Depth report

　　

2021 will be the year electric cars really start to eat into the market for gas-powered vehicles.

Across the ocean, "kid" Tesla staged a "war against Detroit" story; In China, the new forces of the head car also began to seize the market share originally belonging to fuel cars with a wide gap in sales growth.

According to the data: Tesla delivered more than 936,000 vehicles in 2021, up 87.4 percent year on year. According to tesla's financial report, its 2021 operating revenue is 53.823 billion US dollars, up 71% year on year; The net profit of the parent group was $7.64 billion, up 211% year on year. At current exchange rates, $7.64 billion is equivalent to 48.57 billion yuan, or more than 100 million yuan per day on average, according to rough calculations.

The new force of domestic head car manufacturing also handed over beautiful report card: Xiaopeng Automobile delivered a total of 98155 new cars in 2021, with a year-on-year growth of 262.98%; In 2021, NiO delivered 91,429 new cars, up 109.1% year on year, doubling sales for two consecutive years. The ideal 2021 cumulative delivery of 90,491 new cars, year-on-year growth is also up to 177.37%.

Driven by the head of enterprises, new energy vehicles and fuel vehicles show two completely different growth curves. According to passenger vehicle retail data from the Passenger Car Federation, sales of conventional fuel vehicles decreased by 1.02 million units in 2021, down 6% year on year. New energy vehicles increased by 1.88 million units, up 169% year on year, and passenger car retail increased by 860,000 units. New energy vehicles contributed 9 percentage points to the year-over-year growth rate of passenger vehicles.

In the global market, the development trend of fuel vehicles and new energy vehicles is equally unequal. Although the current market size of new energy vehicles is still far less than fuel vehicles, its rapid growth seems to have indicated the direction of the future.

How profitable is Tesla?

In 2021, despite the lingering effects of COVID-19, chip shortages and soaring raw material prices, Tesla's ability to make money has not been affected at all.

Electric cars used to be considered less profitable overall because of battery costs. But Tesla's results demonstrate that electric cars can be hugely profitable.

In the third quarter of 2021, Tesla stopped selling points to make money and generated the highest operating margin of any mass-production automaker. In the third and fourth quarters of 2021, the cost of a Tesla bike has fallen to about $36,000. Tesla reported a gross profit of $4.847 billion in the fourth quarter, with an overall gross margin of 27.4% and a single vehicle gross margin of 30.6%.

 

What is this concept? In the past, Toyota has been the most profitable brand, with gross margins of around 20%; In addition, some traditional luxury brands also have good profitability, such as Porsche's gross profit margin of 16.7%, Ferrari's 18%; The gross profit margin of high-end new energy vehicles in China, NiO and Ideo, is 18.6% and 18.9% respectively. In 2021, Xiaopeng bicycle's gross profit rate is about 11%.

Li Xiang, founder, Chairman and CEO of Ideal Automobile, said: "The gross margin is related to whether an enterprise can continue to invest heavily in research and development. If a company has a single-digit gross margin, it can only invest in r&d at the product level, not in the technology level."

Tesla's overall gross profit margin and gross profit margin per vehicle are far higher than those of other car companies. Analysts in the industry believe that this is not only related to tesla's simplified operation model as a pure trolley company, but also to its profit model such as "software charging".

Tesla, known as a price butcher, has remained unscathed in its profitability after repeatedly cutting prices over the past few years. The reason is that Tesla models not only boldly remove redundant functions, redundant parts, complex processes and price differences between middlemen, but also significantly reduce the daily expenses, sales and marketing expenses. In addition, Tesla believes its current project, which includes large castings, structural batteries, 4680 cells and more, will help it continue to reduce product costs.

In a conference call with executives following the earnings release, Tesla's CFO said the key to tesla's profit margins being able to rise significantly this year was the high volume delivery of the Model Y, which has a much higher profit margin than the Model 3.

It's worth noting that as deliveries continue to climb, the contribution of Tesla's software revenue to overall earnings will continue to climb. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk also said FSD (Tesla's full self-driving capability) will be Tesla's most profitable "product." FSD will increase the value of the car itself more than any other product in history. And this part of the income, is the current fuel car does not have.

"We will continue to innovate to reduce manufacturing and operating costs, and we expect hardware-related profit growth to accelerate in tandem with software-related profit growth over time." Tesla said. There have been seven updates to the FSD beta software. Musk said on the earnings call that "the FSD stack will be deeply improved in the coming months" and predicted that "Dojo will be available this summer."

To simplify complexity and make money is the true portrayal of Tesla's rapid expansion and development.

Electric cars replacing petrol cars?

 

Tesla believes that new energy vehicles achieve a partial replacement effect on the fuel car market, and accelerate the pace of the car market to new energy transformation.

Currently, Tesla is the world's largest new energy vehicle company by sales. Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory contributed significantly to tesla's performance throughout the year. According to a Filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on February 7, Tesla's revenue in The Chinese market reached $13.844 billion in 2021, up 107.8 percent year on year, mainly due to increased production and deliveries at the Shanghai Gigafactorplant.

At the same time, the catfish effect brought by Tesla not only activates the domestic new energy vehicle market, but also drives the rapid rise of domestic new energy vehicle enterprises. China is now the world's largest market for new energy vehicles. In 2021, among the world's top 20 new energy vehicle enterprises by sales, Chinese enterprises occupy 8 seats, ranking first in number.

February 6, ride association secretary General Cui Dongshu released a global new energy vehicle market pattern report shows that in 2021, the global sales of new energy passenger vehicles in the broad sense reached 9.37 million. Plug-in hybrid, pure electric, fuel cell narrow new energy vehicle global sales reached 6.23 million units, year-on-year growth of 118%. In the past year, China's retail sales of new energy vehicles totaled 2.989 million units, up 169.1% year on year. China's share of new energy passenger vehicles in the world reached 53%. From the perspective of trend, China's new energy vehicle market will continue to have a strong trend in 2021, and continue to accelerate upward in the third and fourth quarters.

The report shows that the overall penetration rate of new energy vehicles in the world shows a rapid trend, and has reached 7% this year. Among them, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles is 12% in China, 22% in Germany, 69% in Norway, 4% in the United States and 0.8% in Japan.

It is expected to sell more than 5.5 million new energy passenger vehicles in 2022, and the penetration rate of new energy passenger vehicles will reach around 25%. New energy vehicles are expected to exceed 6 million, and the penetration rate of new energy vehicles is around 22%.

With the rise of China's new energy vehicle market, many independent brands actively layout, also achieved rapid development. For example, the cumulative sales of Hongguang MINIEV in 2021 reached 426,452 units. Byd sold 593,745 new energy passenger cars in the year, up 231.6% year on year. In addition, the head of the new forces also achieved a doubling of sales growth.

In January 2022, the new force of car manufacturing continued its previous development trend and delivered a beautiful delivery report card again. Among them, Xiaopeng Automobile delivered 12,922 new cars in January, an increase of 115% year on year, with monthly sales breaking 10,000 for five consecutive months. Ideal ONE delivered 12,268 units in January, up 128% year on year; Nezha delivered 11,09 units in January, up 402% year on year. Nio delivered 9,652 new cars in January, up 33.6 percent year on year.

Although in the short term, new energy vehicles will not completely replace fuel vehicles, but it can be foreseen that the future of new energy vehicles will continue to carve up the fuel car market share, and the early layout of the new energy vehicle market, and the launch of reliable products of the enterprise, will win a greater say.