In June 2023, the Hurun Research Institute released the "2023 Hurun China New Energy Industry Concentration City List", among the first-tier and super first-tier cities such as Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Suzhou, and Wuhan, there is an "inconspicuous" second-tier small city, which is tied for fourth place with Beijing in terms of comprehensive ranking.
Many people may not have heard the name of this city, but in the field of new energy, its power battery production and sales are among the best in the country, and one out of every 10 new energy vehicles in the world is equipped with a battery produced here (2022);
Her new energy vehicle production is 678,000 units, accounting for 7.1% of the country (2023);
BYD and Li Auto have built factories here;
Power battery giants CATL and China Innovation Airlines gathered here;
Tesla's Gigafactory batteries are produced from here;
The battery, sensors, gas springs and other parts of the Xiaomi car come from here......
This city is Changzhou.
In Jiangsu's "Thirteen Taibao", Changzhou's presence does not seem to be high. In terms of economic development, Changzhou ranked after Suzhou and Wuxi, and was once ridiculed as "Suzhou-Wuxi impermanence"; In terms of tourism resources, the Confucius Temple in Nanjing, the Slender West Lake in Yangzhou, the gardens in Suzhou, and the Taihu Lake scenery in Wuxi are even more famous.
However, Changzhou, which is such a "small transparent", has sprung up in the past two years and has become a place where China's new energy development cannot be bypassed.
In the Yangtze River Delta Economic Belt, where there are many masters, and in the new energy circle surrounded by strong enemies, why can Changzhou become China's "new energy capital"?
With this question in mind, I went to Changzhou.
01
Search for "Changzhou" on the Internet, and the figure of China Dinosaur Park will definitely appear.
This is the world's largest dinosaur theme park, with dinosaur elements all revolving around popular science, amusement, shopping, and accommodation.
So much so that the "stereotype" about Changzhou is also riding a dinosaur to work and school.
China is the country with the largest number of dinosaur species found in the world, and a variety of dinosaur fossils have been found in Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Sichuan and other places, but the number of dinosaur fossils unearthed in Changzhou is zero.
How did Changzhou, which doesn't even have a single specimen, build the world's largest dinosaur theme park?
The answer is simple, a "dragon" is born out of nothing.
In 1996, the 4th World Geological Congress was held in Beijing, and the participating museums donated a number of ancient fossils to the former Ministry of Geology and Mineral Resources.
Changzhou responded quickly and won the "first close contact" with dinosaur fossils.
In 1993, "Jurassic Park" was released in the United States, setting off a dinosaur boom around the world.
In 1997, the China Dinosaur Park, which covers popular science research, leisure and entertainment, officially broke ground in Xinbei District, Changzhou.
At that time, theme parks were still a rare concept in China, with China's first Happy Valley only opening in 1998, and Disney not landing in Hong Kong until 2005.
On the premise that there is no reference sample, starting directly from scratch, it can be seen that Changzhou is bold.
But to a certain extent, this is also the courage to be "forced", in terms of tourism resources, Changzhou does not have the innate advantages of Suzhou, Nanjing, Wuxi, can only give full play to the subjective initiative, to create conditions also on.
This is the "indissoluble bond" between Changzhou and dinosaurs.
For more than 20 years, Changzhou, which was once not associated with dinosaurs, has now given birth to a large number of special tourism and vacation products with strong themes and atmospheres, such as Dino Water Town and Dinosaur Valley Hot Springs, and Dinosaur Planet is also in full swing under construction.
This kind of "making something out of nothing" story also happened in Changzhou's new energy industry.
02
In 2009, the four ministries and commissions of the state jointly launched the "Ten Cities and Thousand Vehicles" plan, which opened the prelude to the development of new energy vehicles in China.
The new energy vehicle industry chain includes upstream raw materials, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earth and other mineral resources, and midstream parts, mainly including the core three-electric system (battery, motor, electronic control), of which the battery can be split into positive and negative electrode materials, separators, electrolytes, etc., and downstream vehicle manufacturing, including charging piles, software applications, terminal services, etc.
In the development of new energy resource endowment, Changzhou also has neither minerals, nor vehicle manufacturing experience, but in 2011, two years after the "ten cities and thousands of vehicles" proposed, Changzhou set up a new energy vehicle research institute, began to lay out the related parts industry, one year, has developed power supply, electronic control and electric drive 6 projects.
There is nothing surprising that urban development follows policy.
What is rare is that Changzhou's response speed is very fast.
In 2010, Changzhou came into contact with Boston Power, which was once known as "Tesla's opponent", which was a year earlier than the establishment of CATL.
In 2014, the State Grid announced that it would open the construction and operation of charging piles to social capital, and Star Charging was established in Changzhou, which later became the country's leading charging pile and operation enterprise;
In 2015, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Power Battery White List", and the first battery project of China Innovation Aviation (formerly "China Aviation Lithium Battery") landed in Changzhou, and in the same year, the BAIC New Energy High-end Industrial Base Project with a total investment of 10 billion yuan was settled in Wujin National High-tech Development Zone;
In 2016, Changzhou introduced the CATL era, which had not yet been visible at that time, and invested 780 million yuan in Li Auto with only 3 pages of PPT.
From introduction to self-construction, from battery and parts manufacturing to vehicle manufacturers, Changzhou has acted quickly and completed the layout of the new energy industry chain within five years.
Such a radical industrial layout is actually a microcosm of the national new energy investment boom during that period, and the corresponding cases are various cases of fraud and investment failure.
From the perspective of investment in new energy in Jiangsu, Sailin Automobile, which settled in Rugao, Nantong in 2017, and Byton Automobile, which announced the construction of a factory in Nanjing, as well as Yinlong and Zhidou Automobile, which "came back from the dead", have fallen silent after a short period of hustle and bustle.
Even Gaohe Automobile in Yancheng will be caught in a storm of shutdown in 2024.
However, Changzhou has relied on BYD and Ideal to produce seventy percent of new energy vehicles in Jiangsu with its own efforts.
Why can Changzhou be "alone"?
An important reason is the completeness of Changzhou's new energy industry chain - that is, the concentration of new energy industries mentioned at the beginning.
03
When I visit many factories and enterprises in Changzhou, one word I often hear is hidden champions.
For example, the star source material for battery separators, and Yougu New Energy for wind power spare parts, these enterprises rooted in Changzhou, except for industry insiders, it is estimated that no one has heard of their names, but their products are exported to the world, and their customers are BYD, CATL, LG, Samsung, wind power giant Envision Group, Goldwind Technology.
A battery separator, a blade screw, a solar photovoltaic panel coating...... It is these seemingly insignificant spare parts that form a complete industrial network.
At the Changzhou Grand Canal Industrial Heritage Exhibition Hall, there is such a set of data:
There are 41 major categories of industry in the country, 37 in Changzhou, 191 out of 207 medium categories, and 606 out of 666 sub-categories.
Especially in the power battery supply chain, Changzhou has 31 key links such as battery materials and battery system technology research and development, and the integrity of the industrial chain reaches 97%, ranking first in the country.
This means that you basically don't have to go out of Changzhou to save a power battery.
With a complete battery supply chain, there is the capital to attract CATL and develop the rising stars of China Innovation Aviation and Honeycomb Energy.
With a complete range of industries, a complete industrial system, and strong supporting capacity for auto parts, there are automakers such as BYD and Ideal.
However, the improvement of the supply chain is not enough, Changzhou's support for the new energy industry also includes real money investment and talent and technology reserves.
In 2018, China Innovation Airlines, which started in Luoyang, fell into business difficulties due to the adjustment of national subsidy policies, and at the critical moment, it was Changzhou Jintan District that was under great pressure, and through capital operation, China Innovation Airlines got out of the quagmire and became the "third" of domestic power batteries in one fell swoop, second only to CATL and BYD.
In addition, Changzhou also participated in the A round of financing of Honeycomb Energy, and fully supported Li Auto, which caused Li Xiang himself to sigh on Weibo, "We should be grateful to Changzhou, the business environment there is so good, so good that it is touching." ”
Therefore, when large and small car factories are in trouble because of production capacity, cost, technology, capital and other problems, Changzhou has come to the center of the stage in the new energy era with a highly complete industrial chain, the production and investment funds that should be shot when they should be shot, and research institutions such as Tianmu Lake Advanced Energy Storage Technology Research Institute and China Innovation Aviation Research Institute as technical backups.
04
In 2023, Changzhou's GDP will exceed one trillion yuan and officially enter the trillion city club.
But that's just the beginning.
The success of Changzhou New Energy is due to the high degree of industrial agglomeration, and in turn, the rapid iteration of terminal products will bring a faster response ability of the industrial chain, forcing upstream enterprises to continuously break through the limitations of technology and materials.
An obvious example is that today, when new energy vehicles are rolled into a twist, the next competitive field is solid-state batteries and autonomous driving.
Take solid-state batteries as an example, the industry is generally expected to achieve mass production and installation in the next 3-5 years, new energy vehicles to install solid-state batteries, power battery companies will invest in research and development, transmitted to the upstream, key materials, technology will also have breakthroughs.
For example, the aforementioned Xingyuan material, its main business is battery separator, in the past two years, because of the industry involution, the price has been rolled all the way from 30 yuan per square meter to a minimum of 5 cents, if the company wants to make a profit, it must continuously reduce the cost of product production through research and development and technological transformation.
When it comes to solid-state batteries, there is no need for a separator in theory.
I asked the person in charge of that company, what are you going to do if solid-state batteries come?
He said that solid-state batteries do not have separators, but there must be corresponding materials to isolate the positive and negative electrodes, but at present, it is limited by confidentiality agreements and cannot say much, but it is certain that the company is promoting the corresponding product line with customers (battery companies).
This is the industrial cluster effect - on the one hand, the large and small enterprises in the industrial chain are interdependent and complementary to each other, constantly calling for friends, and finally attracting "chain masters" to settle in through the scale effect, and the end products can promote upstream technology iteration, and finally reduce costs with scale, improve technology with innovation, and constantly create greater economic benefits.
At the same time, the development of the industrial chain can leverage more talents and greater capital to form a positive cycle.
For Changzhou, it is the comprehensive development of photovoltaics, transformers, power batteries and new energy vehicles, a closed loop of "generation, storage, transmission, use and network", and a new beginning of the new energy era.
05
When visiting Qingguo Lane in Changzhou, the local tour guide told us that in the Qing Dynasty, the "Yanghu Literary School" represented by local famous artists such as Yun Jing and Zhang Huiyan took "everything as the first class" as its purpose; The Changzhou School of painting, represented by Yun Nantian, realized the ambition of "shame is the second hand in the world".
These two sentences, passed down from generation to generation, have gradually evolved into today's Changzhou spirit of "striving for first-class and being ashamed of being second-hand".
Perhaps it is precisely because of this spirit that Changzhou worked hard to develop industrialization in the 80s and created a miracle of "learning from Changzhou in small and medium-sized cities".
It is precisely because of this spirit that Changzhou can still create conditions to build a dinosaur park when the congenital resources are insufficient, and start from scratch in the wave of new energy.
Of course, in the future, the development of new energy vehicles will inevitably usher in the explosion of intelligent cockpit and unmanned driving technology, which will involve more high-end materials, more precise manufacturing and more difficult chip breakthroughs.
In the post-new energy era, whether Changzhou is ready, the answer to this question must be handed over to Changzhou itself, which is "brave to strive for first-class and ashamed to be second-hand".