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Producer / Node Finance
In the mid-to-late 19th century, the famous British writer Dickens wrote in the book "A Tale of Two Cities", "This is the worst of times, this is the best years; this is the winter of disappointment, this is the spring of hope; we have nothing in front of us, we have everything in front of us." ”
Today, a hundred years later, the "great differentiation" has once again stood on an unprecedented cusp -- a small number of countries and enterprises with comprehensive advantages in resources, systems, and science and technology have taken advantage of the wind and led the times ahead, while most of them have disappeared into the torrent of history.
At present, the Russo-Ukrainian war is in full swing, global commodity prices have soared, and Europe, which lacks coal and gas, has been forced into a dilemma in an instant, which has also sounded an "alarm bell" for all countries in the world.
But on the other hand, conflict has prompted economies large and small to accelerate the pace of energy transition. Ethan Zindler, an analyst at BloombergNEF, Bloomberg's energy data and analytics division, said: "This bodes well for the energy transition in the long run. ”
As early as the beginning of 2021, the mainland set a double-carbon target, that is, to achieve carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060, and to build the underlying logic with intelligence and digitalization.
In this way, a billion-level industry that integrates intelligent technology, digital technology, and electronic power technology- digital energy came into being, and is regarded by the world as a deterministic development trend in the next 30 or 40 years.
The general trend has arrived, and it will be destroyed and decayed. There are always some enterprises with a sensitive sense of business smell that will perceive the signal of change in advance, and dig deep and accumulate grain for it, such as Huawei.
However, rooted in itself, at this node to turn out the old book with great fanfare, Huawei also has the "bitterness" of the crowd.
/ 01 /
Digital energy, trillion track "pulling out"
The digital empowerment of energy has long been successful in the world.
At the end of the 1970s, the U.S. energy consumption industry was seriously "inward-coiled", with more than 260,000 gas stations in the territory, a large number of overproduced refineries, and traditional oil companies struggled in fierce market competition, with declining profitability, but consumers were confined to their inherent defects and could not enjoy affordable oil prices.
Born in 1986, FleetCor, by setting up a universal payment system and issuing refueling universal payment cards to commercial vehicle fleets, connecting fleets and gas stations to each other, has reversed the imbalance between upstream overcapacity and downstream channels to a certain extent, and gained a development opportunity from it.
Today, China's energy industry in the context of double carbon is facing similar difficulties as the United States.
On the one hand, due to objective factors such as technical equipment, operation management, and process routes, the energy consumption efficiency of the mainland energy industry is low, the delivery cost is too high, consumers bear high prices for a long time, and industrial chain companies often "lose blood".
According to 2020 data, China's energy consumption per unit of GDP is about twice that of the United States, 3 times that of Japan, and 4 times that of the United Kingdom.
On the other hand, as a manufacturing country, after a long period of high carbon emissions, the problem of environmental pollution has not been fundamentally solved, and clean energy is imminent.
Node Finance learned that China's total energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions surpassed those of the United States in 2009 and 2005 respectively, ranking first in the world as the world's largest energy consumer and the largest carbon dioxide emitter.
But on the back of the grim situation, there is a market with great potential for energy conservation and emission reduction.
In accordance with the direction of the evolution of human society, this energy transformation has obvious characteristics of the times, carbon neutrality, low energy consumption, green environmental protection and networking, digitalization, and intelligence, which not only represent the dissolution of the main vein of traditional fossil energy, but also indicate the opening of an era driven by new energy.
According to a research report released by the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the scale of the mainland's digital economy reached 39.2 trillion yuan in 2020, accounting for 38.6% of GDP, an increase of 9.7% year-on-year, and is one of the most active, innovative and radiating new economic forms at present; in the same period, the mainland's energy consumption has accounted for more than 20% of the world.
That is to say, the digital energy derived from the cross-derivation of the two will be a trillion-dollar starting market, such as wind and solar power generation, energy storage, charging, industrial and building energy conservation, site and data center energy saving, distribution network, etc., are one of the scenarios.
Nowadays, "photovoltaic panel power generation, shepherding sheep under photovoltaic panels, making the desert an oasis", is no longer a poetic enjoyment, thanks to the help of digital energy, the scene of "the sky is clear, the wild is vast, the wind blows grass is low to see cattle and sheep" in the Song of Shule is spreading freely on the arid surface of the Great Northwest... One day, the desert will become an oasis.
The curtain of a new cycle has suddenly opened, who will be the brightest North Star in the future? Regardless of whether it is a conspiracy or a "conspiracy", Huawei's determination to re-warehouse digital energy is fully revealed.
/ 02 /
Heavy warehouse digital energy
What is Huawei's "hard power"?
In the digital energy track that resists the wind and waves, Huawei looks like a "new recruit", but it is actually a "veteran".
Although its reputation in this field is far less than that of the communications industry, it has been around for two or three decades.
Silently play a "call", according to the "2020 Global Photovoltaic Inverter Supplier Market Ranking" released by the US market research institute Wood Mackenzie, Huawei, Sungrow Power and SMA occupy the top three in shipments.
Furthermore, Huawei has firmly held the top spot since 2015, and its position is even stronger than that of the base station market.
In fact, Huawei entered the photovoltaic inverter industry as early as 2013. Earlier, in 1995, Huawei also established a company specializing in the production of power supply equipment - Huawei Electric.
Although the company was later sold to Emerson in the United States in 2001, many technical backbones from the Huawei system were scattered all over the sky, and as entrepreneurs, they grew into the backbone of China's energy field, such as Huichuan Technology, which has a market value of 100 billion, founder Zhu Xingming once served as Huawei's electrical product director, Wu Nonghua, founder of Xinrui Technology, and Tong Yongsheng, founder of Magmit, all of whom served as vice presidents of Huawei Electric.
In other words, Huawei has never left the energy industry.
In June 2021, Huawei Digital Energy Technology Co., Ltd. was officially unveiled. Compared with many cross-track players, what Huawei has done is more like an organizational upgrade, putting past business into a "basket", indicating that the emphasis on digital energy has deepened, and also coordinating the strategic planning and R&D investment in the future, and responding to the complexity of the market level in a timely manner.
In the view of Node Finance, Huawei's strength in digital energy still lies in hard technology strength.
Relying on the digital technology and electronic power technology accumulated in the field of information and communication for many years, Huawei itself has the ability to provide partners with energy solutions including all-scenario intelligent sites from fixed network to wireless, and intelligent data centers from edge to cloud, helping operators achieve green, efficient, safe, reliable, and intelligent operation and maintenance.
Source: Huawei's official website
For example, a 100 MW photovoltaic power station, covering an area equivalent to more than 100 football fields, according to the traditional practice, it takes two months for enterprises to complete the manual inspection of components in the power station, but in the application of digital energy technology in the smart photovoltaic power station, click the mouse, no more than 20 minutes can be done.
In 2022, Huawei will once again clarify the development path of digital energy. The company listed this section separately in the 2021 financial report, and drew a blueprint for it: committed to the integration of digital technology and power electronics technology, the development of clean energy and energy digitalization, the promotion of energy revolution, and the construction of a green and beautiful future.
It is worth noting that in Huawei's newly announced business architecture, digital energy is promoted to a first-class service alongside operators BG, HiSilicon, and HUAWEI CLOUD.
/ 03 /
Digital energy
Can it become Huawei's "Noah's Ark"?
The story of Noah's Ark goes on forever. In order to allow the good-hearted Noah and his family, as well as the livestock, birds and beasts on land, to escape a flood created by God's punishment of the wicked, God instructed Noah to build a large rectangular ship and eventually survived.
Later, people often used Noah's Ark as a metaphor for the life-saving straw in times of crisis, or the meaning of life being saved and life reborn.
Today's Huawei, it is difficult. Revenue in 2021 fell 28.6% to 636.8 billion yuan, and the consumer business has fallen to half the size of 2019 after multiple rounds of sanctions; Huawei HiSilicon's revenue in 2021 plummeted by 76% to $1.5 billion, falling out of the world's top 25 semiconductor suppliers.
Source: Huawei financial report
Surviving with quality, as it was last year and the year before, is the humble appeal of the communications giant.
However, "selling and selling" is not a long-term way (In 2021, Huawei will sell Glory and North Korea Fusion), and building more "Noah's Ark" is the way to go.
As Rotating Chairman Guo Ping said in Huawei's 2022 New Year speech: increase investment in digital energy root technology, develop clean energy and promote the digital two-wheel drive of traditional energy... Only by reducing food and clothing can not achieve high-quality survival, adhere to strategic investment, strong self-improvement can have a future.
Judging from various moves, digital energy in Huawei is exactly the existence of "Noah's Ark" and one of the key breakthrough points for increasing revenue.
According to public information, Huawei currently has about 6,000 employees in the digital energy sector, accounting for 60% of R&D employees, and has set up 12 R&D centers in China, Europe, Asia-Pacific and other places, with business in more than 170 countries and regions.
Financially, Huawei's digital energy business maintains an annual growth rate of about 20%, with revenue reaching 37.7 billion yuan in 2020 and more than 30% in 2021, with a conservative estimate of about 50 billion.
According to the performance guidelines given by Huawei, the smart photovoltaic legion will have a revenue of 20 billion yuan and a profit of 4 billion yuan in 2022, and a revenue of 30 billion yuan in 2023. The data center energy corps will have a revenue of 15 billion yuan and a profit of 3 billion yuan in 2022; in 2023, the revenue will be 22.5 billion yuan and a profit of 4.5 billion yuan.
That is to say, this year, only smart photovoltaics and data center energy in digital energy can contribute about 35 billion yuan of revenue to the company, and other site energy, vehicle power supply, module power supply and so on.
The close up view was good and so was the long view. But because of this, this track has attracted more and more attention from enterprises.
According to incomplete statistics, in 2022, science and technology enterprises represented by ZTE and Industrial Fulian have set up independent departments for digital energy, and many energy central enterprises such as state grid, china southern power grid, Sinopec, national energy group, China energy construction, and state power investment are also like carp across the river, throwing themselves into the tide of digital energy.
According to enterprise investigation data, as of March 15, there were 1,163,600 existing enterprises (note: enterprise names, brand products, and business scope) related to "digital energy, photovoltaic, new energy, and energy management systems", of which 56,700 were added in 2021, an increase of 154.93% year-on-year; there were 159 related existing enterprises with digital energy words in their names, of which 93 were added in 2021, which was 8.45 times that of 2020.
This means that compared with the past, the competitive pressure faced by the "forerunner" Huawei is not the same, and the "Noah's Ark" journey adds a few variables, and it is too early to say that it is the pillar of the company's hundreds of billions of revenue.
But regardless of the industry game, we are convinced that the digital energy industry has marched on the Kangzhuang Avenue, as Wu Xiaobo wrote at the beginning of "Thirty Years of Turbulence": "When this era comes, it is impossible to be sharp." All things grow freely, dust and dawn rise, rivers converge into rivers, nameless hills rise into peaks, and the heavens and earth are incomparably open for a while."
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