Voice of Panda Science Star Chargers are not in the “gas station” business

Star Chargers are not in the “gas station” business

Star Chargers are not in the “gas station” business Image source @Visual China Text | VCPE Reference, Author | Li Zixuan, Editor | Mario At the beginning of the month, a number of new car companies released their January sales report cards. Xiaopeng Motors, Ideal Motors, and Nezha Motors ranked in the top three, with…

Star Chargers are not in the “gas station” business图片来源@视觉中国

Image source @Visual China

Text | VCPE Reference, Author | Li Zixuan, Editor | Mario

At the beginning of the month, a number of new car companies released their January sales report cards. Xiaopeng Motors, Ideal Motors, and Nezha Motors ranked in the top three, with monthly sales exceeding 10,000 units.

In the past five years, the number of new energy vehicles in my country has surged. According to data from the Ministry of Public Security, the number of newly registered new energy vehicles has more than quadrupled from 650,000 in 2017 to 2.95 million in 2021. Accompanying this, the demand for energy supplementation has been further stimulated, and many people have entered the game.

There are two ways to supplement the energy business, charging and battery replacement. In the past, because the technical threshold of battery manufacturing was too high, the cost of battery replacement technology was also higher than that of charging. Many companies chose the latter at the beginning of entry.

After years of development, the industrial chain of the charging industry has gradually refined and developed more roles from simple manufacturers, construction and operators.

At present, the upstream of the industry chain is equipment and material providers, with low technical threshold and small degree of differentiation, such as Guodian NARI and Kelu Electronics; the midstream is the vehicle manufacturer and operator, responsible for the construction and operation of charging equipment and charging stations , such as special calls and Xingxing charging; the downstream is a platform solution provider, integrating upstream and downstream resources, providing car owners with services such as finding piles and recharging, or providing charging pile operation and management solutions for upstream B-end customers, such as Yunkuai Charge, fast power.

The midstream is a key link in the charging industry chain, which has high requirements on the capital volume, channel resources and business scale of enterprises.

In the early stage, the construction of charging piles was mainly undertaken by the State Grid. After the market was released in 2014, private capital became active, and special calls and Xingxing charging entered the market successively during this period. According to the data of the China Charging Alliance, as of July 2021, the number of public charging piles of Teal and Xingxing has ranked the top two in the country, accounting for 26.6% and 21.9% of the market share respectively.

What is the rapid expansion of special calls and star charging? What are the similarities and differences between the operating models and technical routes of the two? Is the end point of the charging pile operator just the “pile king”?

01 The B-end market holds up the “pile king”

Compared with small and medium-sized operators, special calls and star charging have some meanings of “winning at the starting line”. The parent company of Tedian is a listed company of electric power companies, Teruid, which has advantages in capital, talent and technology. The parent company of Star Charge, Wanbang Digital New Energy Co., Ltd., is affiliated to Wanbang Group. It has charging equipment manufacturing business in the upstream and automobile sales business in the downstream. , with industrial chain advantages and financial support.

As soon as you enter the market, it is almost an industry consensus to staking a horse. However, at that time, the number of new energy vehicles in China was quite limited. At the same time, in order to reduce capital investment, starting from the B-end market and light asset operation became the common choice of the two, and both The city is the unit for paving.

The way of charging the stars is to attract investment and find scattered potential partners. Star Charge first publishes investment information. Partners with more than five self-owned parking spaces and Fuyu capacitors can apply by themselves. After Star Charge is screened, it will be reported to the government planning department, and the latter will be screened again in the reported locations. Drop some remote places. Through the checks of government departments familiar with local conditions, the utilization rate of charging piles can be guaranteed to a certain extent.

At the same time, this mechanism also efficiently connects charging pile operators and demanders. In 2015, Star Charge received more than 3,000 electric pile construction applications in one month, and screened more than 1,000 eligible applications according to the number of parking spaces, site legality, lease period, capacitance capacity and other conditions. Since then, Star Charge has copied this model to other cities.

Compared with Xingxing Charge’s investment promotion model of wide-spreading nets, Teelei prefers to establish joint ventures with local governments and enterprises to cooperate in building piles. Because the team may lack local knowledge when developing new cities, this style of play can help improve the efficiency of placement. Considering the market situation at that time, this method can also more flexibly match the strategic layout of the team.

In July 2015, BAIC New Energy Co., Ltd. was jointly established by BAIC New Energy and Jidong Material and Trade Group Co., Ltd. BAIC New Energy is the first car company to set up a joint venture with Teel.

There are two important figures behind this collaboration:

In 2014, Beijing’s electric vehicles ranked first in the country with 8,050 vehicles;

In the first half of 2015, BAIC New Energy ranked third in the country in the field of new energy passenger vehicles with a sales volume of 5,892 units.

With powerful partners, occupy the most powerful market.

Since then, the special call has successively cooperated with large car companies such as Changan Automobile, Dongfeng Electric Vehicle, King Long Bus, Yutong Bus and other well-known local enterprises to expand the territory to hundreds of cities across the country.

In the process of expansion, the two businesses have continued to expand and gradually converged. The partners include not only public transportation companies, logistics companies, online car-hailing platforms, car companies, etc., but also factories, community properties and individuals. The scale has gradually caught up or even surpassed the layout for many years. State Grid Corporation of China.

As of January 2019, according to the statistics of the China Business Industry Research Institute, the top three charging equipment rankings of domestic charging facility operators are Teel, State Grid Corporation and Xingxing Charging, with 122,266, 87,846, 87,846 charging piles respectively. 63100.

However, in the eyes of investors at that time, charging piles were not a good business. Before 2020, the only external force supporting the two businesses was government money.

CDH Capital invested in Teelin in 2020, and its executive director Zhu Weixing began to study investment in the new energy sector around 2015, but did not focus on charging piles because the time had not come.

Zhu Weixing said, “At that time, the number of electric vehicles was not high, and the whole field was more driven by B-end customers and the government, and there was no market-oriented C-end demand outbreak.” The staking-style layout is not very efficient in operation.

The C-end market means more room for imagination. This part of the demand will explode around 2019. Before that, the two companies have already prepared for it. Improving operational efficiency and optimizing user experience are important tasks at this stage, and are extremely important for winning C-end users.

02 From grabbing sites to grabbing users

The charging pile market has experienced a period of staking and savage growth, leaving many hidden dangers for subsequent operations.

Zhu Jianzhong, general manager of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region of Xingxing Charge, recalled, “During that time, everyone had a place to build it, and then built it first.” The rent has also risen, and an ordinary parking space has been fired from 400-500 yuan to 800-1200 yuan .

Therefore, the location selection of many charging piles is unreasonable, the location is remote, and no one cares for a long time. Some charging piles are even built in the depths of underground garages without mobile phone signals, or where there are disputes over land property rights, resulting in charging piles that cannot be used normally. . At the same time, the phenomenon of heavy construction and light operation has also led to a large number of “zombie piles” in the market for a long time.

In addition, the unreasonable configuration of the fast and slow piles also caused a poor charging experience. The charging time of the slow charging pile is 5~8 hours, which is suitable for charging the vehicle of the owner of the community, while the fast charging pile only takes 0.3~2.5 hours, which can better meet the needs of public areas and commercial vehicles such as taxis and transport vehicles.

However, the construction cost of slow charging piles is relatively low, only about a few thousand yuan. Therefore, enterprises often ignore the charging scene during early expansion and prefer to build slow charging piles. According to the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance (EVCIPA), until 2019, the proportion of AC charging piles (slow charging) in China was still close to 60%.

After scale, special calls and star charging began to solve these problems one by one. Beginning in the second half of 2016, the industry began to consider precise investment and construction. Special call conducted in-depth research on user behavior, combined with data such as average daily mileage, charging frequency, etc., made a simulated heat map of utilization, and deployed piles in a targeted manner according to the utilization.

The location selection of Xingxing Charge has been screened by the government planning department before, but the process is long and inefficient. After accumulating enough user data, Xingxing Charge also began to use the pile group site selection model to optimize the site selection, so that the charging equipment can be accurately placed on the market. .

In addition, the industry is constantly stepping up the research and development and construction of high-power fast charging equipment.

In May 2018, Star Charge developed a 500kW liquid-cooled high-power charger, claiming that it can charge for 8 minutes and have a range of 400 kilometers. In 2019, the first high-power fast-charging vehicle in cooperation with China FAW Group Co., Ltd. completed charging and debugging at the Xingxing Charging Station in Changzhou City. The charging power reached 200KW, and it only took 13 minutes to fully charge 80% of the power, and continue to Cooperate with FAW and other car companies to carry out high-power charging demonstration projects.

The director of pre-research of Xingxing charging technology said that the high-power equipment of Xingxing charging is mainly for commercial operation vehicles, including taxis, logistics vehicles, large-scale public transportation vehicles, including electric buses and electric buses, as well as long-distance travel needs on highways and The need for public charging in big cities. Shao Danwei, founder of Xingxing Charge, said, “The power output of a parking space is now 8 to 10 times that of the original, which can help operators share a lot of rent.”

Relying on the advantages of technical experience, Tedian initially took DC fast charging as the main route, and adopted the charging management method of group management and group control: the charging modules are concentrated in a box and connected to multiple charging terminals, which can be charged flexibly. At the same time, two charging modules supply power to one plug, so that the charging speed is fast.” As the advantages of fast-charging piles continue to emerge, Teel continues to increase the proportion of fast-charging equipment in the total number of piles.

By 2020, according to the statistics of the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance, in public stations, the ratio of AC and DC charging piles will be about 1.4:1. Among them, the charging stations for special vehicles such as buses are almost all DC fast charging piles, and the charging stations on highways are also DC fast charging piles with a capacity of more than 60KW, while in residential areas, they are mainly private charging piles, most of which are AC charging piles. Slow charging.

Around 2018 and 2019, the sales of new energy vehicles exceeded 1 million for two consecutive years, which was regarded by the industry as a signal of the outbreak of C-side demand. In addition to optimizing the user experience, charging pile operators continue to introduce more partners to expand their territory.

On the one hand, it is to attract more individual customers to join. For example, Tealline launched the “co-construction partner” plan in 2018, and then opened up cooperation to the public in an attempt to tap individual customers with resources. “Their network of relationships accumulated is much larger than that of any of our (operators),” said the relevant person in charge of the Beijing area.

On the other hand, Tedian is also targeting the sinking market, including local governments in third- and fourth-tier cities such as Changchun, Hohhot, Zibo, Hainan, Jiangxi, etc., which have successively become partners of Teel.

Xingxing charging cooperates with car manufacturers to sell charging cards to car manufacturers. When consumers buy new energy vehicles, the car factory will give 1,000 yuan of charging coupons, which can be used after installing the Xingxing charging app. In 2019, Wanbang Group ranked tenth among national auto dealers with a turnover of 40.079 billion yuan, which undoubtedly provided a strong boost to the promotion of the App.

Star Charge also took the first step in the joint venture. In September last year, Star Charge launched the Bright Top Plan, which plans to invest 3 billion yuan in three years to attract small and medium-sized operators to join the company’s platform.

In order to settle in more terminals, Tedian and Xingxing Charge have joined forces to cooperate with other platforms. In July 2020, Tedian announced that it will be fully connected to the State Grid, Xingxing Charge, and China Southern Power Grid, which will enable the Teel App to cover more than 70% of the country’s charging pile market. Four days later, Xingxing Charge also announced that it will achieve interconnection with State Grid, China Southern Network, Tecnion and other major operators to form a nationwide network.

The two are also connected to new energy vehicle charging apps such as pile search, fast electricity, cloud fast charging, navigation applications such as Baidu map and AutoNavi map, as well as commonly used platforms such as Alipay, to drain the charging piles.

This seems to be a continuation and upgrade of the staking. However, behind this, after the outbreak of the C-end market, charging pile operators have changed their thinking from grabbing sites to grabbing users. In Zhu Jianxing’s view, “In the future, what everyone will be fighting for is the number of users and daily activities.”

03 Not just a “gas station”

At present, the business model of charging pile operators has just been implemented, but the scale is large and difficult to manage, and it is still difficult to achieve overall profitability.

Although Teel claims that it has crossed the profit balance point in 2018, according to its 2020 annual report, only Chengdu Teel achieved profit during the reporting period, with a net profit of 38.0039 million yuan. And special calls, Qingdao special calls are in a state of loss. Among them, the net loss of special calls in 2020 is 77.6962 million yuan, and the net loss of Qingdao special calls in 2020 is 30.7975 million yuan.

However, the contradiction of vehicle piles still exists today, the number of new energy vehicles continues to increase, and the leading operators still cannot stop the pace of investment. User volume and activity will be the long-term pursuit of charging pile operators, because the end point of charging pile operators is not the “pile king”.

The value of users to charging pile operators is not only the contribution of revenue, but also the big data in energy, payment, automobiles, users and other aspects. On top of massive data, enterprises can realize monetization through value-added services or data value mining, and create a new ecology. This is also what investors value.

Zhu Weixing began to contact special calls in March 2019. When reporting internally, some people questioned, “Is this a gas station business?” Information, in addition to current, also information flow, capital flow, three flows in one.”

He dragged the members of the investment committee to the exhibition hall built by TLD invested tens of millions, where the history, present, future, and product system of TLD were visually presented. Later, when we went back to discuss the feasibility of the project, the attitude of the investment committee changed.

In March 2020, Special Call received about 1.35 billion yuan in Series A financing, which was jointly led by Guotiao Fund, Guoxin Capital and CDH Investments.

Today’s Star Charger and special callers are moving towards SaaS platform and smart energy management. Relying on big data and operational experience, they are providing services to small and medium-sized operators, city operators, real estate and property companies, governments, enterprises and institutions, etc. Customers provide charging scenarios and smart energy solutions, and there are more possibilities for the development of enterprises in the future.

In the opinion of Yu Dexiang, chairman of Teelian, charging equipment can weave people, vehicles and energy into a charging network, which is the real valuable part. “In the charging network, the data network, energy network, Internet of Things and The four-layer network of the equipment network is integrated together, forming a high-strength and high-viscosity link between people, vehicles and energy, forming energy big data, financial big data, payment big data, behavior big data, etc., which can provide more information for the charging pile industry. high value service.”

In addition to data, Yu Dexiang believes that after the electric vehicle is connected to the power grid through the charging device, it is an energy storage device. Through the intelligent cloud platform, it can coordinate the charging of the electric vehicle during ordinary hours and discharge during the peak period of electricity consumption.Instead of spending money, users may be able to earn money. Through such means of interaction and coordination with electric vehicles and smart grid dispatching, Yu Dexiang believes that the overall cost of electricity consumption can be greatly reduced.

In May last year, Schneider Electric, CATL and Xingxing Charge jointly launched the “Co-creation of Value, New Ecology, Win-Win Energy, New World – Green Energy Management Winning Plan” to explore energy management under the trend of cleanness, intelligence and low carbonization. solution.

During the period, Star Charge proposed topics such as “charging station EMS power management and control system” and “mobile travel solutions”, and said that if it finds high-quality partners in the win-win plan, it will consider equity participation, holding or acquisition.

In the second half of last year, the government issued a subsidy policy for the charging pile industry, proposing to subsidize the operating units of charging facilities according to the charging power of the charging piles. This will ease the pressure of construction, operation and maintenance of operators, especially in the environment where the construction speed of charging piles has slowed down in the past two years, which is a boost for large operators.

The charging pile business is an opportunity for new energy vehicles, and now it is extending more tentacles and moving towards a more important position in the banner of new energy.

 

https://www.tmtpost.com/6005474.html

作者: wanfeng

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