Musk danced once again at the groundbreaking ceremony of Tesla's Berlin Gigafactory, and Thuringian, Germany, which is only more than 300 kilometers away from Tesla's Berlin factory, and the new base of the Cathey Era have also recently been put into operation.
Zeng Yuqun once again kept up with Musk's pace. In 2020, two years after Musk improvised at the groundbreaking ceremony of Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory, the NINGDE Times Shanghai Lingang Base, which is only 3 kilometers away from Tesla's Shanghai Lingang Super Factory, was put into production in early 2022.
According to Bloomberg, CATL is considering spending $5 billion to build an 80 billion-watt-hour battery factory in North America to supply customers, including Tesla. Some analysts believe that this move in the Cataline era will be conducive to the nearby Tesla US factory. In this regard, CATL replied "no comment".
According to public information, CATL and Tesla have signed two cooperation agreements, one in February 2020, the locked supply period is from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2022, and the other is in June 2021, and the locked supply period is from January 2022 to December 2025.
At present, in the context of the lack of power battery production capacity, the "marriage" between the Ningde era and Tesla is still in the honeymoon period, but new challenges are emerging one by one.
In the US market, Tesla's home base, with the rise of the new energy vehicle industry, battery manufacturers such as Japan's Panasonic and South Korea's SKI have caught up with the Ningde era and have successively announced plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in the us to build factories.
As more and more competitors enter the game, and how long tesla's honeymoon period can last, the Ningde era will inevitably begin to worry.
A
In the "2022 Hurun Global Rich List" released by the Hurun Research Institute, 25 of the top 1,000 richest people are from the automobile industry. With the help of the new energy industry environment of the fire, the stock price of catheter times has soared in the past two years, and Zeng Yuqun ranked second in the car circle with a value of 335 billion yuan, second only to Musk, and more than twice the sum of the wealth of the three founders of "Wei Xiaoli".
The stock price of the Ningde era took off to become "Ning Wang", which began with the binding of Tesla. In January 2020, Musk announced a cooperation with CATL in an earnings call, and before that, the news of the cooperation between the two sides had been uploaded in the market for two months, and the stock price of CATL times doubled.
At that time, for the Ningde era, the cooperation agreement with Tesla was the endorsement of its product quality, and it was also the best advertisement of the brand, and also boosted the confidence of the capital market. The market value of the Ningde era has soared from 240 billion yuan in early 2020 to break through the trillion mark and won the title of "King of Ning".
Zeng Yuqun, chairman of CATL
At present, for the Ningde era, Tesla is not only a "golden signboard", but also its largest customer. According to century securities data, according to the calculation of installed capacity, Tesla is the third largest customer in the Ningde era in 2020, accounting for 5%, and by the first quarter of 2021, Tesla will become the largest customer in the Ningde era, accounting for 24%.
With the sharp increase in Tesla's sales and production capacity, the demand for batteries will also increase significantly, and the binding between the Ningde era and Tesla has begun to deepen.
Cataltime's recently put into operation in the German Turin base, only more than 300 kilometers away from Tesla's Berlin factory, the base project was approved in July 2018, the estimated investment amount of 240 million euros, by June 2019, CATL board of directors agreed to increase the company's capital on the project, the total investment in the project after the capital increase does not exceed 1.8 billion euros.
Five months after the announcement of the capital increase, in November 2019, Musk officially announced that Tesla's second overseas factory will land in Berlin, Germany. Before the news was released, the Tesla team conducted a long-term site selection inspection in Germany.
In Tesla's continuous search for ways to expand production capacity, the new base of the CATL era is moving closer to Tesla consciously or unconsciously.
At the beginning of the year, it was reported that the production capacity of Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory will be increased from about 500,000 vehicles per year to 1 million vehicles per year to cope with the shortage of domestic and foreign orders. At the same time, the Shanghai Lingang Base of CATL Announced Production at the beginning of the year, only 3 kilometers away from Tesla's Lingang Gigafactory.
At the delivery ceremony of the first batch of owners at Tesla's Berlin factory, Musk mentioned that he is working on the third part of Tesla's grand plan, and one of the important plans is to scale up and achieve high production.
In the face of questions from the audience, Musk said that Tesla will definitely go to other markets such as South America in the future, and it is expected to build 10 more gigafactories within a decade to achieve the set goal of producing 20 million cars per year.
Musk
Behind Musk's series of aggressive goals is to boost Tesla's current production. To achieve these goals, it is inseparable from the cooperation of battery manufacturers, as Musk judged, "The main challenge last year and this year is the chip shortage, and the bottleneck next year and the next two or three years will be how many batteries can be produced each year." ”
In this context, in addition to the recent rumors of going to North America to build a factory, it is presumable that there will be more new battery bases around Tesla's new factory in the Ningde era.
B
Musk has chosen All in many entrepreneurial experiences, is a full-fledged "gambler"; Zeng Yuqun believes in "gambling stronger", and framed these five words into calligraphy and paintings, hanging in the office. Investors who saw this painting expressed shock: Fujian people, why not hang "love to fight to win"? Zeng Yuqun replied, "Fighting alone is not enough, that is physical work; gambling is mental work." ”
The best embodiment of Zeng Yuqun's "gambling nature" is the cooperation with BMW Brilliance. At the beginning of the Ningde era, its strength was limited, and the only big customer on hand was Apple, which supplied batteries for the latter's mobile phones. Zeng Yuqun, who has never set foot in the automobile industry, in a wave of doubts, took over the "hot potato" thrown by BMW Brilliance - to provide batteries for its pure electric vehicles. With the help of BMW's "endorsement", the Ningde era has leapt to the position of the industry leader of domestic power batteries.
Zeng Yuqun is 54 years old this year, only 3 years older than Musk. But in the first fifty years of Zeng Yuqun's life, he did not have a direct intersection with this madman on the other side of the ocean.
2018 was a turning point in the relationship between the two. In July of that year, a month after the CATL era was listed, 50-year-old Zeng Yuqun was invited to a hotel in Shanghai. The person waiting for him at the hotel was None other than Musk. At that time, Tesla and Panasonic just had a conflict because of the battery price problem, and it was urgent to change a new supplier, and the industry star of the Ningde era attracted Musk's attention.
A month later, Musk met with Zeng Yuqun again, but the two negotiations were inconclusive. It is reported that the reason why the cooperation was not reached was that Zeng Yuqun believed that the profit was too low, and Panasonic abandoned Tesla because Musk was too fierce and unprofitable. At the same time, Tesla's huge losses also made Zeng Yuqun worried.
The turning point of events came in 2019.
On August 29, 2019, the 48-year-old Musk appeared at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. After talking about Martian colonization and artificial intelligence, Musk "disappeared" after the meeting. Some reporters learned through many inquiries that Musk's plane was still quietly parked on the special apron of Pudong Airport and had not left.
On February 3, 2020, CATL announced that it would become a battery supplier for Tesla's new Model 3.
After the announcement was issued, there was news that Musk "disappeared" after the meeting, which was a secret meeting between Zeng Yuqun and some Ningde era executives, and the two sides reached a cooperation intention within an hour. At that time, there were only 4 months left before Tesla's Shanghai factory was put into operation.
At an alumni forum at Shanghai Jiaotong University in May 2021, Shen Nanpeng threw a question to Zeng Yuqun: Many car companies asked you for batteries, but your production capacity is limited, how do you allocate it?
Zeng Yuqun's answer was: I don't want to guess how much the depot can do, we hope they have confidence in themselves. So it's usually the car factory that packs the production line, not one year, but the year after next year, or even 5-10 years.
The cooperation has brought a lot of benefits to the two companies: Tesla detonated the new energy vehicle market with the domestic Model 3, ending a 17-year loss process; the Ningde era also rode the dust in the power battery industry, and the market value soared to trillions, and was named Ningwang.
C
At the beginning of 2022, a series of rumors pointed to the Ningde era on the cusp of the storm.
The rumors directly affected the stock price of CATL. After reaching a high of 692 yuan on December 3 last year, the stock price of CATL began to slowly decline, and on February 11, it closed at 489 yuan, falling below the 500 yuan mark.
At noon on February 13, CATL issued a solemn statement through the official WeChat account, saying that a series of malicious rumors about cataline times being sanctioned by the United States, being excluded from the ChiNext weight index, and talking with Tesla have recently appeared on the network platform, which has triggered market misunderstandings and misinterpretations and affected corporate reputation. Rumors are unfounded and bad in nature. In order to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of enterprises, on February 12, 2022, CATL has officially reported the case to the public security organs, and will pursue legal responsibility for rumor-mongers in accordance with the law.
On February 14, a day after the statement, CATL once again organized a temporary investor research event, inviting more than 50 investment institutions, including Hillhouse, Sequoia, Temasek, Fidelity and Tencent. For the issue of the relationship with Tesla that the outside world is most concerned about, Zeng Yuqun did not respond positively, but said that "in the American market, the Ningde era must enter." ”
After a series of actions, the stock price of NINGDE Times stabilized and recovered, returning to more than 500 yuan.
The Ningde era is eager to enter the US market, on the one hand, it is the geographical advantage of the nearby supporting Tesla, on the other hand, it is also the pressure given by competitors such as Panasonic.
Canalys data shows that of the 6.5 million global sales of electric vehicles in 2021, the United States will contribute only 8%, and the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in the United States will be less than 3%. In order to stimulate the rise of the new energy vehicle industry in the United States, in August last year, US President Biden signed an executive order requiring that new energy vehicle sales in the United States should account for 50% by 2030, and a bill for subsidies for new energy vehicles is also on the way.
In the battle for the US market, the pace of the Ningde era has lagged behind. Recently, it was reported that another supplier of Tesla, Panasonic, is planning to spend billions of dollars to build a factory in the United States to produce and supply 4680 batteries for Tesla. Another South Korean manufacturer, SKI, announced in January that it would invest $11.4 billion in partnership with Ford to build three battery plants in the U.S. and a plant to produce F-Series electric pickups, with an annual production capacity of about 129 GWh.
In the Ningde era, which ranks first in the installed capacity of power batteries in the world, the contribution of the domestic market is indispensable. According to the data, in February 2022, the loading volume of power battery companies in the Chinese market accounted for 48.02% of the Cataline era, and LG New Energy, the world's second-ranked, accounted for only 2.59%.
However, since the second half of last year, domestic second- and third-tier battery factories have begun to accelerate their efforts to compete with the Ningde era for orders. According to Xiaoxiang Morning News, nest energy, which ranked 7th in installed capacity in February this year, was sued by CATL. In February, "Wei Xiaoli" joined hands to increase the capital of Sunwoda, which ranked 9th in installed capacity.
Fujian Ningde Times Company factory
For the sake of supply chain security, car companies generally do not let battery manufacturers dominate, even Tesla, will not put eggs in the same basket.
Although the current "marriage" between the Ningde era and Tesla is still in the honeymoon period, other manufacturers have not yet been able to meet Tesla's huge demand, but if you want to keep the position of the global battery brother, "Ning Wang" is not yet at the time to sit back and relax.
Resources:
"Zeng Yuqun 'Gambles' on the Future", China Entrepreneur Magazine
"The Ningde era is holding a big move" Wall Street has seen
How much does the Ningde era need Tesla? Deep Road
"Talking to Tesla collapsed? Trillion "Ning Wang" alarm: malicious rumors, the police have accepted, Tesla also responded to the "36Kr" 36kr
"Shoulder to Shoulder ren Zhengfei: The Richest Man in Hong Kong Behind Musk" entrepreneur