On the one hand, there are bankruptcies and mergers, and on the other hand, there is continuous financing. The joys and sorrows of LiDAR companies at home and abroad are not the same.

Electronics Enthusiasts Network reported (Text/Liang Haobin) As 2022 draws to a close, the LiDAR industry seems to have ushered in a turbulent autumn. Last year, the first batch of models equipped with LiDAR began to be listed on a large scale, and the situation was very good. In the past year or so, a large number of LiDAR companies have followed this wave of popularity and rushed to the market. For example, LiDAR companies such as Velodyne, Luminar, Innoviz, Aeva, Ousr, AEye, Quanergy, and Cepton have successively completed their listings in different ways.

Of course, domestic LiDAR companies have not fallen behind. RoboSense, Hesai Technology, Tanwei Technology, Yijing Technology, Liangdao Intelligence, and Tudatong have also received multiple rounds of financing in this wave of enthusiasm.

But just one year later, the situation in the overseas LiDAR industry took a sharp turn for the worse. Some of the market values ​​​​shrunk by more than 80%, some were forced to delist (Quanergy), and some went bankrupt (such as ibeo). Recently, OUSTER even announced a merger with Velodyne, the pioneer of LiDAR.

However, if we turn our attention to China, we will find that the domestic LiDAR market is still thriving: system manufacturers and chip manufacturers are continuously obtaining financing, and recently Hesai and RoboSense have successively released new products. A large number of domestic brands have launched models equipped with LiDAR this year. So what happened to overseas LiDAR companies?

Behind the merger of Ouster and Velodyne

As the pioneer of automotive LiDAR, Velodyne is one of the earliest listed LiDAR companies. Velodyne innovatively developed a 360° rotating LiDAR in 2005 and applied it to self-driving cars for the first time in 2005. With this pioneering application, Velodyne once monopolized 80% of the market share of self-driving LiDAR.

On the other hand, Ouster was only established in 2015, claiming to empower LiDAR with digital technology, and the industry's first use of VCSEL+SPAD solutions to manufacture LiDAR. However, it can be seen from Ouster's official website that their products are currently mechanically rotating, which is quite different from the hybrid solid-state commonly used in mass-produced models in terms of technical route, and it is difficult to apply them to mass-produced models. Of course, there is still a lot of market space in industrial automation and other fields.

Ouster has just announced its Q3 2022 financial report, with revenue of $11.2 million and shipments of 2,136. The company's chief financial officer said that the company's revenue is mainly in the two fields of industry and robotics, accounting for 38% and 37% of the company's Q3 revenue, respectively. In fact, from the performance point of view, Ousterd's growth data is still relatively ideal.

Velodyne's revenue scale is close to Ouster, with total revenue of approximately $11.5 million in the second quarter of 2022.

Interestingly, in June of this year, Velodyne announced that it had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Ouster with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), requesting the ITC to investigate the illegal import of Ouster's lidar sensors. Velodyne believes that the sensors imported by Ouster infringe Velodyne's patent No. 7,969,558 related to lasers.

The core of Velodyne's groundbreaking 360° rotating lidar system is patent No. 7,969,558, which involves a 3D point cloud measurement system based on lidar. Using this patent, Velodyne has previously filed lawsuits against several lidar companies, including Quanergy, Hesai and RoboSense in China. However

, from the perspective of mass production and cost reduction, Velodyne did not have much advantage over other competitors at the time. Especially in recent years, solutions such as galvanometers and rotating mirrors have emerged frequently, and can really be used in mass-produced models. More importantly, Velodyne's patents have been completely avoided, which has gradually eroded Velodyne's market share in the field of autonomous driving by competitors.

Of course, Velodyne did not completely rely on patents. At the end of 2020, they released a solid-state lidar M1600, focusing on the mobile robot market, and claimed that it could achieve low cost and mass production. But judging from Velodyne's recent situation, this has not brought much change to the company.

In 2021, the company's CEO Anand Gopalan resigned, and then even the company's founder resigned as chairman of the board. Until this year, five months after suing Ouster, Velodyne finally had to merge with its rival, who had once fought in court. Of course, there are also reports that behind the merger of Ouster and Velodyne is Ouster's low-price acquisition of Velodyne.

As of November this year, Velodyne's stock price has fallen from a high of $30 in December 2020 to less than $0.8 (November 9), a drop of more than 97%, and its market value has fallen to about $186 million. Judging from the announcements issued by both parties, after the merger, the company will be taken over by Ouster and will seek to establish a faster profit model with a large amount of cash flow.

On the other hand, after the merger of the two lidar companies, the two parties will share 173 granted patents and 504 patents pending, and the sharing of each other's patents may bring certain advantages to future products.

Why are there such differences between domestic and foreign lidar companies?

Although domestic lidar started later, if we look at the global share of the current autonomous driving lidar market, we can find that emerging domestic companies have already occupied the leading position, including Hesai, RoboSense, Huawei, Livox and other lidar companies have a certain market share, and shipments are still growing rapidly.

For lidar manufacturers, the main application scenarios include transportation, autonomous driving, robots and industry, and in terms of market size, as mentioned earlier, Ouster's main source of income comes from industry and robots. But at present, the total demand in the industrial field is not large, and the market size of robots is also relatively small.

The rapid development of automotive intelligence and autonomous driving in recent years has brought huge demand for lidar, which is undoubtedly the most important growth point for lidar companies at present. So after experiencing the investment boom in the lidar industry that began in 2020, now that the tide has receded, it seems that the important criterion for evaluating whether a lidar company is successful has become how many car companies have obtained fixed points.

From another perspective, in fact, in the automotive application of LiDAR, most traditional foreign car companies seem to be lagging behind, or the model development cycle is long. Once LiDAR manufacturers cannot achieve large-scale mass production and pass vehicle regulations at the node of a model, they have to wait for a long time to introduce the next model. On the other hand

, in China, both new car-making forces and traditional car companies have a more open attitude towards LiDAR, and the introduction speed is also very fast. According to incomplete statistics, as of November this year, there have been more than 10 models equipped with LiDAR that have been released or listed in China, with a total monthly sales of approximately 30,000 to 50,000 units. This number is still growing rapidly with the launch of subsequent models.

But this does not mean that domestic LiDAR companies can relax their vigilance. Many overseas LiDAR companies have more than 15 years of technical reserves, and companies including those taking the OPA+FMCW and Falsh routes will achieve SOP in the next two to three years, and may have strong competitiveness in the future pure solid-state LiDAR track. However, judging from the progress of RoboSense and Hesai, they have already moved faster than overseas companies in pure solid-state LiDAR. The blind spot-filling solid-state LiDARs they recently launched all use their own self-developed chips, including SoC and SPAD, and are expected to achieve SOP in the second half of next year.

I am afraid that this cold winter for overseas LiDAR companies will be very long.