After a general understanding of the industrial robot industry chain and then look at the summary of the fixed increase plan, it can be found that most of the raised projects are closely related to the layout and extension of the downstream application market, and this is especially the most significant in the automotive industry. For the automobile industry, we can divide it into two parts: traditional energy vehicles and new energy vehicles.
In terms of the traditional energy vehicle market, according to IFR statistics, in 2019, the global application of industrial robots in automobiles and electronics accounted for 28.15% and 23.59%, which accounted for more than 50% of the demand for industrial robots. Considering the expansion rate of the scale of the electronics industry in recent years, the automotive industry still has a higher proportion of applications, enough to show its leading role in the downstream market.
According to the forecast of the research report of Bank of China Securities, according to the data of CRIA and IFR, the proportion of industrial robots used in the automotive industry in the total market size of industrial robots in China is between 25% and 40%. It can be calculated that the market size range of industrial robots used in China’s automobile manufacturing industry in 2020 to 2022 is 10.55-16.88 billion yuan, 11.97-19.15 billion yuan, and 13.81-22.09 billion yuan. Due to the acceleration of China’s aging process and the increase in labor costs, the domestic demand for automation transformation is still large, and the market size of industrial robots downstream of the automotive industry is still optimistic.
The traditional energy vehicle market itself also has a strong cyclical characteristics, with the marginal repair of demand since the second quarter of 2020 has indeed driven the positive growth of industrial robots to a certain extent, but the traditional automobile market can only be counted as the basic application of industrial robots, and the incremental market brought by new energy vehicles also contains huge value potential.
In December 2019, the “New Energy Automobile Industry Development Plan (2021-2035)” (draft for comment) proposed to accelerate the construction of charging and replacing infrastructure, rationally layout charging and replacing infrastructure, and encourage the application of the power exchange model. In April 2020, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the “Key Points of Standardization of new energy Vehicles in 2020”, proposing to speed up the “completion of the review and approval of the safety requirements of electric vehicles,” to play the leading role of standards for technological innovation and industrial upgrading, and support the high-quality development of new energy vehicles in China. In May 2020, the “Government Work Report” clearly stated that it will focus on supporting the construction of “two new and one heavy”, strengthen the construction of new infrastructure, develop a new generation of information networks, expand 5G applications, build data centers, increase the installation of charging piles and power stations, promote new energy vehicles, stimulate new consumer demand, and help industrial upgrading. “New energy vehicle charging and replacement infrastructure” has become one of the seven important areas of new infrastructure.
Combined with the above information, under the compound influence of the “new four modernizations” of the automotive industry and the accelerated growth of the new energy vehicle market, the layout of industrial robot enterprises in this field has become a key element in shaping the core competitive advantage.