Huawei invested in two battery "little giants"

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Recently, Huawei has made frequent moves in the field of investment.

On April 1, Huawei, through its investment company Hubble, participated in the A+ round of financing of sodium-ion battery manufacturer "Zhongke Hai Sodium". Just 4 days ago, Huawei just joined hands with Xiaomi to invest in a lithium battery company called "Weilan New Energy".

According to the understanding of the Beijing Stock Exchange, Zhongke Haina has won the title of "Little Giant" Enterprise of Jiangsu Province, while Weilan New Energy is a new "Little Giant" enterprise of Beijing Specialized Specialty.

It is worth mentioning that the founding teams of Zhongke Haina and Weilan New Energy are closely related to the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and behind these two companies stands the same person, that is, Chen Liquan, the mentor of Zeng Yuqun and known as the "first person of Lithium Battery in China".

01 Huawei invested in 2 battery "little giants"

According to public information, on April 1, Zhongke Haina completed the A+ round of financing, and the investors included Hubble Investment, Haisong Capital, and Shenzhen Aggregate Capital. Among them, Hubble Investment is an investment company under Huawei.

Founded in February 2017, Zhongke Haina is mainly engaged in the research and development and production of a new generation of energy storage system - sodium-ion batteries.

Compared with lithium batteries, sodium-ion batteries are relatively unpopular.

Although the physicochemical properties and storage mechanisms of sodium and lithium are similar, and the raw material resources of sodium-ion batteries are abundant, widely distributed and low-cost, due to the large volume of sodium ions, the requirements for material structural stability and kinetic properties are more stringent, so that sodium-ion batteries are always covered by the "halo" of lithium batteries.

In recent years, the price of lithium battery raw materials has soared, and the advantages of sodium-ion batteries have gradually become prominent under the background of the average price of lithium carbonate rising from 300,000 yuan / ton to 500,000 yuan / ton.

In July 2021, CATL (300750. SZ) released the company's first generation of sodium-ion batteries, which has heated up the industry's attention to sodium-ion batteries. Subsequently, Sunwanda (300207. SZ) also said that the company has a number of patents such as sodium supplementation method for sodium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries and their preparation methods.

At this time, Zhongke Haina has been working hard in the sodium-ion battery subdivision track for 5 years. According to the understanding of the Direct Beijing Stock Exchange, Zhongke Haina has won the title of "Little Giant" Enterprise in Jiangsu Province in 2019.

In fact, this is not the first time Huawei has invested in battery companies.

On March 28 this year, Huawei participated in the strategic financing of lithium battery company Weilan New Energy together with Xiaomi through Hubble investment.

With the introduction of Huawei and Xiaomi, a PE investor in Shenzhen told the media that the valuation of Weilan New Energy has reached 15 billion yuan, becoming a veritable unicorn enterprise.

Weilan New Energy was established in August 2016, half a year earlier than Zhongke Haina.

As early as 2018, Weilan New Energy completed hundreds of millions of yuan of A round financing, including Jiangsu Zhongguancun Production and Investment, Three Gorges Capital, Tianqi Lithium, Chinese Academy of Sciences Venture Capital and other funds.

With the increasing amount of financing, Weilan New Energy has invested more and more in technology research and development. In March 2020, Weilan New Energy's invention patents exceeded 100. A year later, its invention patents have exceeded 200.

In February this year, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology announced the list of the second batch of specialized new "little giant" enterprises in Beijing in 2021, and Weilan New Energy successfully selected as the "Little Giant" enterprise in Beijing with its outstanding performance in the field of solid-state lithium battery segmentation.

Zhitong North Stock Exchange noted that both Zhongke Haina and Weilan New Energy are closely related to the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is the first place in China to study lithium-ion batteries and sodium-ion batteries. The reason why China can catch up in the field of lithium batteries is inseparable from a researcher named Chen Liquan.

The two battery companies invested by Huawei are related to Chen Liquan.

02 The figure of the Chinese Academy of Sciences behind the "Little Giant"

The Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has made many contributions to the construction of new China, and yan Keats, Shi Ruwei, Qian Sanqiang and other scientists of the older generation have all worked here.

In the 1970s, employees of an American oil company built the world's first lithium battery. This lithium battery is extremely unstable in performance and explodes without a word, so it is not commercially available.

Later, the Japanese made improvements to lithium batteries. In 1981, Akira Yoshino of Asahi Kasei Corporation in Japan began to study lithium batteries, and two years later successfully built the first rechargeable lithium-ion battery prototype.

With its technical advantages, Japan's business in the field of lithium batteries is getting bigger and bigger. For a long time, one-third of the global battery technology patents came from Japan. Akira Yoshino was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his outstanding contributions to the field of lithium batteries.

China's research on lithium batteries is not late, but industrialization is relatively slow.

In 1964, Chen Liquan, who graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China, was assigned to work at the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Chen Liquan majored in crystallography at The University of Science and Technology of China, and his experience in a solid state training in Max Planck, Germany, gave him the intention of "changing careers".

At that time, Chen Liquan found that the entire Institute of MaPu Solids was studying lithium nitride. Lithium nitride is an ionic conductive material that can be used as a car battery.

Compared to bulky lead-acid batteries, lithium nitride batteries are similar to buttons and are lightweight and compact. "I thought this thing was very useful, and I said I was going to change my profession, from crystal growth to a new discipline called solid ionology."

After Chen Liquan returned to China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences set up a solid ion laboratory for him. Chen Liquan's job is to study lithium-ion conductors and lithium batteries.

In 1995, China's first lithium battery was born from the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Six years later, Chen Liquan was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and became the special leader of the national 863 program for secondary lithium batteries.

Lithium batteries have entered the major special topics of electric vehicles, providing key opportunities for the mainland in the future competition for the share of power batteries. In 2014, the market share of power batteries and lithium batteries in the mainland has surpassed that of Japan and South Korea, ranking first in the world.

In Chen Liquan's view, the cooperation between academia, engineering and industry has accelerated the industrialization process of research results.

In 2016, Yu Huigen, a graduate supervisor of the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, pulled Li Hong, a researcher at the Institute of Physics, and Chen Liquan, together to found Weilan New Energy, engaged in the research and development of solid-state lithium batteries, with Yu Huigen as the chairman.

Chen Liquan said that the electrolyte of most lithium batteries is a combustible liquid electrolyte, which is easy to cause safety concerns. "Solid-state batteries are safer, don't explode, and have a longer battery life. This will meet the needs of electric vehicles. ”

However, although there are many advantages of lithium batteries, there are also "card neck" problems.

In the earth's crust, the content of lithium is only 0.0065%, and the mainland lithium resources are not much, accounting for only 7% of the world's total reserves. In contrast, sodium, which has similar physicochemical properties and storage mechanisms to lithium, has a content of 2.75%, and the mainland is rich in raw material resources.

Chen Liquan believes that the prospect of sodium-ion batteries is broad. In 2011, he and Hu Yongsheng, another researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, set out to develop sodium-ion batteries. During this period, they solved the problems of the driving medium of sodium ions, liquid memory, etc., and increased the number of cycleable charges of sodium ion batteries.

In 2017, Hu Yongsheng, Chen Liquan and others founded Zhongke Hai sodium, the first enterprise in China to focus on the development and manufacture of sodium-ion batteries. At present, Zhongke Hai Sodium has a number of core patents for sodium-ion batteries.

03 Who will be the next "King of Ning"?

In fact, Zhongke Haina and Weilan New Energy have successively obtained financing, which is just a microcosm of the fiery heat of China's power battery track.

Since 2021, the power battery track has given birth to a lot of large financing - Hive Energy, China Innovation Aviation, Huineng Technology, Sunwoda Automotive Battery... Among them, China Innovation Airlines and Hive Energy are preparing for listing.

Power battery companies have become fragrant in the eyes of investment institutions, and they are inseparable from the state's support for new energy vehicles.

According to the "New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan (2021-2035)", by 2025, the sales of new energy vehicles in the mainland will account for 20%.

Last year, mainland new energy vehicle sales reached 3.521 million units, an increase of 1.6 times year-on-year, accounting for 13.4% of new car sales. This means that in order to complete the KPI, the sales of new energy vehicles in the mainland will still increase significantly.

The development of the new energy automobile industry has also led to the rapid growth of power battery loading.

According to the research report, the loading volume of continental power batteries increased from 15.7GWh in 2015 to 154.5GWh in 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of 46.4%. From January to February 2022, the installed capacity of power batteries reached 29.9GWh, an increase of 109.7% year-on-year.

At the same time, the government is also encouraging the development of the power battery industry.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries and other new batteries are "ballast stones to promote the development of the new energy industry", it is expected that with the increase of industry investment, technology to maturity, and gradual improvement of the industrial chain, cost-effective sodium-ion batteries are expected to become an important supplement to lithium-ion batteries, especially in the field of stationary energy storage has good development prospects.

Under the blessing of a number of favorable policies, hot money has entered the power battery track, and battery manufacturers have also increased capital and expanded production.

At the end of December last year, Zhongke Haina reached a cooperation with Three Gorges Energy and the Government of Fuyang Municipality in Anhui Province to jointly build the world's first large-scale mass production line of sodium-ion batteries. The production line is planned to have a production capacity of 5GWh, which will be built in two phases, and the first phase of 1GWh will be officially put into operation in 2022.

At the China Electric Vehicle 100 Forum, Li Hong, founder of Weilan New Energy, revealed that Weilan New Energy is cooperating with Weilai Automobile to launch a mixed solid-liquid electrolyte battery with a single charge range of 1,000 kilometers based on the ET7 model, with an energy density of 360Wh/kg, which is expected to be mass-produced at the end of this year or the first half of next year.

According to the direct connection to the Beijing Stock Exchange, as of the beginning of March this year, 5 listed companies in China have thrown out refinancing plans to invest in lithium battery-related projects, and the total amount of funds raised is expected to exceed 2 billion yuan.

Power batteries are a trillion-dollar market. As the core component of new energy vehicles, the industry circulates the slogan of "whoever controls the battery, who has the right to speak".

Zeng Yuqun became the "richest man in Hong Kong" by relying on a small battery, and the Ningde era was also called "Ning Wang" because it sat on a trillion market value.

However, "the era of the world's bitter Ningde has been a long time" . With the continuous expansion of the "circle of friends" of other power battery companies, new forces have been born one after another, and the fight may have just begun.