Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

"it used to be'we can't change', now it's'we can do anything'."

Talking about Bosch's biggest change in recent years, a former Bosch employee wrote on a platform in a slightly sarcastic tone.

In his view, this is because the status of this "giant" has been challenged.

But some people may object. The reason is simple--

In the chip crisis that lasted for more than two years, Bosch, as the world's largest supplier and buyer of automotive chips, stood at the top of the "food chain", single-handedly determining the supply efficiency of car companies.

"Bosch's position is obviously becoming more and more important," someone said.

However, two seemingly opposite views point to a common fact that in the era of smart electric transformation, the traditional automobile supply chain is changing.

As the number one giant in auto parts, Bosch naturally feels the most obvious change, and the lack of core is short-lived, but the requirements put forward by car companies to traditional suppliers due to intelligent transformation are long-term.

The former Bosch employee said that "the market position of Bosch's intelligent driving and control division is far inferior to that of the traditional chassis division".

At the just-concluded "2022 Bosch Innovation experience Day", when asked "is Bosch worried about the future development at the moment of transformation of the automotive industry", Xu Daquan, executive vice president of Bosch, said bluntly that "of course there will be worries". Because any moment of technological change is a great challenge for large traditional enterprises.

Of course, Bosch is far from alone in feeling the challenge.

During the Expo, both Foggia and Mobis, both giants of the traditional parts industry, also mentioned the "challenges" and "anxieties" that they would encounter in the future.

Wang, director of Mobis China Innovation Center, said that component giants facing transformation may be more anxious than mainframe manufacturers. Because they found that "many of the superior parts accumulated in the era of fuel trucks are no longer needed in the era of new energy."

However, the performance of traditional automobile suppliers facing the challenge has two characteristics: one is to keep a low profile in attitude, and the other is to make efforts to adapt to the new rhythm in action.

One Zaifu employee gave another detail: once foreign Tier1 gave people the impression that they never had to work overtime, but now overtime has become the norm.

NO.1 [there are also "new forces" in the supply chain] 2.4 billion euros, or about 16.8 billion yuan.

On October 13, Volkswagen peaked the attention of the chip company with the news of its largest investment in China to form a joint venture with Horizon.

Taking advantage of the intelligent transformation of domestic car companies, the seven-year-old company has experienced rapid development in the past two years-financing has reached $3.4 billion (about 24.33 billion yuan); more than 2 million chips have been shipped, and even more than Mobileye and Nvidia have been shipped in a single month in the Chinese market.

While the new power of automotive chips led by the horizon is rising, on the other hand, traditional automotive chip manufacturers have stopped in the field of research and development of Daimali chips.

At present, there are no more than two types of companies in the forefront of automotive computing chips-start-ups, such as Horizon and Black Sesame, and cross-border giants such as Nvidia and Qualcomm.

They are all new entrants to the automobile supply chain.

Yang Yuxin, chief marketing officer of Black Sesame, said that the reason for this pattern is that many traditional automotive chip companies have taken the initiative to give up strategy in this field. The reason is that in addition to different market concepts, "long-term industry inertia restricts their sensitivity to innovation to some extent".

The chip industry is not alone. There is a similar trend in the ADAS field.

Once upon a time, the traditional Tier1 represented by Denso, Bosch and Amber has always been the ruler of ADAS.

But the combined share of ADAS T0P7 suppliers fell from 90.83 per cent in the first half of 2021 to 86.4 per cent in 2022, according to the Gao Gong Smart Automobile Research Institute.

Because on the other hand, the local emerging ADAS suppliers represented by Huawei, Desai Xiwei, East soft Ruichi, etc., are growing secretly.

By the first half of this year, their combined share had reached 8.89 per cent, an increase of about three percentage points from a year earlier.

Judging from the current share, the pattern does not seem to have changed much. This is because the current high-level auxiliary driving assembly rate of automobile companies is not high, and it is only in its infancy.

A mainframe factory employee told the auto industry that at present, most of the traditional Tier1 "as a whole is still low-level intelligent driving, and the advantage in high-level intelligent driving is not outstanding."

Generally speaking, the medium and low-end models of car companies will use the traditional Tier1 scheme, while the high-end models will choose Huawei and so on.

However, with the development of the intelligent level of car companies, it is only a matter of time before the "foreign" high-level auxiliary driving suppliers represented by Huawei grab more and more market share.

At the beginning of its entry into the auto industry, Huawei threatened to be "the Bosch of the smart car era".

From the current technology provided by Huawei, the hardware includes motor, electric control, fast charging, radar, chip, software has algorithm, high-precision map, cloud control platform and so on. It can be said that Huawei's ability covers all aspects of the supply chain of smart electric vehicles, which is more comprehensive than any traditional Tier1.

From the moment Huawei announced that "do not build cars, help companies build good cars", its biggest rival has become the Bosch-like Tier1.

When it comes to competition with Huawei, although Xu Daquan once said that "Huawei has the strengths of Huawei and Bosch has the strengths of Bosch", he had to admit that "competition is inevitable."

In fact, the competition between Huawei and traditional Tier1 has already begun, and in many key areas, the former is obviously more advantageous.

The fact that NO.2 has been snatched by emerging ADAS suppliers is only one of the threats faced by traditional Tier1, while more and more car companies are developing their own algorithms and even hardware.

With Tesla as the "initiator", from newly built cars such as Wei Xiaoli, to traditional car companies such as Great Wall, Geely and Guangzhou Automobile, to international major manufacturers General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, and so on, they have embarked on the road of self-research in the era of intelligent electric vehicles.

Low-level self-research, only self-development of intelligent system software, three electricity system. For higher-level ones, we should also develop our own chips and batteries.

Although traditional Tier1 and many industry experts agree that this self-developed chip and battery is not the best choice. Because it not only needs to invest a lot of money and time, but also the demand of a single enterprise is limited, the scale effect is very difficult to form, but it is not as obvious as the supplier in terms of cost.

However, in the initial stage of industry reform, this kind of multi-party melee competition is not only inevitable, but also beneficial to the development of technology.

Tesla FSD Chip in 2014, Tesla's first generation of autopilot hardware adopted Mobileye EyeQ3 chips, followed by Nvidia's Drive PX 2 and PX 2 upgrades in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Finally, the self-developed FSD chip was used in 2019.

According to the data released by Tesla, the peak computing power of its self-developed FSD chip increases from 24TOPS to 72TOPS compared with Nvidia Drive PX2 chip. Although the book data has only tripled, the efficiency of running the same model has increased 21 times.

This is also one of the reasons why car companies with intelligence as the selling point have chosen to develop self-driving chips: to better fit their own intelligent driving software algorithms and improve system performance.

Xiaopeng became the most expensive new force for research and development in 2021 because of the self-developed intelligent driving algorithm. However, with the first landing of the NGP intelligent driving assistance system in its own brand, it has also stuck to the "smart" brand label.

And look at the power battery industry.

From Fudi batteries to Honeycomb Energy, power battery manufacturers born out of car companies have now become a force that cannot be ignored in the battery industry.

In short, even because of capital, time and other problems, it is impossible for every car company that claims to be self-research to succeed and achieve mass production, but it is almost certain that the Tier1 cake will become smaller.

In addition to self-research by car companies, another trend is that in core technology areas where car companies are unable to achieve their own research, such as ADAS, intelligent cockpit, and so on, car companies want to be deeply involved in the "desire to control" more than ever before.

Once the mainframe factory was only responsible for raising the demand, and the other "turnkey" cooperation model, which was all handed over to Tier1, is gradually being abandoned. The middle level of a parts company said to the automobile industry that this is the biggest change that has taken place in the automobile supply chain.

"in the past, customers agreed on the price to Tier1, specified which second-and third-tier suppliers to buy parts, and then paid 3 per cent more management fees. Now some have completely changed into the mainframe factory to buy their own parts to Tier1, or buy their own assembly."

In the manager's view, the reason why car companies want to do so, there may be considerations to reduce costs, but it is more important to control the supply chain in their own hands and key technologies in their own hands.

Especially in the field of intelligence.

Ideal ONE announced the use of Horizon Expedition 3 chip or take ADAS as an example. In the research and development of high-level intelligent driving system, the chip is the core of the whole system, and the software development on this basis is mostly controlled by the mainframe factory itself, or by other technology companies. In this context, which Tier2 chip to choose, Tier1's decision-making power has been very watered down, the main role is only hardware OEM.

The most famous is the collaboration between ideal ONE and Horizon Expedition 3. In this project, in addition to ideal and Horizon, there is also a Tier1 involved. But no matter at the press conference or in the media reports, we have never seen its name or figure.

Coincidentally, in its report, Gao Gong Intelligent Automobile Research Institute has divided the current ADAS market into three camps-Nvidia (Desai + auto company self-research), Horizon (local + foreign Tier1), and Huawei (self-research + local Tier1).

It is not difficult to find that in this division, chip enterprises are regarded as the core of the entire ADAS industry chain, and the once strong Tier1 can only live behind the scenes.

NO.3 [from supply chain to supply Circle] on April 2, 2021, Bosch and Auto jointly created the world's first single-chip dual-system multi-terminal intelligent cockpit domain controller mass production line.

This is one of Bosch's many projects of the year, but it has been mentioned again and again in the future. The reason why it is so special is that Bosch has done Tier2 "for the first time" in this project, and Auto World is the Tier1 that directly connects customers.

In the future, Bosch has also been regarded as a major symbol of embracing the change of the industrial chain in the stage of industry transformation.

For traditional Tier1, if you don't want to become a secondary hardware contract manufacturer, you have to work in the field of chips and software algorithms.

However, due to the lack of technology and Internet thinking, their technology is not necessarily better than that of start-up technology companies. As a result, it has become a common choice to cooperate with local start-ups to expand customers at the algorithm level.

In the words of Chen Yudong, president of Bosch China, "the supply chain is no longer as clear as Tier1 and Tier2, and the boundary has been broken."

And this broken old model, Xu Daquan used a visual expression to explain, "it used to be a (hierarchical) supply chain, now it has become a supply circle that needs collaboration."

Bosch is not the only partner in the world.

In May this year, Bosch made a strategic investment in Wenyuan Zhixing, a self-driving technology company. According to the plan, the two sides will jointly develop intelligent driving software and achieve mass production of the high-level intelligent driving 3.0 platform by 2023.

Bosch is not the only one to put down its posture and expand its partners.

As early as last year, Continental Group established a joint venture with chip company Horizon-Continental Smart Drive, which focuses on providing advanced auxiliary driving and self-driving software and hardware solutions for vehicle manufacturers.

In June 2021, ZF also took a stake in a local Chinese company for the first time, working with CalmCar to develop automatic parking and automatic valet parking systems.

Even as early as 2020, Foggia reached a strategic partnership with the horizon to jointly develop autopilot technology.

……

With the help of cooperation, the Tier1, who did not have an advantage in this field, finally got the ticket to compete with the self-research school.

As for whether the right to speak has been weakened, the traditional Tier1 also has a clear understanding.

Previously, Chen Yudong said that as long as the products are competitive, they can serve more customers and make the cake bigger than anything else.

The subtext may be that the key is to get more projects and orders.

NO.4 [at the end] but that doesn't mean Tier1 will lose all their advantages.

In the words of the middle level of the parts company, some simple structural parts companies can buy them directly from second-and third-tier suppliers, but some complex products, such as steering wheels and airbags, still need professional Tier1.

A head of software research and development at a car company said that even though car companies are talking about self-research, not everything is necessary. "with mature modules such as chassis and iBooster (electronically controlled braking system), there is a good chance that the mainframe will not develop on its own. There is no need to compete with Bosch for jobs."

Especially in hardware design, in his view, "Bosch and other big companies are still very experienced."

As for the software level, although some car companies from the bottom, middleware to application software will be fully involved, or even completely their own development. However, he believes that a more mature way of cooperation in the future is for mainframe manufacturers to choose their own operating system, Tier1 to do underlying drivers that are strongly related to hardware, and mainframe manufacturers to freely choose technology suppliers to jointly develop middleware and application software.

In short, it is only when each person performs his or her own duties that the benefits are maximized.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: AutoReport Automobile production Book (ID:autoreport), written by Wu Xue and edited by Yu Jie.

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