It's far from the time for the LiDAR Party to cheer.
In March, with Hesai Technology's 2024 annual report released, the world's first lidar listed company was born to achieve annual profits. For this profit goal, Hesai Technology has been struggling for ten years.
However, the huge shipment volume and low profitability have made Hesai Technology still feel the strong competitive pressure. For Hesai Technology, product iteration, controlling costs, expanding profit margins, and achieving long-term development are still the main themes of the future.
For the entire lidar industry, it is far from the time to get ashore. Even though lidar has achieved a price reduction of more than 90% compared to a few years ago, a large number of lidar companies are still losing money.
At the same time, the price reduction has also brought about the stagnation of the core performance of lidar, and this disguised reduction of distribution is a side effect of technology inclusiveness.
From the market perspective, not all car companies have firmly chosen the lidar route. For example, in addition to Tesla, which firmly despises lidar, some domestic new car companies such as Xiaopeng also prefer pure visual routes.
Especially Xiaopeng, after entering 2025, this former LiDAR fan car company is stopping to carry LiDAR on its new or facelifted models, which is a bit like "reversing history".
But now that lidar prices have been greatly reduced, the reasons why car companies hate lidar have become more complicated.
As Kobayashi, an employee of a certain autonomous driving solution provider, said to Kazi Light Year: "In the long run, lidar may not be a must."
1. Corporate losses and sales surge
On March 11, Hesai Technology, the "China LiDAR* stock" released its financial report for 2024. The company's revenue in 2024 reached 2.08 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.7%; a net loss of 102 million yuan. Under the statistical caliber of non-US General Accepted Accounting Standards (Non-GAAP), excluding equity compensation expenses, Hesai Technology's net profit in 2024 was 13.7 million yuan, while the net loss in the previous year was 241.3 million yuan.
So far, Hesai Technology has become the world's first listed lidar company and the first listed lidar company to achieve annual profitability, and the world's first listed lidar company with positive annual operating and net cash flow.
At the same time, financial report data shows that in 2024, the total delivery volume of Hesai Technology's lidar is about 500,000 units (Taiwan), an increase of 126.0% year-on-year; among which the delivery volume in the fourth quarter reached Taiwan, a significant increase of 153.1% year-on-year.
But it is worth noting that under the premise of such a huge delivery volume, Hesai Technology's net profit in 2024 was only more than 10 million yuan, which was only more than 200 million yuan more than in 2023, which is the highest achievement that the world's leading lidar companies can achieve.
The profitability of Hesai Technology reflects that the entire lidar market is in a state of "turning before it gets old", and the price war is a proof of this.
Data shows that the average selling price of Hesai's lidar in 2019 was US$17,400 (about RMB 122,700), and fell to US$3,200 in 2023.
The average unit price of Sagitar Juchuang's lidar for ADAS applications has dropped from 4,300 yuan to 2,600 yuan within one year from the *Quarter of 2023 to the *Quarter of 2024.
In addition, Sagitar Juchuang also stated that the cost of some new products this year will be reduced to less than US$200, which is the level of 1,000 yuan.
Whether it is the industry leader, Hesai Technology, or other smaller lidar suppliers, they are trying their best to reduce costs. In this process, the beneficiary of * is the car company.
According to data from Gastronic Automobile Research Institute, the domestic penetration rate of lidar installed capacity has rapidly increased from 0.5% in 2022 to 5.5% in 2024. The installed capacity from January to August 2024 has reached 830,000 units, an increase of 720,000 units compared with 2022.
Not only is the increase in the installed capacity, but the number of lidars on a car is even increasing.
For example, Huawei, the Zunjie S800, which is about to be officially released, is equipped with 4 lidars. In addition to one main visual radar and two lateral radars, there is also a backward blind lidar. It has truly achieved 360° without blind spots and all-round lidar coverage.
At the same time, the price of models equipped with lidar is also declining rapidly.
Statistics from Gass Automobile Research Institute show that the core price range of lidar equipped in 2022 is 400,000-500,000 yuan, 350,000-400,000 yuan in 2023, and 300,000-350,000 yuan from January to October 2024.
On March 10, Leapmotor held a pre-sale launch conference for the new car B10 in Hangzhou, announcing that the version of the B10 is equipped with lidar and supports advanced intelligent driving functions, with a pre-sale price of only 129,800 yuan.
At present, the general consensus in the industry is that lidar can continue to rely on scale dilution of costs to further reduce prices.
2. Behind the price reduction is simple matching
Cost was once the original sin of lidar.
But with the advancement of technology, especially the application of solid-state design and chip integration, which greatly simplifies the production process of lidar, lidar is beginning to become cheap or even cheaper.
Early mechanical lidar, transmitting module and receiving module were all installed on rotating components, and the overall laser structure was driven to rotate by 360° through the motor and turntable, thereby achieving all-round environmental perception.
There are several problems with mechanical lidar. One is that it is too large and almost no one wants to install it on ordinary family cars.
Another problem is that due to the limitations of hardware quantity and structural characteristics, mechanical lidar does not have much room for cost optimization, so the cost remains above US$10,000 for a long time. In the early stages of the development of intelligent driving technology, this is not something that ordinary car companies and ordinary models can afford.
However, the large-scale application of semi-solid-state lidar has begun to reduce the overall cost of the product. In this process, there are cost reductions driven by technological progress and cost reductions brought about by performance simplification.
For example, the number of lidar lines is an important performance indicator, representing the number of laser beams that lidar can emit and receive. The more lines, the denser the laser point clouds and the radar can detect clearer and more complete object contours.
Through the innovation of scanning structure, lidar manufacturers can use a small number of laser modules to achieve high-line scanning.
For example, the Livox automotive version of the Lidox laser radar equipped with the Xiaopeng P5, which was launched in August 2021, uses a rotating prism structure, with only 6 groups of transceivers, but it achieved the same point cloud effect as the 144-line mechanical rotating lidar in 100ms points time, and the cost was greatly reduced.
The rotating mirror and MEMS galvanometer structure schemes used by semi-solid-state lidars that are currently on board on a large scale have all reduced the number of laser modules by simplifying the scanning structure, especially the rotating mirror structure. It only requires a beam of light source to complete the scanning task that previously required several laser modules to complete.
On the other hand, chip integration is also the main way for lidar to reduce costs. Integrating detectors, signal processing, etc. into the chip can greatly reduce sensor material consumption and manufacturing costs.
For example, Sagitar Juchuang launched a mass-produced SoC chip on MX lidar, M-Core, which optimized the area of the lidar circuit board by 50%, reduced power consumption by 40%, and reduced cost by 50%.
Sagitar Juchuang CFO Lau once pointed out that lidar can reduce costs by replacing standard chips with independent research and development of proprietary chips (SoCs), and each product can save about 100-200 yuan.
In addition, appropriately reducing or not improving the performance of lidar is also an important reason why lidar can become cheaper now.
The Hesai Technology AT128 LiD, which was launched in 2021, was first equipped on Ideal L9. Its main performance is: at 10% reflectivity, the detection distance is 210 meters, point frequency point/second, and field of view angle of 120° x 25.4°.
In April 2024, Hesai Technology released the ultra-wide-angle long-range lidar ATX based on the fourth-generation chip architecture, and officially promoted it "not only reduces the volume by 60% compared to the AT128, but also reduces the weight by 50%, while achieving a longer detection distance, better* resolution, and a wider field of view."
However, comparing the core performance parameters, it can be found that apart from power consumption, weight and volume, ATX has not significantly improved in other parameters. At 10% reflectivity, the detection distance is 200 meters, the point frequency is dot/second, and the field of view angle also becomes 120° x 20°.
