On March 29th, Tencent and Audi announced a strategic cooperation. Tencent will help Audi build an intelligent and interconnected digital ecosystem, including digital cockpit, digital marketing and user operation, and provide intelligent travel services for Audi users in China. The joint efforts of the two parties will further increase Audi's "digital offensive" in the China market.
Tencent and Audi are not the only ones who have launched an "offensive" in the direction of digitalization and intelligence of automobiles. Huawei, once rumored to build cars, has repeatedly reiterated that "Huawei does not build cars and helps car companies build good cars", and its positioning is to provide intelligent technology suppliers to car companies. Although Huawei claims not to build cars, its industrial chain layout has obviously penetrated into the core areas of automobile manufacturing.
With the in-depth development of technologies such as 5G, AI, cloud computing, and Internet of Things, the traditional automobile industry has accelerated to the direction of intelligence, networking, and electrification. As an important provider of intelligent in-vehicle systems and underlying ICT technologies, Huawei is a player that cannot be ignored in the new forces of building cars.
Huawei and Tencent moped make cars.
In June, 5438 +065438+2020 10, the founder of Huawei issued the "smart car parts business management resolution" to integrate Huawei's smart car business and smart terminal business, and the business jurisdiction was unified to the consumer business management Committee. At the same time, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer business, was appointed as the director of IRB for smart terminals and smart auto parts.
Released by Zheng Fei and led by Yu Chengdong, we can see the importance of smart car business in Huawei's territory. In the smart car business, Huawei has successively launched HMS for Car, car projection screen HiCar, car smart screen and other products to provide smart travel services for car companies. On March 9 this year, Huawei also announced two patents in the field of autonomous driving: "Man-vehicle interaction method for autonomous vehicles and autonomous driving systems" and "Method and device for determining lane information".
In February this year, Yu Chengdong officially announced that Huawei cooperated with Mercedes-Benz to launch HMS for fast application service of automobiles on the brand-new Mercedes-Benz S-Class. Huawei plans to promote 4 to 5 car companies to release production models equipped with HMS during the year for in-vehicle intelligent in-vehicle cloud service solutions.
Huawei and Tencent have joined hands with car companies to build intelligent networked cars, which is accelerating the process of intelligent and digital car companies. In the second half of the "Car Bureau", car companies may fall behind if they are not careful.
Tang Daosheng, senior executive vice president of Tencent and president of Cloud and Smart Industry Group, said: "Tencent hopes to become an important partner of Audi, give full play to its advantages in the fields of car networking, big data, cloud computing and intelligent manufacturing, and provide a solid digital foundation to help Audi build a complete and humanized digital service ecosystem for China consumers, and constantly break through innovation."
In the cooperation between Tencent and Audi, Tencent has injected rich social, content, service and other ecological resources and digital technologies into Audi's digital cockpit, and provided services such as WeChat car version, QQ music, Tencent mini-scene (car applet platform), Tencent map, etc., so that China consumers can also enjoy their familiar and favorite digital life on weekdays, making cars a real "mobile living space".
The gap between "mobile living space" and "iron box" may be the dimension reduction blow of intelligent networked cars to traditional car companies.
On 20 18, Tencent entered the field of smart travel in an all-round way, giving full play to the advantages of digital technology and resources in the fields of car networking, autonomous driving, cloud, location services and travel services, and driving digital innovation in the industry. At present, Tencent has cooperated with 33 mainstream car companies and landed more than 120 models.
In the second half of the car, the competition among the giants became fierce.
In addition, on the track of intelligent networked cars, real estate developer Evergrande is a bit like a "reckless" player. It once spent $800 million to buy FF cars in Jia Yueting, but the latter "returned to China next week" has not been seen yet. Evergrande never gave up the dream of building a car. Evergrande Automobile was launched in July last year, and then the first batch of six models of its new energy automobile brand "Hengchi" was released.
Evergrande also cooperates with Tencent and Baidu to build intelligent cockpit, supercomputing platform and intelligent ecosystem. It took 1 year, 1 1 month to develop the H-SMART OS Hengchi intelligent networking system, aiming at intelligence.
Seeing the second half of the "Car Bureau", the giants entered the stadium one after another. Baidu and Geely established Du Ji Automobile Co., Ltd., and the "Smart Car" jointly built by Alibaba and Pudong New Area also appeared. Didi cooperates with BYD to customize the network car, and the competition is becoming increasingly fierce. Not long ago, it was rumored that "Xiaomi wants to build a car." Although the rumor is fake news, it is speculated that the game may be waiting.
In February this year, the research report of CITIC Securities pointed out that electrification lowered the threshold for building cars, and the electric intelligent supply chain gradually matured after the development in the past few years, laying a manufacturing foundation for new entrants to build cars. At the same time, consumer electronics, real estate and other industries have entered a mature stage, and the soaring market value of Tesla, Weilai, Ideality and Tucki has stimulated traditional giants to find bigger tracks.
CITIC Securities predicts that in the next two to three years, giants will continue to build cars in the technology industry and even other industries, and new car makers will gradually change from "entrepreneurs" like Li Xiang and He five years ago to direct competition among technology giants.
With the entry of giants, it will accelerate the differentiation pattern of traditional automobile enterprises and squeeze the living space of some tail enterprises. However, CITIC Securities believes that the new giants have also given some tail enterprises the opportunity to "hold their thighs": for example, arcfox, the latest flagship model of BAIC, chose Magna's OEM solution and Huawei's complete automotive electronic architecture. Compared with previous products, product competitiveness and intelligence have been significantly improved.
Under the trend of electrification, intelligence and networking, how can car companies run out? The research report of Everbright Securities pointed out that in terms of intelligence and networking, it is expected that software and algorithms will become the core of long-term differentiated competition of car companies under the circumstances of external hardware procurement and cooperative research and development.