Source: Stills from "Trafficking"
There are no airtight walls in the world, but Apple can build cars. Although the latest developments in Apple's car are in the news from time to time, no one can say the specifics. After 8 years of building a car, I have not seen a car, and the problem has returned to the original point of "whether Apple can still build a car."
Until recently, Tianfeng International analyst Guo Mingxi posted on Twitter that "Apple's auto project team has been disbanded for a while", which seems to further verify the speculation of the outside world. Guo Mingxi- nicknamed "the strongest Apple analyst on the surface", it is said that he correctly predicted multiple generations of products from the earliest iPhone 5, and even the information that was revealed many times was confirmed to be completely correct.
Compared with the 76.4% accuracy of the revelation according to media statistics, Guo Mingji's "superpower" that is easily overlooked is his position in the hearts of retail investors. On February 18, 2020, Guo Mingxi said that "USI is the biggest SiP winner in the Apple industry chain", and in the afternoon of the same day, THEI electronics' stock price touched a limit on A shares.
Back to Guo Mingxi's revelations about Apple's car, even if the authenticity of the information is difficult to verify, it still set off an uproar. Combing the timeline of Apple's car can be found that it is basically connected by the news of "insiders". Among them, Guo Mingji's research report and "breaking news" have set off waves in the capital market several times. This time, is Guo Mingqi also "prepared"?
#01
Apple built a car N times restarted
According to foreign media reports, Apple's car-making "Titan Project", which began in 2014, underwent the first team "purge" in 2016. The reason is that there is a dispute between the route of autonomous driving and semi-autonomous driving, and Steve Zadesky, apple's vice president of product design, the head of Apple's car at the time, chose to leave.
In the summer of 2016, former Apple executive Bob Mansfield began to take over and restart the Apple car project, and internally determined the direction of specializing in autonomous driving. However, in January 2019, Apple was again rumored to have removed more than 200 employees from the auto project. Bob Mansfield also left office in 2020.
At the end of 2020, John Giannandrea, Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, was appointed to take over Bob Mansfield's position. It is reported that John Giannandrea reported directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, which shows the importance Apple attaches to the car project.
In 2021, foreign media are still reporting that Apple cars may appear earlier than expected, but Apple cars have ushered in a wave of executive departures. Meta (formerly Facebook) poached more than 100 employees of Apple's auto project in a matter of months, sources said. Once again, the team set up by John Giannandrea was disbanded.
That is to say, in the 8 years from the establishment of the Titan plan to the implementation, every change in executives was accompanied by a major change of team members. In this process, autonomous driving has been one of the core keywords of the Titan program. After 8 years of groping, Apple's attitude towards autonomous driving has also changed subtly.
In 2017, Tim Cook, who has always been silent about car manufacturing, said bluntly in an interview with the media that automatic driving is the mother of all artificial intelligence projects and a core technology that Apple attaches great importance to. However, in the past two years, Tim Cook said of the car-making plan, "Apple is keen on the integration of hardware, software and services, and found the intersection of these aspects, which we think will be a miracle."
#02
Guo Mingxi, who is it?
Like Tim Cook, Kuo's attitude toward Apple's self-driving project is changing.
According to public information, Ming-Chi Kuo graduated from National Chengchi University in Taiwan with a master's degree in business administration and has worked in electronics industry and securities investment analysis at DigiTimes, Kanghe and KGI KGI Securities. According to media reports, he is a recognized analyst in the technology industry, and has been called "the strongest Apple analyst on the surface" by the media in many different countries, and his characteristics are to provide customers with a complete supply chain thinking, horizontal and vertical industry context and several global market portfolio strategies.
Guo Mingxi
It is worth noting that Guo Mingxi is particularly good at analyzing "fruit chains". In June 2021, Guo Mingxi predated the market news, predicting that Luxun Precision's iPhone assembly business would have significant growth, and in the following days, Apple's concept stocks in China changed, and Luxun Precision's stock price rose by nearly 10%. It is based on Guo Mingxi's many accurate judgments on Apple's main business that he has "won the god of the first war" in the hearts of shareholders who care about Apple's movements.
Guo Mingxi's judgment on Apple's car project began as early as 2018. In an investor report, he talked about a series of future plans for Apple, including Apple's A-series chips, Mac computers, Apple cars, and the Apple Car. He pointed out that TSMC will produce custom chips for Apple's driver assistance systems in the future. He gave an optimistic prediction for Apple Cars: Apple cars will be able to achieve Level 4 or Level 5 fully autonomous driving, and this driving system will arrive sometime in 2023-2025.
In December 2020, Guo Mingji pointed out in a tweet that Apple has a lagging gap in the field of autonomous driving, and questioned, "If Apple Cars want to succeed in the future, the key success factor is big data/artificial intelligence, not hardware." One of Apple Cars' biggest concerns is that when Apple Cars launches, the current self-driving car brand will accumulate at least 5 years of big data in favor of deep learning/artificial intelligence. As a latecomer, how will Apple overcome this backward gap? ”
Then, almost at the same time, another "source" revealed to Reuters that although Apple's car-making project has not been going well, Apple is advancing its self-driving car technology and plans to release its own passenger car by 2024. As soon as the news came out, the stock prices of some of Apple's existing or potential partners rose. Among them, the stock of Velodyne Lidar, a manufacturer of lidar sensor systems, rose 14 percent, and Apple tested vehicles using the company's lidar.
Fast forward to 2021, which is the year with the most news and movement since Apple's car-making plan surfaced. On January 10, 2021, Korean media reported that Apple and Hyundai Group plan to produce "Apple Car" at the Kia plant in Georgia. After this news was exposed, Hyundai's stock price was bullish for the next period of time.
On February 2 of the same year, Guo Mingxi also gave the latest expectations for Apple's car manufacturing, he believes that if the cooperation model with Hyundai goes well, Apple will also cooperate with General Motors and Citroën Group to develop other Apple car models or enter other markets. At the same time, he predicted in the report that the launch time of Apple cars will be postponed from 2024 to 2025. However, a few days later, Hyundai motor issued a statement saying that it had not negotiated with Apple on the construction of the car. As soon as the news came out, Hyundai's market value evaporated by $3 billion, and Kia's stock price fell by 15% in an instant.
Coincidentally, Guo Mingji's many "prejudgments" of Apple Cars are accompanied by waves in the capital market. A source close to Apple also revealed a similar view to the car market Story, "Maybe after a while, there will be another release of car-making progress." ”
#03
Is mass production in 2025 a must?
In fact, shortly before Guo Mingxi broke the news on social media on March 15 that "Apple's car-making team disbanded", it was reported that Apple was cooperating with South Korean company OSAT to develop a chip for Apple Car's self-driving function.
A few days later, on March 9, at Porsche's annual results video conference, CEO Oliver Blume said he had discussed "exciting common projects" with Apple. "We've already partnered on CarPlay,"We're already working on CarPlay, and we're going to expand a bit more in the future." Oliver Blume said, "It's too early to make any conclusive conclusions about future projects. ”
Although Apple has never answered the question of building a car head-on, this matter does not need to be argued again. In the era of personal mobile devices, Apple has established itself as a hegemon. To continue to stay ahead of the next generation of personal devices, electric vehicles are the best entry point. A US stock analyst said in the exchange with the car market Story that this time Guo Mingxi's revelation did not have much impact on Apple's stock price, partly because Apple's car manufacturing is a long-term strategy. Although the launch time of Apple's car is still uncertain, the smart car business will not have a greater impact on Apple's revenue and valuation in the short term.
Apple's stock price has risen in the following days after falling to a low of $150 on March 14 over the past two weeks. A group of analysts pointed out that the volatility of Apple's stock price has little to do with the company's fundamentals. Against the macro backdrop of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, oil prices and the dollar soaring, the entire stock market is under pressure.
"Does it matter when Apple built the car?" For Apple, it's not that urgent. What car doesn't support Apple's CarPlay now? A car networking engineer from a joint venture car company revealed that although many car companies are currently promoting their own car machine systems by canceling third-party operating systems such as CarPlay, in exchange for a more imaginative market in the future - value-added services for automotive space. However, for many fuel vehicle users, CarPlay is an important must-have when buying a car.
As Chen Hong, chairman of SAIC Motor, worries, in the era of smart electric vehicles, the "holistic solution" given by technology companies may reduce car companies to another form of foundry. Baidu, Huawei, and Xiaomi have also realized that without automotive hardware as soil, the car-machine system will always be just a castle in the air.
Apple naturally understands this truth. The fact that it has not built a car in 8 years does not mean that Apple has not made progress in the automobile business. The question of "Apple still can't build a car" does not need to be repeatedly argued, after all, even Guo Mingxi has left a way back for his own revelations: re-forming the team within 3-6 months can achieve mass production in 2025.
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