On May 20th, SAIC (600104) said at the 2021 annual general meeting of shareholders that in the past year, China’s automobile industry experienced many severe challenges, such as lack of core, epidemic situation and sharp rise in raw material prices. Despite the challenges, SAIC made every effort to ensure supply, stabilize growth, adjust structure and increase efficiency, and still achieved a smooth start of the 14th Five-Year Plan.
The financial report shows that in 2021, SAIC achieved a total operating income of 779.85 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 5.1%; The net profit was 24.53 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20.1%; The basic earnings per share was 2.12 yuan, a year-on-year increase of 21%.
In terms of sales volume, in 2021, SAIC achieved 5.464 million vehicle sales and 5.811 million terminal retail sales, a year-on-year increase of 5.5%. Among them, the sales volume of self-owned brand vehicles reached 2.857 million, up 10% year-on-year, accounting for 50% of the company’s total sales for the first time, reaching 52.3%; New energy vehicles sold 733,000 vehicles, up 128.9% year-on-year; Overseas sales reached 697,000 vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 78.9%.
Despite many uncertainties this year, SAIC is still full of confidence in its annual sales. SAIC said that at present, despite many uncertain, unstable and unbalanced factors such as repeated epidemics, tight supply chain, sharp rise in raw material prices, geopolitical turmoil and exchange rate fluctuations, this year’s production and operation will still bring very complicated and severe challenges. However, SAIC will adhere to the positive attitude of not being afraid of difficulties and going all out. At present, the company’s work is still arranged in a rolling manner according to the target of 6 million vehicles proposed at the beginning of the year, and strive to outperform the market in terms of annual sales growth.
Resume production and ensure production and marketing.
Recently, the automobile industry is facing the test of epidemic situation, and SAIC has also been disrupted in its production and marketing rhythm. Since mid-March, many companies affiliated to the company have started closed-loop operations one after another, especially in the first half of April, with the suspension of supply chain and the interruption of logistics in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, the company suffered a lot of output losses.
According to SAIC, while ensuring the epidemic prevention safety of 35,000 employees in the closed factory area, the company actively promoted the resumption of work and production. After the stress test of resuming work and production was started on April 18, it took only one day for SAIC passenger cars to get off the assembly line. Under the premise of strictly doing epidemic prevention work, the company has accelerated the key tasks such as personnel returning to work, supply chain recovery and logistics opening. At present, the vehicle base in Shanghai has achieved single-shift production and the production capacity is also recovering rapidly, striving to achieve production and sales in May as close as possible to the same period last year, and strive to reduce the loss caused by the epidemic.
According to reports, SAIC will continue to adhere to its own brands, new energy vehicles, and overseas operation of the "new troika", and strive to achieve a sales volume of new energy vehicles of over 35% by the end of the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, reaching 3 million.
In terms of specific product planning, Zhiji Automobile will launch the electric SUV LS7 in the second half of the year, and B-class SUV and car products will be launched next year to accelerate the sales scale. Two products have been planned in 2024-2025; Feifan Automobile will promote pure electric SUV R7 and a B-class flagship car this year, and launch three new products one after another from next year, and increase the exploration layout in new retail and energy-replenishing ecology; SAIC-GM-Wuling has planned more than 10 new energy vehicles in the next few years; SAIC Volkswagen and SAIC-GM joint venture brands also have a number of new energy heavy models to be launched soon.
Forward-looking layout, continue to increase investment in scientific research
"Data determines experience and software defines cars" has become an industry trend, and SAIC has continuously increased its investment in scientific research. The financial report shows that SAIC’s R&D expenditure in 2021 was 19.67 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 46.83%.
According to SAIC, last year, the "four landmark strategic projects" of Zhiji, Feifan, Enjoying Robotaxi and Yangshan Port’s 5G smart heavy truck were tackled, which is just the "tip of the iceberg" of SAIC’s innovation and transformation achievements. Under the "iceberg", SAIC’s technical support system is the "five centers" of software development, artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and network security.
In the past year, with the "four landmark strategic projects" as the carrier platform, SAIC’s self-developed "cloud-tube-end integration" smart car full stack 1.0 solution has been implemented; At the same time, around the new intelligent electric vehicle, SAIC focused on the user experience and made great efforts to build "seven technical bases", including: SAIC Xingyun pure electric exclusive systematic platform, SAIC Everest oil-electricity integrated vehicle architecture, SAIC Xinghe electric-hydrogen integrated vehicle architecture and other three vehicle technical bases, as well as blue-core powertrain system, platform Rubik’s cube battery system, green-core electric drive system and Galaxy full-stack intelligent vehicle.
At present, SAIC Innovation Research and Development Institute is integrating the internal and external innovation ecological resources of the Group, accelerating the application of the "seven technical bases", and playing the role of the "source" of forward-looking technologies, constantly optimizing the forward-looking technologies such as skateboard platform CTC, integrated casting, solid-state batteries, and chip localization, solving the technical solution of sticking neck, and starting to reserve future-oriented modular solutions such as integrated thermal management and integrated drive bridge; At the same time, actively plan the layout of cutting-edge technologies such as group bionic intelligence and low-carbon materials.
It is worth noting that SAIC said that although the chip shortage this year has improved compared with last year, the overall supply is still tight. In the current situation that the epidemic situation is repeated and the supply chain is still unstable, various car companies are still sparing no effort to grab chips, strengthen resource reserves, speed up multi-point layout, and intensify efforts to promote the localization of car-level chips.
It is reported that SAIC has defined the localization strategy of large computing chips and MCU chips last year, formed a list of 191 kinds of localized chips, and 48 lists of the first batch of automotive electronic chips, and promoted 75 chips to complete localization development and enter the mass production application of vehicles; A third-party joint evaluation platform for automotive electronic chips was established, which reduced the repeated certification investment of chip companies and shortened the certification cycle, and jointly promoted the localization of automotive-grade chips. In the next step, SAIC will establish the chip customization capability of SAIC by expanding the landing of mature chips, implementing major projects and improving the industrial ecosystem.
In addition, the shareholders’ meeting deliberated and passed the relevant proposal on the company’s spin-off of Jethydrogen Technology to science and technology innovation board. SAIC said that this spin-off will accelerate the market-oriented development of hydrogen technology, and at the same time, it marks an important step for the company to deepen the reform of the system and mechanism.
关于作者