According to the "13th Five-Year Plan" of the Zhuhai Municipal Government, new energy vehicle equipment manufacturing will be one of the six major development areas that Zhuhai will focus on.In July 2016, ZTE "cross-border" layout of new energy vehicles, focusing on Zhuhai Jinwan.

ZTE Intelligent Automobile Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as ZTE Intelligent Automobile) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ZTE registered and established after the acquisition of Zhuhai Guangtong Bus Co., Ltd. in 2016, the company's main business includes the design and development of new energy vehicles, manufacturing and sales, and the system research and development and construction operation of automotive intelligent driving and vehicle networking applications, and will rely on ZTE's 5G technology, wireless charging, Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing and other aspects of deep technology accumulation to build urban intelligent buses and lay out the field of driverless.

 At present, the old factory area of ZTE Intelligent Automobile (Guangtong Bus) has a production capacity of about 2,000 units, and the first phase of the new production base under construction will be completed and put into operation at the end of this year, and the production capacity will increase to 20,000 units after the project is fully completed, which can produce tens of billions of output value.

 In 2017, ZTE Intelligent Automobile produced more than 1,500 buses throughout the year, and new energy buses were delivered in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Zhuhai; in 2018, the company will produce 2,000 units throughout the year, and the production capacity tends to be saturated. Among them, the domestic and foreign markets account for about 1:1, the domestic market is all new energy buses, overseas fuel double-decker buses are the mainstay, and there are small batches of pure electric buses delivered.

As a recruit who has entered the new energy bus industry for only two years, the "report card" of ZTE Intelligent Automobile is still "remarkable". This achievement, on the one hand, relies on the original bus manufacturing process foundation of Guangtong Bus and the brand benefits of ZTE; on the other hand, it is inseparable from its unique market strategy.

 Intelligent "wisdom": walking on two legs and advancing in steps

"From the very beginning, we have paid attention to the two markets at domestic and abroad and insisted on walking on 'two legs'." On October 19, when the research team of Gaogong Electric Vehicle walked into ZTE Intelligent Automobile and communicated with Yao Quanli, vice president of the company, he told Gaogong Electric Vehicle.

According to its introduction, in the domestic market, ZTE Intelligent Automobile is now mainly doing some markets with better payment conditions and timely follow-up after-sales service, so it mainly focuses on first- and second-tier cities such as the Pearl River Delta. It is more cautious to enter the inland third- and fourth-tier city market, provided that the product profit can be guaranteed.

In terms of overseas layout, it has carried out strategic business cooperation with Alexander Dennis of the United Kingdom, Hong Kong Jielian, etc., and also exported to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Macao, Eastern Europe, West Asia and other places, and its international market is dominated by relatively high-end routes.

 "At present, our independent brand products do not consider the markets of highly developed countries such as the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, but choose to take the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as the center, radiate along the Belt and Road, and the more developed countries and regions that are close to the needs of the Chinese market, and look for our market space from here", Yao defined it as "advancing in steps".

 Maybe based on such a market layout, from the market performance of the first three quarters, the output value of ZTE Intelligent Automobile in 2018 is about 1.5 billion, and the annual profit will exceed 100 million, which belongs to the domestic industry Profit Margin is extremely impressive.

 "Next year, as orders from overseas markets continue to increase, we will further increase the proportion of overseas markets." According to Yao Quan, this structural arrangement mainly considers that the gross profit margin and payment collection cycle of overseas business are better than in China. For the overseas expansion layout, ZTE intelligent vehicles will still tend to the market model of "single point breakthrough - support deep ploughing - mature replication", and will slowly achieve "spark to ignite the original" in this way.

Established a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle research and development team

Although the development of China's new energy buses is in full swing, objectively speaking, pure electric buses are still in the introduction period overseas. As a new recruit in the industry, ZTE Intelligent Automobile has objectively existed in the distance between Yutong and BYD in expanding the international market. On the basis of this understanding, Yao said that ZTE intelligent automobile are currently accelerating the research and development of hydrogen fuel cell buses, creating their own competitiveness from another dimension.

According to reports, ZTE Intelligent Vehicle has now formed a core research and development team of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

 Yao explained, "ZTE Intelligent Automobile plans to complete the research and development and production of hydrogen fuel buses in the next 1 year, realize the independent technology of clean on-board energy with fuel cells as the driving system, and fully master the VCU vehicle controller technology of the fuel cell hybrid system, as well as the optimal control technology FCU of the fuel cell system. ”

That is to say, ZTE Intelligent Automobile will soon join the team of Hydrogen Fuel Buses in China and win with independent technology.

The direction of intelligent driving based on 5G technology

 In addition, based on ZTE's strong technical advantages, ZTE Intelligent Automobile believes that it has inherent superiority in the field of autonomous buses.

 Yao, who came from the communications industry, believes that in order to truly achieve automatic driving, it must be based on the mature application of 5G technology, and this timeline should be 5-10 years.

 "I think that 5G technology is mature and large-scale applications can truly achieve a driverless" Yao said that although ZTE intelligent automobile are also doing some integrated applications in ADAS, only 5G technology can realize the transmission of information between cars, between cars and roads, and between cars and signal lights in a few milliseconds, and the current 4G technology requires hundreds of milliseconds, and this reaction speed is impossible to achieve the demand for automatic driving.

 In his view, the maturity and large-scale application of 5G technology will take about five years. By then, the transportation infrastructure will gradually be completed, and signal lights and road networks can be uploaded to the cloud through the Internet of Things 5G technology. In this case, autonomous driving can be carried out on a large scale and safely. Before this, our car companies have full advantages to complete the iterative upgrading of core technologies.

At this stage, ZTE Intelligent Automobile will first conduct a technical ecological study of autonomous driving around commuter cars and BRT vehicles with fixed routes in closed areas with simpler road conditions.

 ZTE Intelligent Automobile's "Meticulous Work and Stability Maintenance"

 Judging from the current strategic map of ZTE Intelligent Automobile, "new energy" and "intelligence" have obviously become its important directions. But as a new company, in today's "post-subsidy era", it is still a technical job to survive.

 In this regard, Yao has his own ideas, in his view, with the gradual cancellation of local subsidies, the current domestic new energy vehicles have reached the critical point of true marketization, and the enterprises that master the core scientific and technological research and development advantages and win the competition in the market can really develop in the long run.

 Internally, ZTE Intelligent will comprehensively improve its goal of "living well" by optimizing procurement costs, lightweighting, and technical cooperation.

 In terms of procurement, ZTE Intelligent Automobile is currently negotiating with battery factories for next year's power battery purchase price, requiring suppliers to reduce the price of power batteries next year.

In terms of technology, the company collaborates in a number of existing ecosystems such as automotive lightweight materials and intelligent manufacturing. According to reports, ZTE intelligent Automobile are mainly built with all-aluminum alloy bodies, which effectively reduces energy consumption.At the beginning of this year, the company also established a project with Wuhan University to take advantage of the advantages of universities in academic research and development to accelerate the layout of hydrogen fuel vehicles.

In 2018, ZTE Intelligent Vehicle and ZTE will also jointly invest in the establishment of an autonomous driving company to provide intelligent driving solutions and intelligent computing platform operating systems for car companies and industrial chain suppliers.

At present, a large amount of social capital is accelerating into the new energy automobile industry. Talking about the company's future layout, Yao said that all strategies are orderly and orderly under the premise of "stability", ZTE Intelligent Automobile has the patience to cultivate this industry, and any move will be prudent according to the economic situation.