Innovations in the battery industry before 2020 are mainly reflected in smart manufacturing technology, such as Kirin batteries, CTP technology, blade battery technology, 4680 battery technology, and polymer copper-plated current collector technology. The above technologies are essentially innovations in smart manufacturing technology.
As the innovation in smart manufacturing in the first half has basically reached its extreme, innovation in chemical systems has gradually come to the stage. A new generation of positive and negative electrode materials, solid electrolyte materials, electrolyte materials, semi-solid technology, and sodium-ion battery technology.
At present, there is no company that is strong in both fields. This kind of company must be a great company. The chemical part of the battery and the intelligent manufacturing part are actually very different, because the chemical part involves the microscopic world governed by Schröder's equation, while the manufacturing part is the macroscopic world governed by Newtonian mechanics. The way of thinking and knowledge structure involved in R&D and design between the two are quite different.
Currently, the international leaders are CATL and BYD (a typical enterprise represented by intelligent manufacturing technology), and LG Energy (a typical enterprise represented by chemical technology).
The genes of a start-up company basically determine the advantageous attributes of the company. For start-ups in the traditional mainstream battery industry, if they enter the lithium battery track with their advantages in chemistry or intelligent manufacturing, the first problem they face is to make up for their other strengths. The shortcomings are whether one's advantages in chemistry/intelligent manufacturing can make up for one's disadvantages in another area.
Currently, most of the emerging start-ups in the lithium battery field and those with good financial statements are market-oriented companies. In view of the fierce domestic competition, some companies with mature technologies but weak technical competitiveness in the mainstream market generally target overseas companies. The market is expanding, such as to Europe, the United States and Southeast Asia. To a certain extent, it is also taking advantage of the market opportunities of reverse globalization and short-term gaps in overseas market technology and industrial chains to enter the market and look for opportunities. To some extent, investment in such enterprises The logic favors investment in non-hard technology fields, identifying customer needs and meeting customer needs in a differentiated manner.
There are also many companies that only develop technologies for segmented pain points, such as graphite integrated sintering companies for artificial graphite, and the Moli New Energy that you sent me before. The space for development of these enterprises depends on their own technological barriers and the monopoly power of upstream suppliers and downstream customers. This kind of enterprise has obvious shortcomings in its later expansion capabilities and technology iteration capabilities.
For start-ups that innovate chemical systems, their development speed is not very fast at the beginning. On the contrary, they need to invest a lot of financing in the early stage to build manufacturing capabilities. In the later stage, they can continuously iterate by putting products on the market to achieve the same goal as the existing technology. With the level of competition, the corresponding investment cycle will be longer, which places extremely high requirements on the chemical materials technology background of the founding team, and also puts forward higher requirements on investors’ understanding of technology.
New business models are on the horizon. As people pursue more extreme chemical systems and manufacturing technologies, and more and more smart manufacturing companies, such as various car companies, have a strong desire to enter the lithium battery track, the leaders in the battery industry not only face old competition in the industry, but also in the manufacturing part It will be challenged by car companies, and in the chemical part it will be competed by new forces starting from emerging materials and chemical systems. Once the above two parts can be well combined, it will profoundly affect the current development pattern of the battery industry and change The current situation is one super and many strong.
