Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1690
Ideal Auto is the new car maker with the largest sales volume and the fastest growth rate this year. Last month, ideal sales reached 25,600 units, a year-on-year increase of 516%. The increase in sales has brought another pressure – the stability of the supply chain. “The next main task is to increase the supply of the supply chain. The supply target set at the beginning of the year is a bit low.” Li Xiang, CEO of Ideal Auto, said on social media.
The power battery, which accounts for more than 40% of the cost of a car, is the bulk of the supply chain. Car companies such as Weilai and Xiaopeng have encountered the dilemma of car deliveries being affected by the shortage of battery suppliers.
In order to reduce the risk of the supply chain, most car companies have begun to increase battery suppliers. Ideal had only one battery supplier before, and introduced Honeycomb Energy as a new battery supplier this year.
Changes in the battery market structure and the trend of car companies looking for secondary suppliers have given emerging battery companies like Honeycomb Energy more opportunities. In April of this year, Honeycomb’s installed capacity of passenger cars increased by 43.2% year-on-year. Currently, Honeycomb is preparing to be listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board.
The competitiveness of power battery companies includes product technology, large-scale manufacturing capabilities, and financing capabilities, among which product technology and large-scale manufacturing capabilities are the basic capabilities. To stand out among second-tier companies, basic capabilities must be passed. Differentiated products, major customers, financing, etc. are all the results of basic capabilities.
Product innovation expands circle of friends
The change in battery demand for electric vehicles is the source of the evolution of the battery field.
Five years ago, “range anxiety” was the main pain point of electric vehicles, and it was difficult for people to accept that it would take longer to charge and still not be able to obtain the same cruising range as fuel vehicles. At that time, companies such as Ningde Times and LG New Energy, which mastered the ternary lithium battery technology with higher energy density, gained the largest market share.
Improving the energy density of battery materials and improving battery packs are two routes to improve battery life. Previously, battery companies were more inclined to the former, but the safety problem of high energy density materials cannot be solved. Starting from 2020, innovation in the battery industry will focus more on In terms of the improvement of the battery pack structure, more batteries are inserted into the same volume to increase the battery life.
This allows the lower energy density but safer and cheaper lithium iron phosphate battery to achieve a cruising range comparable to that of a ternary lithium battery – more than 500 kilometers.
This change has reduced the technical differences between the leading companies in the battery industry and the second-tier companies. The ternary lithium battery has a high technical threshold in manufacturing because of the lower safety of the material. A battery industry executive once told “Later Auto”: “In 2020, there will be no more than 5 teams in China that can do a good job in the high-nickel ternary route, and there may be 50 teams that can do a good job in lithium iron phosphate.”
The battery life of more than 500 kilometers is enough to make electric vehicles not weaker than fuel vehicles in the battery life competition. The market is turning to safer, lower-cost lithium iron phosphate batteries.
The difference in technology has been smoothed out, the market share of leading battery companies has also begun to be shaken, and second-tier battery companies such as Honeycomb Energy, Sunwoda, and Yiwei Lithium Energy have begun to rise.
Among these companies, Honeycomb Energy is the youngest. It was established in 2018. Before that, the core team had completed the development of battery systems for dozens of models within Great Wall. Unlike other battery companies with a background in consumer electronics batteries, Honeycomb was formerly the power battery division of Great Wall Motors, and it has a better understanding of the technical and quality requirements of automobiles. This enables it to complete the testing and fitting of a product in a shorter period of time. “Our fastest project can be developed in 6 months, and other companies may take about 9-10 months.” A senior executive of Honeycomb Energy told “Later Auto”.
A deeper understanding and understanding of new energy vehicles is the basis for Honeycomb Energy to differentiate its products. Honeycomb launched a long and thin “short knife battery” based on lithium iron phosphate material in 2019. In 2022, Honeycomb launched a new short knife battery compatible with lithium iron phosphate, high manganese iron nickel, high manganese iron nickel mixed ternary and other material solutions.
According to Yang Hongxin, chairman of Honeycomb Energy, before designing the short knife battery, Honeycomb measured the wheelbase and wheelbase of dozens of models and then determined the size of the product. “The short knife battery can adapt to the battery pack of about 80% of passenger cars, and can adapt to different power requirements through fine-tuning the length, thickness and height.” He said.
This development idea is similar to Volkswagen’s “standard battery cell”, using a more general technical solution to reduce the development process and improve efficiency. A battery generally needs to go through about one year of testing and adaptation from research and development to loading, and car companies need to pay tens of millions of yuan for testing. A shorter adaptation time can reduce the procurement cost of car companies, and also allow car companies to launch new models at a faster speed.
On the Battery Day at the end of 2022, Honeycomb Energy released a new generation of battery system solutions using short-blade batteries-Dragon Scale Battery. By improving the structure of the battery pack, the Longlinjia battery allows the battery to separate the heat source from the BMS and other circuit parts to maintain overall safety when there is a potential thermal runaway, that is, the thermoelectric separation released by Honeycomb Energy in 2022 Battery Day technology. This improvement also reduces the structural parts of the entire battery pack by 20%, reducing the weight of the entire battery pack by 20 kg. By reducing structural parts and stuffing more batteries, under the same volume, the Dragonscale battery pack has 32% more power than Tesla’s 4680 battery pack. According to Honeycomb, the Dragonscale battery will be mass-produced and loaded into vehicles in the fourth quarter of this year.
Picture: The Dragon Scale battery released by Honeycomb Energy at the end of 2022.
These technical routes that are more in line with market demand have brought considerable growth to Hive. Relying on a variety of low-cost and high-safety batteries, Honeycomb has entered the supply chain of leading car companies such as Ideal, Geely, and Stellantis (a joint venture between PSA and Fiat Chrysler).
Stronger manufacturing and more advanced processes
Technology and cost advantages are the stepping stones, and the manufacturing capabilities of battery companies are the core elements that determine long-term competitiveness. When second-tier power battery companies compete for customers, they will face four tortures from car companies: 1. Who have they supplied to before? 2. How much did you pay? 3. Is there a problem? 4. How to solve the problem?
Car companies need low-cost and high-performance batteries, but they also need battery companies to continuously supply large quantities of batteries with stable quality, which determines the life and death of the company.
The battery manufacturing process is complex and cumbersome. There are more than 20 processes in battery manufacturing. The entire manufacturing process lasts up to 15 days. It needs to deal with various materials, liquid and solid. The precision of the control extends from the micron level to the meter level. The battery company must strictly control the different processes. , materials, and environment to ensure the operation of the production line. There will be flaws in this, and battery companies have to bear the cost themselves. The more defective and defective products, the greater the loss.
Manufacturing capability is the comprehensive result of a battery company’s R&D capability, internal management and supply chain control. It ultimately translates into business success or failure through product competitiveness and cost advantages.
The two criteria to measure manufacturing capacity are efficiency and straight-through rate, that is, the time required for a batch of materials to be input from the beginning of the production line to the final finished product and the ratio of the final qualified deliverable product. The pass-through rate gap between different battery companies often exceeds 5%, which means that with the same amount of materials invested, excellent companies can produce 5% more finished batteries. This directly corresponds to the company’s costs and profitability.
Most battery companies will start with a simple technical route and rely on the advanced equipment of the leading supplier to solve the problem. However, in order to take into account product performance, Honeycomb chose a more difficult process route.
Most battery companies use the winding process, that is, the pole pieces are rolled up and processed by winding. Generally, this method has higher production efficiency, but it can only make a certain difference in terms of the internal space utilization rate and energy density of the battery core. concession. The stacking process adopted by the honeycomb can greatly improve the energy density of the battery and make the battery more flexible in size selection.
On the premise of choosing a more difficult process, Honeycomb solves the efficiency problem of battery production through self-developed production equipment. In addition, Honeycomb has also made equipment innovations in the six processes of homogenization, coating, rolling, die-cutting, lamination, and assembly. The self-developed stacking machine has now increased the speed of stacking from 5 times per second to 8 times per second. The short knife battery uses a 1.4-meter ultra-wide coating machine, which can coat 80-meter-long battery sheets per minute. The efficiency is higher than the coating equipment of other battery companies. The industry generally uses a coating machine with a width of 1 meter and a speed of 60 meters per minute.
Figure: Honeycomb energy battery production line.
Another focus after efficiency is quality control.
The first step is to use better equipment to reduce errors in the manufacturing process. In the cell transportation link, Honeycomb adopts the industry’s first magnetic levitation logistics line. This reduces friction and collisions between the cells and foreign objects. Compared with the traditional belt logistics line, the transmission efficiency of the maglev logistics line is higher, which is 10 times higher than that of the belt logistics line. At the same time, the acceleration and deceleration of the maglev transport vehicle is more uniform, preventing the battery cell position from shifting.
The second step is to improve the ability to find problems and increase the detection of defective products. Honeycomb has added a demagnetization process in the slurry conveying process, which can reduce the foreign matter content of battery materials and improve safety. At present, honeycomb can achieve less than 50ppb (the weight of magnetic foreign matter accounts for 50 parts per billion), which is 50% higher than the industry. After the batteries are made into batteries, Honeycomb has set up 4 foreign object detection tests in the entire assembly process of the batteries. The foreign object detection ability of the product is much higher than the level of 2-3 times in the industry.
Honeycomb’s testing of batteries is not limited to the production process. Honeycomb currently relies on the Fengyun platform battery management system to monitor the performance parameters of the installed batteries. The data after the actual operation of the battery can help the hive improve the design of the battery. The Fengyun system can also provide early warning of possible accidents by monitoring the internal state of the battery to ensure the safety of car owners.
The problem parameters collected each time are the source of improved manufacturing capabilities. The third step is to summarize the problems and improve them. At present, Honeycomb has introduced artificial intelligence big data analysis technology to detect quality problems and use artificial intelligence to collect parameters of defective products, and automatically find the best parameters to correct manufacturing mistakes in the production line. The previous battery production line could only detect problems, and correcting errors required engineers. A more intelligent production line can liberate engineers and allow them to do more meaningful things. The system can also monitor the status of production equipment and alert engineers to repair equipment that may be malfunctioning in advance.
The process of improving manufacturing capabilities is linear, pure and realistic. You will become the first if you try the most, encounter and solve the most problems.
The advantages of manufacturing capabilities will gradually increase in the future. In the early stage of the rise of the new energy vehicle industry, battery companies with performance advantages have an advantage, but when the technical advantages shrink, the competition of battery companies will focus on cost and supply stability. The latter two points are linked to manufacturing capabilities. This is also the reason why Honeycomb continues to invest in self-developed equipment to improve manufacturing capabilities.
Competitiveness is ultimately customer service capability
In addition to technology and manufacturing capabilities, the competition among battery companies also lies in the capabilities and production capacity of service car companies.
Hive established a customer business group internally in 2020. This department gathers project managers, product managers and account managers, and is responsible for early-stage program docking, communication after official supply, and development of new projects. This department is directly managed by the rotating president of Hive. .
To put it simply, the core management such as the rotating president will directly coordinate the three most critical roles facing customers, while controlling the product line. This ensures that customer demands are smoothly conveyed internally and transformed into products. The same is true on the client side. The rotating president is also serving customers on the front line, giving feedback on preliminary technical solutions to improve efficiency.
“In terms of feedback timeliness, we require that ‘ things don’t stay overnight ‘ , and small problems are solved on the same day. If it is a big problem, we give feedback to the car company on the direction and plan to solve it within one day.” A senior executive of Hive told “Later Auto”. According to “Later Auto”, most battery companies require 48-72 hours to solve quality problems. In addition, Yang Hongxin, chairman of Honeycomb, will lead a team to visit the top executives of car companies every month.
The nature of the battery industry is an asset-heavy manufacturing industry. The law of large-scale manufacturing is that every time the production capacity doubles, the manufacturing cost will drop by 10%-15%. The larger the scale, the larger the volume, the more stable the product, and the lower the cost. Moreover, automobile companies generally pursue long-term and stable supply. It is difficult for companies that are too small to meet demand to enter the supply chain of leading car companies.
Production capacity directly determines the service capability of battery companies to car companies. Especially for leading automobile companies, the annual sales plan is hundreds of thousands, or even millions, and the required batteries are dozens of GWh, or even hundreds, and battery companies must also have corresponding supporting capabilities.
Honeycomb currently has production bases in Changzhou, Nanjing, Yancheng, and Huzhou in the Yangtze River Delta where the automobile industry is concentrated, as well as Suining and Chengdu in the southwest near lithium resources.
Photo: Changzhou factory of Honeycomb Energy.
Capacity planning is not a simple mathematical problem. It corresponds to the management capabilities of the battery company and how to prevent its own management efficiency from being diluted by the gradually expanding scale.
In the early stage of capacity expansion, Hive centered on the Changzhou factory to train cadres, and assigned engineers with management experience to the new factory, and the headquarters would also regularly send people to the newly built factory. This can ensure that new production capacity and new employees can be put into production faster and improve the efficiency of capacity expansion.
Since the beginning of this year, Honeycomb has continued to increase its customer base and has entered the supply chain of Ideal and Geely’s high-end brand Galaxy. In the second half of the year, Honeycomb and Geely will launch 7 models in cooperation. This means that Honeycomb’s influence in the range-extended car and high-end SUV car markets with rapid sales growth has been further enhanced.
In a more sinking market, Honeycomb Energy has also begun to make gains. Honeycomb has now become a power battery supplier for two models of SAIC-GM-Wuling. In addition, the old customers of Hive, Great Wall, Leap, Lantu, etc. are also deepening their cooperation with Hive. These customers are the cornerstone of Hive’s growth. Leaprun C-series vehicles equipped with honeycomb delivered more than 10,000 units last month, a month-on-month increase of 38%. In the second half of this year, various models of Great Wall Haval and Great Wall’s high-end model Mechalong will also be equipped with honeycomb batteries.
More orders also require Hive’s production capacity to climb faster and maintain a stable state. At present, Hive’s new bases in Yancheng, Nanjing and other places have achieved product roll-off. Production capacity is the foundation of everything, and it is also the lowest level of competitiveness of batteries, which determines the future market share of Honeycomb.
Entering the supply chain of higher-end models is itself an endorsement of the battery company’s capabilities. Larger-selling and more expensive models have higher requirements for supply stability, capacity performance, and quality. Higher requirements will be directly fed back to the competitiveness of the battery company itself. If you meet higher standards, you will naturally become stronger.
Ideal’s L9 and L7 models are equipped with Ningde era and honeycomb batteries respectively. Li Xiang, CEO of Ideal, said that although the suppliers are different, the two batteries “have the same performance, quality, and warranty policy.” This is also confirmed by the side. Honeycomb’s batteries are on par with the top suppliers in the industry in terms of performance and quality.
Picture: In April this year, Ideal L7 began to be equipped with honeycomb energy batteries.
Power battery is one of the few industries in China that still maintains rapid growth, large investment and aggressive expansion. The aggressive, gambling, competitive instincts that have flourished in the Chinese business world over the past few years remain themes of the industry. Competition is also very fair. As long as we do our best in terms of products, technologies, manufacturing, services, and production capacity, growth beyond expectations will become possible.
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