Author: Taylor, Editor: Little City Sister
China is the world's largest consumer of automobiles, accounting for nearly a third of the global market, but on the other hand, China lags far behind the West in the field of traditional fuel vehicles.
What is more desperate is that fuel vehicles have entered the tail stage of innovation after hundreds of years of development, the technology of core components such as engines and gearboxes has matured and solidified, the United States, Japan, and Europe are firmly stuck in key links, and China can only be locked in low-value-added areas as "dry batteries", and it is not realistic to overtake in curves.
If you can't overtake the car in a corner, then change lanes and overtake.
Electrification has basically flattened the position of the Chinese and foreign automobile industries, and in the era of intelligence, China has been at the forefront of the world. In the first three quarters of this year, the market share of independent brands in the Chinese market reached 43.3%, an increase of 6.8pcts year-on-year, and the fundamental reason was the rise of smart electric vehicles.
In the field of intelligent driving solutions and OEM manufacturing, a number of companies that are at the forefront of the world have been born.
Baidu Apollo has the world's largest open platform for autonomous driving, including almost all major automakers, providing autonomous driving solutions for related enterprises.
At the vehicle level, independent brands have greatly improved the intelligent configuration, and new models such as Weilai, Xiaopeng and Great Wall are generally equipped with high-computing platforms, of which the single-vehicle computing power of Weilai ET7 is even as high as 1061TOPS, as a comparison, Tesla's FSD HW3.0 hashrate is only 144TOPS.
The industry runs fast, all relying on the government belt.
Previously, the "Intelligent Connected Vehicle Technology Roadmap 2.0" plan released by The mainland put forward a plan for the development of intelligent vehicles. Specifically, it is divided into three stages: 2020-2025 is the development period, 2026-2030 is the promotion period, and 2031-2035 is the maturity period.
In addition, it also gives a clear development goal, proposing that by 2025, the sales volume of L2 and L3 new cars will reach 50%, and by 2030, it will exceed 70%. By 2025, domestic PA-level and CA-level intelligent networked vehicle sales will account for more than 50% of total vehicle sales, and the new car assembly rate of C-V2X terminals will reach 50%.
According to the data of the Prospective Industry Research Institute, in 2020, the industrial scale of the intelligent car market reached 255.6 billion yuan, an increase of 54.3% year-on-year.
In the next few years, under the guidance of the government and the promotion of the industry itself, the slope of the growth curve of smart cars will become more steep, and the institutional outbreak of the industrial chain is just around the corner.
However, it is frustrating that the status of China's vehicle industry and the status of the parts industry are seriously imbalanced.
In the era of intelligent cars, automatic driving and intelligent cockpit are the main links to open up the gap in user experience, of which automatic driving is the "core proposition". However, the hardware industry chain of automatic driving was peeled off, only to find that it was originally within the control of foreign capital.
Autonomous driving domain controllers are the core components of smart cars, and the world's Head and Face Tier1 giants have basically laid out autonomous driving domain controllers, such as Visteon DriveCore, Bosch DASy, Continental ADCU and so on.
Further development, the technical key to the domain controller is to have a strong computing power support, to put it bluntly is the need for a high-performance master chip.
In the ECU era, MCU chips are the main force, and the suppliers are mainly giants such as NXP, Texas Instruments and Renesas Semiconductor, and there is nothing to do in China.
After entering the DCU era, the complexity of operation processing increased exponentially, so MCU chips were replaced by SoC chips. The SoC chip integrates the CPU, AI chip, and NPU, of which the AI chip is the core.
At present, the automatic driving AI chip is basically in the hands of NVIDIA and Mobileye, especially NVIDIA, the technology path is very radical, and the Xavier chip and Orin chip launched by it are the mass-produced chips with the highest computing power on the market in the same period. In contrast, domestic companies such as Huawei, Horizon, and Black Sesame are still in their infancy, with a small market share.
In order to make the car have the ability of positioning, path planning, and decision control, it must be connected to external cameras, millimeter wave radar, lidar and other hardware, which has become the standard of smart cars.
Image sensors are the core of the technology of in-vehicle cameras, and currently cars mainly use image sensors (CIS) based on CMOS technology. Among them, the American company On Semi is the absolute leader in the automotive camera CMOS industry, with a market share of nearly 50%.
Domestic car camera manufacturers are mainly non-listed companies such as Beijing Jingwei Hengrun and Guangzhou Yigu Electronics, and their competitiveness is relatively weak.
In the field of lidar, Valeo's (French auto parts supplier) SCALA lidar is the first mass-produced product in the industry, according to the 2020 global lidar manufacturer ranking provided by Yole Développement, Valeo's market share is about 28%, ranking first, while Huawei ranks 12th in the world, but the market share is only 3%.
Millimeter-wave radar is more concentrated, with the world's top five companies such as Bosch, Continental, and Denso monopolizing 75% of the market share.
Due to the hardware such as cameras, lidar, and millimeter-wave radar, the number of sensors in the perception layer has increased significantly, so higher requirements have been put forward for data transmission and transmission rate, which has further promoted the volume and price of connectors.
The value of connector bicycles on traditional fuel vehicles is about 1,000 yuan, but the value of bicycles in smart electric vehicles can reach 3,000-5,000 yuan.
But unfortunately, such a large incremental market is also controlled by foreign capital, the three giants Tyco Electronics, Amphenol and Moshi total market share of more than 35%, Japan's Yazaki (Yazaki), JAE (avionics), JST and other companies also have a certain market share. In contrast, Chinese mainland only Luxshare Precision entered the top ten of global connectors, with a market share of only 4.6%.
The commanding heights of the intelligent chassis have also been occupied by foreign companies, and the current suppliers of the line control dynamic system are mainly Bosch, Continental, ZF, etc., of which Bosch occupies an absolutely leading market position.
From a comprehensive point of view, the right to speak in the intelligent car hardware industry chain is almost all in the hands of foreign investors, and local enterprises are still in a marginal position, is there no chance at all?
Not really.
A very important reason why local companies still have the opportunity to turn over is that the automotive supply chain is facing a historic reshaping and reshuffle.
In the era of fuel vehicles, almost all the main engine factories in Japan, the United States and Europe have fixed parts supporting enterprises.
For example, the main suppliers of German OEMs are Bosch, Continental, ZF, the main suppliers of American OEMs are Lear, Johnson, Delphi, denso, Hitachi, Aisin, etc. mainly supply Japanese OEMs.
The essence of smart cars is ICT, in the current popular saying is software-defined cars, the direct consequence of this change is to smash the traditional supply chain pattern, many OEMs began to bypass the traditional Tier1, and directly cooperate with the original secondary suppliers. The most typical is NVIDIA, which has established cooperative relations with a number of head car manufacturers.
This means that the monopoly barriers that traditional foreign Tier1 spend decades to build will be weakened in the era of intelligence, and new entrants will have the opportunity to win in chaos.
More importantly, China's strength in the ICT field is strong, and related companies have cross-border intelligent electric vehicles, such as Huawei, OPPO to enter the smart cockpit, Alibaba, Tencent and other adaptations to in-car information services, which will have a pulling effect on local hardware suppliers.
While the industrial chain is facing a reshuffle, technology is still iterating, which also gives latecomers the opportunity.
For example, the core of the current SoC chip is the GPU, but the GPU cost is high and the power consumption is large, so customized FPGA chips and ASIC chips have now been introduced.
FPGA is a semi-customized chip, compared to the GPU has obvious performance and energy consumption advantages, but the cost of mass production is high; ASIC is a customized chip, which requires customized research and development, with a long research and development cycle and low cost performance due to large-scale tape-outs. At the same time, overseas suppliers have high customized development costs and strong voice, and may not necessarily cooperate with automakers to carry out customized development, but independent suppliers are easy to compromise due to relatively backward technology and scale, and R & D services respond quickly.
If most of the software algorithm technology route is standardized in the future, asICs that integrate performance and cost advantages will form an alternative effect on GPUs. Local companies can fully establish contacts in advance to prepare for future transitions.
From the overall point of view, in order to enhance their competitiveness, OEMs often need to make differentiated advantages in experience, and in many links, suppliers are required to have highly flexible customized development capabilities, and domestic enterprises can fully demonstrate the ability to respond quickly and flexibly.
Finally, the R & D investment and cost pressure of automakers in recent years has increased significantly, especially since last year, the price of upstream raw materials has increased sharply, so that the cost of car companies has increased sharply, ANDD's gross profit margin has declined for four consecutive months, in this context, the price advantage of domestic suppliers will also be magnified.
China stands at the commanding heights of smart cars, but the follow-up troops still have a long way to climb. China is the world's largest consumer of automobiles, accounting for nearly one-third of the global market, and the huge domestic demand market provides a huge space for enterprises to develop in depth.
The road is tortuous, but the future is bright.
disclaimer
This article involves the content of listed companies, which is the author's personal analysis and judgment based on the information publicly disclosed by listed companies in accordance with their statutory obligations (including but not limited to temporary announcements, periodic reports and official interactive platforms, etc.); the information or opinions in this article do not constitute any investment or other business advice, and Market Value Watch does not assume any responsibility for any action arising from the adoption of this article.
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