Supply chains can afford to wait, sales volumes can't afford to wait.
Author | Home scale from the planet Magnesia
After weeks of a shutdown crisis, the auto industry finally sees hope for relief.
Last weekend, the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology released a "white list" to ensure the resumption of work and production, and in the list of 666 companies, the enterprises related to the automobile industry chain accounted for nearly 40%, becoming the object of "key guarantees".
However, there is still no sign of relaxation in the automotive industry in Shanghai: "Although the resumption of work has resumed, it has not actually been put into production." ”
On Monday, SAIC chose to start stress tests involving employees, supply chains, logistics, closed production management and epidemic prevention in the park; Tesla in the Lingang area also began to return to a two-shift production state.
However, after the actual visit of the local media, it was found that it was still difficult to restore the production rhythm before the production was discontinued.
This is still the case for large factories, and it is even more difficult for small and medium-sized factories to speed up.
Employees trapped in the factory
On March 14, before Shanghai tightened its control, SAIC Volkswagen's Anting plant received a 48-hour closed-loop quarantine notice. Originally, the workers only worked ordinary overtime as usual, but as the epidemic worsened, the workers were told to stay in the factory, sleep in tents or camp beds at night, and live the same closed life as other Shanghainese.
According to data from Future Auto Daily, more than 8,000 employees remain in the closed-loop production of SAIC Volkswagen's Anting plant. Thanks to the relatively closed environment, the factory still maintains the production plan while avoiding the spread of the epidemic, which also gives the Anting factory the ability to organize employees for the first time.
In contrast, the problem of employee attendance in other factories is much more difficult. Due to the lack of closed management conditions in these factories, most employees choose to work from home, but Shanghai's current "three-district management" policy and the increase in the layers of the community make it difficult for these employees to return to their jobs.
Judging from the first list of three districts released by Shanghai Municipality, in Pudong New Area, where the automobile industry is concentrated, the sealing and control areas and control areas account for nearly 54% of the whole district. Although Jiading District is not the hardest hit area of the epidemic, it is also under strict control.
In the absence of employees, even if the factory meets the conditions for resuming work and production, it is difficult to return to the pre-epidemic production schedule.
Stagnant capacity
Compared with the reduction in efficiency brought about by the lack of personnel, the stagnation of logistics is to dismantle the entire automotive industry chain into one independent island after another. Raw materials can't come in, products can't go out, even if the workers are on the job.
From March 31, the Anting plant, which lacked raw materials, went into a state of suspension. On the map, Anting Town is located at the junction of Shanghai and Jiangsu Province, but in the face of layers of epidemic prevention management at the highway, some truck drivers who lacked passes were forced to abandon their plans to go to Shanghai and stopped in Suzhou. At this time, the enterprises located in Anting can only be unloaded and transferred by forklifts and other means, and the transportation cost has risen sharply.
According to the Economic Observer, even in the jurisdiction of Suzhou, the policies of different regions for trucks are different, Suzhou has "Su cargo code", Kunshan has "Lulutong", Taicang has "Loucheng epidemic prevention", and they do not recognize each other. And with the seriousness of the epidemic, the epidemic prevention policy is constantly changing, and some areas have almost reached the level of "changing every day", which also brings challenges to freight management.
In order to reduce the isolation risk caused by epidemic prevention, many truck drivers and special logistics companies have chosen to enter the state of suspension. In the words of a logistics company practitioner to describe the current situation: "Logistics relies on drivers to circulate, and now that drivers have stopped, it is naturally difficult." ”
The situation in Suzhou is still the same, and the situation in Shanghai can be imagined. According to a logistics industry agreement seminar, since April, the proportion of toll stations and high-speed service stations in the Yangtze River Delta has been 14-30% and 30%-48%, and the traffic volume has plummeted by 40%-80%. Originally, the Freight Volume of the Yangtze River Delta could account for about 22% of the country's transportation, and road transportation accounted for about 73% of it, and now these industrial chain enterprises can only expect the highway epidemic prevention measures to be reduced, or switch to railways, waterways and other logistics methods.
At present, the Ministry of Transport, in response to the problem of "poor logistics operation in the Yangtze River Delta", emphasizes that "it is not possible to increase the number of layers and one size fits all". With the gradual improvement of the epidemic situation in Shanghai, the impact of logistics on the resumption of work and production will gradually decrease.
Not only to resume work, but also to restore industry confidence
"Confidence is more important than gold." An executive of a local parts company in Shanghai gave such an answer in an interview with the media.
According to the data of the National Bureau of Statistics, the total output of automobiles in Shanghai in 2021 totaled 283.32 million units, accounting for 10.68%, ranking second in the country, counting brands such as Weilai and Geely in Shanghai, shanghai car production can account for about 20% of the national total.
Before the shutdown, production in the Shanghai area had been in a relatively compact state of full production. As the number of production days continues to accumulate, the delivery of existing orders and the development of new cars will usher in a trough in April.
Taking Tesla as an example, the Shanghai Gigafactory produced a total of 55,000 new cars in March, and since March 28, the factory has been suspended for more than three weeks, which is equivalent to missing at least 40,000 electric vehicles, and at 300,000 yuan per vehicle, the loss will exceed 12 billion yuan, which is bound to have an impact on Tesla's second-quarter performance.
As far as the current situation is concerned, in the absence of logistics and manpower, the recovery of pre-epidemic production capacity in Shanghai's automobile industry is still far away. In this regard, the well-known industry analyst Guo Mingxi estimated on Twitter, "At present, Tesla's workload is roughly estimated to be about 40 to 50 per hour, while the water level of spare parts inventory is about 2.5 weeks, which is equivalent to about 25,000 to 30,000 electric vehicle shipments per month." If you want to return to the level of 80-85 before the epidemic, you also need to rely on factory epidemic prevention control, the progress of the resumption of work in the supply chain, and whether the logistics have improved significantly, so the production capacity of Tesla's Shanghai factory will not return to the pre-sealing level until mid-May at the earliest.
Tesla is still like this, and other companies in the industrial chain are even more difficult.
epilogue
In the past few years, events such as lack of cores and batteries have gradually become the "memory of the times" unique to this industry. The epidemic has made people realize that automobile manufacturing is not an island industry, and every link will affect the overall trend of the development of the entire industry.
For car companies, they need to rethink the problem of inventory again, once it has been impacted from the outside, the stability of the supply chain is bound to be hit, at this time, inventory is still one of the factors affecting profits?