Chinese “BATH” Weight in Auto
As we enter the new year of the ox, Chinese tech giants have all stepped up their strategies in the automotive field. Baidu will be making cars while Alibaba holds a stake in a new EV brand. Tencent has deep roots in serving auto companies and Huawei’s full stack solution is almost everything needed to make a car.
Baidu: Bosch + Apple Car
On January 11, 2021, Baidu announced the plan to establish a standalone company aimed at the design, manufacturing and sales of smart electric passenger vehicles.
In the new venture, the auto OEM Geely will be an investor and partner with minority stake offering manufacturing expertise and facilities including the SEA (Sustainable Experience Architecture) EV platform. Baidu as the majority stakeholder will bring intelligent technologies and solutions from its Apollo ecosystem.
Back in 2017, Baidu formed an Intelligent Driving Group (IDG), often branded as Apollo. It nowadays spans across three distinct units:
- Intelligent vehicle unit: offering pre-equipped products and solutions for smart driving, smart cockpit, HD map and vehicle cloud.
- Autonomous driving unit: dedicated to robotaxi commercialization
- Smart Transportation unit: offering smart road/v2x products and solutions to local government
Essentially, the IDG intelligent vehicle unit is the supplier to the new EV company, as it has been to many other auto OEMs.
Baidu’s auto ambitions used to be described as “Bosch” for smart cars. Now we can add to it the China version of Tesla or Apple Car.
Baidu has also invested in a list of startups in the AV and EV space:
Alibaba: IM + Banma + autonomous logistics
On November 26, 2020, SAIC Motor announced a joint venture called IM Motors (also named by Zhiji) together with Alibaba and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Group to produce luxury EVs. A month later, it revealed details on the first two models, of which a sedan will be open for orders this coming April and ready for deliveries by the end of the year while an SUV will hit the market in 2022.
With 18% shares in IM, Alibaba has officially joined the growing list of tech companies to launch EV brand.
IM Motors isn’t the first collaboration between SAIC and Alibaba. The two co-founded Banma back in 2015 to develop an open platform for smart cockpit products. Banma’s solutions had been exclusively adopted by SAIC’s models until August 2019 when the company was restructured to be open to serve other OEMs. Alibaba has become the biggest shareholder after the restructuring and set an aggressive goal last November for Banma to be equipped on 10 million vehicles in 3 years.
Alibaba has been involved in the R&D of autonomous driving technologies for years. With its core business in e-commerce, the efforts are dedicated to logistics solutions including last mile delivery and goods transportation.
Alibaba is an investor in XPeng, DiDi, Qianxun (HD localization), Amap (HD map), T3 (MaaS platform), etc.
Tencent: the Microsoft in auto
On January 19, 2021, Tencent and Geely announced the plan to further collaborate in the areas of smart cockpit, autonomous driving, digitization and low carbon development. Back in 2019, the two had partnered on smart cockpit solutions through ECARX, a subsidiary of Geely. The update sounds like a step further for tech companies to empower traditional OEMs with software capabilities.
Tencent became one of the tech giants through competitive B2C products. As the B2C profits reaching a limit, it has started exploring the B2B area. Two years ago, Tencent built an internal business group called CGIS dedicated to B2B products.
CSIG stands for Cloud and Smart Industries Group, which aims to facilitate traditional industries’ digitization with AI, big data and cloud computing technologies. Auto is among the traditional industries in transition. Tencent’s latest auto solutions can be categorized in 5:
- Mobility services
- Tencent Auto Intelligence (TAI): a cloud-based open platform targeting in-vehicle infotainment experience
- Tencent Cloud for automotive
- Tencent Autonomous Driving (TAD): see an earlier post for details
- Smart transportation
Tencent has made several investments in auto, such as Nio and DiDi. It has not been involved in making EVs yet and might stick to the neutral role to better server all the auto companies. Therefore its auto strategies are quite comparable to Microsoft.
Huawei: HI
On November 14, 2020, Changan disclosed a plan that it would join with Huawei and the battery supplier CATL to create a high-end smart EV brand and the first model will be launched in 2022. Although not much detail has been revealed, Huawei and CATL might hold certain stake in the new venture as well as Tencent.
Huawei will supply some of its solutions and components if not the entire package to the new EV brand, as in the relationship it has built up with many other OEMs. The company also reiterated that it does not make cars. However, the assumption about Huawei making cars is still circulating in the industry. (Huawei’s auto solutions cover almost everything to make a car except items like seats and tires.)
Huawei Intelligent Automotive Solution, branded as HI, was presented at a recent company event on October 30, 2020. HI is a full stack solution aimed at empowering OEMs to build smart connected electric vehicles. It includes:
- A brand new computing and communication architecture “C/C”
- 5 smart system solutions for automated driving, cockpit, electric power, connectivity, and vehicle cloud
- A suite of smart components such as LIDAR and AR-HUD
- 3 computing platforms and corresponding operating systems for automated driving, smart cockpit and vehicle control
Besides the “BATH”, DiDi has been working with BYD to produce ride hailing EVs, Meituan and Bytedance are behand Li Auto, LeTV associated Faraday Future has just got back on the ground, and the Taiwanese Foxconn has teamed with Geely to offer contract manufacturing of EVs. Everyone has claimed a part of the automotive value chain. And what is yours?
