Source: Securities Daily
Reporter Ren Shibi
AI is sweeping the automotive track, bringing an "intelligent upgrade" to the automotive industry.
On July 6, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference that with the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, it is expected that full automatic driving will be expected around the end of this year.
Analysts said that since the beginning of this year, favorable policies have been introduced one after another, and many automobile manufacturers have also increased their efforts to improve the degree of automotive intelligence, promoting the continuous progress of intelligent driving technology, and accelerating the development of the industry, and the market size is expected to reach 600 billion US dollars. In this context, long-term funds such as social security funds, insurance funds, and QFIIs have laid out intelligent driving tracks to explore long-term investment opportunities in the intelligent driving industry chain.
The development of intelligent driving technology is accelerating
It is understood that intelligent driving refers to the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence to enable vehicles to have environmental perception, path planning and autonomous control capabilities, so as to achieve intelligent driving. Intelligent driving is divided into five stages: assisted driving, partial automatic driving, conditional automatic driving, highly automated driving, and fully autonomous driving, corresponding to level 1-5 respectively.
Since the beginning of this year, favorable policies have been frequently introduced, and the development of the intelligent driving industry has accelerated. For example, in May, the Beijing Municipal People's Government issued the Implementation Plan for Accelerating the Construction of a Globally Influential Artificial Intelligence Innovation Source in Beijing (2023-2025), which proposed to promote the smooth implementation of projects such as the Beijing High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone 3.0, improve coverage, build private networks and standardization platforms, promote the implementation of new products, and empower smart transportation with data.
It is worth mentioning that recently, Xin Guobin, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that the pilot of intelligent networked vehicle access and road traffic will be launched to support the commercial application of conditional automatic driving (level 3) and higher level automatic driving.
It is understood that at present, the test road mileage of intelligent networked vehicles has exceeded 15,000 kilometers nationwide, and multi-scenario demonstration applications such as autonomous taxis, unmanned buses, autonomous valet parking, trunk line logistics and unmanned distribution have been carried out in an orderly manner.
In this regard, Chen Yi, chief economist and director of the research institute of Sichuan Finance Securities, who was interviewed by the reporter of "Securities Daily", said that with the promotion of the pilot and the gradual improvement of digital infrastructure, L3 level intelligent driving technology is expected to achieve large-scale landing, and intelligent cars will provide drivers with automatic driving services in the true sense. With the continuous breakthrough of AI technology, the development of L4 and L5 intelligent driving technology is expected to be further accelerated.
"Intelligent driving is a major trend in future transportation development, and a series of technical difficulties such as high-precision map production and deep learning still need to be overcome." Yang Delong, chief economist of Qianhai Open Source Fund, told reporters, "With the continuous development and improvement of intelligent driving technology, it is believed that it will become the mainstream form of urban transportation and bring more convenient and comfortable experience to people's lives." ”
The industrial chain ushered in new opportunities
Recently, many subdivisions of the intelligent driving industry chain have received great attention from the market. Institutions generally believe that the current policies related to intelligent driving in various places have gradually landed, and L3 level intelligent driving is expected to make breakthroughs within this year. The landing of domestic L3 intelligent driving is a milestone, which will accelerate the application of this round of AI innovation in automobiles, and usher in new opportunities for the intelligent driving industry chain.
Data shows that the penetration rate of L2 level assisted driving in mainland China will reach 34% in 2022, and the penetration rate of L3 level autonomous driving will reach 70% in 2030.
"The great changes in automotive intelligence and electric vehicles have reshaped the industrial order, and we are optimistic about the golden decade of the automotive industry." Intelligence is the medium and long-term focus of the follow-up automotive sector, the essence of software-defined vehicles has not changed, the policy landing is expected to provide legal support for L3 high-level assisted driving testing and commercial use, Tesla FSD North America utilization rate inflection point appears, the landing of new forces NOA is expected to accelerate data accumulation and algorithm optimization, optimistic that the intelligent driving sector will continue to catalyze and the penetration rate of components such as domain controllers will increase in the second half of 2023. Cui Yan, an analyst at West China Securities, said.
Orient Securities believes that automotive intelligence is mainly reflected in the two aspects of automatic driving and intelligent cockpit, and the development of AI technology continues to improve the intelligent capabilities of automobiles: the application of AI large models in the field of autonomous driving will give rise to massive computing and data transmission needs, and the cloud and vehicle-end computing power hardware industries are expected to benefit; The application of perception large models drives the demand for sensor hardware, vehicle cameras, 4D millimeter wave radar, high-wire harness solid-state lidar are key sensor components, while multi-modal large models and NLP large models will promote the development of intelligent cockpits.
Since the beginning of this year, the intelligent driving concept sector has performed strongly. Flush data shows that from January 1 to July 7, the intelligent driving concept sector rose by 31.78% during the period, significantly outperforming the Shanghai Composite Index (cumulative increase of 3.47%) during the same period. Among the 204 constituent stocks in the sector, 167 achieved gains during the period, accounting for more than 80%. Among them, 9 concept stocks such as Zhongji Xuchuang, Dongtian Micro, Mingpu Optomagnetic, Huagong Technology, and Xinguodu all rose by more than 100% during the period.
"Intelligent driving is a hot track in the near future, with the strong support of policies, intelligent driving is an important direction for future development and can be paid attention to for a long time." It is recommended to pay attention to leading companies in the industry with core technologies and real competitiveness. However, the recent sector gains are relatively high, and you need to be wary of pullback risks. Yang Delong said.
Underlying stocks are favored by long-term funds
Recently, "intelligent driving" has become a hot word in the A-share market, and relevant listed companies have also responded to investors' concerns.
Mankun Technology said on the investor interactive platform on July 7 that automotive electronics is the key area of the company's market strategic layout, and the company's PCB products are widely used in many fields such as automotive unmanned driving.
Zhongji Xuchuang said on the investor interactive platform on July 5 that the company's main business includes the research and development, production and sales of ultrasonic radar, vision sensors, smoke sensors and body controllers. Among them, some products can be applied to the field of unmanned driving, and the development trend and market demand in this field have played a positive role in promoting the company's business development.
Under the background of good development prospects in the industry, intelligent driving concept stocks are favored by long-term funds such as social security funds, QFII, and insurance funds.
According to data from Oriental Wealth Choice, as of the end of the first quarter of this year, among the 204 listed companies in the intelligent driving concept sector, 77 of the company's stocks were heavily held by social security funds, pensions, QFII, insurance funds and other institutions, accounting for nearly 40%. Specifically, social security funds, QFIIs, pensions and insurance funds appear in the list of the top ten shareholders of 33, 30, 7 and 26 companies respectively.
Further combing found that among the 33 companies held by the social security fund, 10 companies were held by the social security fund for five consecutive quarters; Of the 30 companies held by QFII, 8 have been held by QFII for five consecutive quarters.
Talking about the main reasons why long-term funds are optimistic about related stocks, Chen said that first, AI technology has achieved further breakthroughs this year, which is expected to accelerate the development of intelligent driving technology. Second, domestic favorable policies continue to accelerate, while the marketization process of intelligent driving has been further accelerated. At present, the industry is in its infancy, with good future development prospects, strong growth and strong investment value. Third, there are many subdivisions of the intelligent driving industry chain, and there are more intelligent driving industry chains and investment opportunities among A-share listed companies. These three factors attract long-term funds to enter the layout.
For investment opportunities in this sector, Chen said that with the continuous advancement of policies and technologies, the marketization of L3-level intelligent driving is accelerating, and the intelligent driving industry is expected to enter a period of rapid development, and enterprises in various segments will continue to benefit, driving the sector to strengthen. In the long run, it is recommended to pay attention to the fields of intelligent driving software algorithms, lidar, automotive chips, by-wire sites and intelligent vehicle manufacturing.