Recently, car road cloud integration projects have been set up intensively in many cities, and major policies in the field of car road cloud have been introduced frequently, driving up related concept stocks, and the response from the secondary market has been enthusiastic.

The Zhitong Finance App learned that on June 24, the “Measures on Creating New Consumption Scenarios and Cultivating New Consumption Growth Points” issued by the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments mentioned that the commercialization and operation of autonomous driving will be steadily promoted, new scenarios for advanced intelligent driving will be created, and a pilot “vehicle road cloud integration” application for smart cars will be launched.

In June of this year, four ministries and commissions determined that nine car companies, including BYD, Changan, Guangzhou Automobile, and SAIC Motor, were shortlisted for intelligent connected vehicle entry and road access pilot projects; on July 3, the first batch of pilot cities for “vehicle road cloud integration”, including 20 cities (consortia) including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, was officially announced, indicating that infrastructure construction represented by vehicle-road collaboration is expected to accelerate further. Related industrial chain layout enterprises are expected to usher in new development opportunities.

Today, the development of vehicle-road collaboration and advanced intelligent driving is gradually being implemented, marking that the advanced intelligent driving function has entered the trial operation stage and the collaborative development of the vehicle-road is accelerating. In this context, companies that lay out intelligent driving and vehicle-road collaboration are expected to directly benefit from the new round of favorable policies and trends.

Lay out players in multiple fields to seize the capital market

According to the Zhitong Finance App, there are currently many companies that are deploying intelligent driving and vehicle-road collaboration, but there are still a few that have both at the same time. Meanwhile, among the companies currently planning to go public or have submitted a list, Youchao Innovation and Mushroom Auto Federation are representatives of such companies with a multi-sector layout.

Among them, Youchao Innovation is currently one of the few companies in the industry that has achieved a comprehensive layout in the three fields of intelligent driving, smart cockpit, and vehicle-road collaboration. In terms of intelligent driving, Youchao Innovation can provide customized L0 to L4 intelligent driving solutions, which have been verified by mass production.

With the iterative development of the company's intelligent driving technology, and a homologous technology stack based on algorithm development, software engineering, and hardware design (especially perception algorithms), Youchao Innovation has also naturally derived a vehicle-road collaboration business linked to the underlying technology, forming a collaboration with its bicycle intelligence business.

Since 2021, Youchao Innovation has been developing the vehicle-road collaboration business, and delivered the first V2X project in 2022, for the earliest domestic company to lay out vehicle-road collaboration. Up to now, the company has participated in 13 typical vehicle road collaboration projects, and the vehicle road collaboration business revenue has also increased dramatically. It is expected to be the earliest company that currently lays out smart driving and vehicle road collaboration at the same time.

It is worth mentioning that among companies that are preparing to go public or have been listed recently, Youchao Innovation is the only smart driving company that lays out vehicle-road collaboration. Its vehicle-road collaboration business covers the two major scenarios of highway and intersection management, industrial parks and parking lot management, and promotes the development of intelligent transportation infrastructure and smart cities, thereby promoting the establishment of an intelligent automobile ecosystem.

According to the company's prospectus, in 2023, Youchao Innovation Auto Road's collaborative revenue was about 71.5 million yuan. Compared with 2022, the company's vehicle-road collaboration revenue increased significantly in 2023, and the gross profit margin of the business rose from 10.2% to 19.8%. Among them, more large-scale projects with relatively high gross margins were delivered in 2023.

On the other hand, the Mushroom Auto Connect revolves around AI digital road base stations, autonomous vehicles, and smart transportation AI cloud platforms, which can be quickly deployed on a large scale in urban open roads, highways, etc., and has now formed a complete standardized autonomous driving product package and has built a full-link, multi-dimensional comprehensive autonomous driving technology solution. According to reports, the company has also previously revealed its intention to do an IPO.

Trillion-level market size, broad prospects for the racetrack

As far as market prospects are concerned, Guotai Junan once stated in a research report that road collaboration is an important expression of new quality productivity in the transportation field, and the possibility of short-term implementation is high. With the large-scale implementation of the Beijing Vehicle Road Cloud Integration Project, the vehicle road collaboration industry will enter a period of explosion. It is estimated that the intercity high-speed information technology market space will exceed 100 billion dollars, and the market space for urban road informatization pilot cities will also reach 100 billion dollars.

Furthermore, according to the forecast of the Yiou think tank, China's auto road collaboration market is expected to reach 496 billion yuan in 2030, and the CAGR will reach 26.64% in 2021-2030. The market prospects are broad.

As far as the larger market related to intelligent connected vehicles is concerned, according to CCI data, the size of China's intelligent connected vehicle market is close to 600 billion yuan in 2022, and is expected to exceed 5 trillion yuan in 2030. China's connected car market is growing rapidly, and is expected to exceed 2 trillion yuan in 2030. Among them, the market size related to “vehicle road cloud integration” is expected to exceed 14 trillion yuan in 2030.

In the medium to long term, the market related to intelligent connected vehicles has broad room for growth, which is expected to spawn a trillion-level market. With the continuous introduction of favorable policies and commercialization, the industry is expected to usher in more investment opportunities, and related industrial chains are expected to benefit in the long term. Among them, companies that have achieved a layout in multiple fields, such as Youjiao Innovation and Mushroom Auto Connect, are expected to be direct beneficiaries.