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Looking back at the Q1 of 2022, which was full of bad news, we suddenly found that the price increase of electric vehicles was the most insignificant one.
According to the recent collation, this round of new energy vehicles has no dead angle price increase at 360 °, and it has begun to have eyebrows from the beginning of the new year. However, many models are due to the 2022 subsidy new policy (from January 1) caused by the terminal price increase, even if the active price increase is generally limited, has not been (let alone dare not take the initiative to cause) widespread attention.
The trigger on the level of public memory was on March 10, Tesla opened its own "7 days and 3 consecutive rises" prelude. Immediately after that, BYD, Xiaopeng, Nezha, Weima, Zero Run, Euler, Wuling, Volkswagen ID., Ideal, almost all the well-known new energy brands/sequences except Weilai, have completed (or have been predicted) this round of price increases of no small magnitude.
When this happens, everyone doesn't want to
No sane manufacturer would have insisted on going up without raising prices. Conversely, when everyone chooses to rise, the only reasonable explanation is that "there is really no way not to rise." Even, in fact, this time the price increase of electric vehicles, not too sudden, but late enough.
In "New Energy, Gu Tou also has to take care of the stomach" (the two parts before and after), Ben Hu said that the price of the main expensive raw materials required for electric vehicles generally began to rise as early as the beginning of 2020, until today. As for a military conflict and the nickel price short-selling incident related to it, it is only the last straw (two) straws.
That is to say, this entire new energy vehicle industry chain did not transmit upstream raw materials to the consumer end until two years later.
Leave nickel aside for now. According to the increase in the cost of main materials for power batteries in the past year, if it is an electric vehicle equipped with a 70kWh NCM811 battery pack, the cost of the battery pack alone will increase from about 35,000 yuan to about 63,000 yuan; if it is a cheap electric vehicle equipped with a 50kWh lithium iron phosphate battery pack, the cost of the battery pack alone will increase from about 13,000 yuan to about 33,000 yuan (rough estimate, only for orders of magnitude reference).
We have no way of knowing the current situation of the gross profit margin of the entire industry, but we can refer to some car companies whose sales have become a climate and only produce electric vehicles. The gross profit margin of Tesla and Weilai is about 20%, each estimated according to the average unit price of 300,000 and 400,000 yuan, and the gross profit space is 60,000 to 80,000 yuan. The gross profit margin of Xiaopeng, whose overall car price is relatively lower, is about 15%, and the gross profit is estimated at an average price of 200,000 yuan, and the gross profit is about 30,000 yuan.
It can be seen that even for the head car companies such as special, Wei and Small, the increase in battery costs in the past year has been equivalent to less than half and more than half of the gross profit of bicycles in the latest quarter.
The experience of nickel prices is even more exaggerated, and in the two trading days from March 7 to 8, the price of nickel in London rose from about 30,000 US dollars / ton to 100,000 US dollars / ton. That is, today's well-known "demon nickel", Tsingshan Group was forced to empty by bulls.
This means that a model with a high nickel ternary lithium battery like the Tesla Model 3 long-endurance version of about 70kWh is calculated according to the typical bicycle nickel 40kg (approximate). The value of the nickel used in the car alone tripled from about 7,500 yuan to 25,000 yuan in the 48 hours from the morning of March 7 to the evening of March 8.
For most electric car owners, March 8, 2022, will probably be the highest single-day revenue day of our lives (Mo Zhen).
The nickel issue will be revisited later. The above is to illustrate that the increase in power battery raw materials is so large and the rise is so fierce that it has reached the point where "I know that I can't do it with my fingers".
Friends who have long been concerned about the automotive industry should have an understanding, don't look at the car as a large consumer goods often ask for six figures, in fact, the profit margins of many companies are pitifully thin, and it is the general norm to be calculated and not pulled out. Many low-end cars even have to be omitted with a sun visor makeup mirror; the top of the cast aluminum shock absorber tower that only appears on the BBA high-end car, in fact, its material cost is only a few hundred yuan.
If a certain configuration is worth thousands of dollars, then it is a "nerve-wracking" event for mainstream economic models. It's not that the car companies are pitiful, of course, there is no shortage of these practices that ask for prices and use knives to force you to be highly matched. It is just that for the carefully calculated and fault-tolerant gross profit distribution of car companies, the additional cost of hundreds of yuan already needs to be digested.
The price of a car sold to consumers is more than ten or hundreds of thousands of yuan, and the cost of batteries has risen by "tens of thousands of yuan" in a year. The huge pressure of increasing battery costs has always oppressed the profits and even living space of car companies in the past one or two years, and car companies are holding their breath and standing firm with each other, only because there has not been the first willing to risk sales (and be scolded) and take the lead in price increases.
This may explain why in early March, when brands like Tesla and BYD announced price increases, most other new energy vehicle companies increased prices one after another.
At present, there are no car companies that have announced price increases, except for Weilai, most of which are traditional brands. However, it should be noted that most of the traditional car companies are not self-operated direct sales and fixed car prices like new cars, and there is often a certain preferential space in the 4S store channel. So although the official guidance price of many traditional brand new energy vehicles has not been raised, it may actually be adjusted in the form of tightening the preferential intensity.
At present, among the leading new energy vehicle companies, only Weilai has stated that "there will be no price increase in the near future". This is partly due to the "vehicle-to-electricity separation" model brought by BaaS, which leaves a considerable number of "additional" battery packs in the power exchange network, which is equivalent to having more "inventory" as a buffer space.
Despite this, in last week's earnings call, Weilai did not completely rule out the possibility of future price increases. The recent rise in raw materials is actually more than battery materials, copper, aluminum and other nearly a year's increase is equally touching, and the buffer space brought by the replacement power station is limited after all. NIO will launch the 2022 model of the ES8/ES6/EC6 model in May this year, which will be a possible window to wait and see the situation and even adjust the price.
No one can tell you if this is the top
As highlighted in the previous linked article, the rise in raw material prices this time is a long-term process that lasted for two years, not a surprise caused by regional conflicts, which is only the fuse that guides consumer terminal prices to "keep up" with the rise in production costs.
So first of all, the mere mitigation of conflicts is not enough to support a decisive decline in raw material prices (the same is true for oil prices).
Car companies always need to be cautious about the increase in terminal prices (except tesla, of course). If it is finally decided to increase the price by 5% or more - a rise that will hardly be ignored by any consumer, then it is very likely that in the perspective of car companies, in the short or even medium term, cost pressure is unlikely to usher in a more significant improvement.
Car companies have not moved, borne and digested the cost increase, in addition to the aforementioned "who should be the first" dilemma, the judgment of the future trend of raw materials is also on the one hand. If high raw material prices are not expected to persist, price adjustments may be exhausted, and the loss of consumer confidence will seem unworthy – and the reverse can be imagined.
Last weekend's 2022 Electric Vehicle 100 People's Conference Forum, the price increase of battery raw materials is naturally the focus of the whole field. Ouyang Minggao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, estimates that the balance between supply and demand of lithium resources may return to normal after 2 to 3 years. This further hints that looking at the cost of lithium alone is unlikely to reverse the rally and turn down, at least in the short term.
Mainland lithium ore resources are abundant, but the improvement of mining speed still needs time, and the motivation for capital investment in lithium mining needs (at least for the foreseeable period) the rich returns brought by high lithium prices. In the long run, recycling lithium may replace lithium mining, but the recycling of battery materials and the low cost of recycling means are more distant things (it is currently expected to see the post-2040).
At the same time, lithium is not all the increase in battery costs, and batteries are not all about the increase in the cost of electric vehicles.
After the epic shortfall in early March, the London nickel period was suspended for several days, and the price after the reopening fluctuated between 30,000 and 40,000 US dollars / ton. Although everyone knows that the high price of $100,000/ ton on March 8 cannot be maintained, in the process of jumping up and down since the review, even the lowest price has only just touched the level before the "demon nickel" surge.
If you exclude the abnormal fluctuations of March 7-8, nickel prices are still in the upward trend of the past two years.
If the price of lithium and nickel is largely affected by the surge in demand for electric vehicle batteries, then other base metals such as copper and aluminum are more independent and difficult to shake only by the upstream and downstream of electric vehicles. Even because the price of crude oil determines the global logistics costs, it will also indirectly affect the rise and fall of all prices, including electric vehicles. When the prices of most commodities are rising, electric vehicles have no reason to stay out of the matter.
Landing in the consumer market, the terminal price of electric vehicles jumped by several percentage points, which will definitely weaken the demand for upstream raw materials; the price difference between ternary lithium batteries and lithium iron phosphate is widened, which will also inhibit the demand for nickel to a certain extent. This will certainly slow down the upward speed of raw material prices, but it is not enough to cause them to go against the trend, let alone enough to promote car companies to quickly reduce the price of raw materials expectations.
For consumers, although the price of the car is affected by the price of raw materials, the purchase of a car is ultimately consumption rather than investment behavior, and there is no need to pay too much attention to the right and wrong of bulk futures. Since the beginning of this year, "buying a car is like financial management" is not false, but don't forget that cars are consumer goods. Even if the price level of electric vehicles falls in two years, it will not offset the use value of vehicles during this period.
Whether it is the fundamentals of the upstream commodity market, or the predictions and actions of industry insiders to car companies (such as deciding to increase prices), it shows that in the short and even medium term, there is no predictable and significant decline in the cost price of electric vehicles. Then as long as the demand for car purchase is not far away from three years, it will be a better choice to buy as soon as possible and lock in the subsequent price increase risk.