With the proposal of carbon neutrality goals and the landing of related policies, the era of power exchange with replacement charging is quietly coming to us.
In the field of more convenient and lightweight electric vehicles, imada e power exchange, China Tower, easy riding, Yugu Technology, Xiaoha power exchange, etc. have become the forerunners of the power exchange road, and then Emma and AI power exchange have entered the power exchange track, and Yadi has launched a love exchange and exchange platform, which further accelerates the "out of the circle" of the power exchange mode.
In the automotive field, with the rapid development of new energy vehicles, there are new requirements for charging. Saving charging time with the mode of replacement charging alleviates the user's mileage anxiety to a certain extent and meets the needs of public travel. The large demand for endurance has also attracted new car-making forces and traditional car companies to compete for layout.
Recently, WEILAI announced the completion of the 700th substation, which means that the number of constructions this year has increased by nearly 10 times compared with last year, and the 2021 annual target has been completed ahead of schedule; this year, BAIC BJEV also plans to build more than 100 substations in Hainan, Dongguan, Zhuhai, Shenzhen, Shandong, Shanxi and other provinces and cities; in November 2021, Geely will further exert its efforts in the field of new energy.
Signed cooperation agreements with Chongqing Liangjiang New Area and Fuling District; in addition, Geely Technology Group also plans to invest in the construction of a 12GWh power battery project in Fuling District. Prior to this, Geely also set a target of building 100 substations in Chongqing in 2021 and completing more than 200 by 2023. And it is ready to build Chongqing into a demonstration city for power exchange, and with the local as the center, it will radiate to other provinces across the country, covering cities, highways and provincial roads.
In fact, Geely's layout of the power exchange mode has begun as early as 2017, and it is not difficult to understand the field of increasing the number of power exchanges now, but why did it choose Chongqing as the core area for power exchange? Under the situation that the power exchange mode is not mature and there are many thresholds that need to be broken, can Geely's plan to achieve rapid coverage of the power station replacement be smooth?
Why Chongqing?
As a mountain city, Chongqing is not only a hot food capital, but also carries the dream of many big factories.
Such as Yubei Chang'an Passenger Car, Jiangbei Changan Auchan, Yubei Lifan Automobile, Yubei SAIC-GM-Wuling, Fuling Brilliance Xinyuan Siwei, Yubei Beijing Hyundai, Banan Changan Suzuki, Yongchuan Great Wall Motors, etc. are all located in Chongqing.
The reason is not only that Chongqing has a long history of automobile manufacturing, in the last century, Chongqing has become the main battlefield and heavy military vehicle production base of the third-line construction of military enterprises with strong industrial strength, and has a rich accumulation in automobile manufacturing, and also has a complete automobile industry chain.
It can export products along the Yangtze River to central And Eastern China, and can be deeply cultivated in Yunnan, Guichuan, Chongqing and open up the dominant position in southeast Asia and Central Asia markets, making many parts manufacturers layout here, forming a closed-loop advantage in the whole industrial chain of talents, markets, logistics, headquarters operations and so on. In particular, the low-end half-business and half-ride industrial chain is the most developed, and the industrial supporting costs of newly settled car companies are low.
It is also because Chongqing has become the fourth national-level vehicle networking pilot zone in the country, which makes the development of Chongqing and the Internet of Vehicles more advantageous, attracting car-making forces to settle in.
Coupled with the support of national and local policies, for car companies that have established vehicle bases, settling in Chongqing Liangjiang New Area, which has the title of "National Economic Development Zone", can enjoy relevant national preferential policies and mature and efficient government operation capabilities, it is not surprising that Geely chose Chongqing as the starting station and key layout area.
Create a new pattern of new energy vehicles
Since the landing of relevant national policies, new energy has become an outlet, and new and old car-making forces have continued to lay out in this direction.
In 2019, Geely rushed into the third place in the sales volume of domestic new energy companies with good sales. But this heat has not been maintained, and by 2020, Geely's market share in the new energy automobile industry has fallen to the ninth.
(Data: China Business Intelligence Network)
From January to September 2021, the sales growth rate of the great wall and Chang'an, the top three independent domestic independents, was particularly rapid. According to the statistics of the Association, during the period, Geely had 921,700 vehicles, an increase of 5.3% year-on-year; the Great Wall had 884,000 vehicles, an increase of 29.9%; and Chang'an had 900,000 vehicles, an increase of 40.1% year-on-year. Although Geely's sales volume is in the front, its growth rate is far less than that of the Great Wall and Chang'an. The large-scale establishment of the substation carries Geely Automobile's considerations in terms of sales and market to a certain extent.
This first starts from the positioning of the service subject of Geely's new energy vehicles. Compared with the C-end users that Weilai faces, Geely is mainly facing the B-end users who run taxis and online ride-hailing cars, and then slowly penetrate into the C-end. The logic lies in the needs of B-end users for power exchange modes to be more stable, more mainstream, and more rigid.
At this stage, Geely's service model in the power station is currently mainly Lifan Maple Leaf 80V, but soon there will be a Maple Leaf 60S for taxis, an official car 80X, etc., so in Geely, it has a strong shared travel brand Cao Cao Travel, which is also more conducive to the promotion of Geely's new energy vehicles. In addition, at present, local taxis in Chongqing are still fuel vehicles to a large extent, and the demand for new energy vehicles in the future is huge. Then, in this wave of transformation process, the service of Geely substation is expected to usher in a wave of explosive benefits.
After that, Chongqing will gradually expand the "radiation" of the substation in key cities across the country with Chongqing as the center, which can also be understood as Geely cultivating potential customers. Because in the next 5-8 years, with the elimination of China IV and below models, China will have 200 million new car consumption demand, Fu Bingfeng, executive vice president and secretary general of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, said at the 2021 China Automobile Industry Forum.
After solving the mileage anxiety problem of the battery life after the replacement power station is established, consumers may be more inclined to new energy vehicles. Because on the cost side, consumers will buy a car at a lower cost.
Under the separation of vehicle electricity in the future power exchange mode, consumers can choose not to buy power batteries and adopt the rental method, which greatly reduces the cost of car purchase and is very conducive to the promotion of electric vehicles. Enterprises can also launch a variety of sales solutions according to the power exchange to promote the growth of their car sales.
Nowadays, whether it is the market, policy or demand, they are constantly promoting the power exchange track to a larger scale, but behind the favorable environment, there are still many problems in the early stage of development of the power exchange model, and there are many "thresholds" that need to be crossed.
Battery Standards and Costs: The Inescapable Problem of Changing Phones
Unified battery standards are a unified problem to be faced in the field of power exchange and a threshold that cannot be stepped forward for the time being. For example, from the previous launch of the love exchange and replacement platform between Yadi and the Great Yangtze River Group, the unified battery standard is still an important factor restricting the promotion and development of the replacement power station.
Du Fangci, an adviser to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, also said in an interview with the media that the biggest difficulty of the power exchange mode is that the battery standard is not uniform: "It is difficult to establish a unified battery standard. Taking mobile phone batteries as an example, the development of many years has not formed a unified standard in the industry. ”
Although Geely's intelligent substation adopts a modular architecture of high-compatibility power exchange platform, it can be adapted to a variety of models. However, at present, it mainly serves lifan maple leaf 80V, and soon there will be models such as maple leaf 60S for taxis and 80X for official cars, and the number of models that are actually applicable is still not much.
In addition, we are going to focus on the issue of cost. Geely has set a target of completing more than 200 substations by 2023 and operating 5,000 smart substations worldwide by 2025.
According to public information, the basic operating cost of a substation is from 6.8 million yuan, and the actual cost of battery, the basic cost of the substation and the operating cost may be higher, and the large-scale construction will test the financial pressure of car companies. Because like the automobile industry, it belongs to a long-term industry with heavy investment and slow return.
The high cost of batteries is a common problem in the field of power exchange, which is also what Geely, who is in this track, has to face. Since 2018, Geely has shown a downward trend in terms of revenue and net profit. Revenue decreased from 106.595 billion yuan in 2018 to 92.114 billion yuan in 2020, and net profit decreased from 12.553 billion yuan in 2018 to 5.534 billion yuan. Then, Geely's large-scale construction of substations is bound to require a lot of investment.
Many years ago, companies that abandoned this plan due to excessive input costs, such as the Israeli company BetterPlace, which tried to promote the power exchange model as early as 2007, but it was difficult to sustain it because it was difficult to balance the operating input and revenue. In 2013, Tesla also briefly tested the water and power exchange model, and finally gave up due to the high price of power exchange and inconvenient operation.
Although it is no longer the same with the different times, the root causes that hindered the development of this leading group many years ago, such as high input costs and difficulty in achieving a balance of benefits, have not been solved accordingly. Although the construction of the replacement power station can be regarded as Geely's layout of the new energy ecology in advance, under the background of the current pressure on revenue and net profit trends, Geely still needs to pay attention to the balance point between them, so that the market can see more clearly. But this is not a matter for Geely alone, but a process in which the entire industry and many car companies need to explore the answer together.
Source of this article: New Industrial Insights