It rose slightly by 1.3%. After the release of the second quarter earnings report brought about a 9.91% plunge, Tucson's share price rebounded a little in the future.
On August 6th, five days after the stock price fell below the issue price of $4, Tucson released its second-quarter financial report in the future. The data shows that Q2' s revenue was USD 1.482 million, compared with USD 263, in the same period of last year, an increase of 463%. The net loss attributable to ordinary shareholders was $117 million, up 316.6% year-on-year ($28.84 million in the same period last year); The operating loss was $121 million, up 331.8% year-on-year. The basic loss and diluted loss per share attributable to ordinary shareholders were $.64, compared with $.49 in the same period of last year.
The reason for the loss is the increase of "three fees". Tucson will spend $75.891 million on R&D in the next two quarters, up 245.3% from $21.979 million in the same period last year. Sales and marketing expenses were $1.41 million, up 328.4% from $243, in the same period last year; The general administrative expenses were 42.425 million dollars, an increase of 714.5% compared with 5.27 million dollars in the same period last year. But obviously, this performance is a bit disappointing to investors. At the performance conference, Tucson's share price dropped significantly in the future.
From the perspective of specific business, there are two key indicators for Tucson's future, namely: road mileage and the number of trucks scheduled. The financial report shows that as of the end of the second quarter, the road mileage was 4.6 million miles, an increase of 26% from the previous month; The total number of trucks booked was 6,775, an increase of 1, compared with the first quarter; Map-mapped miles totaled 8,5 miles, up 7% from the previous month. Revenue mileage was 88, miles, an increase of 46% from the previous month. These two figures are not particularly exciting, and it can even be said that the progress is not great.
In the self-operated fleet, in the prospectus, Tucson will have 7 L4 trucks running at that time, and the second quarter report did not disclose the specific figures, but from the balance sheet, this figure has not changed much at present.
Although the profit seems to be in the foreseeable future, some investment companies like ARK Invest are still firmly optimistic about Tucson's future. But for Tucson future and more commercial vehicle autonomous driving companies, whether the business story can be finally realized is still an unknown event.
1
Listing in April: The market value rides a roller coaster
On April 15th this year, Tucson will be officially listed in the United States, with a price of $4 per share and a total market value of $8.48 billion. However, from the listing to now, Tucson's future fleet size is still more than 7 vehicles, and there is not much progress when it was listed in April. However, although its income at that time was only 1.84 million US dollars, and it was the title of "the world's first autopilot", Tucson initially had a good performance in the capital market.
On June 3th, Tucson reached the highest value since its listing, and its share price once exceeded $7, reaching $79.79 per share, with a market value exceeding $16 billion. But then, after entering July, Tucson's future share price began to decline continuously. After the release of the second quarter earnings report, Tucson's future share price plummeted by 9.9%, and the final closing price was $33.91, with a market value of 7.89 billion, which was the lowest share price since June.
But for Tucson's future, the good thing is that its successful listing has given it a key cash reserve. According to the financial report, as of June 3, 221, Tucson will have 1.49 billion US dollars in cash and cash equivalents in the future, compared with 21.575 million US dollars as of June 3, 22. It has restricted cash of $1.56 million, compared with $75, as of June 3, 22. The challenging aspect is that the capital market needs Tucson to produce tangible results as soon as possible in the future.
Any good business is meaningless if it just stays at the story level. After temporarily getting rid of the financing dilemma, Tucson will begin to face a new level of technical difficulties and commercialization in the future.
Tucson Future was established in September 215, focusing on commercial L4-class autonomous driving solutions based on computer vision, and its main business is to provide unmanned truck freight services to the global market. Tucson's future business is mainly in the United States. Tucson will build an autonomous freight network AFN as its commercial landing scene in the future: the network consists of driverless trucks, logistics hub centers and monitoring. There are two profit models:
1) The logistics company buys self-driving trucks from the OEM cooperated by Tucson, and delivers the subscription fee of TuSimplePath to Tucson. The fee is charged by mileage, which is .35 USD/km. After subscription, you can use Tucson's full-stack autopilot capability (including software, networking, high-precision maps and insurance services).
2) The customer places a delivery order directly with Tucson, and the charge is 1.45 USD/mile. Both charging modes are based on mileage, which can greatly reduce freight costs and improve freight safety. In addition, mileage charging is more profitable than one-time charging, and Tucson will build its own freight ecological platform through AFN.
This is not a freight version of Didi, and the business structure is more complicated. Tucson plans in the future that by 224, it will draw a total of 46, miles of American intercontinental highway system, and the operating route of AFN will be 16 times that of the current one. If the plan goes well, by 224, Tucson's future trucks can travel on the main transportation routes of 48 States in the United States.
However, "AFN" is still in the early stage of development and commercialization. Therefore, before AFN is commercialized on a large scale, Tucson must increase the number of users, develop the terminal network, expand its high-definition digital map route and increase the number of special L4 autonomous semi-trucks in the future. At the same time, there must be a milestone breakthrough in research and development. "So far, we have only received limited income from the freight capacity services we provide on AFN. "Tucson admitted in the second quarter earnings report that the scale development of its business is in a difficult exploration period.
In addition to the self-driving truck network (as mentioned above, there are three revenue models), outward export technology is also one of Tucson's future plans. According to its prospectus, in 22, Tucson will start pre-assembly mass production cooperation with Navistar and Traton, a subsidiary of Volkswagen, and plans to build and deliver L4 driverless trucks. The number of reserved L4 semi-trucks has exceeded 6,5, an increase of 1, over the previous quarter, which is certainly nothing compared with the huge truck market.
Losses and slow business growth are still key issues that plague Tucson's future. According to the prospectus, from 218 to 22, Tucson will always be in a state of loss in the future, and the loss will expand year by year. In these three years, their net losses were $45.3 million, $84.883 million and $177 million respectively. A total of 36.9 million dollars, about 2 billion yuan. The main reason for the loss is the high R&D investment. From 218 to 22, Tucson's future R&D expenditure will be 32.278 million US dollars, 63.619 million US dollars and 132 million US dollars respectively. In the foreseeable future, its operating and R&D costs will increase and losses will continue.
2
Crowded track: There is no first place for truck autonomous driving
Compared with passenger cars, commercial vehicles are considered to be the earliest possible market segment for autonomous driving. This is determined by the usage scenarios and industry characteristics. The route of commercial vehicles is relatively single, and some places have closed environments. The limited scenes include parks, ports, automatic parking and mining areas. From the point of view of use, a large part of transportation cost is labor cost. The growth rate of logistics transportation cost and labor cost in China is higher than that of freight cost.
According to the data of China Federation of Purchasing and Logistics, from 29 to 218, the labor cost increased by 1.%, the diesel price increased by 2.7%, and the freight cost decreased by .75% due to the intensification of competition. And in 22, the transportation cost accounts for 53% of the total logistics cost, with the fastest increase of 81.5% in labor cost and 35.5% in distribution cost. Logistics companies have an urgent need to reduce costs. In the past two years, more and more enterprises have begun to pay attention and resources to the commercial vehicle field.
In China, Yinche Technology and Zhijia Technology are considered as their most direct competitors. In addition, Xiaoma Zhixing, which began to lay out the automatic driving of commercial vehicles as early as 216, is also accelerating its layout. In March this year, Xiaoma Zhixing first announced the brand name of its truck business-"Xiaoma Zhika". Recently, Didi, which was once called "no car", was also revealed to be led by CTO Wei Junqing and began to study the direction of self-driving heavy trucks. He Xiaofei, the pioneer of the unmanned vehicle team who left Didi, founded Feibu Technology, planned to start unmanned freight transportation, and developed his own AI chip.
Internationally, apart from Waymo, Aurora, an American autonomous driving company, announced that it would enter the self-driving heavy truck, and Nuro also announced the acquisition of Ike, a truck autonomous driving startup, last year. In addition to self-driving service providers, some host manufacturers have already laid out the track of self-driving trucks. In 219, Daimler Truck Company acquired a majority stake in Torc Robotics, a driverless truck solution company, and subsequently established a driverless technology group. In March of this year, Daimler made it clear that it would shift the focus of unmanned driving from passenger cars to trucks.
Waymo announced a round of investment of 2.5 billion dollars in June this year, and said that this investment will be used to promote its autonomous driving technology and team development. Aurora announced in official website in July this year that it has reached a cooperation agreement with a SPAC company, and will be listed in the form of SPAC in the near future. After the listing of Tucson in the future, the development speed of its domestic rivals is obviously accelerating.
Take Mache Technology as an example. On August 2nd, Mache Technology announced that it had obtained a series B financing with a total amount of US$ 27 million. This round of financing will be mainly used in R&D and other fields. Mache Technology will further increase investment in its self-developed truck automatic driving system "Xuanyuan" and accelerate the layout of the electrification field. It is worth mentioning that in November last year, Hunche Technology just got $12 million in Series A+ financing. At this time, it is just eight months since the last round of financing.
In May, Zhijia Technology said that it had signed a merger agreement with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Hennessy Capital Investment Corp. V. After the merger, Zhijia Technology will use the stock code "PLAV" to be listed and traded on the New York Stock Exchange in the third quarter of this year. According to the terms of the transaction, after the merger, the market value of Zhijia Technology will be about 3.3 billion US dollars, and it will receive about 5 million US dollars in new financing, including about 15 million US dollars from fund investors such as BlackRock and D. E. Shaw, and about 345 million US dollars from HCIC V
After the first self-driving vehicle was acquired by Tucson in the future, the competition for mass production of the first self-driving truck was conducted in secret.
Since 219, Mache Technology has jointly developed mass production models of self-driving heavy trucks with China National Heavy Duty Truck and Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle. According to the company's previous introduction, these two products will be the "world's earliest" mass-produced self-driving heavy trucks, and both cars are equipped with the full-stack self-developed self-driving system "Yuche Xuanyuan", which is planned to be mass-produced at the end of this year.
However, as early as April this year, Jiefang Automobile, a subsidiary of China FAW, has released its self-driving heavy truck ——J7, which cooperates with Zhijia Technology. The official said that this is a heavy truck with L3 automatic driving function. In this regard, Hunche Technology's booster product is "the world's first truck with fully redundant L3 automatic driving capability". Although competitors have different attributions about the "first paragraph" and there is still controversy in the industry, there is no doubt that in the field of automatic driving of commercial vehicles, the competition for mass production has begun.
3
Going out of the "story" stage: It's difficult for technology to land
From the perspective of automatic driving of commercial vehicles, although they are different in specific ways, they are basically variants of the "technology+operation" model. Tucson's main battlefield in the future is in the United States. It cooperates with American Express and some large freight companies to buy cars, and it also operates itself, using L4-class automatic driving on the route; However, Win Tech relies on the shareholder G7 Company, and the parent company can provide help for Win Tech in vehicle operation and network operation through financial leasing. Therefore, Mache Technology has established the largest self-operated vehicle team among the three companies at present. Its goal is to build a capacity of 5,-1, units in the future.
Randy, the founder of Winch Technology, told Spiegel pro that it is meaningful not only to research and develop technology, but also to lay out operations at the same time, considering that technology will ultimately generate value. The specific path of Zhijia Technology is slightly different. It mainly relies on the network of Manbang Group and chooses to operate with Manbang. At present, the company's core position is technical service provider, and it does not operate. Its logic is clear. To operate, you have to buy a car first, which is too high and too heavy for startups or Internet entrepreneurs.
However, Manbang and Zhijia Technology have signed in-depth cooperation on "commercial operation, vehicle sales and L4 driverless technology research and development", so there may be more room for imagination in the future. However, whether to operate or not may become a tangled problem. If it is made into a fleet, then the assets will be overweight, which is not good news for the development of enterprises; But on the other hand, the data and scenario tests brought by the team, including the complete control of the logistics links, are valuable. However, it is worth mentioning that too much involvement in other links of the freight market will lead to conflicts among logistics companies.