At present, China's new energy automotive market continues to expand, and as the new energy vehicles, "heart" of the battery is standing in the outlet. Reporters visited some of the battery companies found that China's battery R & D manufacturing capacity increased significantly, some domestic battery in the energy density, cycle life, safety and other aspects quite competitive, but still can not go beyond Japan's Matsushita, South Korea's Samsung and other top international Battery brand.
The healthy development of power battery industry can directly affect the development of China's new energy automotive industry can achieve the strategic goals. At present, China's power battery there are diversified technology routes, standards, technology is not uniform, the level of intelligent manufacturing is not enough and so on. Insiders pointed out that in all countries to accelerate the layout of the power battery industry, the critical period, China must accelerate the standardization of the system to help power batteries to seize advantages.
Core technology in hand has become a "group wolf potential"
Mastered the most advanced power battery technology, to grasp the future of new energy vehicles. Experienced nearly a decade of silence, China's new energy automotive battery industry has entered a period of rapid development, emerged a group of leading enterprises, they are in the core of power battery technology breakthroughs, with a strong international market competitiveness.
From the production capacity and sales point of view, China's power battery in the international market presents the "group of wolves potential." According to statistics, in 2016, the global power battery companies ranked the top ten in terms of sales volume among seven Chinese enterprises, including BYD, CATL, Watma and Guoxuan Tech. China's lithium battery sales account for more than half of the world, more importantly, according to the current rate of development of lithium battery industry in terms of China's share of the world will continue to rise.
Some experts estimate that in 2017 China's demand for power batteries will increase to 31Gwh, and the demand for power batteries will reach 125Gwh by 2020. "Our biggest difficulty now is not enough capacity." Jiang Junwei, executive vice president of Fu Energy Technology Research Institute introduced that in 2016, Fu Power Technologies sold over 10,000 sets of power battery packs and over 10,000 sets in the first quarter of 2017, Shipments ranked first in the country. Far East Fortes New Energy Co., Ltd., located in Yichun City, Jiangxi Province, Asia, surged from 5 million yuan in 2010 to 1.5 billion yuan now. It is estimated that its output value will reach 3 billion yuan by 2018.
From the core technology point of view, domestic power batteries continue to break in the field of subdivision, reached the international advanced level.
Wang Fu, chairman of Fu Technology, is a national "Thousand Talents Program" expert, who led the team in the United States to develop lithium batteries. In 2009, he returned to China with the most advanced Lithium power technology in Silicon Valley in the United States. The energy density of the ternary lithium battery pack developed by his team has exceeded the Panasonic battery used by Tesla. Businesses and Mercedes-Benz, BMW and other top international car prices have cooperation. In 2016, with its cooperation with Beiqi, Beihang Renewables Co., Ltd. exceeded 300 km for the first time and increased to 550 km by 2018.
Located in Fuzhou City, Jiangxi Province, the battery company Dubico, is working overtime overtime production of lithium batteries, while Masada car company jointly developed graphene lithium titanate batteries. This power battery can be fully charged in 6 minutes, charging and discharging cycles up to 20,000 times, because of its low voltage, its safety is also higher than the ternary lithium battery and lithium iron phosphate battery. Enterprise R & D personnel told reporters that once the graphene lithium titanate battery overcome the problem of lower energy density, will get great market prospects.
In addition, researchers all over the world are walking in the commercialization of solid-state battery on the road, many domestic battery companies have begun or will soon be mass-produced solid-state batteries. All-solid-state lithium batteries with high safety, non-flammable solid electrolyte, non-corrosive, non-volatile, no liquid leakage, but also overcome the phenomenon of lithium dendrites, equipped with all-solid lithium batteries, the probability of spontaneous combustion will be greatly reduced.
Jiang Junwei introduced the current three-cell lithium battery is still the international mainstream, although our country started this technology line late, but already mastered the core technology, coupled with the largest application market in the next three to five years will be more mature. He believes that regardless of the technical route based on the power battery to capture the direction of high energy density, fast charge, excellent cycle and security and low cost. Enterprises will be based on market positioning needs, choose a different technology route, look for the technical balance, the maximum degree of industrialization.
Intelligent manufacturing measures the competitiveness of enterprises
No matter how the capital speculation, the battery industry manufacturing properties will not change, the quality of the battery is still dependent on innovative technologies, manufacturing processes and manufacturing levels. The gap between high-end domestic batteries and Japan's Panasonic and South Korea's Samsung batteries is mainly reflected in the consistency between the batteries. Intelligent manufacturing is the future trend of battery production. It is an important way for enterprises to improve battery quality and occupy the market. However, the level of smart manufacturing in China still needs to be improved.
The overall performance of the battery pack to follow the "short board effect," one of the worst performance of the battery. Panasonic and Samsung batteries can do a number of batteries, each performance is almost exactly the same. Solve the issue of battery consistency, the key is to improve the level of intelligence equipment to ensure that the battery in each manufacturing node on the consistency.
Dubico uses both domestic and Korean equipment at the same time and finds that there is a gap between the productivity and failure rates of domestic equipment and imported equipment. Far East Foster used all imported equipment in South Korea, the president assistant Liao Zhenggen told reporters that the degree of automation of domestic equipment can basically meet the requirements, but difficult to get through between the equipment, because each device has different ports. "The money put on smart devices in the field of power batteries is basically earned by Koreans!" Liao Zhenggen said.
According to industry experts, there are many reasons for this phenomenon. First of all, equipment manufacturers lack of capital and technology, can not afford to upgrade, and the domestic battery manufacturing equipment purchasing equipment is basically temporary, do not advance research and development, when the production capacity can not meet the needs of the order, the urgent need to expand the scale of production equipment procurement, therefore, the basic There is no time to work with equipment manufacturers to develop a production line that suits their needs. Second, the battery manufacturing enterprises lack the overall design staff and are worried that the manufacturing process will tell manufacturers to reveal trade secrets. They do not want to listen to manufacturers' suggestions, Rarely mention the requirements of the equipment between the convergence, and equipment manufacturers did not develop the initiative, so do not want to devote too much to the development of new technologies.
Under the market-driven premise, how to improve product quality and how to reduce costs will become an issue that enterprises need to consider. As a core technology of new energy vehicles, battery technology also faces this challenge. With the country for the battery-related requirements increase, some power battery manufacturers will be forced to withdraw from the stage of history. Faced with the increasingly harsh competition environment, technological innovation to promote business development, market access will be the only way for battery companies.
However, Fu can adhere to the use of domestic technology equipment. They worked with Xinsong Robotics, a leading robot manufacturer in China, to design a power battery smart device production line and provide key technologies to effectively solve the problem of connection between devices. By using domestic equipment to reduce manufacturing costs, has become one of the core competitiveness of this enterprise.
Recently, the relevant person in charge of the Ministry of Industry and Information Industry in China Automotive Battery Innovation Alliance 2017 Annual General Assembly introduced MIIT on the next step in the development of battery deployment, which mentioned the need for new energy vehicles to provide support to accelerate the improvement of power battery outfit Development and manufacturing level, speed up large-scale intelligent manufacturing technology and equipment development. It is foreseeable that the enhancement of intelligent manufacturing capacity will be one of the major force points for the next step of battery manufacturers.
Quality control level is the key
Power battery industry, the lack of "Haier smashed refrigerator" strength and courage. Far Eastern Foster and Samsung use the same Korean-made smart devices, but the product consistency is still a gap with Samsung's products. Dubuque, which also uses South Korean smart devices, also faces similar problems.
"The stability of battery quality depends not only on the intelligent level of manufacturing equipment, but also on the level of quality control." Jiang Guolong, general manager of Cylindrical Battery Industries at Dubuque, once worked for a South Korean energy company. The production line produces about 300,000 batteries a day, all the batteries produced during the commissioning period of more than ten days are completely scrapped. Calculated in accordance with a battery of 10 yuan, several production lines will lose billions of dollars during commissioning. Matsushita also maintained a very high product scrap rate, the product has the slightest risk must be scrapped.
"They have a huge national subsidies, for us is not afford to lose." Many battery business executives admitted that investors and local governments are eager to see corporate profits, compared to Samsung and Panasonic are all national battery billions Level subsidy input, they do not have the strength and courage to reference the pattern of Japan and South Korea, the implementation of the most stringent quality control.
At present, the new energy vehicles market "used" prevails, low-quality competition appears. In 2016, the annual output of new energy vehicles in China will reach 516,000 units. By the end of 2016, however, China's power battery production capacity has reached 120Gwh, which can meet the demand of 2 million new energy vehicles. By the end of 2016, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology put forward the standard of 8Gwh benchmarking enterprise production capacity, aimed at guiding the superior enterprises to become bigger and stronger with high standards and restraining the low-end production capacity, which was mistakenly interpreted as the threshold of production capacity.
To reach this standard in 2016 only the Ningde era and BYD two. Now a large number of enterprises more than 8Gwh capacity easily. If the capacity expansion plan can reach capacity, China's power battery production capacity will exceed 170Gwh. "There is no core technology, that is, burnt money everywhere digging, the import of equipment." Jiangling New Energy Vehicle Co., general manager Liu Nianfeng observation, and the extent of power battery capacity expansion compared to the overall R & D investment significantly less.
In the first half of 2017, the profitability of a number of power battery companies, including Fluoride, Guoxuan Tech and BYD, has declined. Behind the impact of the new energy subsidy policy and product standardization reform, the new energy sector Overcapacity, high-end supply issues such as the beginning has also begun to show. In mid-2017, Guoxuan Tech dropped profits by 16.6%, polyfluoride profit by 39.69% and BYD profit by 23.75%.
"We put the cost of ternary batteries has been pressed to no longer pressure, almost doing turnover, the major domestic companies are losing profits." Liao Zhenggen said that the expansion of low-quality production, is likely to lead to internal prices by the industry Fight, let the power battery reduced to the next photovoltaic industry.
