Yole Group: Chinese manufacturers will take 84% of the global automotive LiDAR market in 2023, with Hesai leading the pack

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 together 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 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 laser radar market size has increased significantly between 2022 and 2023, and it is expected to show another significant increase between 2028 and 2029.

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

“The journey of robo-taxi services started with NuTonomy’s launch in Singapore in August 2016. 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 robo-taxi services has put the lidar market for robo-taxi far ahead of the passenger car market,” said Pierrick Boulay, Senior Technology & Market Analyst, Automotive Semiconductors at 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 will be US$414 million in 2023 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 autonomous taxi lidar will be only US$124 million in 2023, after which growth will accelerate, reaching US$638 million by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate of 31%.

Chinese manufacturers dominate

From the perspective of the lidar supplier landscape, the top nine manufacturers are: Hesai Technology (37%), Robosense (21%), Seyond (Innovusion, 19%), Valeo (10%), Huawei (6%), Waymo (2%), Livox (1%), Ouster (1%) and Luminar (1%).

Among them, Chinese manufacturers occupy a dominant position, accounting for a total of 84% of the global automotive lidar market.

Hesai Technology

Chinese manufacturer Hesai Technology continued 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 73% in the self-driving taxi lidar market.

Players in the autonomous taxi field such as Cruise, Aurora, Baidu Apollo, Didi, Pony.ai and AutoX 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 combined gross profit margin of the Robotaxi business and ADAS business was 38.8%.

The total delivery volume of LiDAR reached 59,101 units, a year-on-year increase of 69.7%; among them, the delivery volume of ADAS products was 52,462 units, a year-on-year increase of 86.1%.

As of the end of the first quarter of 2024, Hesai Technology has obtained mass production orders for nearly 70 models of LiDAR 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 range of 300 meters (@10% reflectivity), a 50% improvement over 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 laser radar also uses Hesai Technology's fourth-generation self-developed chip, which can support a maximum processing of more than 100 million points per second. It supports AT512 and can provide cars with image-level ultra-clear three-dimensional perception at an ultra-high point frequency of approximately 12.3 million points per second, achieving a globally uniform 0.05° x 0.05° angular resolution, and a point cloud density that is 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 the financial report of RoboSense, in 2023, RoboSense achieved total revenue of 1.12 billion yuan, 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 1s.

RoboSense expects the sales target for automotive lidar to reach 1 million units in 2024.

On April 15 this year, RoboSense launched a new generation of medium- and long-range LiDAR MX, which is equipped with RoboSense's fully self-developed dedicated SoC chip M-Core, and also 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 brought the price of LiDAR down 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 projects when it was released, and the first of them will achieve large-scale mass production in the first half of 2025.

Seyond (Tutongda)

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 information, Tudatong was founded in 2016 and has R&D centers in Silicon Valley, Suzhou and Shanghai, and highly industrialized automotive-grade lidar manufacturing bases in Ningbo and Suzhou.

In 2018, the company shipped its first batch of products and received a $30 million Series A funding round led by NIO Capital. Subsequently, NIO also became a major customer of Tudatong.

Its automotive-grade mass-produced ultra-long-range main-view laser radar Falcon has been mass-produced and delivered as a standard feature of the Aquila super-sensing system of NIO's NT2.0 platform, and is installed on many models including 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 automotive parts supplier with 175 production bases, 66 R&D centers, and 112,700 employees worldwide. Its sales in 2023 will reach 22 billion euros.

According to the official website, 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.

LEO has the Intelligent System Division, Power System Division and Vision System Division, among which the LiDAR business belongs to the Intelligent System 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 .

Its effective detection distance is 150 meters. It uses a rotating mirror solution. The transmitting module uses an edge emitting laser (EEL) to emit 905nm laser, and the detector is an avalanche diode (APD).

Due to the technical limitations at the time, we could only achieve a level of 4 lines in the vertical direction.

In 2021, Valeo launched its second-generation lidar, which is installed on the Mercedes-Benz S-Class model.

Then at the 2022 CES, Valeo released the third-generation SCALA lidar.

As of March 2023, the third-generation SCALA lidar has been selected by Stellantis, a leading Asian manufacturer, and a leading US autonomous taxi company.

By September 2023, the SCALA series radars will be installed in nearly 200,000 vehicles. Other data show that Valeo's current SCALA lidar shipments are mainly concentrated in high-end cars of Kia and Hyundai.

Huawei

Huawei will enter the top five of the global automotive LiDAR market in 2023 for the first time with a market share of 6%, while in 2022, Yole believes that its market share is approximately equal to 0. It can be seen that in 2023, Huawei's automotive LiDAR shipments and revenues have increased several times year-on-year.

According to information, Huawei began developing lidar products as early as 2016 and began to enter the automotive field in 2018.

On December 21, 2020, Huawei officially released its automotive-grade front-mounted mass-produced LiDAR, an automotive-grade 96-line medium- and long-range LiDAR solution with a large field of view of 120° x 25° and a full-field ranging range of up to 150 meters. It was first installed by ARCFOX, a high-end new energy brand under BAIC New Energy.

Since then, Huawei's automotive lidar products have entered high-end models of brands such as Wenjie, Avita, Jifox, Zhijie, and Nezha , but the overall shipment volume is relatively limited.

It was not until 2023 that sales of the Wenjie series of models promoted by Huawei and SERES exploded, and shipments of Huawei's automotive lidar products also began to explode.

According to official data, AITO Automobile's cumulative sales in 2023 were 106,703 vehicles, and its cumulative deliveries were 94,380 vehicles.

Jin Yuzhi, CEO of Huawei's Intelligent Automotive Solutions BU, previously stated that 70% of users have chosen Huawei's advanced intelligent driving package.

That is to say, at least 70,000 users have chosen Huawei's advanced intelligent driving version, and most of these models are equipped with laser radar.

It is worth noting that on December 26, 2023, Huawei released its self-developed new generation 192-line laser radar at the M9 launch conference. It has an imaging capability of 1.84 million points per second, a vertical resolution of 0.1°, a radar scanning frequency of 20Hz, and an ultra-long-range accurate recognition capability of 250 meters.

In addition to Wenjie, in which it has in-depth cooperation with SERES, Huawei has also in-depth cooperation with Chery, BAIC and other three automobile companies, and launched Hongmeng intelligent travel brands such as Zhijie and Xiangjie, and launched a number of cooperative models, covering the new energy vehicle market of 200,000 to 600,000 yuan.

In addition, Huawei also plans to launch a million-level car in cooperation with JAC to compete with Maybach.

According to the latest data released by Huawei, in the first half of 2024, the entire Hongmeng Intelligent Driving series delivered a total of 194,207 vehicles, which means that the delivery volume in half a year exceeded the full year of last year.

This also means that Huawei's LiDAR shipments are expected to double this year. According to data from Gasgoo Automotive Research Institute, in the first quarter of 2024, Huawei's LiDAR accounted for 18.6% of the market share with 41,800 units installed, ranking second in the domestic market.

Lanwo

Lanvo Technology is a subsidiary of DJI Innovations. Founded in 2016, it is committed to providing high-performance, low-cost lidar sensors. Its product applications cover industries such as autonomous driving, smart cities, surveying and mapping, and mobile robots.

Currently, Lanwo Technology's lidar products have been sold to 26 countries and regions including the United States, Canada, China, Japan and the European Union.

According to public information, Lanwo Technology's current lidar products are mainly used in industries such as industry and robotics. Its main automotive customer is Xiaopeng, and its first automotive lidar product has been used in Xiaopeng P5.

At the same time, Lanvox is also the lidar supplier of Fiat Chrysler Group, and its latest lidar product, Tailan-15, is also expected to be adopted by Fiat Chrysler Group's driverless cars.

In addition, among the partners displayed on the official website, Dongfeng Motor, FAW, Yutong Bus, and TuSimple are also customers of Lanwo Technology.

summary:

Overall, in the current global automotive lidar market, Chinese manufacturers occupy a dominant position in terms of both market sales share and shipment volume.

For example, in terms of sales share, Chinese manufacturers accounted for 84% of the global market in 2023.

If we count the shipments, the market share of Chinese manufacturers may be even higher, after all, compared with overseas LiDAR products, Chinese radar products are more cost-effective. This is also due to the rapid growth of China's smart car market in recent years.

Yole Group also stated in the report that since 2018, nearly 200 design success cases have been noted, of which 124 are scheduled to be commercialized in 2024 or shortly thereafter.

Notably, nearly 90% of these come from Chinese automotive OEMs, which are actively promoting the integration of lidar into their vehicles.

Unlike European and American automakers, which have primarily restricted LiDAR to the premium F-segment, Chinese automotive OEMs are incorporating LiDAR into the more affordable D-segment.

It is worth noting that in 2023, the first C-class car equipped with lidar will be launched.

These cars are much cheaper than the F-Class, leading to an increase in the production of lidar-equipped cars, which in turn has driven the price of lidar technology down significantly.

Benjamin Pussat, senior analyst at Yole Group System Teardown, pointed out: "The fast-growing lidar market is an opportunity for chip manufacturers, as most chip suppliers are non-Chinese brands and should benefit from it." However, he also said that Chinese lidar manufacturers also have their own research and development of some key lidar chips. "Because mass production allows lidar manufacturers to design their own chips (ASIC) to replace expensive chips. This also reduces the dependence of Chinese manufacturers on foreign chip manufacturers."

Chip Intelligence