Recently, a circle of friends of Pei Pei, a researcher at China International Finance Corporation, went viral!
He said: " CATL's 's one-year R&D expenses are worse than Xiaomi Group's , which is recognized as the least technical in the Internet industry. What kind of hard technology is it? It's simply a fool's dream. Manufacturing is manufacturing, so what's the big deal? Wolf tail!"
Sure enough, to start a war, there must be a high-profile topic, and then the topic attracted great attention from netizens.
Then some good netizens compared CATL’s R&D investment with major Internet companies such as Xiaomi , and the result is that CATL really does not match its moral standards!
Therefore, netizens think that taking Xiaomi to fight against Ningde will indeed overshadow Xiaomi.
CATL’s R&D investment is indeed nothing.
As the world’s largest power battery company in terms of market share, CATL is naturally a global leader. It has a large number of vehicle enterprise customers, and it has ternary lithium, Kirin and other power supplies. In the CATL era of battery technology, its external image is undoubtedly that of a “hard technology company”.
So, why did Pei Pei publicly point out that it is not even as good as Xiaomi in R&D and is a manufacturing company?
What Pei Pei said may be related to the speech made by Ningde Times Chairman Zeng Yuqun at the company's performance conference on the same day. From December 2021 to now, CATL’s share price has fallen by more than 40%, and Zeng Yuqun said in response to the sharp fluctuations in stock prices: “As a rapidly growing high-tech enterprise, CATL’s valuation should also refer to the early levels of world-class high-tech enterprises. "
However, according to the 2021 public financial report data, in terms of total R&D, R&D rates, and the number of R&D personnel, CATL is at least as high as Alibaba , Tencent , Baidu , Meituan and other Internet giants. There is still a considerable gap compared with the factory.
In terms of research and development expenses, in 2021, CATL’s expenditure will be 7.69 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 115.48%. But in front of Internet high-tech companies, this bit of research and development is nothing.
In terms of R&D expenses last year, Xiaomi spent 13.2 billion yuan, Meituan spent 16.7 billion yuan, Baidu spent 22.1 billion yuan, Tencent spent 51.8 billion yuan, Alibaba spent 57.8 billion yuan.
Compared with others’ tens of billions of R&D expenses, CATL’s R&D expenses are only 58%, 46%, 34%, 15%, and 13% of theirs respectively.
Even if CATL’s R&D efficiency is particularly high and every penny is spent wisely, its actual R&D investment is unlikely to reach the level of Tencent or Alibaba, because the difference is an order of magnitude, and the gap is really too big... …
Calculating the proportion of R&D expenses in total revenue, Ningde Times does not have an advantage. Its R&D rate in 2021 is 5.89%, only higher than Xiaomi's 4% and lower than Alibaba's 6.9%, Tencent's 9.2%, Meituan's 9.3% and Baidu's 17.7%.
In terms of the total number of people in R&D, CATL’s 10,079 people are about the same as the 10,646 people announced by Ant Group in the first half of 2020, which is less than Xiaomi’s 13,900 people, Meituan’s 18,000 people, and Baidu’s 24,000 people. According to estimates by industry insiders, Alibaba and Tencent have more R&D headcount than Baidu.
The technical barriers in the battery industry are not high. Nowadays, in terms of research and development, even Internet technology companies cannot compare with CATL.
Looking at the essence through the phenomenon, if Ningwang is called a "hard technology" company, then Meituan, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba, whose total R&D expenses and revenue ratio are higher than it, are also qualified to be called "hard technology" "enterprise.
The technological attributes that the Internet continues to support
The fact cannot be ignored. In the years when the Internet platform turned from virtual to real, Internet companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu did invest heavily in basic research and development and continued to enhance their own technology. Attributes.
Especially in terms of designing national games competition, leading Internet companies have never hesitated to spend money on the shortcomings of Chinese science and technology.
The drones being researched by Meituan and the chips being researched by Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and Xiaomi are all technologies that China needs to break through.
As early as 2017, Meituan launched the exploration of drone delivery services in urban scenes. It promotes the transformation of contract fulfillment tools through technological innovation, accelerates the construction of a local instant delivery network with air-ground collaboration, and is committed to providing users with 3 kilometers and 15 minutes. standard delivery service. As of December 2021, Meituan drones have been deployed in 8 communities and 1 business district in Shenzhen, and have completed 19,000 orders for real users.
During the Shanghai epidemic, as of April 15, the cumulative delivery orders of Meituan’s automatic delivery vehicles exceeded 60,000.
In terms of choke chips, the patent applied by Tencent for " qubit frequency control signal processing method, superconducting quantum chip" was authorized. This invention provides a qubit frequency control signal processing method, device, superconducting Quantum chips and storage media can not only measure the distortion of the superconducting qubit frequency control signal, but also use the properties of the measured transfer function to correct the control circuit, thereby achieving rapid frequency offset of bit .
Previously, Tencent’s self-developed AI inference chip Zixiao, video encoding and decoding chip Canghai, and smart network card chip Xuanling have industry-leading product performance.
In 2018, Baidu company released the first cloud full-featured AI chip " Kunlun ", which includes the training chip Kunlun 818-300 and the inference chip Kunlun 818-100. Now, Baidu's first-generation Kunlun chip has been launched in early 2020 Mass production, more than 20,000 pieces have been deployed on a large scale; after Alibaba released its first self-developed chip, the AI inference chip Hanguang 800, it successively announced the Xuantie 910, cloud chips Yitian 710 and Xuantie in the field of autonomous driving C910, and Alibaba’s chips are mainly for personal use.
Today, Internet technology companies are reversing the situation in which China has long lagged behind others in terms of shortcomings in technology.
