In 2020, the number of civilian vehicles in the country will be 280 million units, including 240 million units of cars, an increase of 17.58 million units compared to 2019.
I believe that most practitioners in the automotive aftermarket industry will see these figures and habitually pair up with the segment they work in. For example, peers in the tire industry might think of how much tire consumption there is each year. Those in the automotive lubricant industry might think of how much lubricant is consumed?
What Yi Falcon wants to talk about today is the current situation and prospect analysis of another post-automotive segmentation industry - automatic transmission repair industry, and why capital does not add code to this industry?
I. Total automatic transmission market and current situation
According to the summary of network data, the total number of vehicles with automatic transmission in China will be 60% in 2020, and the number of vehicles with automatic transmission in China will be 160 million units according to the current car ownership of 280 million.
From this data, our country has already surpassed Europe in terms of automatic transmission loading. However, compared with North America, there is still a long distance to go.
According to common sense, China's market capacity is large and the development prospect is thriving, the automatic transmission industry and market prospect should be very good, but in the view of Yi Falcon, the actual situation is the opposite.
Let's look at the following aspects.
1、Core technology
Because of the late start of our automatic transmission manufacturing, the gap with the western developed countries is very obvious in the research and development of new products and technologies of automatic transmission for automobiles. Although many independent brand vehicle factories have invested a lot of human and material resources in these years, the distance between the automatic transmission product technology level, product quality stability and other aspects of the developed countries in the West is still far away.
2、Mainframe supporting aspect
Basically monopolized and controlled by the traditional automobile manufacturing powerhouse, especially in the field of high level automatic transmission (above 6-speed), Japan's Aisin, Germany's ZF and Gatco under Nissan Motors, as well as Volkswagen, GM's own brand.
3、Parts supply
The domestic automatic transmission parts supply, like the second point, is also monopolized and controlled by foreign brands and overseas suppliers.
II. Characteristics and mode of automatic transmission aftermarket
The domestic automatic transmission industry started in 1994, with its origin in Zhuhai City. In the earliest days, the originator of this industry was a British company - ATP.
To this day, many of the old generation of automatic transmission repair industry practitioners, as well as the founders or core team members of some major domestic automatic transmission repair enterprises, have grown up and come out from this enterprise.
In terms of geographical distribution, domestic automatic transmission repair and parts supply enterprises are mainly concentrated in the two cities of Guangzhou and Shanghai. Although Chengdu and Beijing also have a certain scale, there are gaps with these two cities in terms of starting time, industry aggregation and maturity.
For the time being, Guangzhou is at the forefront of automatic transmission repair and parts supply, as well as automatic transmission remanufacturing, and is even second to none in Asia.
There is the well-known Chentian Wrecking Parts Market, which also played a big role in the supply of automatic transmission wrecking parts before it was demolished.
There is also a national leading automatic transmission parts supplier such as Transpeed Guangzhou Hengtai Auto Transmission Technology Co.
Guangzhou Hengtai Auto Transmission Technology Co., Ltd, established in 2000, is the earliest enterprise engaged in the sales of auto automatic transmission parts in China. The company has now developed into a modern enterprise integrating parts sales, R&D and manufacturing, transmission assembly, automatic transmission oil and parts remanufacturing, transmission testing, repair equipment R&D and sales. We have opened 30 branches in Guangzhou, Shanghai and other places, and our products are exported to many countries and regions in North America, South America, Europe and Southeast Asia, etc. We are the leading enterprise in China's auto automatic transmission service industry.
In terms of industry aggregation, the position of these two cities is irreplaceable for the time being. However, the over-concentrated distribution of the industry also leads to a very uneven development of the whole Chinese automatic transmission repair industry, which restricts its accelerated development and popularity in the country.
In the after-sales mode, at present, domestic automatic transmission repair and service is mainly through logistics, first by the automatic transmission repair factory online initial diagnosis, put forward preliminary quotation; after confirmed by both sides, by the sending party will disassemble the faulty transmission, through logistics delivery or repair party door-to-door collection; after repaired, and then sent back to the sending party installation and commissioning error-free, and finally delivered to the owner.
This way in the first and second-tier cities or cities with strong logistics and transportation capacity, the problem is relatively light. But if it goes to more remote areas, or less economically developed areas, the problem is relatively large.
Because, once there is a return to repair, not to mention the increased cost of transportation back and forth, it is also common for tug-of-war to occur between repair shops and automatic transmission repair shops.
Therefore, the existing repair and service model of automatic transmission needs to be changed urgently. At present, a new repair and service model - automatic transmission replacement model has already appeared, but it is not yet popular. At present, the best solution for automatic transmission repair and service model in China has not yet been found.
Third, why is it forgotten by capital?
In addition to the sheet metal spraying industry, the automotive aftermarket has not yet been favored by the capital, other than the automatic transmission repair industry. Why? The reason is actually very simple.
First of all, there are deep technical barriers in this industry, including the supply of parts, maintenance and after-sales service. Deep technical barriers, which means that want to achieve rapid replication in this industry, it is very difficult.
Secondly, not high frequency, sudden and strong, is also one of the attributes of this industry. This also means that it is difficult to standardize and form a fixed law. Especially compared with the conventional maintenance projects, the uncontrollability of the automatic transmission repair project, seems more obvious.
These two reasons are enough to discourage a lot of capital. The existence of some non-compliant business practices in the industry also makes the capital for this industry is not high concern. In addition, the industry requires higher quality practitioners, training cycle is relatively longer, there is no sufficient talent pool and a sound talent training system to support, it is difficult to promote in the country on a large scale. Of course, there are often opportunities behind the problems. On the current automatic transmission repair market and industry situation, compared with other areas after the car such as lubricants, tires and wash beauty, the development prospects are more promising.
1、The technical barriers of the industry are very deep, which also means that the barriers to entry are high and the profitability of enterprises is stronger.
2、Up to now, the national automatic transmission repair chain has not yet appeared, and the market is still a blue ocean.
3、More and more models are assembled with automatic transmission, and as the share of medium and high-end cars grows, the market capacity will be bigger, especially multi-stage automatic transmission will be further popularized and applied (8/9/10 speed).
4. Not high frequency, sudden and high technical barriers make it difficult for Internet companies to erode this industry in a short period of time, and the price system is relatively stable and not easy to be polluted.
In the next 3-5 years, one or two unicorn enterprises may appear in the field of automatic transmission repair and service.
