With the surging of cross-border car-making, ODM mode, which means 'commissioned design and manufacturing or original design and manufacturing', has become a new trend of car-making. When industrial chain enterprises such as Luxshare and Alte become the protagonists of cross-border car-making, the ODM mode of new energy automobile industry is activated, thus entering the era of diversified car-making.

ODM has gradually become a new trend of building cars

Recently, Bojun Automobile, which has been quiet for a long time, suddenly released a message saying that its subsidiary Tianjin Bojun Automobile Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as 'Tianjin Bojun') has postponed the recruitment of investors. Previously, Alte Automotive Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as 'Alte') had tried to acquire Tianjin Bojun. Regarding the postponement of investor recruitment in Tianjin Bojun, Alte said that the company's equity acquisition of Tianjin Bojun is progressing in a normal and orderly manner.

It is understood that in order to enter the new energy automobile industry, Bojun Automobile and faw xiali jointly established Tianjin Bojun in 2019. However, after the establishment of the joint venture company, Bojun Automobile did not fulfill its relevant obligations. According to the relevant information of the national credit publicity system, the paid-in capital contribution of Bojun Automobile is only 14 million yuan. After the establishment of the company, there has been no substantial production, so far, no production models have been launched. In 2020, Tianjin Bojun entered the bankruptcy liquidation stage.

According to the analysis of the industry, in the face of such a 'mess', Alte still insists on the acquisition, and cares about the production qualification of new energy vehicles and fuel vehicles in Tianjin Bojun. In addition, Tianjin Bojun has complete four processes of vehicle manufacturing, stamping, welding, painting and final assembly, and their ancillary facilities, and the automation level of the line body is high, with an annual production capacity of 150,000 vehicles. Once the acquisition of Tianjin Bo County is completed, Alte will become a member of the car-making army like many cross-border people.

However, unlike many domestic cross-border car-making enterprises, which mostly adopt OEM mode in vehicle production, Alte chose ODM's car-making mode. Alte believes that this is an attempt by the company to expand to complete vehicle ODM in the business sector based on the existing business advantages and the demand of supply chain structure in the automobile market.

According to the data, Alte is an independent automobile design company focusing on vehicle R&D. In recent years, it has made large-scale investment in the field of automobile core components.

Coincidentally, Luxshare, a well-known OEM company of Apple, also entered the automobile industry in the mode of ODM. In February this year, Luxshare and Chery established a joint venture company. However, regarding the rumor that 'Luxshare wants to build a car', Luxshare said that the purpose of this strategic cooperation with Chery is not to build a car, but to cooperate with Chery to develop another new industry, that is, the whole vehicle ODM model.

Wang Laichun, chairman of Luxshare, said that smart electric vehicles are a new business opportunity in China's auto industry that never happens in a hundred years, and will attract many new entrants. 'If we follow the current pace and speed, we are worried that we will miss the window period, especially when ODM opportunities arise, and we are worried that we will lose the opportunity to enter key components.'

According to the introduction, Luxshare has been immersed in the automobile market for more than ten years. The main products related to automobiles include connectors/connecting wires, low/high voltage vehicle harnesses, special wire harnesses, etc. The main customers include domestic traditional vehicle enterprises, new forces in car making, and some large Tier1 manufacturers (that is, tier 1 suppliers that directly supply parts to vehicle enterprises).

Actually, apart from Alte and Luxshare, there are already enterprises in the field of automobile ODM. Foxconn, a well-known foundry company, is also actively testing the ODM； of the whole vehicle by acquiring Lordstown Motors, an American electric vehicle company, and joining hands with Geely; Didi D1, which was officially launched in March last year, is the product of BYD ODM.

There is a certain space in the market

For the automobile industry, OEM is not a new thing. For example, Magna, a vehicle service provider, is an automobile OEM giant. The data shows that Magna has mass-produced about 30 models for many car companies, with a cumulative output of more than 3.7 million. The well-known BMW X3, Mercedes-Benz G, Toyota, Jaguar and other brands have commissioned Magna to design and produce their models.

At present, OEM is mainly divided into OEM and ODM. Compared with the previous OEM mode in the automobile industry, ODM mode expands the business scope for brand users from simple manufacturing to the whole chain of R&D, design, production and post-maintenance. That is to say, customers only need to put forward their own requirements for automobile products, and then they can leave everything to ODM manufacturers.

All this stems from the electrification and intelligent transformation of the automobile industry. Whether Foxconn, Luxshare or Alte, these enterprises trying to transform ODM are aiming at the vast market of China's new energy automobile industry.

With the rapid development of the automobile industry, new technologies, new functions and new demands are emerging in automobiles, and ODM has also entered the field of vision of the industry.

In the past, the automobile manufacturing process was complicated and involved many parts. The traditional OEM mode could not fully meet the individual needs of automobile companies, and automobile companies were reluctant to reveal their core technologies. However, after entering the era of new energy vehicles, the three-electric system (electric drive, battery, electric control) has replaced the gearbox and engine, and has become the core element of car-making. The rules of the game have also changed, and the high degree of centralization has become an industrial trend, and the difficulty of OEM has dropped significantly.

At the same time, it is difficult for some new entrants to obtain vehicle qualification in a short time, and they need to rely on the original vehicle companies to obtain production qualification. According to the data from China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, in 2020, the capacity utilization rate of passenger cars in China has decreased from 66.55% in 2017 to 48.45%, and the vacant capacity of tail enterprises is very serious. Based on this, Li Bin, CEO of Weilai Automobile, lamented: 'With so many high-quality production capacity in the country, it would be a waste for us to repeat the construction of production plants.'

It is worth mentioning that after the baptism of fierce market competition, China's electronic industry chain already has considerable technical reserves, which can not only meet the demand of 'ODM to build cars', but also complete industrial upgrading.

In this situation, the emergence of ODM model not only digested some excess capacity, but also made the technical advantages of cross-border car makers in electrification and intelligence reflected.

Wang Laichun said, 'Compared with cross-border car makers in other industries, our advantage is that we can see the opportunities and challenges of the market clearly, and we won't blindly follow the wind to build cars. Instead, we can get the best results with limited resources through active selection. At present, the opportunities brought by Smart EV (Smart Electric Vehicle) include not only the whole vehicle, but also Tier1 with stronger vitality. The market size of Tier1 is almost 70% of the total output value of all car companies. However, among the top 100 Tier1 manufacturers in the world, there are only 8 Chinese companies. Under the new situation, the market needs ODM to build cars, and we should seize this opportunity. ' In her view, just like the division of business in the smart phone industry, when brands such as Apple and Xiaomi operate in a light asset mode and focus on product R&D and design, professional OEM companies such as Foxconn and Luxshare will exist. In the future, there will be a professional division of labor in the intelligent electric vehicle industry chain, which is the reason why Luxshare firmly enters the automobile ODM.

Previously, the research report released by CITIC Securities proposed that in the era of functional machines, Motorola, Nokia and other mobile phone manufacturers adopted self-built factories for production. However, after the rise of smart phones, brands such as Apple and Xiaomi turned into large-scale ODM production, which led to the iterative upgrading of the mobile phone industry chain. Referring to the development history of mobile phone industry from functional machine to intelligent machine, this trend is expected to be replicated in the automobile industry in the future and reshape the pattern of automobile industry chain.

Diversified car-making pattern is formed

At present, with the establishment of the trend of electrification and intelligence of automobiles, it is possible to decouple the automobile manufacturing industry chain, and more and more industrial chain manufacturers are beginning to participate in the wave of new energy automobile industry.

Wang Xianbin, director of Geshi Automobile Research Institute, said that OEM mode will be an important direction of the future automobile industry, which will greatly reduce the trial and error cost of new players. However, the rise of OEM mode, especially ODM mode, does not mean that the entry threshold of automobile manufacturing industry is lowered, but the competition pattern will become more intense.

In addition, many people in the industry hold different opinions on OEM modes including ODM. They think that the automobile industry is difficult to use in general, with strong professional skills, and the entrusting party will face many uncertainties, such as the product quality can not be guaranteed, and the production side has business risks.

Tesla CEO Musk once bluntly said, 'Compared with mobile phones or smart watches, cars are very complicated. You can't go to a supplier like Foxconn and say,' Build me a car.'' He believes that mobile phones can be standardized assembly line operations, but automobile manufacturing has extremely high requirements for equipment, updating of production lines and flexible production.

Freeman Shen, founder of Mawei Automobile, has repeatedly declared in public that the actual OEM operation is too different from the theory, and the R&D, process and sales channels are in his own hands, but the production links have to be handed over to others, which may lead to various problems.

For similar reasons, although it has long been a general trend to reduce the cost of automobile hardware through modular car-making, it is only an expedient measure for some new car-making forces to enter the automobile field in the form of OEM. At present, a number of cross-border car-making enterprises have started to build their own production bases, and have obtained production qualifications by merging traditional car companies, and the car-making mode has gradually become diversified.

Take Xpeng Motors as an example. At the beginning of the venture, Xpeng Motors found Haima Automobile to produce its first new energy vehicle, Tucki G3. However, after sufficient funds, Xpeng Motors immediately set up its own production bases in Zhaoqing, Guangdong and Zhengzhou, Henan.

Similarly, in order to solve the problem of car-making qualification, Zero-Run Car initially chose Hangzhou Changjiang Passenger Car Co., Ltd. as the OEM. At the end of 2020, Zero Run Automobile acquired the production qualification through the wholly-owned acquisition of Fujian Xinfuda Automobile Industry Co., Ltd.. At the initial stage, Weimar Automobile made it clear that it would not adopt the 'OEM' mode, and became the first batch of 'new forces for building cars' in China to obtain production qualifications and build their own factories.

Wang Xianbin believes that there will be three modes of automobile OEM in the future: the first one is the pure OEM mode of Haima Automobile for Xpeng Motors OEM; The second kind is that companies that master C-side resources such as Didi will transform into travel service providers through OEM mode; The third is the ODM method based on the modular car platform of Geely, BYD and other car companies.

In the industry's view, it is unrealistic for newcomers to want to hold a huge right to speak in the supply chain like Apple, and the complex format of the automobile industry is doomed that OEM companies such as Foxconn and Luxshare cannot replicate their legends in the field of mobile phones.

Zhang Xiang, a researcher at north china university of technology Automobile Innovation Center, believes that automobile ODM must meet the design and manufacturing requirements of various automobile brands, which not only makes R&D more complicated, but also makes the production workshop and production process more complicated. He judged that the market opportunity of automobile ODM might be in the field of commercial vehicles and logistics vehicles. In these fields, there are many models of automobiles, and each model is different. At the same time, the owners of vehicles are more concerned about how to recover the cost and return on investment ratio as soon as possible. Therefore, the ODM model that emphasizes differentiation and economy has its place.