The author | Harry Zhang
In the global automotive industry, although car companies occupy the upstream position of the industrial chain, there is such a supplier, which can be called the uncrowned king, it is Bosch. Whether in terms of sales market value or industry status, Bosch has a relatively large voice in the global automotive industry, especially in terms of diesel engine high-pressure common rail and chassis active safety technology, Bosch has built a technical advantage that is difficult for other companies to overcome.
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And this technological advantage has been magnified in the face of a sudden new crown pneumonia epidemic. The global chip tension caused by the epidemic, especially the chip used on the Bosch ESP, which is almost indispensable on every car, has risen from 13 yuan to 3,000 yuan, and it is still difficult to find a core, so that Bosch has once again come to the forefront of people's sights. Taking the new force car companies such as Wei Xiaoli as an example, in 2021, in the case of a good situation, everyone hopes to be able to take the lead in touching the scale of 100,000 vehicles, but no one has ever thought that the lack of core crisis has begun to spread, and everyone can only watch the orders in their hands cannot be delivered. Bosch, which needs to assemble chips into ESP, seems to have become the biggest driving force behind the sales rankings of various car companies.
Bosch in the traditional automobile era can do almost everything
Bosch is the undisputed leading parts company in the traditional automobile era, which not only ranks among the top 500 companies in the world for many years, but also the world's largest auto parts company, with an annual turnover of more than many global auto brands. From the perspective of business scope, Bosch's business scope covers gasoline systems, diesel systems, automotive chassis control systems, automotive electronic drives, starters and generators, power tools, household appliances, transmission and control technology, thermal technology and security systems. Among them, such as high-pressure common rail in diesel systems and ESP in automotive chassis control systems are mandatory choices for major OEMs.
Take ABS, the predecessor of ESP, as an example, at that time, Bosch's ABS accounted for the vast majority of the market share and adopted a high-priced sales model. Later, the domestic organization of industry, education and research and other forces hoped to overcome the technical difficulty of ABS and break the monopoly of Bosch, the mainland and some other giants. However, after not wanting to make a technological breakthrough in China, Bosch immediately announced a price cut. In the case of huge investment in the early stage, domestic ABS companies have almost no ability to fight back. With its past project experience, product stability and cost performance, Bosch still firmly occupies the market of domestic car companies, especially foreign brand car companies. This is not only Bosch, but also a common trick used by other foreign brands to suppress domestic up-and-coming brands.
Silicon carbide chips become Bosch's largest chip
At present, almost all car companies in the world are actively laying out the electric vehicle market, especially smart electric vehicles, which has become the core area of competition technology for major manufacturers. Compared with traditional fuel vehicles, the demand for chips for smart electric vehicles has shown an explosive growth trend. Among the chips used in electric vehicles, the new generation of silicon carbide chips will undoubtedly play a decisive role. For electric vehicles, compared with the previous power chips, silicon carbide chips can greatly improve the performance of power transistors, whether from the overall size or from the thermal energy dissipation, can improve energy efficiency and the mileage of electric vehicles.
Bosch will invest more than 400 million euros (US$467 million) in 2022 to expand its semiconductor plants in Dresden and Reutlingen, Germany, and it will also establish a semiconductor test center in Penang, Malaysia. In addition to expanding existing chip production capacity at these plants, Bosch will also begin mass production of silicon carbide chips on a large scale. For car companies, it is urgent to improve the mileage of electric vehicles, and even become one of the key indicators for consumers to buy electric vehicles. Therefore, helping car companies and customers to use silicon carbide chips as soon as possible will be the key task of Bosch in the coming period.
From Bosch's point of view, compared with other chip companies, it undoubtedly understands the operation mode of traditional car companies and has better cooperative relations with car companies; compared with other automotive industry parts companies, Bosch has more advantages in chip accumulation and production capacity. Integrating its strengths in the chip and automotive industries will become Bosch's biggest strength when competing with other component companies in the coming period.
Bosch is actively expanding its business layout
In the current Chinese and even global automotive market, autonomous driving and zero emissions are the two most important trends. In addition to silicon carbide chips, Bosch also has many layouts in autonomous driving and fuel cells.
In the field of automatic driving, Bosch has relied on its investment platform - Boyuan Capital, to invest in key enterprises in the value chain of China's autonomous driving industry, including software platform supplier Momenta, lidar manufacturer Hesai Technology, autonomous driving solution provider Yushi Technology, Mainline Technology, etc., and black sesame intelligence, an autonomous driving chip supplier, which constitutes a relatively complete automatic driving industry chain. In the future, Bosch is likely to rely on the upstream and downstream enterprises of the autonomous driving industry chain that it has invested in to create a complete set of automatic driving systems that integrate software and hardware by itself. At present, almost all car companies or Internet giants in the world regard autonomous driving as the brightest pearl in the technical crown of the automotive industry, as the world's largest auto parts company, Bosch naturally will not sit back and watch itself be left behind in this field. However, rather than investing abroad, we would like to see Bosch's own progress. After all, whether it has the ability of full-stack self-developed autonomous driving technology has become one of the important indicators to measure the core technical strength of an automobile-related enterprise.
In the field of fuel cells, Bosch is also constantly making efforts. Among them, Bosch not only invested in wuxi to build its first fuel cell center outside Germany, but also became the second largest shareholder of Weifu Hi-Tech through its subsidiary RBINT, holding 14.16% of the shares. In addition, Bosch has established Bosch Hydrogen PowerTrain (Chongqing) Co., Ltd., a joint venture with Qingling Motors, which is mainly responsible for the development, application, assembly, sales and service of fuel cell systems. According to Toyota's previous experience, the deployment of fuel cells in the passenger car field is a long way off, but on trunk logistics trucks with relatively fixed driving routes, the use of fuel cells will have a very considerable economic and environmental effect. Whether it is Toyota, Hyundai and other Japanese and Korean car companies that are very committed to fuel cells, or European heavy-duty truck companies such as Volvo and Daimler, they have not given up research on the commercialization of fuel cell technology. Therefore, Bosch's active investment and layout in the field of fuel cells undoubtedly maintains a technical route and reserves for itself.
For companies like Bosch, they are currently undergoing a business adjustment like traditional car companies. After first abandoning traditional mechanical structural components and embracing electronic control systems in full swing, Bosch is currently investing in more forward-looking technologies such as chips, autonomous driving, and fuel cells from electronic control systems. Although chassis control and gasoline/diesel systems are still the main sources of Bosch's revenue, the forward-looking business will be able to bring more imagination to Bosch's market value and ensure that Bosch can continue to grow in the future. In particular, Bosch is accelerating the integration of the industry chain, including autonomous driving-related technologies, not only by investing in its own research and development, but also by building an investment platform. By bringing together the industry's top technology start-ups to maximize synergies, Bosch is even more frightening. At present, big bulls such as Huawei and Cataline Times are all two-wheel drive: on the one hand, through active self-research, to build core competitiveness; on the other hand, they are also actively investing abroad and continuing to expand their influence in the industry. Such a Bosch is even more terrifying.