2021 is Tesla's year of China. In the past year, Tesla China has sold a total of 484100 vehicles, accounting for about 51% of the total global sales. Most of the figures come from the super factory located in Shanghai Lingang district. The latter plans to increase its production capacity to an annual output of 1million vehicles in the future, which is enough to make it one of the largest automobile factories in the world.
By guohaiwei
Successor of "fruit chain"
At the beginning of the establishment of the plant, both the industrial chain, policy observers, musk and investors at all levels had high expectations for Tesla's industrial efficiency.
For Tesla, the parcel post area is a "productivity paradise", which can provide the most comprehensive parts matching and solutions for the start-up automobile company that was once trapped in the supply chain in the shortest time.
As for the industrial chain, Tesla's huge and rapidly growing order volume, the human design of musk Silicon Valley geeks, and the emerging intelligent industry attribute of trams immediately remind almost everyone of the great wealth that Steve Jobs brought to China's coastal entrepreneurs more than a decade ago.
It was an opportunity to directly put a group of grass-roots entrepreneurs on the Forbes list, and those who were successful or abandoned in the opportunity were crowned with a common name because of it:
"Fruit chain".
In the past decade, the fruit chain has become a symbol of 3C manufacturing wealth like a mysterious label.
They once owned hundreds of billions of market value enterprises in the A-share market, such as instant precision, Lansi technology, Goethe shares and so on. And their common characteristic is that they are called "apple"( https://apple.pvxt.net/c/1251234/435400/7639?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.apple.com%2Fcn%2Fmusic%2F ) And rely on apple -- more than 70% of the revenue was once from orders from Apple Park in California.
According to rough statistics, apple family barrel provides $100billion worth of hardware orders for downstream industrial chains at all levels around the world every year, and a considerable part of its parts business flows to the supply chain system in East Asia. At its peak, only A-share "fruit chain three fools" had a total market value of nearly trillion. Even today, when 3C manufacturing fades, the four words "Apple concept" still surround the listed companies with a scale of 2trillion.
Now, Tesla is catching up with apple in output value.
Wall Street predicts that Tesla will provide $70billion in manufacturing value worldwide this year, and if everything goes well, it will further double in the next twoorthree years - eventually surpassing apple and becoming the largest hardware value provider in Silicon Valley.
The doubling of sales may also mean that musk will replace apple and become a new spokesperson for Silicon Valley to link China's manufacturing industry.
In fact, Tesla's enthusiasm for China's manufacturing industry may also be rare in Silicon Valley.
If you press iphone Compared with the development time of production and marketing, Tesla, which has been deeply involved in electric vehicles for more than 10 years, is making its own "iPhone4 moment". More people-friendly models are making Tesla's sales climb at an unprecedented speed.
If only in terms of output value, the annual scale of Shanghai Lingang factory is 150billion yuan, which is also equivalent to the hardware value of apple in 2012. Whether the current production capacity of 450000 vehicles or the doubling of the production capacity planned in phase II is enough to make this factory the largest single automobile factory in China and even the world in the future.
At present, the only comparable foreign / private factory is probably Zhengzhou Foxconn. As the most important production base of iPhone in the world, Zhengzhou Foxconn's 300000 employees exported more than 200billion yuan of 3C products in 2020. However, unlike the port factory, Zhengzhou Foxconn is actually a collection of factories distributed in three districts, and mobile phone manufacturing is only one of its businesses.
The huge and rapidly growing output scale is not enough to explain Musk's "enthusiasm" for China, and Tesla further holds a positive attitude towards "localization".
In 2021, its officials made it clear that the factory in Shanghai will achieve 100% localization rate in the future.
Although the definition of 100% localization rate actually refers to the localization rate in the sense of location, not local companies. But this is still a positive and rare statement for Silicon Valley. For the fruit chain enterprises that struggled repeatedly in love hate Apple many years ago, this is a rare gesture.
From all angles, Tesla seems to be becoming the best successor of the "fruit chain" in terms of strength, willingness and appearance.
Figure source: Tesla official website
Invisible "special chain"
So, will Tesla follow the example of "fruit chain" to open the next "special chain miracle" as many expect?
The answer may be complicated.
From a numerical point of view, the industrial chain company behind Tesla is indeed very large. If we compare the "Apple concept" and "Tesla concept" in the A-share market, we will find that the enterprise value in the Tesla industrial chain has far exceeded the apple industrial chain.
Tesla concept shares has 193 enterprises with a total market value of 4trillion yuan; "Apple concept stock" has 105 enterprises with a total market value of RMB 2trillion.
However, if we carefully observe the structure of the company, we will find that although Tesla is involved in the industrial chain and the scale of the company is huge, most of them are Tesla's "ordinary friends" and have a strong "head effect" in the industry, including many mature leading enterprises with ultra-high market value, such as Ningde times, Longji shares, Fuyao Glass, etc.
In other words, Tesla does not dominate.
If we look at the "special chain" according to the "fruit chain" requirements, it means that there are not many companies that can really be called "special chain". Taking the data of fiscal year 2021 as an example, there are only two A shares of companies with Tesla's revenue accounting for more than 30%:
Top group, Xusheng Co., Ltd.
If the proportion standard is raised to more than 50%, the above figure will become slightly embarrassing:
0。
It is important to know that Apple's orders account for more than 70% of the revenue of these fruit chain enterprises, whether it is Tencent precision or Goethe shares; Even for industry giants like Foxconn's parent company Hon Hai Precision, Apple's order revenue was once close to 50% of the group's revenue.
Obviously, Tesla concept stock has not evolved into a "special chain" level.
For example, for Ningde, Tesla may be an important potential customer accounting for 10%, which will affect its ownership with LG, who will eventually become the world's largest battery manufacturer. However, if it is really divided by customer type, whether it is the new power of domestic automobile manufacturing or the transformation of traditional automobile enterprises, it is now a bigger cake type than Tesla - the basic plate of Ningde is still a domestic new energy enterprise.
For companies of Fuyao level, Tesla's skylight order does not seem to be more noble than SAIC Wuling's order, nor can it be compared with Toyota Volkswagen's tens of millions of production and marketing giants.
In contrast, some secondary suppliers in China, which mainly rely on LG power batteries, are more in line with the "special chain" standard. Tesla's Shanghai plant ate a large proportion of orders from LG new energy's Chinese plant, which once countered the Ningde era in terms of global installed capacity. But as time goes on, it may become more and more difficult for you to accurately say whether these companies are more "LG chains" or "special chains".
After all, if the above-mentioned industrial chains are forcibly classified as "special chains", it will be a bit confusing for generations. They are not so much "Tesla concept stocks" as "Mahalanobis selected tram industry chain 200 index".
Musk's "Ford worship"
Special chain and fruit chain are two different ecosystems, just as musk and jobs are two different people. Although musk often enjoys the comparison between himself and jobs, they do have different personalities, live in different industries and uphold different business ideas.
If we really want to compare a "sage" with musk, it must be Henry Ford.
This similarity now seems to be imprinted in genes. They are young, promising and "introverted", like to buy media assets, have a high interest in new money and new energy, and show democracy and dictatorship in the long-term immersion factory.
They both swing between Democrats and Republicans. Or, to put it more radically, they are more like Republicans dressed as Democrats. The business itself has never been able to satisfy their appetite, and the American president is their dream (by the way, musk just wants to establish a new civilization on Mars).
However, compared with these "hobbies", their more important commonality lies in their similar understanding and pursuit of the supply chain - they believe in the power of vertical integration, that is, their ambition to build everything from scratch.
Musk once publicly expressed his appreciation for Ford's representative work "Rouge River factory". According to musk, the most important product of old Ford has never been Model T, but the production system represented by "yanzhihe factory".
In the 1920s, the Yanzhi river was a magical place for local mining, logging, steel making, casting, assembly, and then local driving. Now you can only see such scenes in RTS games such as empire times.
This huge factory area is 100 miles (160 kilometers) high only by transportation railway, which is used to connect 93 single buildings in the factory. It is probably only in the early days of the automobile assembly line industry that the industrial miracle can be born.
Later, people said that Ford redefined the factory and also redefined capitalism.
Yanzhihe factory was once an industrial miracle
A hundred years later, the "young people" from South Africa built a new power center based on electric smart cars and named it gigafactory.
Like the old Ford Model T, Tesla's core product is not model 3, but the hardware manufacturing system behind gigafactory.
Musk is probably the best person on the planet who is good at "vertical integration" in a unique way.
However, this level of vertical integration is no longer just a collection of geographical locations of low-level assembly functions, but connects all links in the industrial chain and finds the most economical technical iteration route.
In fact, there are many such cases, which even run through the whole narrative of Musk's hardware business model:
For example, at the beginning of Tesla's story: at that time, all the world's auto giants took it for granted that power batteries were regarded as technology and as an insurmountable bottleneck for new energy vehicles in the short term. This start-up electric vehicle manufacturer directly connected the 3C lithium battery of Panasonic in series, and finally realized the acceleration experience of roadster's 100 km acceleration of 3.7 seconds, thus attracting a large number of geek fans.
In the story of SpaceX: you will know how much musk is keen to use all kinds of civil parts( https://microsoft.pvxt.net/Xx07X ) Installed on a super spacecraft flying into space. SpaceX even took three ordinary civilian chips to replace those expensive aviation modified chips that were originally used to resist cosmic rays and high temperature. Because he believes that the problem of radiated interference can be eliminated to a great extent by continuously making several chips align automatically.
In fact, the common characteristics of this unified integration approach are:
Musk doesn't like those things that increase his hardware cost too much due to the high technology premium.
A more typical case is that Tesla is one of the major players. It is almost the first company to cancel detectors such as laser and millimeter wave, and instead adhere to thorough visual navigation.
According to musk, roads are designed for the human eye, so vision should be the best solution in road navigation. But at the bottom, the essence of visual route is an algorithm system that Tesla can master. It may one day be reused in a variety of robot scenes. At the same time, the hardware purchase cost of this route is only a domestic camera that will be as cheap as silicon sooner or later.
Like Henry Ford a hundred years ago, musk wanted to return all products to BOM cost. However, in this era of super division of labor, musk is willing to undertake several additional points of gross profit margin for the outsourcing of these products.
Using silicon valley's technical team to graft global super factories, musk is actually building a super Rouge River factory across space. Connecting these factories is no longer just a cumbersome railway, but also a worldwide data bandwidth.
And more often, Tesla is obviously ahead of Ford.
For example, Tesla is the first passenger car brand in the world to successfully kill dealers. Although the latter has been proved to be the lowest cost circulation mode of most automobile brands for more than 100 years, musk obviously believes that new energy vehicles can be better;
Tesla is not willing to act as an insurance agent just like an enterprise car company. Instead, it wants to launch a fully self-supporting insurance business based on a new pricing logic.
In his recent interview, musk also made it clear that Tesla is actually a collection of six companies:
Sales and service; Overcharge business; Vertical integration (manufacturing business); Software and AI algorithm; Chip and computing power (Dojo platform); Tesla insurance.
Obviously, old Ford created an integrated empire in the industrial era through the assembly line mode; Now, under the new energy and intelligent transportation revolution, musk is taking the long march of old Ford in the new era - which may be the destiny of every new industrial giant.
Empire or kingdom
If we fully understand Musk's extreme consideration of cost and efficiency, we can naturally understand that apple and Tesla have fundamentally different attitudes towards external hardware innovation.
When many people think of jobs, they often think of the product manager with "reality distortion force field" and "paranoia". This person, who made countless people miserable and crazy, just created an unprecedented intelligent product in his life - the iPhone with only one button.
"Paranoia" and "unprecedented", these two factors together mean that in the global 3C manufacturing industry at that time, it was difficult for anyone to meet jobs' needs for product design. In other words, the birth of the iPhone requires a large number of "unrealized" processes, which means that the downstream industry chain needs to do a lot of customized demand development around jobs' needs.
In a large number of subsequent media interviews, both Foxconn founder Terry Gou and Corning CEO Wendel weeks, as well as core suppliers who have prospered with the help of apple, clearly remember the similar words that jobus said to them when he was stunned by the "super outline test question":
I know you can do it. Go back and have a try. How can you know if you don't try?
Jobs' tempting orders combined with his "reality distortion force field" buff are enough to make these billionaire industry leaders go back like wage earners and take their teams to work overtime for tests. When even this can not promote core suppliers to do more, apple sometimes even sets up an industrial fund with an amount sometimes as high as US $1billion, or simply directly buys a new production line equipment dedicated to apple for the industrial chain company.
To some extent, this can partly explain why jobs' successor is not even the product manager, but the head of the supply chain:
When the core competitiveness of a company is the product manager, then the product is the core; However, when the core of a company is a paranoid product manager, the core competitiveness of the company will be infinitely close to the implementation ability of product landing. In particular, the over demanding "customization" itself has a tendency of anti market inertia, so someone must pay more energy and extra costs for it.
Besides jobs, cook is probably the only one who can implement Apple's "high sugar" and "high pressure" supply chain empire.
Therefore, you can even make a slightly rude conclusion: the essence of the fruit chain is actually the product of "Apple customization". This is why even today, when Android mobile phone manufacturers are very mature, a considerable number of consumers will still be amazed by Apple's highly completed products.
Tesla also likes customization and boasts itself as a super company driven by the supply chain.
Of course, the meaning of this customization is quite different.
Tesla often likes to customize by itself. Its ultimate goal is to make the upstream and downstream industrial chain cheaper and closer to the cost of BOM through its own customization. Therefore, even if there are some "Tesla customization" industries, they are actually carried out around Tesla's extended demand for "self customization".
If we only talk about automobile manufacturing, the most well-known case is the famous "Giga press" integrated die casting technology.
Integrated die casting is not a new technology, but it was rarely used in automobiles before.
The main reason is that traditional automobile factories have long used stamping + welding, so they doubt the yield and strength of "integrated die casting". In addition, Giga press has eliminated part of the parts system, which will reduce the parts revenue of the 4S store and make it more difficult to repair the car. After all, the shell is integrated. A slightly "heroic" collision may make the loss amount close to scrapping.
But on the other hand, it is a craft for musk.
It saves materials and processes, so the car body will be lighter - so it can also reduce the battery cost in disguise. What's more, musk doesn't like 4S stores that pay for too many things, so he can make decisions directly. As for the third-party insurance premium, Tesla can also use data to establish its own insurance business moat.
Looking back at the previous article, top and Xusheng, the only two "special chain" enterprises in a shares, are actually industrial chain enterprises with integrated die-casting technology.
This is a common sense truth. If you want to open up your own "chain" enterprises in a field, you need at least a leading position in new fields.
Tesla certainly has some, but most of the time, more innovation fields come from Tesla's teams in California and Texas. Whether it is battery design, autonomous driving and computing power construction, Tesla must do it by itself, rather than outsourcing it to Panasonic, Ningde or NVIDIA.
Especially for companies like NVIDIA, they are more likely to be competitors in the field of artificial intelligence and partners for in-depth cooperation in the future. Even one day, as Tesla builds its own production lines in fields such as battery cells, companies like Ningde times may also be its potential competitors.
This may have something to do with Musk's vision. He hopes that Tesla can become an automobile group with an annual output of tens of millions. Meanwhile, musk believes that lower prices will inevitably lead to broader product scenarios. This demand for its own scale has led him to constantly transform into a company with extreme business costs.
This price is so strong that Model3 and modely once existed as "futures" in the market. Even if there are still old owners standing at the door of their flagship store protesting against the price reduction, Tesla can go against the trend and reduce the price by thousands.
Musk "hates" cost, because low cost is regarded as Tesla's weapon; Apple's "utilization" cost and industrial premium are its crown.
So it is hard for you to imagine that jobs would one day, like musk, sleep in the factory day and night for a certain production link. He will choose the suppliers he appreciates, and then spur them with money and dreams. If it fails, it will change a more competent candidate or supplier to do what it wants.
Similarly, it's hard to imagine that musk, like jobs, would make his ipad In the series of products, there is no built-in calculator application for a long time. On the contrary, musk will choose the scheme that can be iterated to use first.
So in a way, apple is like an empire.
He subcontracts everything, and then almost uses the way of controlling the vassal states to control various suppliers - when it is time to suppress, when it is time to empower, the tax collection is ruthless, and the money is not soft.
Eventually, Apple was able to extract the most valuable productivity potential from the huge global supply chain.
Tesla is more like a kingdom.
He has established a directly managed supply chain system from factory to consumer from beginning to end. He personally mastered the land that was easy to defend, difficult to attack and high-yield, and then selected the most high-quality and low-cost products from the world open market as a supplement to productivity.
For most players in the open market, it is not fundamentally different from other participants except that it can bring more orders.
There is no difference between good and bad. The Kingdom and Empire are a kind of governance attitude. If the ruling ability is strong enough, the kingdom is not necessarily smaller than the Empire.
Just like "special chain" is not necessarily worse than "fruit chain". In a way, Tesla may be more benign.
After all, China's industry, which has a GDP of billions, is no longer Cinderella. Therefore, it is no longer necessary to rely on a fatherly super company to form a tropical rain forest.
This may be the more representative side in the new context of "Silicon Valley China" software and hardware after Tesla's concept.