On April 1, Qualcomm officially announced that it and its partner SSW Partners have completed the acquisition of self-driving company Weininger, with a total equity value of 4.5 billion yuan.
Investment firm SSW Partners will acquire all of The Outstanding Shares in Vininger, followed by the sale of arriver, the autonomous driving software business, to Qualcomm, while SSW Partners will retain the Vininger Tier-1 business.
After cooperation, division, and bidding, Qualcomm finally got the Arriver software business they most wanted. This also means that Qualcomm's automotive territory has expanded again, officially launching an impact on the highland of smart cars.
01
What is the origin of the Väninger, who is scrambling to buy
Many people may not know the ADAS supplier of Vininger, the Swedish company formerly known as Autoliv, the world's largest manufacturer of airbags and seat belts, focusing on automotive active and passive safety configurations, with the mission of saving more lives.
In 2018, Autoliv smelled that there were greater business opportunities and better development prospects in the field of intelligent driving, so it decided to split the electronic and electrical hardware and intelligent driving division separately, so there was Veoneer, and in July 2018, Veninger was officially listed.
Weininger has both hardware development and manufacturing capabilities and software research and development capabilities. Key products include autonomous driving domain controllers, active and passive safety systems, and autonomous driving sensors. Its main customers are Volvo, Subaru and Mercedes-Benz.
Vininger reached a very deep cooperation with Volvo, a Swedish company, and the two also co-funded the establishment of Zenuity, a self-driving software research and development company, but eventually parted ways due to the different development concepts of the two.
Although this is not a successful cooperation case, it is still a good thing to win volvo's favor and willingness to tie it deeply to meet the challenges of the transformation of the automotive industry.
Subaru, a car company with a good reputation in China but has never reaped good sales. In addition to the horizontally opposed engine and four-wheel drive system, the "niche" car manufacturer is also a must for the Eyesight vision system.
The Eyesight based on binocular perception on the Subaru Levorg is provided by Vininger, and the new generation of Eyesight still uses wide baseline binocular vision, and the biggest advantage of the wide baseline is that it can expand the detection range.
In addition, Mercedes-Benz's binocular perception system is also provided by Vininger, and Geely also has some models that use Vininger's monocular vision system.
Moreover, as mentioned earlier, Weininger is not only good at software research and development, but the company's ability in hardware development is also very strong. The millimeter-wave radar produced by Vininger is mainly supplied to Ford, Honda, Jeep and other manufacturers. In terms of lidar, Vininger is a foundry of Velodyne. In addition to the hardware, perception and decision-making layers, Vininger also produces execution layer hardware, and Vinninger and Honda affiliate Nisshin have established a joint venture to produce automotive electronic braking equipment.
But Qualcomm this time "eat soft not eat hard", Weininger's other business does not want, as long as the Arriver department.
Arriver itself is The Most Forward-Looking Division in The Autonomous Driving Business at Vineninger, developing the Next Generation Visual Perception and Strategy software stack. Qualcomm and Weininger's original cooperation plan was qualcomm to provide hardware, and Weininger implanted Arriver into the system-level chip of Qualcomm's autonomous driving platform Snapdragon Ride, but the intellectual property rights belonged to Weininger, and the most critical part of the intellectual property rights was exactly what Qualcomm needed.
02
Qualcomm, which integrates soft and hardware, is the star supplier
Qualcomm bid with Magna to buy Vineninger because Qualcomm saw its own limitations.
In the field of smart cockpits, Qualcomm, with its 8155 chip, knocked on the door of many new forces to build cars. Today, many manufacturers even take the Qualcomm series of chips as the main selling point. But in the field of automatic driving, Qualcomm has never provoked too much splash, looking at the world, NVIDIA chips with large computing power and high openness, has become the first choice for many new cars. Mobileye is the number one player in the field of visual perception, and the total number of chips delivered has exceeded 100 million pieces.
In China, the main battlefield of intelligent driving, there are also many technology companies that have sharpened their heads and poured into the intelligent driving chip track. In addition, there are many new cars that have been rumored to be self-developed chips.
This is a threat to qualcomm's development.
At CES at the beginning of this year, Qualcomm released a series of intelligent car products around the whole process of the car, including the new generation of Snapdragon Ride platform, Snapdragon cockpit platform and so on. In addition, Qualcomm also released the Snapdragon Ride visual perception system,
The Snapdragon Ride platform supports high customization and has successfully won two car companies, BMW and Great Wall.
The Snapdragon Ride vision system is built on a system-on-chip (ON) 4 nm process, integrating a dedicated, high-performance Snapdragon Ride SoC and Arriver's next-generation vision perception software stack, as well as an 8-megapixel wide-angle camera developed on a custom neural network architecture. This visual perception system can identify traffic infrastructure such as road guardrails, as well as traffic participants such as pedestrians and two-wheelers.
Seeing this, you may have understood why Qualcomm would "cut off" Magna even if it cost more money. For Qualcomm, hardware is not a problem, software is an urgent need. Today's Qualcomm has the ability to integrate chips and software algorithms to form a more complete autonomous driving solution. At the same time, this solution also has the advantages of high openness, which is exactly what many vehicle manufacturers need.
How competitive is the Snapdragon Ride platform
Today's new car industry, but anyone who wants to make achievements in the field of intelligent driving, can not go around two companies, namely NVIDIA and Mobileye. The former has high openness and large platform computing power, which has won the favor of many manufacturers, and the latter can provide very stable visual perception processing results and eat all over the L2 market. Qualcomm wants to grab orders from them, which means it must have a prominent advantage.
At the CES conference, Qualcomm labeled itself as: large computing power, high performance, low power consumption and Lego-style openness.
Qualcomm's Chinese customers and self-driving unicorn company it invests in, Millima Zhixing, uses qualcomm's Snapdragon Ride hashrate platform, the veneer power 360 TOPS. In addition, customers using the Snapdragon Ride platform can also choose their own sensor solutions and automatic parking requirements according to their needs. From this point of view, in fact, this is also a kind of differentiated competition.
03
Write at the end
In 2018, Qualcomm tried to acquire NXP, but the deal ultimately failed for regulatory reasons.
But Qualcomm did not stop expanding, but poured more effort into the automotive industry. Past experience in the automotive industry has proven that having only hardware capabilities cannot support a company to become a key hot star supplier. The acquisition of Weininger is the first and most critical step for Qualcomm to fully blow the battle over the automotive supply chain.
Since the release of WEILAI ET7, new cars have set off a new round of "arms race", and large computing power chips have been warmly welcomed by the industry. In this context, NVIDIA and Huawei have become star suppliers. In stark contrast, the industry leader Mobileye is unsatisfactory in the domestic L4 field, and the order volume is getting smaller and smaller. This is a huge insertion gap for Qualcomm, seizing the opportunity to compete with NVIDIA.
Author: Bobo
Edit: June 3
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