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

Recently, Chengdu has made another success. Among the economic answers submitted by local officials in succession, Chengdu Guanxuan GDP broke through 2 trillion for the first time and officially entered the "2 trillion Club". This is after Suzhou exceeded 2 trillion yuan in 2020, two years later, new cities crossed this threshold.

When it comes to Chengdu, the first thing you may think of is "Internet celebrity" and "Bashi". In fact, Chengdu is still the highland of the southwest automobile market. In the first six months of 2022, the number of cars in Chengdu reached 5.896 million, second only to Beijing.

The latest data show that there are 605800 new energy vehicle-related enterprises in China. In terms of cities, Shanghai ranks first with 21500 new energy vehicle-related enterprises, while Chengdu ranks second with 18500.

At the conference of the vehicle intelligent system industry of Chengdu High-tech Zone at the beginning of the year, Chengdu announced that Chengdu High-tech Zone would be built into "China's Smart car Valley". It can be seen that Chengdu is embracing the automobile industry with a new attitude.

This paper attempts to answer three questions:

1. How did the western "New Automobile City" rise from scratch?

2. What kind of resistance does Chengdu face to attack the strong city of new energy vehicles?

3. What is Chengdu's strength to seize the opportunity of the second half?

In retrospect, the development of the automobile industry in Chengdu has not been plain sailing in the past few decades.

Chengdu, which is located in the southwest and separated by mountains, lacks political advantages compared with northern cities, and economic advantages compared with southern cities. And in the Sichuan Basin, there is also a strong rival-Chongqing.

With the separation of Sichuan and Chongqing in 1997, Chongqing became the "youngest" municipality directly under the Central Government. According to a report by the Sichuan Provincial Investment Promotion Bureau, the total output value of Sichuan's automobile industry reached 1.36 billion that year, Chongqing divided 1.1 billion, and Sichuan's automobile industry fell into a state of "poverty and poverty."

In order to fill the gap after Chongqing's "departure", the heavy burden of reviving Sichuan's automobile industry has since been left to Chengdu. Chengdu began to vigorously develop the automobile industry and introduced the Sichuan Toyota joint venture project the following year, which is also Toyota's first vehicle joint venture project in China.

However, limited by various conditions and constraints, Toyota brought only Costa passenger cars and Prado off-road vehicles, and the main models of its passenger cars, such as cars, small and medium-sized SUV, were not produced locally, which made the Chengdu automobile industry suffer a trough for more than a decade.

The turning point occurred in 2008.

In that year, FAW-Volkswagen officially joined Chengdu and launched the southwest base project on May 8, 2009.

Recalling the difficult situation of attracting investment at that time, Yu Jian, then director of the Automobile Industry Investment Bureau in the Economic Development District of Chengdu, had a lot of feelings. At that time, in order to convince FAW-Volkswagen to settle in Chengdu, it flew to Changchun almost every two weeks for a long time. Progress has been slow over the years, and it was not until the Chinese auto market reached an important point of accelerated development that the previous efforts paid off. In 2009, FAW-Volkswagen officially settled in, so that Chengdu's automobile industry began to drive into the fast lane, and also became the beginning of its "golden decade".

In 2010, during the critical period of Chengdu Automobile concentration, Chengdu Chong Cang invested in Geely to buy Volvo, and at one point stopped the meeting of the standing Committee of the Municipal CPC Committee to study investment issues, which was called "fighting by helicopter" in the industry. This enthusiasm moved Geely, and finally got Geely's Chengdu factory.

In the same year, Chengdu International Automobile City sprang out, and Newman, president of the global auto giant Volkswagen Group China, predicted: "here will become the second 'Wolf Castle'."

In 2016, FAW-Volkswagen and Chengdu automobile industry both ushered in a milestone. In that year, the annual output of FAW-Volkswagen Southwest Base broke through the 700000 vehicles mark, and the automobile output of Chengdu also exceeded the million vehicles mark to 1.1538 million vehicles. The main business income of its automobile manufacturing industry also broke through from 49.4 billion yuan in 2011 to 200.275 billion yuan in 2017.

"in the past, the automobile industry of Sichuan Province was planned in Chongqing, and after Chongqing was directly under the jurisdiction of Chongqing, there was basically no automobile industry in Sichuan." Yu Jian witnessed the great change of Chengdu automobile industry from scratch. Today, Chengdu has become a western "new automobile city" with an annual production capacity of more than one million, and the automobile industry has become the first driving force for the industrial development of Chengdu.

Standing in front of the factory building, talking about the development of the automobile industry in Chengdu Economic Development Zone, Yu Jian said: "in only seven years, we have completed the industrial foundation accumulation that other automobile industry bases need 20 to 40 years." In the view of Guo Konghui, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, this is "a miracle of the development of the automobile industry."

2. Scramble for locomotives although Chengdu has found its place in the new round of development of the automobile industry before, Chengdu has not cultivated excellent local car companies.

In 2018, when there is a battle for new forces in the construction of new energy vehicles, Chengdu has not introduced some competitive fresh blood in this period, coupled with the lack of traction from local car companies, which has greatly reduced the attractiveness of Chengdu to new cars. at the same time, it also lacks the advantage of building a new energy automobile industry cluster.

But on the new energy car track, Chengdu has also tried to invest in leading companies, such as Weimar.

In 2018, Longquanyi District, an important automobile town in Chengdu, signed an investment agreement totaling 2 billion yuan with Weima Motors. In exchange, Weima will build a global R & D headquarters in Chengdu.

At that time, Weima Automobile, as a new force and ideal of car-making, Weilai and Xiaopeng, also known as the "four Little Dragons of car-making", was the first to receive 10 billion yuan of investment from D-round. Unexpectedly, the magnificent Weimar at that time would be the first to withdraw from the market center. Over the past year, Weimar has stalled, cut wages, streamlined operations and frozen assets. Take care of yourself, according to people familiar with the matter, Weimar Chengdu global R & D headquarters, has been taking land for two years, there is still no substantive construction. It remains to be seen whether the 2 billion yuan investment in Chengdu will bring a return.

In addition, the development of local car companies in Chengdu is not optimistic. In 2019, Reading went to Sichuan to buy the Chengdu local car company Mustang, and the acquired Mustang was not like a fish in water, but was brought into the old man's happy era by Reading.

At present, if Chengdu wants to enter a strong market of new energy vehicles, it faces two major obstacles:

First, the low production efficiency of Chengdu car enterprises has hindered enterprise investment, resulting in leading enterprises not being able to build new factories directly in Chengdu, but can only make use of existing production capacity, which means that they have to pay a large "pick-up" cost. used to acquire and transform less efficient and relatively backward car companies in the province. It is reported that Xiaopeng had intended to invest in Chengdu before, but ended up in vain due to "production qualification problems".

Second, the local supporting of the industrial chain is insufficient. At present, the industrial matching rate of Chengdu new energy vehicles in the province is about 30%. Although Sichuan has advantages in power batteries and other accessories, key parts such as motor electric control are still blank. From the perspective of industrial development trend, the new energy vehicle industry chain is still "following the whole vehicle factory", but the leading enterprises do not come, resulting in the weak construction of the whole industry chain.

3. Scramble for the "smart car city", but the opportunity is that the current automobile industry is undergoing unprecedented changes. China Electric vehicle hundred people Association explained in the report "Development trend and Policy trend of Global and Chinese New Energy vehicle Industry": the application of intelligent and network-connected technology in new energy vehicles is rapidly popularizing. Compared with electrification, it is easier to reflect the differentiation of different vehicles, which is the focus of the next stage of competition.

In the new round of scientific and technological revolution, Internet genes give cars unlimited imagination space. This new track also reserves the strength for Chengdu's strategic rudder.

The electronic information industry in Chengdu has been developing for a long time. In 2003, Intel chose to locate the first and only packaging and testing factory in western China in Chengdu. Subsequently, Dell, Lenovo and other large technology enterprises also settled in one after another, and the advantages of Chengdu science and technology industry gradually took shape. As one of Tencent's trump card games, the "Arena of Valor" team is also rooted here. After years of accumulation, when the wave of the new four modernizations of the automobile came fiercely, the advantages of the science and technology industry in Chengdu began to appear rapidly in the automobile circle.

Unlike other cities that focus on manufacturing, Chengdu and Hangzhou, with a strong atmosphere of Internet technology, have begun to catch up in the field of intelligent Internet-connected cars.

The government also intends to guide the development of the local intelligent network association and is determined to fight a turnaround. In 2017, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology formally approved the "Sichuan Test Base for Automobile networking Standards and Test Verification pilot Project of Sino-German Cooperative Intelligent Network", which means that the eighth national test and demonstration base project has been officially settled in Chengdu. The other seven national test and demonstration bases, namely Wuxi, Shanghai, Chongqing, Zhejiang, Changchun, Beijing and Hebei and Wuhan, are the leading areas of the national automobile industry.

In 2019, Chengdu issued an implementation plan for the development of the intelligent network automobile industry, with three years as the initial stage, to build an intelligent network connection automobile industry cluster and train 1-2 "unicorn" enterprises. The scale of intelligent network connection automobile and related industries reached the order of 100 billion. According to the data of forward-looking Industrial Research Institute, the market size of vehicle networking in Chengdu will reach 3.2 billion yuan in 2021. It is expected that the market size of Chengdu vehicle networking industry will grow from 4.5 billion yuan to 15.6 billion yuan from 2020 to 2026. Many car companies have set up R & D centers in Chengdu.

Although the status of Chengdu in the automobile circle is not as good as that of some established automobile cities, its unique Internet charm is attracting more and more smart car-related enterprises to settle in.

In July last year, BYD signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Chengdu, under which the two sides will carry out broader and deeper practical cooperation in strategic emerging industries such as new energy vehicles. Soon after, Longquanyi, an important automobile city in Chengdu, released a list of investment opportunities, which revealed a number of new energy vehicle industry projects, including automotive global manufacturing plants, full-stack intelligent driving system solution integrated chip projects, and so on, involving more than 80 billion yuan. In addition, Chengdu signed a cooperation agreement with Zhengwei Group a few days ago, and the two sides plan to cooperate in new energy vehicles and other fields.

Leading enterprises are often accompanied by butterfly effect. FAW-Volkswagen once pried the Chengdu automobile industry to "start again"; Intel landed in Chengdu and indirectly created a trillion-level electronic information industry. The new leading layout of Chengdu is of great significance to lead Chengdu's new energy automobile industry to break through the tight encirclement.

4. In the end, what are the advantages of Chengdu in the urban competition for new energy vehicles, which can lead China to become a "city of smart cars"? Che Bai think Tank believes that there are two points.

First, talents. Chengdu has eight "double first-class" universities, ranking fourth in the country, more than 30 state-level scientific research institutions and 218 national innovation platforms, and ranked 29th in the global innovation index. the number of national high-tech enterprises and technology-based small and medium-sized enterprises reached 9952 and 8153 respectively, ranking fifth in vice-provincial cities. Rich scientific and creative resources will promote the manufacturing industry to accelerate the transformation and upgrading and move forward to the high end of the value chain.

It is worth mentioning that Chengdu is becoming a yearning place for young people. Within ten years, the population has increased by 5.818 million, and 70% of the 9.6 million young people are "Rong Piao". Not only is it rich in young talent resources, the labor cost of the manufacturing industry is 29% and 27% lower than that of Hangzhou and Ningbo respectively.

The second is the business environment.

In recent years, the business environment in Chengdu has been continuously optimized. In the "16 articles of Chengdu High-tech Zone supporting the Development of Intelligent Internet connection Automobile Industry (trial) (draft for soliciting opinions)" (referred to as "16 articles") issued in June last year, for the first time, it exposed its plans to attract investment to enterprises related to the intelligent Internet connection automobile industry. "Sixteen articles" provides rich investment promotion treatment for intelligent network couplet automobile related enterprises.

For example, Chengdu High-tech Zone can provide one-time rewards ranging from 5 million to 10 million for the "main chain" and "chain" enterprises of the intelligent network automobile industry chain that have set up global and national headquarters; for intelligent network connection automobile core parts manufacturing projects with more than 1 billion yuan, provide a subsidy of up to 200 million yuan. In addition, relevant subsidies can also be obtained for intelligent online automobile-related enterprises with annual revenue exceeding 50 million, or cooperating with Chengdu vehicle manufacturing enterprises, or participating in key technological projects, or presiding over the revision of relevant international and national standards.

The subsidy of real knife and gun shows the greatest sincerity of Chengdu's intelligent network. The policy dividend will also promote the urban energy level of Chengdu, the industrial chain will be more complete, and help accelerate the development of Chengdu intelligent network automobile industry.

[full text reference]

[1] "Chengdu: in addition to fireworks, there is also high-end manufacturing", Reading City Story Studio, Wang Chenting

[2] "Forecast: Chengdu will become the second Wolf Castle", Sichuan online

[3] "if you get up early in the morning and catch the evening collection, how can the dream of building a car in the land of abundance come true? "Future Automobile Daily, Qin Zhangyong

[4] "grab the tuyere of Intelligent Network", Chengdu layout trillion-level growth of the new track ", Chengdu Daily, Li Yanling

[5] "Chengdu Speed: building a Dream of Automobile Industry in Seven years", China Business Daily

[6] "behind the output value of hundreds of billions of Automobile Industry: the car Dream of Panda City", China Business Daily

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: che Bai think Tank (ID:EV100_Plus). Author: Zhou Shuangjiang.

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