小马智行上市，Robotaxi「三国杀」丨氪金·硬科技
Author | Geng Chenfei
Editor | Song Wanxin
This year, the domestic autonomous driving industry has witnessed an IPO wave, with enterprises from all links of the industrial chain entering the secondary market. Robotaxi, based on L4 driverless technology, is the most ideal and ultimate application scenario of autonomous driving, and is regarded as the pearl of autonomous driving.
Recently, the listing of Pony.ai, a domestic intelligent driving company benchmarking against the pioneer of Robotaxi, Waymo, not only has brought the IPO wave to a new height, but also, as a more symbolic enterprise move, makes the industry believe that the competition of Robotaxi will officially kick off.
On November 27, Pony.ai was listed on Nasdaq, making it the largest IPO of autonomous driving in the US stock market this year, attracting unprecedented attention from the capital market. Before the IPO, Pony.ai postponed the pricing once because "investors showed a high enthusiasm for its IPO subscription".
The 8 years from the establishment of Pony.ai to its IPO are also 8 years during which autonomous driving has experienced several ups and downs. In the process, technology, market and capital have been constantly matching and misaligned. Up to now, the attitude of the primary and secondary capital markets towards autonomous driving has shifted from "pursuing the technical concept" to "verifying the commercialization ability".
From Waymo to Cybercab, from Roborun to Pony.ai, the technological iteration in the past 8 years has gone through the first 90% before commercialization. Now, Robotaxi is infinitely approaching the critical point of the last 10%.
01 "The Chinese Version of Waymo"
Pony.ai has been a follower of Waymo from the very beginning, and is very similar to Waymo in business model and technical route. For example, it directly skips Level 3 autonomous driving and focuses on the research and development of L4 autonomous driving, as well as choosing the technical route of lidar.
From the perspective of business segments, Pony.ai has three core businesses: autonomous driving mobility service (Robotaxi), autonomous driving freight service (Robotruck), and technology licensing and application service.
Among them, Robotaxi mainly obtains revenue by providing autonomous driving solutions to OEMs or multinational companies to provide autonomous driving taxi services to users; the Robotruck business mainly generates income by providing paid transportation services to logistics platforms using a fleet of robotic trucks; the technology licensing and application service mainly provides software and hardware solutions of intelligent driving assistance systems to passenger car manufacturers.
Currently, the business that contributes the most to Pony.ai's revenue is Robotruck. In the first three quarters of 2024, the total revenue of this business was 27.4 million US dollars, accounting for 69%.
As for the Robotaxi business that the market pays the most attention to, its proportion in the total revenue in 2022, 2023 and the first three quarters of 2024 was 13.1%, 10.7% and 11.9% respectively, and it has not yet shouldered the main responsibility. However, in the process of expanding the landing pilot, Pony.ai is actually the first to start.
Long before "Roborun" caused a sensation in Wuhan this summer, Pony.ai had completed the trial operation of Robotaxi in Beijing, Guangzhou and other places.
Since launching China's first autonomous driving mobility service in 2018, Pony.ai has taken Guangzhou as the starting point and gradually expanded its business to more cities, and has taken the lead in obtaining the license for unmanned driving mobility service in the four first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The prospectus shows that in the first three quarters of 2024, the Robotaxi business achieved an income of 4.7 million US dollars, with a year-on-year increase of 422.2%.
Pony.ai disclosed that Pony.ai will cooperate with Toyota and BAIC respectively to mass-produce Robotaxi, and a thousand-scale Robotaxi will be launched in the next two years. Pony.ai expects that the profit of a single vehicle can turn positive next year and enter a positive self-hematopoietic stage.
Data shows that the average daily order volume of Waymo One autonomous driving taxis in San Francisco in August this year is about 8,823, while the average daily order volume of traditional taxis in the same city is about 5,784. That is to say, traditional taxis in this city have been surpassed by autonomous driving taxis.
With Waymo as a precedent, the capital market now increasingly believes that this is a business model that can be successful.
Waymo was formerly the self-driving car project launched by Google in 2009. In 2016, Waymo completed its first autonomous driving test in Phoenix, USA, and officially became independent as a subsidiary of Alphabet in December of the same year.
Two years later, Waymo took the lead in bringing autonomous driving technology to the market, launching autonomous driving taxi services and paid operation services. In 2020, Waymo went further and became the world's first company to provide fully autonomous driving taxi services to the public.
Currently, Waymo operates an autonomous driving taxi-hailing platform in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles. And it plans to start providing autonomous driving taxi services in Miami, USA from 2026.
In this context, as an apprentice of Waymo, the listing of Pony.ai is naturally endowed with a stronger symbolic significance. However, the Chinese market is different from the US market. In addition to more complex road conditions, the competition also comes earlier than overseas.
02 Robotaxi "Three Kingdoms Battle"
In 2018, Waymo initiated the commercialization era of autonomous driving. Six years later, although the full-scale implementation of L4-level autonomous driving has not yet been achieved, this track in China has become increasingly crowded.
At present, the Chinese Robotaxi market presents a situation of a three-way rivalry among Roborun, Pony.ai and WeRide. However, in addition to these three, AutoX, Xiaopeng, Geely, Ruqi Mobility and others are also promoting the implementation of Robotaxi.
From the perspective of business layout, there are certain overlaps between Roborun, Pony.ai and WeRide, but their respective focuses are different.
Roborun almost completely focuses on Robotaxi, seizing the travel market through large-scale urban operations; Pony.ai takes the Robotaxi business as the core, while also laying out the Robotruck and technology licensing and application service businesses; while WeRide emphasizes "general autonomous driving", and its business coverage is more extensive, from autonomous driving taxis to minibuses, trucks, sanitation vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems, trying to expand the market space through multi-scenario layout.
In terms of large-scale and operational capabilities, currently, only Baidu's Roborun and Pony.ai truly have a relatively large-scale Robotaxi fleet and truly achieve the regular operation of Robotaxi.
The prospectus shows that Pony.ai has more than 250 Robotaxi vehicles, and the average daily order volume of each vehicle has exceeded 15. The research report of Huajin Securities pointed out that Roborun has deployed nearly 1,000 Robotaxis nationwide, and the average daily service order volume in Wuhan has been on par with the daily single order volume of local taxi drivers.
However, from the perspective of market expansion and resource allocation, Roborun and Pony.ai have obvious differentiated strategies.
In the Chinese market, Roborun's service network has covered 12 cities. In addition to the first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, it has also entered the second and third-tier cities such as Fuzhou, Jiaxing, Yangquan, Chongqing, Chengdu, Hefei, Changsha and Wuhan, pursuing a wide layout.
In contrast, Pony.ai concentrates on deeply cultivating the four first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and pays more attention to the refined operation of high-value areas.
In terms of overseas expansion, unlike Roborun, which has been developing the domestic market for a long time, Pony.ai has already laid out autonomous driving businesses in countries and regions such as South Korea, Luxembourg, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
However, at the end of last month, Roborun obtained an autonomous driving license in Hong Kong, taking the first step in global business expansion.
The domestic market pattern is not yet clear, and the race has just begun. In the secondary market, in the short term, autonomous driving companies are also experiencing a new logic.
A senior investment person told 36Kr that the future stock price trends of autonomous driving enterprises listed in the US such as Pony.ai also depend on the situations of Tesla and Waymo. Currently, after Trump took office, the valuation logic of Tesla has changed, which in turn brings benefits to related autonomous driving stocks.
Currently, Tesla's market valuation is largely deeply bound to its autonomous driving business. Since Trump won the US presidential election, Tesla's stock price has risen by nearly 70%. As of the US stock market close on December 11, Tesla's stock price has exceeded $424.
The factors driving the increase include not only the market's bet that the Trump administration will relax the regulation of autonomous driving vehicles, but also the impact of the upgrade of Tesla's autonomous driving system. It is understood that Tesla previously released the latest version FSD V13.2 of its "Full Self-Driving" software and completed the first batch of deliveries.
Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said that Tesla's artificial intelligence and autonomous driving part has the potential to contribute $1 trillion in market value to the company.
At the same time, the number of players exiting is becoming denser. After Argo AI went bankrupt, Ghost Autonomy and Embark also went bankrupt one after another. The latest news is that General Motors' self-driving department Cruise announced its withdrawal from the Robotaxi market.
"In a market with intensified competition, autonomous driving taxis require a lot of time and funds to achieve large-scale, so integrating resources is more in line with our capital use strategy." Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, said.
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