Ideal car: Chip shortage continues! Better to ask for help

Automobile Information Network, May 24th. Facing the continuous chip shortage, Li Auto finally couldn't sit still.Recently, Ideal established a wholly-owned subsidiary in Mianyang, Sichuan, Sichuan Ideal Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: Ideal Intelligent Technology).According to Tianyancha, the registered capital of the new company is 100 million yuan, and the legal representative is George Li. Its business scope includes integrated circuit chip design, auto parts and accessories manufacturing, and new energy vehicle sales.Although Li Auto has not yet responded to this matter, considering that Li Auto has suffered from millimeter-wave radar chips due to the impact of the epidemic...

Auto Information Network, May 24th,in the face of the continuous ch ip shortage, Li Auto finally couldn't sit still.

Recently, Ideal established a wholly-owned subsidiary in Mianyang, Sichuan, Sichuan Ideal Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: Ideal Intelligent Technology).According to Tianyancha, the registered capital of the new company is 100 million yuan, and the legal representative is George Li. Its business scope includes integrated circuit chip design, auto parts and accessories manufacturing, and new energy vehicle sales.

Although Li Auto has not yet responded to this matter, considering that Li Auto has suffered from a shortage of millimeter-wave radar chips due to the impact of the epidemic, the new car had to be reduced in delivery, and the terminal sales of products have been affected. Researching chips has a deeper appeal.

Ideal for "passive" entry

With the improvement of automobile intelligence, the number of chips required to manufacture a car is also gradually increasing. It is reported that the number of chips suitable for a traditional fuel vehicle ranges from 40 to 150. The current popular new energy vehicles demand for chips The amount is 4-5 times that of traditional fuel vehicles, and the entire automotive market is very dependent on chips.

However, due to the global spread of the new crown epidemic, there has been a continuous shortage of chips.Secondly, high-end chips of consumer electronics such as mobile phones have suppressed the production capacity of automobile chips. After all, consumer-grade chips have lower requirements and higher profits than automobile chips. Therefore, chip foundries are more willing to put into production lines to produce consumer-grade chips, so there is a supply and demand of automobile chips. unbalanced situation.

In addition to this, the geopolitical tensions threaten the production of neon gas, which is indispensable in the chip manufacturing process, exacerbating semiconductor shortages and driving up prices.Take a body electronic stability system core chip produced by STMicroelectronics as an example. The original price was only about 20 yuan a year ago, and the current quotation in the SEG electronics market in Huangpu District, Shanghai has reached 2,800 yuan.

On May 10, TSMC held a 2023 chip order meeting with customers in advance, and informed that from January 2023, it will comprehensively increase the foundry prices of advanced and mature processes again. According to different customers, products and order sizes, the increase is about 5~9%.This is also a key factor why new energy vehicle companies generally increase prices after 2022.

According to industry insiders, at present, even if car companies do not buy high-priced off-the-shelf chips, the delivery cycle of ordinary ordered chips is frequently extended, from about 6 months in the past to an average of 12 months, and some chip companies have issued The estimated delivery cycle of 36 months is really unbearable for those new forces who are short of money and urgently need delivery.

As a representative of new energy car companies, Ideal Auto is naturally suffering from the shortage of parts and components. It even came up with a delivery plan of delivering chips first and then adding chips. In April, 4,167 Ideal ONEs were delivered, down 24.77% year-on-year. , fell 62.23% month-on-month, and the month's sales were only more than one-third of January, the lowest since February last year.

In addition, Li Xiang mentioned in the first-quarter financial report of Ideal Auto that medium-sized products in the range of 200,000-300,000 yuan will be dropped in the future, including range-extended and pure electric models.It is reported that Li Auto will launch 3 new models next year, including Li Li’s first medium-sized car of 200,000-300,000.Obviously, with such a huge product matrix in the future, relying on suppliers to provide chips will definitely not satisfy, and self-developed chips can better alleviate the "stuck neck" problem.

On one side is the rising chip price, and on the other side is the delivery volume and future planning of the company, which has forced the ideal, a new force in car-making, to the road of self-developed chips.

Can car companies develop their own chips?

According to the financial report of Ideal Auto for the first quarter of 2022, the free cash flow of Ideal Auto was 502 million yuan, and as of the end of the first quarter, its cash reserves reached 51.19 billion yuan.Abundant cash flow can support Li Auto to continue to develop with strong strength in a few years.

But having funds does not mean that self-developed chips can be accomplished overnight. Among automotive chips, the most in short supply is MCU chips. This type of chip is almost monopolized by foreign chip manufacturers. Except for BYD, the market share of Chinese manufacturers is almost 0. .

For example, Weilai Automobile established a Smart Hardware hardware team in 2020, announcing the start of self-development of self-driving chips; Xiaopeng Motors announced in April 2021 that it has launched the self-driving chip project in China and the United States at the same time.However, judging from the current situation, the progress of its autonomous driving chip project has not been announced to the public. It is not difficult to see that for car companies, self-developed chips are indeed facing a lot of difficulties.

As we all know, automotive chips are notoriously "difficult to make".In terms of working temperature, operating stability, anti-interference performance, service life, and low failure rate, automotive-grade chips are "completely abused" by consumer and industrial control chips.Taking the fault tolerance rate as an example, the number of errors allowed for consumer chips per million chips is 300-500, but the fault tolerance rate is infinitely close to 0 due to the personal safety involved in automotive-grade chips.

Miao Wei once said at the 2022 China Electric Vehicle Hundred People's Conference that many auto companies are worried that their investment in chips will affect the existing supply chain cooperation. On the other hand, they are manufacturing automotive chips, especially high-end automotive-grade chips It is not a one-day achievement, and even the probability of failure is greater.

Manufacturing chips is already a strategic issue, so most of the new car-making forces are deploying through investment, and chips are an inevitable part of it.However, the chip manufacturing process and division of labor are very mature. Under the current technology, it takes at least three years for chip manufacturing to form a production capacity.In addition, judging from the increasing domestic market demand, self-developed chips are now completely unable to keep up with user needs.Even as powerful as Tesla, it needs foundry Samsung to make chips.

From definition, design to tape-out and mass production of a chip, it is by no means an overnight thing.Now, car companies that have started to develop their own chips may still have decades of self-sufficiency.However, even if it will take a long time to achieve self-sufficiency, there will still be many new energy car companies in order to be self-sufficient. Like ideal cars, they will join the team of self-developed chips without hesitation. After all, the taste of being stuck in the neck is real. Not feeling well.

However, although the road to core making is difficult, don't forget that the ideal car has always been unusual.From the miniature car at the beginning, to the top three new car-making forces with only one ideal ONE, even in the future product planning, the ideal car also shows a distinctive side, in addition to continuing to expand its growth in the future. Cheng product camp, in terms of electrification, the pure electric products it wants to do are also different from any form of products currently on the market. It is specially designed for the special form of pure electric power.

And Li Auto also said that in the same price range, there will be pure electric and range-extending products, and the product forms are different.Its product solution is very similar to that of the iPhone. For different price points, with the help of an effective technology platform, different products are launched to precisely meet different consumer needs at different price points. Such a product strategy is really rare.

In addition, the ideal car is also at the top of the new car-making forces in terms of "making money".In the first quarter, Li Auto's gross profit was 2.16 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 250.9%, and its gross profit margin was 22.6%, a year-on-year increase of 5.3%.

Li Auto's gross profit margin data is second only to Tesla, and it is not only the most dazzling among the three new car-making forces, but also not inferior to the three independent giants of traditional auto companies, BYD, Geely, and Great Wall. In 2021, they are The gross profit margins were 17.39%, 17.1%, and 16.16%, respectively.

Li Xiang, who often considers himself a product engineer, has a clear understanding of the development of Ideal Auto, "Like supply chain manufacturing, we will also cover a very mature and technologically organized system and organization model. Make apps, make the Internet, and make sales services. We will also fully cover such methods like the Internet. In the future, we will also have to acquire the capabilities of multiple vehicles, large-scale software, and more open L4-level autonomous driving.

"If we look at the past routes, we may have done well, but if we look at the future goals, we can see that we are not doing very well in everything." Shen Yanan said frankly that if we want to achieve our goals in five years, we must There are corresponding resources to invest.

It can be seen that the ideal car also has a clear plan for chip manufacturing.Although the road to core making is very difficult, don't forget that the ideal car has brought us many surprises along the way, and these "surprises" also make us have more expectations for the ideal car core making