Image source @ Visual China
Text | Finance and economics are unscrupulous, the author | Jiang Xiaoqiao
The British materialist Mark Miodonik once wrote an interesting book, "Fascinating Materials", and when writing about glass, he expressed his doubts and regrets with a separate section on "China's Unique Invention". "China is an expert in the development of paper, wood, ceramics and metals, but it ignores glass... The East ignored glass for a thousand years, and glass changed Europe during this time. ”
But now people don't lose sight of the influence of Chinese glass. In 2020, the 92nd Academy Awards awarded the best documentary feature film to "American Factory" in which Fujianese Cao Dewang played the "protagonist", a documentary that tells the story of China's Fuyao Group, which Cao Dewang helmed, to build a factory in the United States. At that time, Fuyao was still the world's second largest automotive glass manufacturing company, and now it is already the first.
However, a recent news item may confuse Cao Dewang.
Li Xianyi, the founder of the previously low-key Xinyi Glass, also surfaced with media reports and was crowned with the new title of glass king.
The question is, can these four words stand up to in-depth scrutiny?
Lee Hyun-yi and his Xinyi "Glass Building"
Compared with Cao Dewang's high profile of running a university and attending "Readers", Li Xianyi, who is also a Fujian native, has rarely accepted media interviews before. The only few TV interviews I had were a few words.
But seventeen years ago, when Xinyi Glass was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Li Xianyi was already known as the "Glass King".
At that time, Xinyi Glass, like Cao Dewang's Fuyao Glass, was mainly automotive glass, but the revenue was only 1.38 billion Hong Kong dollars, only about half of Fuyao. But the difference between the two is that the automotive glass produced by Fuyao is mainly sold to the domestic market, while Xinyi Glass has focused on overseas and has become the largest exporter of automotive glass in China.
This is not unrelated to Li Xianyi's previous experience and accumulation of resources. Some media have reported Li Xianyi's early experience, saying that he dropped out of school to work at the age of 15 because of his family's poverty. After 10 years in society, 25-year-old Lee Hyun-yee started a business, ran through transportation, operated a freight convoy, and then went to Hong Kong alone in the early 1980s to open a small auto repair auto parts store. Li Xianyi once recalled, "At that time, the scale was very small, and only 1 employee was hired. ”
The next choice is crucial for Li Xianyi and Xinyi Glass. From the moment Xinyi chose to extend upstream, Li Xianyi and Cao Dewang waved goodbye on the watershed of fate, each embarking on a different path of development.
Cao Dewang and Fuyao focused on automotive glass, focusing on being a good "supporting role in the automotive industry", while Li Xianyi's Xinyi first extended the float glass business upwards, and then cut into the photovoltaic glass industry, cross-border new energy industry, and then involved in photovoltaic power station development and lithium battery energy storage, forming today's diversified business map.
Since Xinyi established an independent company Xinyi Solar energy in 2008 to enter the field of photovoltaic power plants, Li Xianyi officially opened the high-speed expansion mode of the industry.
In the 7 years from 2013 to 2019, Li Xianyi, like a skilled glass worker, constantly cut out pieces of shining "glass" and built a building - through serial splitting, Li Xianyi created three Hong Kong listed companies of Xinyi Solar, Xinyi Storage and Xinyi Energy. Coupled with Xinyi Glass, which was listed as early as 2005, Li Xianyi's Xinyi's Xinyi industry covers all kinds of glass, photovoltaic power stations, lithium batteries and energy storage implementations, with a total market value of about HK$240 billion.
Li Xianyi's wealth thus far exceeded that of Cao Dewang. In last year's Hurun Rich List, Li Xianyi was worth 67.5 billion yuan, ranking 80th, while Cao Dewang, who ranked 272, was about one-third of Li Xianyi's net worth.
Controversial "beyond"
Compared with the media's enthusiasm for the "glass king substitution", neither Li Xianyi nor Cao Dewang has any voice.
What he is saying may be that the two companies focus on different areas of business. In fact, this is indeed the focus of controversy among netizens.
But the numbers represent "facts", not necessarily the truth.
In terms of Fuyao's business composition, more than 90% of it is in automotive glass. In 2021, Fuyao will account for 31% of the global automotive glass industry and more than 60% of the domestic market.
Xinyi also has an automotive glass business, with sales of automotive glass business in 2021 of 4.44 billion yuan, accounting for only 17.9% of the overall business, and Fuyao Glass is still 4.8 times more than Xinyi in volume. Moreover, the year-on-year growth rate of Xinyi's automotive glass business is only 18.4%, which is between Fuyao's 18.57% Bozhong.
What really made Xinyi Glass "Great Leap Forward" last year was the widely used float glass business. This part is its most important business - sales in 2021 reached 17.83 billion yuan, accounting for 72% of Xinyi Glass's overall revenue, an increase of 85.7% year-on-year.
From the second half of 2020, the price of float glass as a whole is in an upward channel, and by 2021, the demand for China's float glass industry is particularly strong, and the price has risen sharply. On the one hand, the reason is driven by the high completion rate of China's real estate industry; on the other hand, in the context of "carbon peaking and carbon neutrality", the Chinese government is still restricting new approvals for new float glass production capacity, which in turn limits the supply of float glass.
Therefore, it may not be possible to talk about "transcendence", and perhaps the issue of "who is the king of glass" at the beginning is also a false proposition. The two companies are the representatives of the two tracks, and the difference in product structure shows that one is the spokesperson of automotive glass and the other is the spokesperson of float glass.
Therefore, in terms of knowledge, some people feel that the saying "glass king substitution" is a bit "eyeball".
However, as the new energy industry is becoming a megatrend, Cao Dewang and Li Xianyi have once again come to the same track.
China also needs more "glass kings"
But the controversy of jumping out of the "track", in the view of Cai Wujie, whether it is Li Xianyi or Cao Dewang, may not be the real "glass king".
From the perspective of the entire glass industry, the annual output value of the mainland is almost 600 billion yuan, and the total business volume of the two enterprises is only about 8%.
Put into the global glass market, whether it is Fuyao or Xinyi, the gold content of the "glass king" is even more insufficient. The world's leading glass company, France's Saint-Gobain Group, has a sales revenue of 38.1 billion euros in 2020, 10 times that of Xinyi and Fuyao. In 2021, its organic growth hit a new high, up 18.4% from 2020.
So in fact, whether in the world or at home, neither of them can be called the real king.
In addition to the numbers, perhaps as a "glass king" can play a decisive change in the industry or social development, rather than a simple increase in market share.
The Egyptians were the first to invent glass, but the research and creation of glass technology in Europe directly affected the birth of the modern world.
There was once a famous thesis - "tea, coffee and cocoa, only tea conquered the world" - Alan McFarlane, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, the representative work is actually the "World of Glass" written by glass, in his view, glass has played a huge role in human civilization, and led to the evolution of civilization in different directions, such as glass and the Renaissance have a great relationship. Medieval optics, built on glass, also advanced geometry, as optical studies inevitably touched on the relationship between light and space, both of which were in some ways the cornerstones of the Renaissance.
In 1952, the British Pyrkington Company invented the float process, and the glass processing process entered a new era of economies of scale and significantly reduced costs.
To require the current "glass king" with such a standard is of course too harsh, but China's glass industry is also facing a problem in many fields, subject to people.
Modern glass can be simply divided into flat glass and deep-processed glass, deep-processed glass can be mainly divided into architectural glass, automotive glass, solar glass, electronic fine glass and special glass (home appliance glass, security glass, etc.), but so far the mainland in the ultra-thin fine glass and other fields still have technical gaps.
A typical example is neutral borosilicate glass. Under the epidemic situation, vaccine bottles have become a tight product, and the neutral borosilicate glass mainly used in the new crown vaccine bottle is a "card neck" problem for the Chinese people. As a material with advantages such as impact resistance, acid and water resistance, and high chemical stability, the demand has soared under the epidemic, and the industry has once experienced a situation of short supply.
However, the technical difficulty and complexity of neutral borosilicate glass are extremely difficult. The high liquid viscosity of neutral borosilicate glass makes it very difficult to set, and once the process is wrong, the glass tube can no longer be used. Such a difficult process makes it difficult for not many companies in the world to master the production technology of neutral borosilicate glass.
At present, the global neutral borosilicate glass industry is in an oligopolistic situation, and Japan's whistle, the United States Corning, germany Schott and so on are among the leaders. Among them, Germany's SCHOTT once won nearly 90% of the world's neutral borosilicate glass required for approved new crown vaccines. The mainland is also highly dependent on German products.
In this sense, of course, we need the king of scale on a mature track, and we also need the real king who can observe social life with more comprehensive business and more technological breakthroughs.