Author: Furuhara
Source: Zhenghe Island
The new energy industry has become a global outlet. In this field, the outstanding innovations that the world can see are basically focused on China and the United States. New energy as a global carbon neutrality policy spawned by the industry, in order to rise rapidly, it is necessary to rely on the super-large-scale market, in order to have the possibility of development, only China and the United States in the world not only have a large enough market, but also have enough scientific and technological talents to support innovation in the field of new energy.
In China, the various subdivisions of new energy have a good leader, such as the "Ning Wang" in the battery field, BYD, a vehicle battery production integrator, and the high-end electric vehicle brand Weilai, etc. Recently, some more subdivided tracks have also appeared some dark horses.
Today, we also interviewed an outstanding entrepreneur who crossed the border into the field of new energy.
This entrepreneur is Su Xin, the chairman of Yineng Times, who has just launched an industry-disruptive product with his team, and this company is actually a new recruit who has just entered the field of new energy.
Su Xin, chairman of Yi Neng Times
It's very curious that new recruits come to the market and make innovations at this level.
01. Enter the charging module market
The Era of Easy Energy is entering a subdivision track in the field of new energy, that is, the charging module.
The charging module is the core component of the charging pile and the key component that determines the charging efficiency, stability and profit of the charging operator.
Objectively speaking, the current charging operator's life is not good. Vicious price competition, low operating profits, high input costs, long operating cycles, and high equipment damage rates are the current status quo of the charging operation market.
The author is actually full of confusion about the yineng era's choice to enter this market at such a time. An entrepreneur's judgment and analysis of the market is the most important decision, whether to enter, when to enter, what kind of product to enter, if this key decision is done wrong, it is a matter of life and death for the enterprise.
Su Xin believes that the chaos of the current charging operation market is a short-term phenomenon, the most important reason is that the main customer group of the current charging operation market is the operation of vehicles, the operation of electric vehicles is a highly price-sensitive customer, compared to convenience and high efficiency, they are more to choose low prices.
The number of household electric vehicles is not enough, and there has been no spillover effect. There are a large number of family cars in China that do not have fixed parking spaces at all, and when the number of household electric vehicles gradually increases, choosing to charge at the charging station will become an inevitable choice, and this inflection point is coming.
In the future, the charging operator's main customer base will be changed from operating vehicles to household vehicles, at this time, how to provide efficient and high-quality services for residential electric vehicle owners is the next battlefield for charging operators.
Globally, Japan's Tokyo and the United Kingdom have announced that they will ban the sale of fuel vehicles in 2030, and France, Israel, Spain and other countries have announced plans to gradually phase out fuel vehicles between 2030 and 2040.
The global rise of electric vehicles under the carbon neutrality target is the trend of the times, and the sales of residential electric vehicles will grow exponentially in the next few years.
Charging is the most important infrastructure for the development of electric vehicles. If countries around the world want to achieve the time target of banning the sale of fuel vehicles, they must build charging infrastructure on a large scale.
I think that entering this market now is the best time to go.
02. What are the subversive products in the industry?
Charging module is the core product of the Era of Easy energy into the field of new energy, according to the author's understanding, there have been many large suppliers in this field, and the industry concentration is not low, what is the performance of the products of the Era of Easy Energy, and can actually claim to be an industry subversive product?
Su Xin told me that one of the biggest product pain points of the charging module is the high electrical loss, "We are developing this product for the needs of charging operators, and one of the biggest values created for users is to reduce the electrical loss."
The traditional charging module, the charging efficiency is about 90%-94%, which means that it has a 6%-10% power loss, do not underestimate this power loss, if a charging pile is running at full load, the annual electrical loss is as high as tens of thousands of yuan.
The charging module of the energy-friendly era can increase the charging efficiency to more than 99% and control the electrical loss within 1%.
A super-charged pile 480kw, working time of 10 hours, if the use of easy energy era of charging module, it means that a day than the current module to save 280 kWh of electricity, equivalent to a single pile to earn 200 yuan more per day, the annual profit of 6-7 million yuan, 2-3 years of saving money can already earn back the hardware investment of super charging pile.
This means that the original 4-5 year investment recovery cycle may be shortened to 2-3 years with the blessing of the products of the Energy Era.
This can effectively change the problem of long investment cycle of charging operators, and also allow the charging operation market to enter a good business ecology.
In addition to this key innovation, the charging module of the Yineng era also has the characteristics of higher power and higher power density, which is smaller but more efficient, which can improve the utilization rate of space, which means that a smaller area can accommodate more charging piles for enterprises building charging stations in the city, thereby improving the overall output of operators.
At the same time, the reliability and experience of the product have also been greatly improved compared with the traditional charging module.
For example, the use of unique soft switching technology, so that the switching loss rate becomes lower, controllable air cooling technology, so that the charging pile operating noise is lower, nanosecond short circuit protection, improve the service life of the charging pile.
All in all, these technological innovations all revolve around one purpose, that is, how to allow charging operators to save costs, improve efficiency, increase the output capacity of a single device, and greatly improve the efficiency of charging operators and reduce costs significantly.
03, cost performance is the focus
Technological innovation is not only to have better performance than traditional products, but more importantly, it is cost-effective. High-performance products, if expensive, mean higher one-time investment for charging operators. As an enterprise, the calculation is always the input-output ratio, not just the advanced technology.
I threw this question to Chairman Su, but the answer surprised me very much.
Su Xin said that our pricing strategy is to maintain the same price point as the products in the existing market, that is, we can achieve 99% charging efficiency, but we will compete with those charging modules that are a little more than 90%.
"Generally speaking, the traditional pricing model is that our quality products, the pricing strategy should be 2-3 times that of traditional products, because the benefits we bring to customers are clear and clear, but the goal of the Yineng era is to quickly occupy the market, in the face of the new energy market that is about to blowout, we do not have time to slowly wait and cultivate, what we need is to quickly gain market share."
The goal of the Era of Easy Is not just the Chinese market, but a world market, we need to grow at a high speed, which is the fundamental reason why we launch subversive products in the industry while also adopting a low-price entry strategy.
At the same time, we also believe that only high quality and low price can truly bring value to customers.
After the completion of the technical research and development of this product, we will also make every effort to deepen the innovation of the supply chain. Now the company's operations have shifted from product technology research and development to supply chain innovation optimization, and several senior executives dedicated to supply chain innovation have been introduced.
Supply chain innovation is one of the most effective means to reduce product costs. That is to say, we will continue to reduce costs, for charging operators, every cost innovation we have, means that their procurement costs are reduced. ”
Only this kind of innovation can constitute the core competitiveness of enterprises and form a long-term market moat.
04. Why do cross-border teams disrupt the industry?
The core members of this team of Yineng Era are all from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, but 3 years ago, they were not involved in hardware development in the field of new energy, and the main team members were engaged in hardware research and development of telecommunications equipment and military equipment.
However, in just 3 years, the Era of Easy Energy came up with a product that amazed the whole industry, how did this work?
Su Xin said that cross-border development is indeed not easy. However, cross-border development is not without advantages.
Many other developers in the industry, in the field of charging efficiency, often set the research and development goal at the level of 1% and 2%, although this indicator is also a very good indicator, which can help operators save a lot of costs.
But as a cross-border team, if we can't have breakthrough technological innovation, we simply can't get a foothold in this industry.
Therefore, when formulating technical indicators, we first put forward a bold goal, that is, to achieve 99% charging efficiency, and then study the technical path and development possibilities under this indicator.
At this time, we found that the existing technical path is impossible to achieve this goal, and can only find another way, which makes our technical path in the development of charging modules completely different from existing products.
We acknowledge that there is a factor of luck here, but it also has a very important relationship with cross-border research and development.
The advantage of cross-border research and development is that it is often not bound by the traditional technical path, although the probability of failure is also high, but if it is successful, it is possible to make subversive products, I have to say that we are lucky.
05, the core of hardware products is quality
As a hardware product, or the core component of the charging pile, in addition to research and development, more important is the quality control of mass production, countless innovative companies may be able to make product prototypes, but in mass production, often because of the problem of quality control, resulting in the inability to obtain market recognition, how to face this problem in the era of Easy Energy?
Su Xin said that after we finished the product development, there were several important debates within the team.
First, is whether we want to produce charging piles, we have made the most important things in the charging piles, why can't we directly produce charging piles?
After debate and thinking, we believe that we can not enter this field, the reason is that the charging pile is not only a matter of producing products, but also a field that has to face countless customers for fine services, our goal is to continuously improve the technical performance of the charging module and reduce its cost, which is our core competitiveness, what we need is to work closely with downstream manufacturers to empower them.
At the same time, we also have nearly a decade of intelligent hardware research and development, digital technology and data operation mature experience, we will empower these experiences to charging pile manufacturers, so that they have a stronger competitiveness, only this division of labor, in order to make efficiency higher, if we want to earn anything, it is possible to earn nothing.
The second debate is about whether to build your own factory.
Like the thinking after the first debate, we finally decided not to build our own production, but to entrust production to the world's best hardware foundry - Foxconn, for quality control, efficient production, supply chain integration, no one in the industry is more powerful than Foxconn.
So why should we produce it ourselves? Are we more confident in our own production management than Foxconn? Can our management of raw product control be better than Foxconn?'
Since we don't have this confidence, we can give profits to Foxconn and let him produce, and we can continue to focus our capabilities on supply chain innovation.
When our entire team focuses on innovation and research and development, our quality is the most guaranteed, because every link is handed over to the most professional people, on the surface, the gross profit is reduced, some money has not been earned, but in the long run, only by integrating into the industrial ecology and doing an irreplaceable role is the key to making the new energy market bigger and stronger in the Era of Easy Energy.
06. Interview afterword
Chairman Su of the Yineng era is a post-80s generation, a typical Chinese new generation of scientific and technological innovation entrepreneurs, with steady speech, incomparably clear logic, and lofty goals, which is very admirable.
It is reported that Eneng Times has obtained multiple rounds of financing, and the latest round of financing is as high as 250 million yuan. This round of financing was led by Zhengdong Investment Group, and the original old shareholders chased and increased their holdings. It seems that the capital market is highly optimistic about the dark horse of the new era in the era of easy energy. The first new product launch of The Era of Easy was also successfully held in Guangzhou on March 13.
What left the deepest impression on the author was the courage and ideas of cross-border innovation in the Era of Easy Energy, which is often referred to as entrepreneurship.
Enterprises are always faced with great uncertainty, and the responsibility of entrepreneurs is to face this uncertainty and make judgments and decisions that are worse than business logic, and this decision-making requires courage and wisdom.
Bless Mr. Su, bless the era of Yi Neng, and hope that they are not only the dark horses of China's new energy market, but also hope that they can become an important part of the global new energy supply chain in the future.
At the same time, I also hope that more and more young entrepreneurs like Su Zong will use innovative thinking and the courage to dare to subvert to drive scientific and technological innovation in the whole of China.