. This means that tesla's new cars sold in Europe last year were almost entirely supplied by the Shanghai Gigafactory in China.
Combined with the sales performance of Tesla's European market and the design capacity of the Berlin Gigafactory, the current capacity of 500,000 vehicles in the Berlin Gigafactory has been able to fully meet its market demand in Europe. In the future, Tesla's Berlin Gigafactory and China's Shanghai Gigafactory will perform their respective duties and be responsible for supplying the European and Asian markets respectively.
In addition, the commissioning of Tesla's Berlin Gigafactory means that Tesla models will be localized in Europe. In fact, the reason why Tesla will temporarily add a power battery production department in the Berlin Gigafactory is precisely to show its determination to localize production.
In Tesla's Shanghai factory, the localization rate and the price reduction law of Tesla models are traceable. Among them, the most typical case is that when the Model 3 was domestically produced in the Shanghai Gigafactory, the model ushered in two diving price reductions in just one month, and the price dropped from 355,800 yuan to 299,000 yuan, and the price reduction was as high as 56,800 yuan.
In Xiao Lei's view, these two diving price cuts are precisely because Tesla has turned the original pure imported Model 3 into a domestic Model 3 with a supply chain localization rate of 30%. In addition, many people believe that this model still has a lot of room for price reduction after the localization of Model 3, and their basis is precisely because the domestic Model 3 still has 70% room for improvement in the localization of the supply chain.
Today, even under the influence of Factors that are not conducive to the development of pure electric vehicles, such as the 30% decline in subsidies for new energy vehicles in China and the surge in raw materials for power batteries, the starting price of Tesla Model 3 is still only 265652 yuan. Xiao Lei believes that such pricing is also related to the localization rate of more than 90% of the Tesla factory in Shanghai.
Obviously, the effect of Tesla's localization production has been vividly reflected in the pricing of models produced by shanghai gigafactory and Shanghai gigafactory. The localization of the Berlin Gigafactory also means that Tesla's production costs in Europe will be greatly reduced in the future, which indicates that with the Shanghai Gigafactory put into operation that year, Tesla's price reduction offensive in China will repeat itself in the European market.
Even if it needs to rely on the Supply of Shanghai Gigafactory, Tesla Model 3 still beats the European land snakes as an import and becomes the highest-selling pure electric vehicle in Europe in 2021. In September last year, the Tesla Model 3 even beat the Volkswagen Golf to become the best-selling car in Europe, and it was also the first time that electric vehicles surpassed traditional fuel vehicles in the European market.
We can imagine that when the Tesla Berlin Gigafactory is put into operation, the tesla Model Y, which is the first mass-produced tesla, will be converted from vehicle imports to local production. At that time, the impact of this model on the European automobile market can be imagined.
The Berlin plant started operations and the Shanghai plant is also expanding
At the same time that Tesla's Berlin Gigafactory was put into operation, the Shanghai Gigafactory is also actively expanding production. In fact, the commissioning of the Berlin factory itself can free up about 30% of the capacity of the Shanghai factory, and the vacated capacity has been able to basically meet Tesla's needs in the Asian market.
So, why does Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory still have to expand production wildly when it can be used? For a car company, overcapacity is as dangerous as insufficient capacity. As for why to expand production, Tesla's official statement is to further enhance the production capacity of Model 3, Model Y and related derivative models.
At the end of November 2021, Tesla invested an additional 1.2 billion yuan in the expansion of the Shanghai Gigafactory, which is expected to be officially completed in April this year. At that time, Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory will become the world's largest new energy vehicle factory, and its annual production capacity will increase from the current 500,000 to more than 1 million.
In Xiao Lei's view, Model 3 and Model Y are already relatively mature products, and their sales will reach a bottleneck in a certain period of time. After the start of operations at the Berlin Gigafactory, the Shanghai plant's original annual production capacity of 500,000 units has been able to meet the needs of both models in the Asian market.
In Tesla's official statement, Xiao Lei believes that the most interesting thing is the "related derivative model". So the question is, what kind of model needs to occupy the 500,000-unit annual production capacity of the Shanghai Gigafactory after the expansion? Xiao Lei believes that this model is not the "Model 2" (unofficial name) priced at $25,000 (about 160,000 yuan) that Musk mentioned earlier.
For the lowest-positioned model Tesla has ever made, Musk said Tesla may officially mass-produce in 2023. It should be known that the successive price reductions of the Model 3, which cost more than 200,000 yuan in the first two years, have frightened many domestic new energy vehicle companies, and the launch of this new car is bound to wash the new energy vehicle market of 100,000 yuan.
At that time, Tesla will form a complete product line of new energy vehicles covering the price range of 100,000-400,000 yuan. You know, the price range of 100,000-400,000 yuan is not only the place where almost all car companies survive, but also the place that must be contested. With Tesla's technological strength and brand influence, the market in this price segment seems to be within its reach.
In 2022, Tesla's new Tesla Berlin Gigafactory and Texas Austin Gigafactory will be officially put into operation, and both gigafactories are designed to have an annual production capacity of 500,000 vehicles. In addition, the Shanghai Gigafactory and the Fremont Gigafact in California are expanding production, and the production capacity will increase by more than 50% after the expansion.
In 2021, Tesla's global sales are less than 1 million. However, if all goes well, Tesla will have an additional 2 million vehicles in 2022, which means that even if Tesla does not increase production capacity at all in 2023, it will have to sell 3 million cars a year to avoid overcapacity.
With the completion of the production and expansion projects of the four Tesla gigafactories throughout Eurasia and the United States, and the completion of the layout of 10-1 million yuan models, Tesla, which is not constrained by re-production capacity, may not be able to lift the head of global new energy vehicle companies.
Note: The material for this article comes from the Internet