Chinese manufacturers have captured 84% of the global automotive LiDAR market! Hesai ranks first, Huawei ranks fifth!

Recently, market research firm Yole Group released a report titled "Automotive LiDAR 2024", which shows that in the automotive LiDAR market in 2023, Chinese manufacturers will still lead the world. Chinese LiDAR suppliers such as Hesai Technology , Robosense, Seyond (Innovusion), Huawei , and Livox have jointly captured 84% of the global market.

The LiDAR market for passenger cars and light commercial vehicles is booming

First of all, from the perspective of the entire automotive LiDAR market size, the global automotive LiDAR market size has reached US$538 million in 2023, a year-on-year surge of 79%. It is expected to grow to US$3.632 billion by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate of 38%. Obviously, this will be a market with great growth potential. In addition, it can be clearly seen from the change curve in the figure below that the LiDAR market size has increased significantly between 2022 and 2023, and it is expected to increase significantly between 2028 and 2029.

Secondly, from the perspective of market segmentation, before 2022, the autonomous driving taxi (Robotaxi) lidar market has always been ahead of the passenger car (PC) and light commercial vehicle (LCV) lidar markets.

“The journey to self - driving taxi services began in August 2016 with the launch of NuTonomy in Singapore. Then, another important milestone came in 2017 with the entry of Waymo and Cruise into Phoenix, Arizona and San Francisco, California in the United States. Later, Chinese companies such as Didi, AutoX and Baidu also joined the race to launch services in cities around the world. The rapid adoption of self-driving taxi services has put the lidar market for self-driving taxis far ahead of the passenger car market,” said Pierrick Boulay, Senior Technology & Market Analyst, Automotive Semiconductors, Yole Group.

However, with the rapid decline in the cost of vehicle-mounted lidar, high-end passenger cars began to introduce lidar on a large scale. At the same time, Waymo and Cruise significantly slowed down their operations due to a series of accidents. This also directly led to the passenger car and light commercial vehicle lidar market surpassing the autonomous taxi lidar market for the first time in 2022, and continued to widen the gap in 2023.

Yole Group's forecast data shows that the passenger car and light commercial vehicle LiDAR market size in 2023 is US$414 million, and is expected to grow to US$2.993 billion by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate of 39%. In contrast, the market size of self-driving taxi LiDAR in 2023 is only US$124 million, and growth will accelerate thereafter, reaching US$638 million by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate of 31%.

Chinese manufacturers dominate

From the perspective of LiDAR suppliers, the top nine manufacturers are: Hesai Technology (37%), Robosense (21%), Seyond (19%), Valeo (10%), Huawei (6%), Waymo (2%), Livox (1%), Ouster (1%) and Luminar (1%). Among them, Chinese manufacturers occupy a dominant position and have won a total of 20% of the global automotive LiDAR market.

84% share.

Hesai Technology

Chinese manufacturer Hesai Technology continues to rank first with a market share of 37%. Although it has dropped by 9 percentage points compared to 2022, Hesai Technology still has a market share of up to 73% in the autonomous taxi lidar market. Cruise, Aurora, Baidu Apollo, Didi, Pony.ai and AutoX, and other players in the autonomous taxi field, are all customers of Hesai Technology.

According to Hesai Technology's financial report, Hesai Technology achieved revenue of 1.877 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 56.1%. LiDAR shipments reached 222,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 176.1%. Among them, ADAS LiDAR shipments reached 195,000 units throughout the year, a year-on-year increase of 215%.

Hesai Technology achieved revenue of RMB 360 million in the first quarter of 2024, a year-on-year decline of 16.51%. The total delivery volume of LiDAR reached 59,101 units, a year-on-year increase of 69.7%; among which the delivery volume of ADAS products was 52,462 units, a year-on-year increase of 86.1%. The combined gross profit margin of Robotaxi business and ADAS business was 38.8%. As of the end of the first quarter of 2024, Hesai Technology has obtained mass production orders for LiDAR for nearly 70 models from 18 OEMs and Tier-1 customers.

According to public information, Ideal Auto is the largest single customer of Hesai Technology. In addition, NIO, Xpeng, Changan Automobile, Jidu Auto, HiPhi, Lotus, SAIC Group, GAC Group, etc. are all partners of Hesai Technology.

It is worth mentioning that at this year's CES, Hesai Technology released its self-developed 512-line ultra-high-definition ultra-long-range LiDAR AT512, which can achieve a standard distance of 300 meters (@10% reflectivity), which is 50% higher than the previous generation product AT128; the maximum detection distance can reach 400 meters, which is about twice that of similar long-range LiDARs on the market. In addition, the LiDAR also uses Hesai Technology's fourth-generation self-developed chip , which can support a maximum processing of more than 100 million points per second, supporting AT512 to provide cars with image-level ultra-clear 3D perception at an ultra-high point rate of about 12.3 million per second, achieving a globally uniform 0.05° x 0.05° angular resolution, and a point cloud density 8 times that of AT128.

RoboSense

The second-largest company is Robosense, also from China, with a market share of 21%, doubling from 2022 (up 12 percentage points), mainly due to a significant increase in revenue from its lidar products for ADAS.

According to RoboSense's financial report, RoboSense achieved total revenue of 1.12 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 111.2%, of which ADAS product revenue reached 777 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 384.6%. In 2023, RoboSense shipped 256,000 units of LiDAR products, of which the sales of LiDAR products for ADAS applications and LiDAR products for robots and others were approximately 240,000 units and 16,000 units respectively. The revenue share of ADAS products increased from 30% in 2022 to 69.4%.

RoboSense's first quarter 2024 financial report shows that the total revenue for the quarter reached approximately RMB 360 million, a year-on-year increase of 149.1%. The total sales volume of LiDAR products in the first quarter was approximately 120,400 units, a year-on-year increase of 457.4%. Among them, the sales volume of LiDAR products in the ADAS field was approximately 116,200 units, a year-on-year increase of 542.0%. As of May 17, 2024, RoboSense has successfully obtained mass production orders for 71 models from 22 automobile OEMs and Tier 1. RoboSense expects that the sales target for automotive LiDAR in 2024 will be 1 million units.

On April 15 this year, RoboSense launched the new generation of medium- and long-range LiDAR MX, which is equipped with RoboSense's self-developed dedicated SoC chip M-Core, and uses the same two-dimensional MEMS scanning chip as the M platform. At the same time, it realizes the chip iteration upgrade of the transceiver system. It is the culmination of its LiDAR chip design, and for the first time, it has reduced the price of LiDAR to less than US$200, leading the industry into the "thousand-yuan machine" era. With its leading product advantages, MX has won three new mass production project points when it was released, of which the first project will achieve large-scale mass production in the first half of 2025.

Seyond (Photo Tongda)

The third place is still the Chinese manufacturer Seyond, with a market share of 19%, an increase of 4 percentage points compared to 2022. According to third-party data, Seyond's lidar shipments exceeded 150,000 units in 2023.

According to the information, Tudatong was founded in 2016, with R&D centers in Silicon Valley, Suzhou and Shanghai, and highly industrialized automotive-grade LiDAR manufacturing bases in Ningbo and Suzhou. In 2018, the first batch of products was shipped, and it received a $30 million Series A financing led by NIO Capital. Subsequently, NIO also became Tudatong's main customer. Its automotive-grade mass-produced ultra-long-range main-view LiDAR Falcon has been delivered as a standard configuration of the Aquila super-sensing system of the NIO NT2.0 platform, and is installed on many models such as ET7, ET5, ES7, ES8, EC7, ES6, ET5T, and EC6.

It is worth mentioning that Tudatong has passed the IPO registration of the China Securities Regulatory Commission on August 10, 2023, and is preparing for an IPO in the United States. It is expected to become the third Chinese laser radar listed company after Hesai Technology and RoboSense.

Valeo

Ranked fourth is France's Valeo, with a market share of 10%, down 3 percentage points from 2022.

According to data, Valeo is a world-renowned supplier of automotive parts with 175 production bases, 66 R&D centers and 112,700 employees worldwide. Sales in 2023 will reach 22 billion euros. According to official website data, Valeo, as the world's leading manufacturer of driver assistance sensors , has produced more than 1.5 billion ADAS sensors in the past 30 years and will produce another 1.5 billion in the next five years. Valeo has the Intelligent Systems Division, the Powertrain Division and the Vision Systems Division. Among them, the LiDAR business belongs to the Intelligent Systems Division.

As early as 2017, Audi released the world's first mass-produced Level 3 autonomous driving car , the Audi A8, which was equipped with Valeo's first-generation SCALA series lidar, with an effective detection distance of 150 meters. It uses a rotating mirror solution, and the transmitting module uses an edge-emitting laser (EEL) to emit 905nm laser, and the detector is an avalanche diode (APD). Due to technical limitations at the time, it could only achieve a line level of 4 lines in the vertical direction.