Recently, Huawei Yu Chengdong's sentence "Buying a fuel car now is like buying a functional machine in the era of smart machines" was "scolded" on the hot search. The red and blue camps have their own views on this point of view, and we will leave it aside for the time being. As a Hongmeng developer said: When Yu Zong often says something, that is what he (Huawei) focuses on. We can also see from all aspects that the current position of smart cars in Huawei's strategy of rising again is relatively important. This article will briefly analyze from several aspects: Can smart cars save Huawei?
This year, Huawei changed the original consumer BG to terminal BG, and Yu Chengdong was transferred to the CEO of smart car solution BU and the director of the IRB of smart terminals and smart car components, and its focus has also shifted to smart cars.
According to a public report by Radar Finance, in February this year, Yu Chengdong said in an internal speech that "Huawei cars have overturned Tesla in one year, soared in two years, and annual sales should quickly exceed 2 million vehicles, and BBA (Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi) should be killed." ”
Why "annual sales should quickly exceed 2 million vehicles"?
As we all know, Huawei was sanctioned by the United States in 2019, and then after several rounds of blows, it still resisted, and the sales performance in 2020 still grew, reaching 891.3 billion yuan (RMB), but the revenue in 2021 has been significantly reduced by 254.5 billion yuan, falling to 636.8 billion, down 25.8%.
Source: Huawei's official 2021 annual report
The biggest reason for the sharp decline in revenue in 2021 is that high-end 5G chips have been cut off and smartphone sales have fallen off a cliff.
In 2019, Huawei's terminal business (smartphone) revenue reached 467.3 billion yuan, accounting for 54.4% of the total revenue, contributing more than half of the company's revenue;
In 2021, Huawei's terminal business revenue was 243.2 billion yuan, close to the waist compared with 2019. At the same time, the proportion of the terminal sector in total revenue in 2021 fell to 38.2%.
At present, the prospect of Huawei resuming the supply of high-end chips such as 5G is still uncertain. In order to save itself, and in order to rise again and achieve phoenix nirvana, Huawei had to find another area that is likely to achieve large revenues. According to the current trend, combined with Huawei's precipitation and technology, it can only be a smart car (new energy electric vehicle).
For Huawei, in order to achieve another increase in revenue, or at least basically flat, it needs to make up for at least 250 billion yuan of revenue due to the decline in smartphones. In the next few years, Huawei's revenue on smart phones may continue to decline more, or even to the freezing point, then it will have to make up for more than 460 billion yuan, nearly 500 billion revenue gaps.
The burden of making up for this revenue gap is estimated to fall on Yu Chengdong, so there is a goal of "rapid annual sales of more than 2 million vehicles" in the front.
Because, at present, the most suitable price of smart cars (or new energy electric vehicles) positioned in the industry is about 250,000, which is also the positioning of China. To achieve revenue of 250 billion, you need to sell 1 million cars, and to completely fill the gap of nearly 500 billion smartphones, you need to sell 2 million cars.
This should be yu Chengdong's goal of "2 million vehicles"!
When will we achieve our annual sales target of 2 million vehicles?
In April, two months after his internal speech in February this year, Yu Chengdong changed his tune in an interview: "In the case of the lack of cores in global cars, it is impossible to achieve 300,000 vehicles." Because the supply is not available. If we can do 1.2 million units in the first year, it is already a miracle. ”
In the past year or so, the hardest hit area of chip shortage in the semiconductor industry is precisely in the field of smart cars. According to the industry's TSMC, Intel and other executives in 2021 forecasts, chip shortage problems will be alleviated in 2022. More recently, however, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact and chip shortages in the semiconductor industry continue to worsen, the industry has once again predicted that it will take at least 2024 to resolve.
Although the highest demand for chip shortage is in the field of smart cars, the production capacity of semiconductor fabs has not been tilted to this field on a large scale, according to the author's recent "From TSMC's 2017-2022 Performance Analysis to the Global Chip Industry and Shortage Trend" article:
In 2021, TSMC produced 26% of the world's semiconductors, and its net revenue by platform was: 44% from smartphones; 37% from high-performance computing (HPC); 8% from the Internet of Things; and 4% from cars. In addition, 4% came from digital consumer electronics, while the other accounted for the remaining 3%.
In 2019, TSMC's wafer production capacity in automobiles accounted for 4%, and the proportion of automotive semiconductor production capacity in 2019-2021 remained basically unchanged.
It can be seen that although the shortage of automotive chips is the most serious, for the most upstream fabs in the semiconductor industry chain, its sales revenue is far less than 1/10 of that of smart phones, so it does not get enough attention and capacity tilt.
Despite the rise of a large number of domestic chips, the wafer production is there, and downstream design companies can only "look forward to the ocean".
Therefore, according to industry forecasts, 2024 can solve the problem of chip shortage, and according to the changes in the objective situation in recent years, it may not be until 2025 that there will be a rich supply of automotive chips. According to this trend, Huawei will have to wait at least 3 years to achieve the goal of "2 million vehicles per year".
However, to really achieve annual sales of 2 million vehicles, it is not necessarily so easy or smooth.
Let's look at sales in the automotive industry.
First of all, let's look at how many years tesla, the leader of the new car manufacturing, has been selling 1 million vehicles?
In 2020, Tesla's global delivery volume is close to 500,000 units, truly ushering in its own blowout period, of which the Chinese market demand is huge, and the Model3 sales in the Chinese market alone have exceeded 130,000 units.
According to statistics, from 2008 to 2020, Tesla spent more than 12 years to complete the sales of 1 million new cars in its industrial history.
Note that this is a total of one million vehicles that took 12 years. Of course, with the foreshadowing of the front, the back is much easier.
Tesla's global deliveries in 2021 are 936,000 units. Among them, the Shanghai Gigafactory delivered a total of 484,100 vehicles, accounting for 51.7% of Tesla's total global deliveries. The Shanghai plant not only undertook deliveries to China's auto market, but also more than 160,000 units to be exported to other countries in Europe and Asia in 2021.
With qualitative changes, the quantity has also increased rapidly. Tesla aims to sell 20 million vehicles a year by 2030.
Of course, it cannot be said that Tesla took 12 years to achieve annual sales of nearly 1 million vehicles, and Huawei also needs 12 years.
Because of the promotion of the trend of new forces to build cars and the support of the policies of various countries around the world, especially China, coupled with Huawei's own basic precipitation and technology accumulation, to achieve the annual sales target of 2 million vehicles, for Huawei now, the process may be much faster.
But due to international and domestic competition from automakers, the process will certainly not be quick.
Annual sales of automobiles in the Chinese market
In January 2022, the China Passenger Vehicle Association officially released the annual sales data for 2021: from January to December last year, the cumulative retail sales of the national passenger car market reached 20.146 million units, an increase of 4.4% year-on-year.
From January to December 2021, the wholesale volume of new energy passenger vehicles reached 3.312 million units, an increase of 181.0% year-on-year, and retail sales reached 2.989 million units, an increase of 169.1% year-on-year. The trend of new energy vehicles and traditional fuel vehicles has become a strong difference, the former has a partial substitution effect on the latter, and the entire automobile market has begun to accelerate the transformation to new energy in 2021.
According to China's "New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan (2021-2035)", by 2025, the sales volume of new energy vehicles will reach about 20% of the total sales of new vehicles, which is expected to be achieved in 2022. The plan proposes that after 15 years of continuous efforts, pure electric vehicles will become the mainstream of newly sold vehicles.
That is to say, in the next 14 years from this year, the sales of new energy vehicles in the Chinese market will start at 4 million and gradually grow to more than 20 million, with a compound annual growth rate of about 13%.
By 2025, this time node, that is, the time point when the shortage of automotive chips may be completely solved, the sales of new energy vehicles in the Chinese market are expected to reach about 6 million.
Then, if Huawei wants to achieve the annual sales target of 2 million vehicles in 2025, it needs to occupy 1/3 of the new energy market share.
In a conversation with car critic Wu Pei in April, Huawei Yu Chengdong said in a conversation with car critic Wu Pei: "Huawei's entry into the automotive industry is to be the first, which is both a belief and a vision, and I will definitely do it." ”
epilogue
At the beginning, Yu Chengdong said that there will be only three smartphones left in the future, and indeed, by the heyday of 2019, only Huawei, Xiaomi and OV will be left in the Chinese market. In the international market, it is mainly Apple, Samsung and Huawei (at that time, Xiaomi and OV's share in the world was not yet the top), and Huawei's market share once became the second. If it were not for sanctions, Huawei smartphones might have become the number one in the global market.
Now, in order to save itself and rise again, Huawei has chosen a variety of paths, including on May 26, Huawei held the inaugural meeting of the third batch of legions and systems departments. In the past six months, Huawei has established a total of 15 legions, covering coal mines, smart roads, customs and ports, smart photovoltaics, data center energy, power digitalization, government one netcom, airports and rails, interactive media, sports health, display new cores, parks, wide area networks, data center bases, and digital site industries.
These legions are all oriented to the industry and professional fields, and the annual revenue created by a single legion may not be too large, of course, their diversification is a powerful guarantee for Huawei's foundation.
To imagine the rapid rise of the original smartphone and obtain large revenue, it is necessary to rely on the possible mass consumption field: smart cars (new energy electric vehicles).