Reporter ｜Yang Song
edited｜Han Lu
"What the CEO does is to find people, things and money."
He Bei is the CEO of the autonomous driving company Sinian Zhijia. In early September, before an exclusive interview with a reporter from 21CBR, he just ended a remote meeting with investment institutions, which was about a new round of financing.
As a doctorate in the Department of Electronics at Tsinghua University, He Bei’s previous work content was not very good at dealing with investors. After walking out of the ivory tower, he served as an unmanned driving scientist in Baidu's Intelligent Automobile Division and the CTO of the main technology of autonomous driving startups, regardless of financing matters.
Now, he has become the CEO of a startup. The company has been established for two years and still needs financial support. With his promotion, the company is achieving financing at a "half-year round".
Snian Zhijia has completed three rounds of financing, with a cumulative total of over 100 million yuan. Investors include ByteDance, Chentao Capital, etc., with a valuation of over 1 billion yuan.
Bet port
The current market environment is complex, and investors have become more cautious about the field of autonomous driving with huge investment in R&D and attach more importance to commercialization. He Bei estimated that it would not take until 2026 before the autonomous driving industry could achieve rapid development.
The more the cooling-off period, the more the market values "revenue", that is, the commercialization ability of technology.
The entrepreneurial direction of Shinian Zhihua aims at port autonomous driving and firmly believes that this will be the first segment to achieve commercialization.
H Bei explained that if the L4-level unmanned driving technology needs to be implemented, it must first pass the laws and policies. Ports and mines are fully enclosed environments, and vehicles are considered construction machinery, which can lower the access standards.
Domestic mine informationization is backward, different mining environments are different, and the replicability of unmanned driving technology is very low.
ports are different. They are part of the global trade economy. Domestic port informatization and automation have been developing for many years, and even have fully automatic ports. Standing on the shoulders of predecessors, Si Nian Zhijia's technology has great advantages in commercial use and has higher customer acceptance.
There is indeed a demand for unmanned driving technology in ports. To operate a car, more than 50% of the cost is spent on manpower. If unmanned driving technology is adopted, it will not only save driver costs, but also enable long-term operation. It is expected that the corresponding gross profit margin can exceed 50%.
Sinian Zhihua calculated a bicycle UE model, with an annual revenue of 600,000 yuan for a truck. As the operator, the unit price of the whole vehicle is about 700,000 yuan (financial leasing can reduce capital investment), and the cost of transforming sensors and other sensors is 150,000 yuan.
uses driverless trams, and only has small expenses such as vehicle depreciation and operation, saving driver labor of 300,000 yuan and gross profit of 304,000 yuan.
"Intelligence is suitable for some labor-intensive, high-income and high-return industries." He Bei said that the salary of port transport truck drivers is much higher than that of workers operating sanitation and cleaning vehicles. From the perspective of application value, the former is more worthy of the implementation of unmanned driving technology.
At the beginning of this year, relevant national departments introduced favorable policies to encourage the construction of smart ports and promote the intelligent transformation of existing container terminals at Dalian Port, Tianjin Port, and other ports.
Some listed port companies have also put the construction of smart ports on the agenda. Taking Ningbo Port as an example, it stated in the 2021 annual report that the pace of smart ports has accelerated, and the Meishan Port District has realized an automated operation model to create a model of smart container terminals.
Run-through mode
If everything goes well, ports can become the implementation scenario of autonomous driving technology. For new companies that are just starting out, business expansion will still be a shortcoming. Port companies are more traditional, and it is not easy to convince the other party to spend a lot of money to purchase driverless vehicles. At the executive meeting of
, some members believed that since no one had succeeded before, they would be no exception. He Bei and the executive have both worked in main technology and have been to port companies to promote autonomous driving technology, and the negotiation process is full of difficulties.
purchases autonomous vehicles, and the decision-making cost is very high. But at least, they found that the port demand for driverless driving exists.
For example, under the influence of the epidemic, front-line work cannot recruit drivers and is difficult to manage; senior management cares about the operational efficiency of the port and how to adjust strategies to respond to the national smart port strategy.
He Beisou took another step forward, and Sinian Zhijia directly provided unmanned driving cards to go to the port for "operation agency".
In May 2020, Si Nian Zhijia began to conduct bicycle and multi-vehicle actual ship operation tests at Ningbo Daxie China Merchants International Wharf . In November of the same year, four unmanned electric trucks were put into operation.
He Bei said that the reason for progress is that technical products can meet the expectations of the entire port. "This is not a test, but a daily test. Whether L4-level autonomous driving is really realized."
Take the stop position as an example. Through the multiple integrated positioning and accurate stop positioning system, the positioning accuracy of the smart driving automatic card is only 5 cm, which is a significant improvement compared to the 10 cm of a competitor.
is the port "operation agency". Sinian Zhihua has to purchase vehicles by himself and participate in port operations in person. Compared with the industry providing autonomous driving solutions and charging technical service fees, the "light model" has greater capital and management costs and heavier models.
He Bei believes that "agent operation" is just a means, the purpose is to open up the market - prove the company's business value and financial model, rather than relying on PPT demonstrations to convince investors. At present, the efficiency of the self-driving truck operation of Sinian Zhihua's autonomous driving truck is more than 90% of the driver's cars, and there are zero accidents in the operation process.
10 billion market
With the case of Ningbo Port, the advancement of other ports has become relatively easy. After two and a half years of entrepreneurship, Si Nian Zhijia has obtained orders from five major ports and deployed nearly 100 commercial vehicles, ranking among the top in the port track.
Sinian Zhihua is also enriching product types.
In August this year, the unmanned intelligent tablet transportation equipment IMV (Intelligent Mobile Vehicle) jointly developed by the company and XCMG Port Machinery was launched on Xiamen Port , with a collection scale of 38 units.
This is the first unmanned transportation equipment sales order in the port industry this year, and it is expected to be delivered to the port for operation by the end of the year.
heavy asset model is very popular on the client side and is also referring to it by peers. However, this model is a test of the technology, operational management, business and other capabilities of startup companies, and it is difficult to be surpassed in a short period of time.
As customers increase, Sinian Zhijia's revenue has achieved explosive growth. It will exceed 10 million in 2021 and is expected to increase to tens of millions of yuan this year.
port unmanned driving is still in the stage of rapid penetration. Taking Ningbo Port as an example, out of 1,500 integrated cards, only 20 are autonomously driven, and the penetration rate of is less than 2%.
Domestic ports with internal locks tractor has a holding of more than 25,000 vehicles. According to the calculations of the Sinian Zhihua, the market size is about 30 billion yuan. The market size of the "port" between ports and ports, as well as the port to parks and industrial parks is 120 billion yuan.
He Bei told reporters that the company's port unmanned driving business has matured, and 70% of the team members are promoting product research and development between ports, and it is expected that large-scale product implementation will be achieved in three years.
In his opinion, if Sinian Zhijia does these two major scenarios, the company's size will be successfully listed and its market value can reach tens of billions. After the technology is mature, the broader field of autonomous driving trunk logistics can be further expanded.
In recent years, autonomous driving companies have set off a car manufacturing wave. In this regard, He Bei believes that this industry still needs a long time to cultivate. He has been in the industry since 2017 and has a clearer judgment on the timing.
"We still choose to take root in segmented scenarios and promote the commercialization of driverless technology, and will not build cars."
