Author | Guo Zhaochuan
Edit | Magi
Whether it is the new energy car company Tesla, "Wei Xiaoli", or the traditional car company SAIC and the Great Wall, they have all been disrupted by the sudden epidemic control.
On April 9, WEILAI posted that due to the suspension of production of supply chain partners in Jilin, Shanghai, Jiangsu and other places, WEILAI's vehicle production had to be suspended. Five days later, on April 14, NIO's Hefei production base gradually resumed production.
Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory announced its suspension of production on March 28 and officially resumed work on April 19, with a cumulative shutdown of 22 days, the longest shutdown since the plant was completed and put into operation.
Traditional car companies such as Great Wall Motors also announced the suspension of production of some of their models on April 14.
Shanghai is known as the "New Energy Vehicle Capital of China". According to the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics, Shanghai's automobile production alone will reach 2.8332 million units in 2021, accounting for 10.68% of the country's automobile production. In order to promote the resumption of production of automakers, on April 11, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officially launched the "Automotive Industry Chain Supply Chain Smooth Coordination Platform" to help automotive industry chain supply chain enterprises timely feedback and solve practical difficulties. The State Council issued the Notice on Earnestly Ensuring the Smooth Flow of Freight Logistics to ensure the smooth flow of transportation channels.
Among the new energy vehicle companies located in Shanghai, Tesla is one of the first 666 "white list" key enterprises to start resuming work and production in the "Work Plan on Carrying out Key Enterprises to Ensure Operation (Trial)". In addition to Tesla, the "white list" also includes auto parts suppliers such as Schaeffler, Valeo and Aptiv.
What is the pace of new energy vehicle companies resuming work and production at present? In the dilemma of continued difficulties in manpower and supply links, who among the new forces such as Tesla and "Wei Xiaoli" is "hurt" the most?
1, a daily subsidy of 400 yuan, Tesla resumed work
On April 19, Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory officially resumed work, and more than 8,000 employees have arrived.
Among them, some front-line workers have entered the "closed-loop production", which means that they must eat and live in the factory, and also have a corresponding subsidy of 400 yuan per day.
News about the resumption of work at Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory, Image source: Asia Financial News
According to Bloomberg, the workers who put into "closed-loop production" do not have enough dormitories, and many people sleep on the floor at night, but fortunately, Tesla will provide employees with daily necessities such as three meals a day and shower equipment for employees who resume work and production.
New energy vehicle companies that also actively promote the resumption of work and production include Weilai Automobile. After announcing production on April 9, WEILAI said on April 14 that its Hefei production base is gradually resuming production.
According to the research report data of Guosen Securities, only from the perspective of factory capacity located in the epidemic area, the new energy vehicle company most affected by the epidemic should be Tesla - after all, its super factory in Shanghai is said to have an annual output of up to 450,000 vehicles.
The new energy vehicle companies Xiaopeng and Weilai, the factories are located in Guangzhou, Guangdong, Zhaoqing, Guangdong, Wuhan, Hubei and Hefei, Anhui, respectively, and there is currently no limited production capacity in the epidemic area.
In fact, whether new energy vehicle companies in the epidemic area can successfully resume work and production depends greatly on whether two difficult problems can be solved. The first is, of course, the return of personnel to work, and the second difficulty is the supply of spare parts.
Taking Tesla's Shanghai factory as an example, due to the limited number of workers returning to work, the intensity of single work has increased accordingly. The "two shifts" that originally worked 8 hours a day in the factory were also changed to a "one-shift system" - working 12 hours a day, working 6 days a week and resting one day.
According to the "First Finance" report, there is still a gap between the actual number of workers and expectations. Statistics from a Shanghai car company found that less than 40% of the total number of employees who really meet the conditions for resuming work are added, and if there is a conflict with the specific epidemic prevention system of the local neighborhood committee, this proportion will even drop to 30%. In the case of insufficient personnel, the recovery of production capacity has encountered the first hurdle.
Another influence on the actual production plans of car companies is the recovery of parts production and whether the supply chain is smooth.
"Because the supply of parts is a problem, the decline in production does exist." An industry insider told Xiaguang News Agency, "Normally it comes according to the order plan, and it is too late to react when it is suddenly sealed." "In particular, the procurement of parts by many large OEMs requires a series of certifications, approvals and publicity, and it is difficult to find spare parts suppliers in a moment and a half.
Another interviewee who is engaged in the rubber assembly industry around Shanghai revealed: "A rough calculation of the order losses caused by this closure accounted for 42%, 42% and 46% of our order volume from January to March, respectively." "The company is a supplier to many large domestic car companies, and between March 29 and April 9, the car companies affected by their company's insufficient production capacity include GM, Volkswagen, Great Wall, Geely and so on.
The parts supply chain is "stranded", resulting in many car companies having to reduce production capacity. "Many domestic suppliers' production bases are in Shanghai, and if production of parts can be resumed, the problem of supply cuts can be solved by more than half."
The person in charge of Tesla's Shanghai area also mentioned in the interview that even if a single shift is fully produced within three or four days, the inventory of vehicle parts is only about a week of consumption. If the normal production of auto parts suppliers cannot be restored and the logistics chain is closed-loop, the pressure to resume work and production is still very large.
Other new energy vehicle companies such as Nezha and Zero Run are also paying attention to the supply chain early warning system every day. Nezha Automobile once said in an interview that they will not only pay attention to the first-level parts suppliers, but also pay attention to the inventory of the second-level parts suppliers and the local epidemic prevention policies.
Source: He Xiaopeng Weibo
2, "butterfly effect", Weilai under pressure
In an automotive forum, someone gave Tesla and Weilai an account for each.
According to the daily production capacity of Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory of 2,000 vehicles, the production loss of more than 20 days of production that was recently discontinued for more than 20 days will reach more than 40,000 units. If Tesla's Shanghai plant is delayed until early May to restore production capacity, according to the previous forecast of JL Warren Capital, the loss will reach 84,000 units.
The production capacity of the NIO Jianghuai plant is 700-800 vehicles per day, and the lost production capacity of one week of suspension will reach more than 5,000 units. And Weilai's monthly sales in February this year were only 6131 vehicles.
If the supply of parts continues, NIO's losses may be further expanded. Based on the average sales price of 420,000 yuan previously announced by WEILAI, the production capacity of 5,000 vehicles involves more than 2 billion yuan in future revenue.
However, in Tesla's Q1 earnings call on April 21, Musk was confident in the Shanghai factory, believing that "we can see Record production in Shanghai in the second quarter, and the numbers in the third and fourth quarters will be better." "In addition, the capacity of its new Berlin and Texas super factories is rising, which can be used to compensate for the loss of capacity in the Shanghai super factory, and the actual delivery pressure may be alleviated."
The problem that Weilai has to face is not only to restore production capacity, but also to resolve more and more "realistic helplessness" in the game of "high-end electric vehicles".
On the one hand, Weilai's promise of "no price increase" had to be punched in the face on April 10, and finally officially announced the price increase of a number of models. Li Bin, the founder of Weilai, helplessly said in the Weilai APP that "the price increase is also forced, please understand.".
On the other hand, Weilai's sales data in March was only 9985 vehicles, which has been overtaken by new forces such as Nezha and Zero Run, which have come later, and even fallen out of the first echelon of domestic new energy vehicles. In the crisis of backward delivery, if you face huge capacity waste and delivery pressure, it is obviously worse for Weilai.
In addition, although weilai Jianghuai base is in Hefei, its international headquarters and mass production vehicle research and development center are in Shanghai. At the beginning of the establishment of Weilai in Anting Town, Shanghai, the core supply chain location was laid out within a radius of 600 kilometers with Shanghai as the center of the circle.
Li Bin's explanation of the parts supply and suspension of work was "in mid-March, some parts of Weilai were cut off, relying on some parts inventory to barely support", which was actually due to the suspension of production by its parts suppliers in Jilin, Shanghai, Jiangsu and other places, which caused the butterfly effect. The central control and battery modules required for the production of the whole vehicle, as well as the windshield, front-view camera, etc., all need the continuous supply of NINGDE Times, Fuyao Glass, and the suppliers of United Electronics, Bosch, ZF, Pirelli and so on in Shanghai.
The component supplier clusters gathered around Shanghai involve tens of thousands of enterprises, of which there are thousands of core large-scale parts suppliers. Large international parts companies such as Bosch, BorgWarner, ZF and other factories are gathered around Shanghai.
As Li Bin said, "a car is not able to produce a part", which has finally become the biggest obstacle to its resumption of work and production.
Some of the 666 "white list" enterprises related to the automotive supply chain Source: "Work Plan on Carrying Out Key Enterprises to Ensure Operation (Trial)"
3. Supply chain management, the pain point of the whole industry
After Weilai Li Bin, Huawei Intelligent Car Yu Chengdong, and Tesla Musk expressed their views on new energy vehicle companies affected by supply chain obstruction, on April 19, Li Xiang, CEO of Ideal Automobile, also published optimization suggestions for the parts management system of new energy vehicle companies in the circle of friends:
"In addition to solving the problem of the supply of parts in front of them, all auto brands must also do a special management work: analyze in advance the small and medium-sized parts suppliers that you never need to manage, including the three- level, four-level, and five-level, and their survival problems in this epidemic."
The impact of the "shutdown curse" is so extensive that not only makes the importance of the first-level and second-tier suppliers of car companies more and more prominent, but even the small and medium-sized parts suppliers that were previously selectively ignored have also been included in the ranks of "analysis and investigation" by car companies. In the future, these car companies want to reduce risks, not only to adjust the order plan, but also to help and support small suppliers.
Supply chain constraints and parts shortages are not a new problem. Tesla has been "burned" more than once by the obstruction of parts supply.
At the beginning of the global epidemic in the past few years, Tesla's battery system was provided by Panasonic Battery in Nevada, usa, and the Shanghai Gigafactory was once cut off due to the impact of the epidemic in the United States, and the factory was temporarily shut down.
Under such "lessons learned", Tesla has been trying to expand the parts capacity of its Shanghai Gigafactory in the past two years, until the localization rate of parts in the Shanghai Gigafactory has reached 86%-90%. Thanks to this, tesla's Shanghai super project last year exceeded the capacity of its Fremont factory in California.
The resumption of work in the lights of the Tesla factory Source: Little Red Book users
The shortage of chip supply has long become a common problem faced by new energy vehicle companies in recent years. Tesla and Weilai have stopped production more than once because of chip supply shortages, and the main reason outside the epidemic is that the chip demand of new energy vehicle companies has far exceeded the production and supply capacity of fab manufacturers.
On March 29 last year, Weilai Jianghuai Manufacturing Factory once suspended production for 5 working days due to "lack of core". In September last year, Weilai once again lowered its expected new car deliveries in the third quarter due to chip shortages, from a target sales volume of 23,000-25,000 units to 22,500-23,500 units.
Judging from the shutdown, SMIC, Huahong and TSMC have large-scale wafer foundries in Shanghai, and chip suppliers such as Freescale and Deyi are also within the radiation range. According to the data given by the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology at the end of 2021, Shanghai is the most important agglomeration of the integrated circuit industry, with the scale of the surrounding industries accounting for 1/4 of the country, and more than 700 key enterprises in the industry.
In order to truly realize the resumption of production and work of car companies, in addition to the return of workers to work, it is key to solve the supply of parts, especially the production and logistics of chip suppliers. In the post-epidemic era, many car companies may have to change the original inventory cycle, increase the purchase of parts and components and hoarding.