「Core Tips」
Whether Huawei has built a car, the boundary of this question has been somewhat blurred, because the release of the M5 has declared that Huawei is infinitely close to the fact of car building. The real key is that for the current Huawei, there is an urgent need for a blockbuster to prove itself, and this will really test the wisdom of Huawei's management.
Author | Li Xin
Edited by | Gokuno
"I say a bad word, you look at China's car factories, those companies that choose our car BU, including state-owned enterprises and central enterprises, want brands without brands, channels without channels, retail without retail, product design, experience in all aspects are not good, there is no line, even the new forces of car manufacturing can not do, who can he do? ...... If we don't enter the market and help car companies to do a good job in the design and experience of the car and sell it well, this business cannot close the loop at all. ”
In a video of about 5 minutes circulating on the Internet before, Yu Chengdong, Huawei's managing director, consumer BG CEO, and CEO of smart car solution BU, like a cannon, counts the inefficiency of traditional car companies, but the meaning of drunkenness, everyone can see it - highlighting the importance of Huawei's assistance to car manufacturers to build cars.
At the 2021 annual report press conference of Huawei a few days ago, Guo Ping, huawei's rotating chairman, also reiterated that "Huawei does not build cars" and should deeply integrate the ICT capabilities accumulated for more than 30 years with the automotive industry to help car companies build and sell good cars.
However, instead of discussing how important Huawei is to car companies, the market seems to be more concerned about whether Huawei will build cars itself. For example, in recent exchanges, there are readers who discuss this matter with Super Source Force.
Overall, for the evolution of Huawei's car manufacturing, there are currently three main views in the market:
In the eyes of some people, Huawei will become Bosch in the era of fuel vehicles - a strong first-tier supplier that makes car manufacturers afraid;
Another part of the people believe that just like the "resolute not to build mobile phones" and then reversed, Huawei brand cars will eventually appear;
The most pessimistic people believe that Huawei's car manufacturing may be difficult to replicate the glory of mobile phones.
In fact, no matter how the endgame evolves, Huawei's car manufacturing will become an important case in business history, and the conflicts and games in it will also enlighten everyone.
In this article, we will sort out three questions for you from the perspective of an observer:
Why should Huawei participate in car building?
What is Huawei's car-making capability?
What's next?
1. "Dragon Trap Shoal" seeks transformation
In previous articles, we have talked about whether companies do so-called strategic planning or organizational restructuring, they are essentially for growth.
Huawei's choice to enter the automotive market is a similar consideration.
In August 2020, U.S. sanctions against Huawei were escalated, which made it impossible for Huawei to use self-developed chips or purchase 5G chips from third parties.
As a result of the sanctions, Huawei was forced to lose its high-end position and sell glory.
According to Strategy Analytics data, compared with the peak of Huawei's sales of 50 million mobile phones in a quarter, in 2021, Huawei's global mobile phone sales shrank by nearly 80% year-on-year, falling to less than 30 million units throughout the year.
From the financial report, in 2021, Huawei's once proud consumer business with mobile phones as the core had revenue of 243.431 billion yuan, a year-on-year drop of 49.6%, and the proportion of corresponding revenue in Huawei's total revenue also plummeted from 54.18% in the previous year to 38.23%.
The decline in consumer business revenue has put the head of the business, Yu Chengdong, under the dual pressure of sales team and channels.
According to Caixin, in the past year, a large number of employees of Huawei's consumer business group have turned to the car sales business, accelerated the transformation of stores across the country, and prepared for assisting partners in selling cars;
It should be noted that in the three major sectors of operator business, enterprise-level business, and consumer business, the consumer business group, which once accounted for more than half of the revenue, is Huawei's only department with both R&D and sales teams, and sales play a key role in promoting business.
As for the channel dealer resources that Huawei has not been able to establish so hard, it is looking forward to the stars and the moon, waiting to get new "explosive products" from Huawei, and follow Huawei to make money again.
For Yu Chengdong, if you want to keep the sales team and channels, cutting into the field of cars with a larger volume than mobile phones seems to have become a must for Huawei.
As he has said in several public occasions before, under the US ban, Huawei mobile phones have encountered huge difficulties, and smart electric vehicles have high unit prices and high value, and are the only products that can make up for the lack of mobile phones.
So what preparations have been made for Huawei's car-making plan?
2. Huawei "Family Barrel"
At present, the market generally believes that in addition to batteries, Huawei has almost mastered a full range of car-making technology from hardware to software. This is also the root cause of why "Huawei must build its own car".
Huawei's entry into smart electric vehicles dates back to 2014, when Huawei set up a car networking laboratory in the "2012 Lab".
Since then, Huawei has taken its own 5G technology as its starting point, from the Internet of Vehicles communication architecture to the chip winning mercedes-Benz's in-vehicle module project step by step layout.
In 2019, Huawei officially established the Intelligent Vehicle Solution Division, which is juxtaposed with network product and solution BU (business line), cloud + artificial intelligence industry and service BU, plus Huawei operator BG (business group), enterprise BG, and consumer BG to form Huawei's six first-level departments.
In October 2020, Huawei released its independent brand "HI" (Huawei Inside), which, for example, is somewhat similar to the KFC Family Bucket, providing full-stack car solutions for automakers, including:
1) The new "Computing and Communication Architecture";
2) Five intelligent systems - intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, intelligent electric, intelligent network and intelligent vehicle cloud;
3) LiDAR, AR-HUD (Augmented Reality Head-Up Display Scheme) and other full set of intelligent components.
In addition to the above, "HI" also provides computing power and operating systems, including:
4) Three major computing platforms: intelligent driving calculation platform, intelligent cockpit calculation platform and intelligent vehicle control calculation platform;
5) And three major operating systems: AOS (Intelligent Driving Operating System), HOS (Intelligent Cockpit Operating System) and VOS (Intelligent Vehicle Control Operating System).
This combination seems dazzling, but the meaning behind it means that if a car company really wants to quickly build a similar electric car, it can almost find Huawei to achieve one-click customization.
With the ability to do it, how can Huawei cooperate with the automaker? Specifically, the cooperation model between the two sides is mainly divided into Huawei Inside mode and parts supply mode.
The former is a deep cooperation, requiring car companies and Huawei to be firmly bound, for example, in the vehicle definition stage, joint design, joint development, and the use of Huawei's full-stack automatic driving solutions;
The latter cooperation is relatively shallow, Huawei only provides the MDC platform (Mobile Data Center: mobile data center) and the necessary on-board network middleware, as for the perception and execution algorithms, are developed by the car manufacturer.
Among the co-operative car companies, BAIC, GAC and Changan adopt the Huawei Inside model, and Huawei provides a full-stack intelligent driving system and an intelligent cockpit system.
For example, on April 17, 2021, BAIC BJEV's Alpha S Huawei HI Edition was officially launched, which is equipped with Huawei Hongmeng OS and high-end automatic driving ADS system, with 3 Huawei 96-line vehicle-grade lidar, 6 millimeter wave radar, 12 cameras, and 13 ultrasonic radars, which can support the super computing power of 400TOPS and meet the urban full-scenario automatic driving. At that time, a road test video of the car driving itself was brushed on the network.
As for other car companies that have not adopted the HI model, they mainly adopt a relatively "shallow" parts supply model, and Huawei provides the MDC platform (Mobile Data Center: mobile data center) and necessary parts or car and machine software parts to car companies.
For example, on August 25, 2021, Nezha Automobile and Huawei signed a cooperation agreement saying that the two sides will cooperate in HMS (Huawei Mobile Service. Huawei Mobile Service), autonomous driving core sensors, MDC, intelligent cockpit, etc., and the first model of the cooperation between the two sides, Nezha S, will apply Huawei MDC intelligent driving computing platform and lidar technology, and will be launched in 2022.
However, the work is handed over to Huawei, is the automaker really willing?
3. Urgent need for explosive models
On June 30, 2021, Chen Hong, who has just been reappointed as the chairman of SAIC Motor, said at the shareholders' meeting that if the overall solution of a third party such as Huawei is adopted, it is tantamount to losing the "soul" of traditional car companies and can only be reduced to a "body".
Earlier in the same year, Zu Xiangjie, vice president and chief engineer of SAIC Motor, also said: "The brain of the next generation of cars is a complete electronic and electrical architecture and a software architecture that controls the entire car. ”
In fact, the concerns of big car manufacturers are not unreasonable, because in the era of fuel vehicles, Bosch is such a terrible existence.
There is an old saying in the era of fuel vehicles, the whole car factory is working for the engine factory, and the engine factory is working for Bosch.
Bosch is the world's largest auto parts manufacturer, and although it does not produce cars, it controls the chains of the automotive industry. For traditional car companies that want to transform, it is difficult to escape bosch, and they do not want Huawei to become a new nightmare.
Of course, SAIC motor has not completely refused to cooperate with Huawei. As early as 2018, SAIC Motor and Huawei agreed to carry out joint research and development in new technology areas such as V2X (Vehicle-Connected Communication Technology) intelligent travel service-related systems, intelligent algorithms, and roadside unit development.
According to conventional logic, if Huawei does not cooperate deeply with first-line manufacturers, it seems that the problem is not big, because if it can cooperate well with non-first-line car manufacturers, make explosive models, and give market confidence, Huawei can also succeed.
However, from the data point of view, Huawei has not yet got too good a sample.
For example, the Cyris SF5, which Huawei and Xiaokang co., Ltd. cooperated in the early days, the annual delivery volume since April 2021 is almost not worth mentioning, only 8169 vehicles, which is less than the one-month delivery volume of "Wei Xiaoli".
And this also makes Huawei, which is eager to sort out the benchmark, quite stressful, and an intuitive performance is the birth of the M5.
The M5 is a medium-sized luxury SUV, it has three versions, the price range after subsidies is 250,000 to 320,000 yuan, from Huawei and the listed company Xiaokang shares under the Xilis cooperation brand - AITO.
Q&I M5 is Huawei's painstaking work, and there are media reports that the places where Huawei parts can be loaded in the car are loaded.
At the Huawei consumer business new product launch in December 2021, Yu Chengdong spent more than an hour to introduce the new car, constantly emphasizing that the model design upholds the spirit of Huawei.
From the momentum point of view, M5 performance is good, the listed 3 days of orders have exceeded 6000, but whether it can be maintained, need to be seen.
For M5, Yu Chengdong gave high hopes, and a "small goal" previously formulated was to plan to use 1,000 stores to sell cars by the end of 2022, assuming that each store could sell 30 cars per month, and monthly sales could reach 30,000 vehicles, so that The annual sales of Huawei cars exceeded 300,000.
In addition, Yu Chengdong also test-drove and called M5 on Weibo.
In addition to the M5, looking ahead, huawei's HI model also has two production models to be delivered in 2022.
One is the Polar Fox HI version. The model was launched in April last year, but it was only partially delivered in December 2021 on a small scale and did not achieve the goal of external delivery. The other is Avita, a sub-brand of Changan Automobile.
In addition, a new MODEL of AITO equipped with Huawei's autonomous driving system is expected to be available in the third quarter.
The market performance of these models will affect the confidence of a large number of on-the-spot people in Huawei's automotive business.
Overall, whether it is for business growth or to maintain sales teams and dealer channels, Huawei's automotive business is a position that must be won.
As for whether Huawei has built a car, the boundary of this question has been somewhat blurred, because the release of the M5 has declared that Huawei is infinitely close to building a car. The real key is that for the current Huawei, there is an urgent need for a blockbuster to prove itself, and this will really test the wisdom of Huawei's management.
Resources
How do you view Huawei's smart car layout? , Changjiang Securities
"How Huawei Builds Cars", Caixin