Author: Liu Ming
Edit: David
Capital's attention to new energy vehicles seems to be moving from the whole vehicle to the parts link. "Electric intelligence will give birth to a large number of value-added parts, domestic parts with the advantages of response speed, forward-looking layout, cost performance, etc., is expected to be born in the process of electric intelligence with international competitiveness." On March 27, Qiu Guanhua, chief strategy officer of Zheshang Securities, pointed out this in his speech at the 2022 China Electric Vehicle 100 Conference.
On the same day, Yan Xiaoyang, Senior Vice President of Investment at Desay SV, expressed a similar view in his speech. In its view, in the next five to ten years, the global penetration rate of new energy vehicles will increase rapidly beyond imagination. In the second half of the new energy vehicle - intelligence, the reshaping of the pattern of the automobile industry will also accelerate. In this context, it believes that future investment is focused on the industrial chain and automobile ecology, rather than vehicle manufacturing.
In Yan Xiaoyang's view, there will be three obvious investment opportunities in the field of new energy and intelligent vehicles in the future. The first is that intelligence brings about changes in the product technology landscape. For example, the three product domains of intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving and connected services are merging with each other. Yan Xiaoyang believes that it is time to quickly complete the layout of key technologies in the entire value chain, especially in the upstream. From the perspective of growth, this direction is consistent with the theory of the smile curve of investment in the automotive industry chain that we are familiar with;
The second investment opportunity is the evolution of the industrial ecology brought about by intelligence. The changes in the functions of the car brought about by the intelligence of the car, the changes in the functions of the car bring about changes in the way of use, and even the changes in the properties. Compared with the mature market, in the profit structure of China's automotive industry chain, the profit of product hardware (such as vehicles) manufacturing and sales links accounts for too high, more than 40%. Under the wave of intelligentization of electric vehicles, the proportion of product profits based on technology provision, interconnection services and travel services will increase significantly;
The third investment opportunity is a new opportunity for overseas markets brought about by the reshaping of the global division of labor in the automotive industry chain. Under the wave of intelligence, Chinese enterprises will be ahead of the world in technological innovation, new product applications, and the creation of new application scenarios. These leading edges will enable Chinese companies to export in technology research and development, high-end manufacturing and other aspects.
Qiu Guanhua believes that this investment explosion in the industrial chain is closely related to the entry of the Chinese automotive industry into a "golden period". In its view, in the second half of 2020, China's new energy vehicles have entered a real consumption inflection point, and new energy vehicles have transformed from policy-driven to market-driven, realizing the dream of changing lanes and overtaking. By 2021, the sales volume of new energy passenger cars has increased by 1.7 times year-on-year, and the penetration rate has increased rapidly from less than 5% to a monthly penetration rate of more than 20%. Judging from the sales situation in the first two months of 2022, the market share of self-owned brand passenger cars reached 45%.
"The rise of independent brands will continue to be interpreted." Qiu Guanhua believes that this is mainly driven by three factors: First, the mainstream price band of pure electricity is about 100,000 yuan of car supply improvement, and the models are further enriched. Second, independent brands usher in the first year of hybridization, which is expected to challenge the 100,000-200,000 yuan fuel vehicle market. Third, intelligence is accelerating, and the advantages of autonomy are more obvious. With the continuous expansion of the share of the new energy vehicle market, the completion of the vehicle and related industrial chains will achieve mutual achievements, and the domestic automobile industry chain will also rise, with the help of scale advantages to achieve winner-take-all.
Under the change of these three factors, there will be many investment opportunities in the parts and ecological construction links.
First of all, most of the whole zero support in the era of traditional fuel vehicles is the foreign parts car industry to foreign vehicle support, the era of electric intelligent vehicles will be iterative, which makes the car companies respond to parts and components service efficiency greatly improved, and some relatively closed supply chains usher in the domestic substitution breaking point. On the other hand, electric intelligence will give birth to a large number of value-added parts, domestic parts with response speed, forward-looking layout, cost performance and other advantages, is expected to be born in the process of electric intelligence with international competitiveness of enterprises.
In this process, such as integrated die casting, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, localization of passenger car seats, etc. are all potential sectors with high growth, and these four segments are the directions that Qiu Guanhua believes have the most investment value. "The rise of domestic production and electric intelligence is the most certain investment main line in the automotive sector in the next decade, or even for a longer period of time, and it is necessary to grasp the industrial trends and opportunities of domestic rise and electric intelligence double-click from top to bottom." It states.
Yao Zhipeng, managing director of Harvest Fund, believes that China's new energy automobile industry will be the long-term main line of future investment, this is because after real estate, the future of China's economy needs to find new growth points, and the new growth point is in the future global division of labor, China has a major voice in the industry, "the probability is some long-term cycle can win the manufacturing industry." Yao Zhipeng said. He believes that these manufacturing industries include automobiles, electronics, chemicals, machinery, etc., of which automobiles as a high-end manufacturing industry is a typical industry with new growth points, and he even raised the significance of energy vehicles to a new height.
Smart cockpit equipped with Huawei's Hongmeng system
"Behind it is essentially the embodiment of the country's national strength, which we call the 'war of national fortunes.'" Yao Zhipeng pointed out. In his view, at the critical juncture of automobile transformation, China has gained a rare opportunity. "Precision manufacturing and mass industrial capacity in Germany and Japan, which is the accumulation of decades or even centuries in these industries in the past, but this is already in the past. The era of intelligent cars is narrowing the differentiation in the field of machinery, and when the era of electronics and the Internet comes, the relative advantages of China and the United States in the field of automobiles will be highlighted.
"It's a point of change in the industry." Yao Zhipeng judged. From the perspective of new energy intelligent vehicles, its market penetration curve is higher than any previous industrial cycle. From 2014 to 2016, the intervention of the policy brought about the start of the electrification of commercial vehicles and the basic completion of the electrification of buses; by 2017 to 2019, with the decline of subsidies, the industry has carried out the consolidation of penetration rate, and the penetration rate has risen rapidly since 2020. The slope of such penetration rate is faster than ever, and the Chinese market is facing a big opportunity for consumer start-up.
Referring to countries with relatively high relative penetration rates, including Sweden and Norway, according to the evolution of this curve, Yao Zhipeng judged that the monthly penetration rate of China's new energy vehicles is expected to reach 70% in 2025. In this process, Yao Zhipeng believes that intelligent driving of cars will become the best investment point. "The software revenue that automotive companies or ecosystems are expected to generate may exceed the smartphone hardware itself. There is also an innate scenario in the car with significant monetization potential, which is autonomous driving, and this scene actually implies huge returns. It pointed out.
But Yao Zhipeng pointed out that although it can be predicted that the biggest scenario for new energy vehicles in the future is automatic driving, there is still uncertainty in the entire industry. "In the future, how big the monetization channels are and how many possibilities there are, it still needs to be confirmed in the future time." Just like in 2014 and 2015, we don't know that the application scenarios such as mobile games have become a very important source of realization for smartphones. Yao Zhipeng said.
In fact, as early as 2020, Zhu Jiangming, chairman of Zero Run Automobile, said that Zero Run was already the last ticket that capital could grab in the new car-making forces. However, at that time, most people's feeling was that they were selling melons in the queen's wife. When with a new round of capital in 2021 the year before the grab, the pattern has been very obvious. At present, among the new vehicle manufacturers that have not been listed, and the cumulative sales volume exceeds 10,000 vehicles, only a small number of car companies such as Weima, Zero Run, and Nezha are left, and they have now been robbed by capital.
With the gradual development of traditional car companies in the field of electric vehicles, the opportunity for new forces to grow has become smaller and smaller, which is also the reason why capital has gradually shifted to auto parts and ecological construction. For the companies that have joined the car manufacturing in the future, although there is Wei Xiaoli waiting in the front, how to impress the capital is probably a more difficult thing than before.