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Written by Wen Yehao Editor | Wu Xianzhi
Source: Photon Planet
Looking back at the trends of cloud computing manufacturers in the past year, the automotive cloud seems to have become the “sweet pastry” of the cloud computing track.
Especially in the second half of the year, whether it is the three cloud giants Ali, Tencent, and Huawei, or Baidu Cloud, JD Cloud, Byte Cloud and other players struggling to compete for the “fourth cloud”, they have “refreshed” their cars in various forms. cloud strategy.
Behind the uniform actions, it reflects the common anxiety of cloud computing players in the deep water area. In this context, players have played differentiated hands based on their own advantages, so as to seize the few growth opportunities.
And such a lively atmosphere indicates that the auto cloud is gradually moving from the horizontal landing scene of cloud manufacturers to the strategic depth.
Escape the “comfort zone” of the base camp
The cloud computing giant’s shift to the automotive cloud is, in a sense, an escape from the former Internet stronghold.
For a long time, the core of cloud computing players’ external output is “computing power”, which makes pan-Internet companies with high demand for computing power the most important customer group of cloud computing.
Based on this, based on their own business advantages, each giant has divided into camps under the general framework of the pan-Internet. Alibaba Cloud’s customers are mostly companies in the e-commerce and retail industries, while pan-entertainment players are more willing to flock to Tencent in groups. cloud.
Tencent once disclosed in the financial report conference call that nearly 50% of Tencent Cloud’s revenue comes from Internet companies, and nearly 50% of domestic game companies use Tencent Cloud’s capabilities, which is enough to illustrate the importance of pan-Internet customers to cloud computing.
However, as the Internet industry as a whole is under pressure, not only the demand for Internet companies to go to the cloud has dropped sharply, but customers who have already gone to the cloud are also reducing their budgets. growth bottleneck.
Ali’s financial report shows that in the third quarter of this year, its cloud business revenue was 20.757 billion, a year-on-year increase of 4%, and the growth rate has slowed down; similarly, Tencent’s cloud and other enterprise service revenue also declined in the third quarter.
Although the rapid growth of the past is no longer there, there is not no good news in the financial report. Tencent’s third-quarter financial report mentioned: “We actively help non-Internet industries embrace digital transformation, especially for industries that used to focus on offline development. The proportion of related revenue has increased.” In the third quarter, Alibaba Cloud’s customer revenue from non-Internet industries increased by 28% year-on-year, which is a considerable growth rate, and the proportion of revenue also rose to 58%.
In other words, cloud vendors, dragged down by the cold winter of the Internet, are jumping out of their comfort zone and shifting their growth focus to non-Internet industries.
However, non-Internet industries have different tracks, and the “cake” in some fields not only cannot satisfy the appetite of the giants, but also faces competition from a lot of cloud vendors at the waist and tail, which can be described as thankless. In contrast, the automotive industry, which is undergoing a transformational period of “new four modernizations”, is obviously the “ideal type” of cloud giants.
The “2021 China Auto Cloud Market Tracking Report” released by Sullivan and Toubao Research Institute shows that China’s auto cloud is still in the early stages of development, and the auto cloud market will show a steady growth trend in the next five consecutive years.
In other words, there is still room for growth in Auto Cloud, the market is large enough, and the high threshold also screens out a large number of low-end players who are trying to grab food. This naturally attracted the attention of cloud giants.
However, from the production and R&D process involving the supply chain, to the sales and service facing users directly, and some car companies are superimposed on the digital transformation side of traditional enterprises, it can be said that the complexity of the car cloud track is far beyond most vertical scenarios. Based on this, even though the cloud giants have a common goal, the paths they choose are not uniform.
Giant Involved Auto Cloud
The current car cloud track seems to be able to divide two factions of players.
Based on the previous differences in strategic cognition, Baidu, which is also one of the BATs, lagged behind Ali and Tencent in entering cloud computing. When Ali chose to go to cloud computing, Baidu chose to bet on AI. The difference in choice made Baidu miss the early dividends of cloud computing, but it also planted a seed for its development in deep water areas.
After all, the focus of non-Internet customers on the cloud is not “computing power”, but “service”, and the PaaS and SaaS layer business based on AI can exactly meet the needs of non-Internet customers. Thanks to this, in the third quarter of this year, Baidu Smart Cloud, which focuses on AI, saw its revenue increase by 24% year-on-year, outperforming other cloud vendors.
Baidu Apollo is the embodiment of Baidu’s AI advantages. At present, autonomous driving capability, as an important reference dimension for users when choosing a car and purchasing a car, has become a shortcoming that many car companies urgently need to make up for, especially traditional car companies that lack IT capabilities. However, considering factors such as the R&D cycle, R&D costs, and hardware costs, most car companies are unwilling to end it in person. Based on this, Baidu, which has strong autonomous driving capabilities, may have a first-mover advantage in this field.
In addition, both Baidu and Huawei have another opportunity to go deep into the automotive cloud, that is, “car building”. Although Huawei has repeatedly declared that it will not stop building cars, the industry has long known whether it is Hua or not. Although Ali also builds cars, its pace is more like investment, with limited participation. In contrast, Baidu is much more frank, and together with Geely, it launched the set degree.
However, Huawei and Baidu, which started cooperative car manufacturing earlier, are obviously slightly better than latecomers in terms of the coupling of cloud business with the auto industry and their familiarity with the auto industry chain. According to Sullivan’s “2021 China Auto Cloud Market Tracking Report”, Huawei Cloud ranks first in China’s auto cloud market (IaaS+PaaS) with a 22.8% share, and Baidu Smart Cloud ranks first with a 13.7% share. third.
However, having “car-making” experience is not entirely a good thing. After all, the car track has always adhered to a relatively conservative industrial thinking mode. For car companies, Baidu and Huawei are not only the “enablers” of cloud computing, but also their market competitors. Car companies are unwilling to bind with them at the subjective level-WM has lost its self-developed autonomous driving In exchange for the possibility of Baidu Apollo’s self-driving technology, Baidu turned around and cooperated with Geely to establish Jidu, which put Weimar in an embarrassing situation.
For large car companies that have been in the industry for decades, this worry is particularly obvious. As Accenture mentioned in its report, car companies can survive by relying on their own core technological competitiveness. Therefore, they are often cautious about any form of third-party outsourcing services, let alone core operations. category.
In other words, established car companies are only willing to find assistants, not partners, to help them with their digital transformation and “new four modernizations”. Because of this, even though Huawei Cloud occupies the top spot in the automotive cloud track, its customers are mostly small and medium-sized car companies.
For other players such as Tencent Cloud and JD Cloud, the “crisis of trust” of car companies has become an opportunity instead. Based on this, Tencent has repeatedly emphasized its own positioning, insisting on not making cars or hardware, but only as an assistant. The reason why Huawei has repeatedly emphasized that it does not build cars may be to appease car companies verbally.
However, regardless of whether cloud manufacturers “build cars” or not, the automotive cloud is nothing more than scenarios such as the Internet of Vehicles, autonomous driving, vehicle-road collaboration, and the digital transformation of car companies themselves. Within this broad framework, many manufacturers will often choose to focus on their efforts based on their own differentiated advantages.
In addition to general-purpose scenarios, Baidu, which holds Apollo in its hands, naturally raises autonomous driving to a more important level, and places it in the Netlink Cloud, one of its “three clouds” for cars; while Ali and Byte, which have strong marketing genes, are in In its automotive cloud solution, “marketing cloud” and “smart marketing cloud” are respectively divided;
JD Cloud tells the story of the digital intelligence supply chain and integrates the automotive industry into it; Tencent tries to leverage its C-end advantages and integrate various product components into its smart cockpit solutions; and Renault, which has reached a cooperation with Google Cloud, is in digital transformation At the same time, the Android operating system is also integrated into the car media display.
On the other hand, perhaps because they do not want to be too deeply bound to a single cloud vendor, veteran players such as Geely often reach cooperation with multiple cloud vendors at the same time to resolve potential crises. Superimposed on the above-mentioned differentiated advantages of various cloud vendors, the logic of the automotive cloud track may gradually change from “one-stop service” to each has its own job.
end
At the moment when cloud computing giants are leaving the field one after another, the atmosphere of the automotive cloud track is quite lively. This inevitably makes people feel vigilant. After all, in the past two years, the Internet context has witnessed countless stories of ups and downs.
As mentioned above, China Auto Cloud is still in the early stages of development, not to mention how far the autonomous driving capability mentioned by various cloud manufacturers is from large-scale application, but the most basic issue of data security is placed on the Internet. The car scene will also be a test.
Take BMW, which cooperates with AWS, as an example. Only application developers and engineers within the BMW Group can access and add data, and combine data with AWS functions. That is to say, at the commercial level, the aforementioned car companies have very high requirements for the confidentiality of their core technologies, which will undoubtedly increase the difficulty for car companies to fully integrate with cloud computing.
In addition, the data collected by the car is stored in the cloud. If there is no effective protection, it is likely to be lost or leaked due to cyber attacks, thus violating user privacy.
On the other hand, the current automotive cloud market seems to be booming, but this is largely due to the “contention among a hundred schools of thought” among auto companies brought about by the new energy trend. As the window period gradually fades, the market gradually becomes saturated, and overseas mature car companies gradually develop new energy sources, the probability of surviving seats will gradually decrease until several giants dominate the market.
And the fact is exactly the same. Since the second half of this year, many new car-making forces have experienced a decline in sales, and some players even fell into trouble for a while. If the downward trend continues to spread, the cake allocated to cloud manufacturers will inevitably be reduced. At that time, the automotive cloud track in the eyes of cloud manufacturers may be no different from the current Internet.
In addition, relying on the automotive cloud alone cannot improve the sluggish growth of cloud computing giants. According to Sullivan’s data, in 2021, the annual budget of small-scale domestic car companies will be around 10 million yuan, while the budget of large group-level car companies will be around 50 million yuan. Although the number has surpassed the vast majority of non-Internet customers, but the player base of the car track is limited.
In other words, as far as cloud computing giants are concerned, Auto Cloud, as a piece of fat, can still satisfy hunger, but it cannot save lives. If they want to find the second growth curve, they need to go deep into more non-Internet scenarios to find landing opportunities. But right now, it is still time to give the answer as to who among the players playing different hands can stand out.
(Disclaimer: This article only represents the author’s point of view, not the position of Sina.com.)
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