China AV – Mar. Newsletter

China AV - Mar. Newsletter

TikTok Autonomous Driving? ByteDance invested in Qcraft and it seems that latterly everyone wants to take part in the new era of AV transformation. China continues to dominance in AV trucks with new capital flow to TuSimple, Plus.AI and Inceptio, while Pony.ai launched PonyTron separate brand for its truck BU. The only industry drawback is the shortage of computing chips that already has an impact on smart vehicle production, as NIO stopped the factory for several days due to this issue.

Mar.2^nd: Baidu and Geely tied up the establishment of Jidu Automobile, a company scoping in the new energy automotive sector. Jidu Auto was registered on March 2 with a registered capital of CNY 2 billion. Jidu Auto’s legal representative, Xia Yiping, was the co-founder and CTO of Mobike. Baidu and Geely hold 55% and 45% shares respectively in this new company.

Mar.3^rd: ZTE issued an internal document on stating that the firm will set up an automotive electronic product line, which will be responsible for coordinating the relevant R&D and business units. ZTE will set up an automotive electronics team, which is subordinate to the system product technology planning department and is responsible for unified business planning and operation in the automotive electronics field.

Mar.5^th: ByteDance to invest in autonomous driving firm QCraft. The investment is said to be at about USD 25 million, with investors including Lenovo and IDG Capital. QCraft is developing L4 autonomous driving technology to adapt to the complex urban traffic environment. At present, its core team includes members are from Waymo, Tesla, Uber, Ford, NVIDIA and other autonomous driving and technology companies.

Mar.9^th: Plus.ai has started talks with partners on SPAC, to achieve backdoor listing and fund its expansion in the field of autonomous driving. Plus.ai, which was invested by Sequoia Capital before, received letters of intent from several SPAC listing in the United States. The scale ranges between $300-$500 million. The startup is cooperating with Goldman Sachs to launch a roadshow with private equity (PIPE).

Mar.10^th: Inceptio Technology announced the launch of the autonomous driving system “Xuanyuan”. It also said that Dongfeng commercial vehicle and China heavy duty truck will launch mass production L3 heavy truck, based on the system. The vehicles will be delivered by the end of 2021 and will be upgraded to L4 through OTA in the future.

Mar.12^th: Shanghai Municipal Transportation Commission has released the test report of Shanghai intelligent network connected vehicle open road (2020). Data show that by the end of 2020, Shanghai has opened 559.87 km test roads and issued road test or demonstration application qualifications to 22 enterprises and 152 vehicles. In terms of road test mileage, the total effective test mileage of relevant enterprises in Shanghai has reached 397,000 km in 2020.

Mar.15^th: Hengyang municipal government and MOGO (蘑菇车联) signed a strategic cooperation agreement. The two sides will carry out in-depth cooperation in the fields of intelligent terminals, vehicle road coordination, autonomous driving and intelligent transportation. The two plan to jointly build an innovative demonstration of intelligent city transportation system. The total investment in the project is estimated at RMB 500 million, of which RMB 70 million will be invested during the first phase – 38km long that is expected to be operational by August this year.

Mar.16^th: SENIOR announced that it has obtained tens of millions of RMB seed round financing from Chentao Capital. This round of financing is mainly used for R&D investment, market development and talent recruitment. Founded in April 2020, SENIOR focuses on the research and development of unmanned port container truck solutions.

Mar.19^th: Momenta raises USD 500m from leading strategic players including SAIC, Toyota, Bosch, Daimler AG, Temasek, Yunfeng Capital and Tencent. According to the company, the newly raised capital will be used on its mass production crowd-sourcing technology to promote large-scale implementation of autonomous driving.

Mar.25^th: DiDi, China’s largest online ride-hailing company, is more likely to raise its IPO in New York than in Hong Kong, with a target valuation of at least USD 100 billion. DiDi also discussed the possibility of listing through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). However, taking into account its sizable valuation target, it seems that SPAC option is not feasible.

Mar.25^th: Evergrande Automobile held the launch of HENGCHI intelligent network connection, and the intelligent cockpit, super computing platform, intelligent ecosystem, and other cutting-edge scientific and technological achievements. Evergrande Automobile also launched the H-SMART OS HENGCHI intelligent network connection system, which took one year and 11 months to develop with Tencent and Baidu.

Mar.26^th: NIO officially announced that it will reduce its Q1 delivery to 19500 vehicles, compared with the expected delivery of 20000 to 20500 vehicles in the Q1. It is worth noting that from January to February this year, NIO has delivered a total of 12803 new vehicles. According to the adjusted delivery expectation of 19500 vehicles, NIO delivered 6697 new vehicles in March, 500-1000 less than expected. The reason for the expected reduction is still due to the impact of chip shortage. For this reason, NIO will even temporarily stop production for five working days. This also makes NIO the first car manufacturing enterprise in China to suspend production due to lack of core chips.

Mar.30^th: Xiaomi announced on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that its Board of Directors has formally approved the establishment of the Intelligent Electric Vehicle business and intends to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary to be responsible for the Intelligent Electric Vehicle business. The initial investment will be RMB 10 billion, while Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi, will also be the CEO of the Intelligent Electric Vehicle company.

Mar.31^st: Plus AI announced it has raised USD 2.2 billion in Series D+, jointly led by FountainVest Partners and ClearVue Partners, followed by SAIC Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Millennium Technology Value Partners, and Zoyi Capital. According to the company, this round of funds will be used to expand global commercialization and promote the implementation of mass production autonomous driving heavy trucks.

Mar.31^st: Pony.ai announced a new brand name of its truck business – “PonyTron”. This marks the official formation of Pony’s two-wheeled business layout of “Robotaxi + autonomous logistics”.

Sources: YICAI, EqualOcean, Gasgoo.