Two Sessions Express | Accelerating China's Independent Automobile Brands Going Global, Using Industry to Drive Energy Ecological Layout and Automotive Chip Upgrade

The 2024 National People's Congress and General Manager of GAC Group, Feng Xingya, is currently holding two sessions. He focuses on the hot areas of international automobile exports and the development of intelligent connected new energy vehicles, and puts forward suggestions and proposals on automobile exports, new energy vehicle power battery standards, and the development of the automotive grade chip industry chain.

The 2024 Government Work Report of the State Council pointed out the need to expand high-level opening up to the outside world and promote mutual benefit and win-win outcomes. The "going global" of automobiles is becoming one of the important engines driving the growth of China's automobile production and sales as well as foreign trade. According to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, China's passenger car exports reached 4.14 million units in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 63.7%, making it the world's largest exporter of automobiles.

Feng Xingya stated that the current international market has great potential and many opportunities. Self owned brand cars should firmly grasp these opportunities and regard internationalization as an extremely important new growth point for their next development. It is understood that GAC Group has initially achieved the "two legs" of vehicle export and local operation in 2023, with a global R&D network covering Guangzhou, Shanghai, Xiamen, Los Angeles in the United States, and Milan in Italy. It has the ability to conduct independent research and technological innovation 24/7, and has also completed market layout in the Middle East, America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, as well as 42 countries and regions. In January of this year, the world's first overseas production base of GAC Aion began construction in Thailand and is expected to be completed in July.

Feng Xingya believes that the export of independent brand cars currently requires the industry to jointly respond and make forward-looking layouts. Therefore, he suggests promoting international cooperation in industries, coordinating common export issues, optimizing export supervision mechanisms, strengthening information and transportation capacity construction, and taking multiple measures to escort Chinese automobiles to high-quality overseas markets.

With China taking the lead in establishing a national strategy for developing new energy vehicles and actively promoting the transformation and upgrading of the automotive industry, new energy vehicles have achieved rapid development. According to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the production and sales of new energy vehicles in China in 2023 were 9.587 million and 9.495 million, respectively, an increase of 35.8% and 37.9% year-on-year. The market share reached 31.6%, 5.9 percentage points higher than the same period last year, ranking first in the world for nine consecutive years. The rapid development of the market has made it difficult to replenish electricity a pain point in the development of new energy vehicles. At the same time, inconsistent standard specifications of power batteries, lack of basic support for battery/power resource sharing, and overloading load regulation of power systems have also become industry challenges.

Among them, as the core component of new energy vehicles, the standard system of power batteries has not yet been perfected, which to some extent restricts the further scale development of new energy vehicles and the forward-looking technology research and development of all solid state high-performance batteries. Feng Xingya suggests unifying high-power charging and swapping standards, exploring the establishment of a standard system for all solid-state batteries, etc., in order to improve the utilization efficiency and user experience of swapping stations, promote the large-scale production and commercial application of solid-state batteries.

Feng Xingya believes that the demand for energy replenishment from new energy vehicles has significantly increased the difficulty of supply and demand in the power system. He believes that "interaction between vehicles and the power grid" can provide solutions and proposes suggestions to accelerate the improvement of technology and standard systems for interaction between vehicles and the power grid, improve electricity prices and trading mechanisms, and increase exemplary applications.

The energy ecology is closely related to the use of new energy vehicles, which will to some extent determine the competitiveness of China's new energy vehicle industry in the future. Public information shows that GAC Group has identified the energy ecology sector as one of the five major increments of the "trillion yuan GAC". In recent years, it is accelerating the construction of a vertical integrated industrial chain consisting of "lithium mines+basic lithium battery raw material production+battery production+energy storage and charging and swapping services+battery leasing+battery recycling and cascading utilization".

According to GAC Group, its energy ecological layout has been preliminarily formed, and the Inpai Battery Intelligent Ecological Factory with a planned production capacity of 36GWh in battery production has been officially put into operation in December 2023, and the first 6GWh production line has been put into operation; In terms of energy replenishment, GAC has built 979 charging stations and 150 replacement stations in cities across the country, which can achieve 2-minute battery swapping and significantly improve the replenishment experience for electric vehicle users.

At present, intelligent connected vehicles have become the strategic direction and commanding heights of the global automotive industry development, and are an important breakthrough in promoting the transformation and upgrading of the automotive industry. The independent and controllable ability of automotive chips has become a key factor affecting the healthy development of China's automotive industry.

Therefore, Feng Xingya proposed suggestions such as overcoming chip design shortcomings, improving manufacturing capabilities, strengthening automotive applications, and improving application support.

It is reported that as a leading enterprise in the Guangdong intelligent connected new energy vehicle industry, GAC Group has gradually built an automotive chip ecosystem in the form of industrial investment in recent years to accelerate the improvement of domestic chip application rate. Since 2019, GAC Group has successively laid out multiple enterprises such as Yuexin Semiconductor and Horizon, covering key links in the industry chain such as chip design, manufacturing, verification, and application. By integrating resources from GAC Aion, GAC Trumpchi, GAC Research Institute, and other core enterprises in the industry chain from the user's perspective, GAC Group collaborates with them to jointly sort out automotive chip research and development plans, driving the upgrading of the industry chain from the application source, and helping the high-quality development of the automotive manufacturing industry.