text | "Chinese Entrepreneur" reporter Pan Juntian
editor | Zhang Hao
picture source | Visual China
While still inspecting, Xiao Sun discovered that "something was wrong" with the market.
He has been selling villa photovoltaic products in Europe for more than ten years. In the past two years, almost every household in Europe has been equipped with photovoltaic products, but there still seems to be a blank market in China. "The application scenarios of new energy are always first implemented abroad because electricity costs are too expensive, especially in Europe, and then gradually transferred to China. Villa photovoltaics are already so mature in Europe, will this be a big opportunity?" He told China Entrepreneur. The original idea of
is very simple. A set of villa photovoltaic products usually consists of photovoltaic panels, energy storage systems and inverters. The main production areas of these three products are in China, which saves a lot of freight and tariffs, and the price is definitely lower than abroad. Xiao Sun's company has mature product and service experience in Europe, so it stands to reason that it has obvious advantages.
But before he finished visiting dealers and customers in various provinces, the market seemed to "change". Villa photovoltaics suddenly entered the "free era" because a large number of players rushed in. Dealers of distributed photovoltaic power stations who were originally active in the township market have turned to new investment directions due to policy changes at the beginning of this year - the power grid no longer purchases the full amount of power generated by distributed photovoltaic projects. Villa photovoltaics is the most popular area. one.
"Free installation, free operation and maintenance, free power station, saving electricity bills and making money..." In the reporter's interview, some villa owners received more than a dozen sales calls a day. Equipped with financial products, it can be installed and used without spending money.
Huawei, an important player in the European villa photovoltaic market, began to accelerate the development of the domestic market last year. Different from the European product strategy, it has changed from focusing on cost-effectiveness to focusing on mid-to-high-end products. This is of course related to the characteristics of the domestic villa crowd. The basic price of a villa photovoltaic product is one to two hundred thousand yuan, while the retail price of the domestic "cheap version" is less than a fraction of that.
has the same idea as Xiao Sun. Many established European villa photovoltaic manufacturers, including Huabao Xinneng , are also planning for the domestic market. But the reality is that the market heat suddenly increased, and they had to adjust their strategies immediately.
"This is already a Red Sea market. How can we compete with them at low prices? Impossible." Xiao Sun sighed. Faced with the current simple and crude low-price bombardment, no matter how confident he is in his products and service capabilities, he has to find ways to reach the market more efficiently.
The key is whether this is a "real market" or a "fake market". The rise of European villa photovoltaic products in recent years is directly related to the skyrocketing electricity costs in recent years. Domestic electricity bills are very stable. In the past five years, the European market has been booming, but the domestic villa market is considered "unaffordable." Will
be able to get up this time? Xiao Sun also murmured in his heart.
风气
Because the previous core market was affected by policies, it was no longer "making money". In March this year, the National Development and Reform Commission issued the "Regulations on the Supervision of Full Guaranteed Purchase of Renewable Energy Electricity", and the State Grid gradually stopped "full purchase" in various places. "Now the power grid will basically not accept your electricity. The next step must be to find who to sell it to." Chen Shisheng, honorary consultant of the Huizhou Energy Association, told reporters. If new consumers of electricity cannot be found, the return on investment is completely uncontrollable.
According to the calculations of Qian Xin, marketing director of Longi Green Energy China distributed regional brand, the number of domestic villas ranges from 5 million to 10 million. If all photovoltaic panels are installed, the market upper limit is 100gw. At the current industry installation rate, it can support the market growth in the next two years.
In terms of volume, this should be the most attractive piece of "cake" in the field of distributed photovoltaics. However, the villa market has been considered a "poor mine" in industry discussions over the past few years, and developers are more keen to sign up industrial and commercial customers with high energy consumption (photovoltaic installation scenarios such as enterprises, factories, office buildings, etc.).
"No one has entered the domestic villa market in the past few years. Huawei returned to China to start business in 2020. It has cooperated with GCL and Chintai Anneng to launch products. However, developers everywhere believe that this market cannot be done. Huawei has always Hold on." Xiao Sun told reporters. The reason why
cannot be implemented is that "user needs have not been discovered." At that time, developers working in the villa market mainly focused on household use (compared to industrial and commercial scenarios, most of which were self-built house installation scenarios). The photovoltaic subsidy policy allowed them to enjoy a subsidy of close to 20 cents per kilowatt hour. This is extremely competitive after the country stopped the photovoltaic power grid subsidy policy in 2019.
But let every distributed photovoltaic agent settle the accounts. The villa project is a sure-profit business.
"Doing commercial photovoltaic, installing 200kw photovoltaic panels, earning 20 cents per watt, only 20,000 yuan, which can be earned from a villa. And this kind of money is easy to collect, it is basically cash, and there is no financial risk. There is no pressure on inventory. There are usually hundreds of units in a villa community, and it is very profitable to develop ten units a year," Xiao Sun told reporters.
is also easy to deploy. Other distributed photovoltaic scenarios often encounter property rights disputes, and it is unclear who owns the property rights.
"For example, there are hundreds of residents in a building in an urban residential area, and the income model is very good. However, the roof of the residential area is a public property, and it needs to be negotiated door to door, which is impossible to get. Photovoltaics is a new thing, and many people don't know. Accept it. And many owners know that the project is for making money, so they have the idea of stealing my things and making money yourself," Xiao Sun said.
On the contrary, the property rights of the villa roof belong to the owner, and the villa usually comes with open space, which also belongs to the owner.
But the villa market just cannot afford it. In the past few years, even Huawei has not had a single breach. During the reporter's interview, a common challenge for industry salespeople is that villa owners generally have relatively good family financial conditions and have little interest in saving electricity bills and making money from selling electricity.
"If the electricity is calculated at 30 kilowatt hours a day, I can save 20 yuan. I bought a villa worth tens of millions of yuan and spent one to two million yuan on decoration. The money saved by photovoltaics is not enough to buy a pack of cigarettes." Xiao Sun said.
However, in his understanding, the company did not seriously "think about it". For example, Chintai Aneng's villa photovoltaic product "Green Electric Home" provides four purchase models: roof leasing, cooperative co-construction, green finance and full self-investment. The first three models are all common distributed photovoltaic investment and financing solutions for the purpose of "making money", which are attractive to rural self-built house owners, but owners in the villa market are obviously not sensitive.
Huawei has also been revising its strategy, including refining new demand points. A partner in the northern region told "Chinese Entrepreneur": "Beijing owners are interested in the backup power supply function, so they can have electricity even if there is a power outage; Shanghai owners are interested in the trend, Europe is equipped like this, and I want to be installed in the same way." "Guangzhou is interested in the insulation performance and avoiding sun exposure." is regarded as the main selling point, and the lifestyle aspects of design, technology, and even green life are amplified, and correspondingly, the selling price is increased. , trying to promote villa photovoltaics as a "luxury service".
Of course, this may all be changed by this wave of low price offensive. The advertising slogans used by distributed photovoltaic dealers are still the same, "Free installation, free operation and maintenance, stable profit, free power station..." Xiao Sun was caught off guard. He was also observing whether Huawei would change its strategy. In Shanghai last month At the Photovoltaic Exhibition, several leading manufacturers showed no signs of following up with price cuts.
"Old business"
"Villa photovoltaics is a new business in China, but it is an old business abroad." Xiao Sun said.
Especially in the past two years, the price of electricity for European residents has skyrocketed. It has been several times higher than the domestic electricity bill. Photovoltaics have become a "save money tool", and the government has also implemented large-scale subsidies for residential photovoltaics. For example, Germany can provide subsidies of up to 45,000 euros to residents who purchase photovoltaic panels and energy storage systems in 2022. The market for
was not large at the beginning.According to Mike, the head of Huabao New Energy Home Storage Product R&D Center, around 2018, a villa in Europe will be equipped with 5kw photovoltaic panels, and in the UK it may only be 3kw.
Many families only use photovoltaics as a backup energy source. After the electricity prices increased, they began to hope to achieve self-sufficiency in electricity through photovoltaics. The demand for has rapidly escalated to the level of 15kw (which can generate more than 50 kilowatt hours of electricity a day), and the supporting energy storage capacity has also been expanded to more than 20 kilowatt hours. Judging from the trend, the average daily electricity consumption of households is still rising.
Moreover, the market initially focused on selling "parts". Xiao Sun said that Huawei provides inverters, LG Chem, Samsung SDI and others provide energy storage products, and Longi Green Energy, JinkoSolar and others provide photovoltaic panels. Many European villa owners will buy these parts from dealers and assemble them into a home photovoltaic system themselves.
The market at that stage was a blue ocean, and manufacturers were more in a synergistic relationship: The more LONGi’s photovoltaic panels were sold, the more Huawei’s inverters would be sold, and Huabao New Energy’s energy storage would follow suit. Starting amount.
However, Chinese companies are still habitually "involved", and the market quickly entered a state of price competition. The direct consequence is that the profit margin from selling individual parts cannot be guaranteed at all. Every component company has begun to plan for "integration". The customers are essentially the same people. There is a very sufficient supply of components such as photovoltaics, energy storage, and inverters in China, and even the launch of their own product lines took only a year. Something that can be accomplished within a few seconds.
"Shifting from components to integration can also solve some old problems. These components will eventually form a system. If they work independently, even the most basic interfaces cannot be unified, and the experience will be very bad. In order to protect the security of their respective products , the current will be easily cut off. Owners must buy products with redundant capacity to ensure stability, which will also increase procurement costs," Xiao Sun said.
Huawei was the first to smell market risks and start transformation. Before 2019, its main business was inverters, with a large share of the European market. It has been among the top ten in the global photovoltaic inverter industry for five consecutive years. In 2019, it quickly launched an energy storage system, purchased photovoltaic panels from dealers, and launched the first generation of integrated villa photovoltaic products that year.
was a leading company in portable energy storage systems at the time, and Huabao New Energy quickly followed suit, first launching photovoltaic panel products in 2019. "At that time, as the sales of portable energy storage increased, more and more people wanted to buy photovoltaic panels as a package, so we consciously sold them as a package." Mike said.
Until 2021, Huabao Xinneng will start to do more. Some domestic second-tier energy storage companies have entered the European market and directly offered lower prices. New entrants plan to make one component one of the top players in the industry and then expand to other products. In order to maintain and expand market share, Huabao Xinneng also chose integration.
And every company is learning from Huawei’s strategy of controlling channels. Huawei's main way to seize the inverter market at first was to sell it in conjunction with communication equipment that had more market power. For villa photovoltaic products, Huawei has copied this path again, using inverters to drive sales of the entire system product.
"Huawei knows very well that what this industry competes for is its market channel capabilities and the cash flow behind it." Xiao Sun said.
Rolled back into the country from abroad
The European villa photovoltaic market was quickly rolled into a saturated state. Since last year, companies including Huawei and Huabao Xinneng have shifted their focus from Europe to China. They have mature product solutions and are preparing to replicate the results of the European market.
Huawei is one of the first villa photovoltaic companies to develop the domestic market. However, its product positioning has changed, from "high quality and low price" in the European market to a "high-end brand" in the domestic market. According to information on the official website of
, Huawei’s cheapest villa photovoltaic system is 130,000 yuan. Its main components include 6kw photovoltaic modules, 10kwh energy storage, 8kw inverter and a smart photovoltaic system. Calculated according to the market price, the cost price of such a set of products is 30,000 to 50,000 yuan.
Huawei has summarized five major advantages for its products: beauty, intelligence, technology, security, and experience.The extracted selling points are more "home appliance-based", which is different from the return on investment that is the main focus of traditional distributed photovoltaics.
In order to match the high selling price, Huawei has also improved its product standards. For example, in energy storage systems, suppliers will undergo extensive secondary inspections to solve the problem of yield rate. Huawei also went to two photovoltaic companies, Longi Green Energy and Aixu Co., Ltd., to customize and produce all-black small photovoltaic panels. Such components are better-looking and easier to deploy, but they are much more expensive.
’s sales channels in the domestic market are mainly offline. In addition to the original dealer channels for inverters, Huawei has also opened up new channels such as villa decoration companies.
but there is no starting point. Xiao Sun saw the sales of Huawei's villa photovoltaics in the circle of friends as "good news", and the monthly sales nationwide were in the order of hundreds of units. LONGi Green Energy rejected Huawei's photovoltaic panel order requirements this year, and other suppliers did not promote cooperation with Huawei as a key project.
The above-mentioned Huawei partner told reporters, "Now we have obtained all possible sales leads, the problem is how to convert them."
At least from now on, Huawei's high-end path has not yet been completed. Even so, when Xiao Sun had business exchanges with his colleagues, Huawei was still the core topic of discussion: "Their product line is long enough, such as supercharging stations, cars, etc. If they are bundled and sold together, buying Huawei cars and selling Huawei There are many ways to play with villa photovoltaics. "
A bunch of small and medium-sized distributed photovoltaic dealers are targeting Huawei at low prices. Huawei sells a 10kW product for 130,000 to 170,000 yuan, but these dealers only sell it for 30,000 yuan.
Xiao Sun said that the "cheap solution" cannot use all-black photovoltaic panels like Huawei. They will only purchase the lowest-priced conventional products from photovoltaic manufacturers, and sell them as villa products themselves, without considering the aesthetics and difficulty of deployment. “If there is a problem, the owners don’t know who to call for repairs, not to mention that these are electrical appliances. There are always certain risks of use." Xiao Sun also mentioned that most plans do not include energy storage equipment. First, it will increase the selling price. Second, small and medium-sized dealers will have to pay hundreds of thousands of yuan in upfront investment.
Let the old villa photovoltaic manufacturers see that the practicality of these products is very poor. If it is not equipped with energy storage, isn't it just a "semi-finished product" that cannot be used overnight?
But no one can predict the impact of low prices on the market. Miang Photovoltaic is Huawei's first partner for villa business in Shanghai. The company's CEO Cai Jian told reporters, "Many small installers in Shanghai have no time to take into account the owner experience. In just a few years, the gross profit margin of products has increased from 50% to 15%. , the homogeneity is extremely serious.”
Huabao Xinneng’s strategy is close to the “mid-range market” and does not directly compete with Huawei or small and medium-sized players. has sold some small photovoltaic systems in Europe, focusing on "distributing part of the electricity at a low price". The lowest photovoltaic panel power is only 0.5kw, which only generates a few kilowatt hours of electricity a day. The selling price abroad is only a few thousand yuan, and it will be even lower in China.
"Our product allows you to use less electricity, reduce energy consumption by 20% to 30%, and meet emergency needs. This product is the most cost-effective. If you want to have a whole-house power backup, you will definitely have redundant capacity. Otherwise, it will be very expensive," Mike said.
Xiao Sun has repeatedly communicated with the team and should follow this idea. This is the only path that can guarantee both experience and price, especially for a company that is not large enough to compete with Huawei. There is a prototype of a product like
, which is a portable energy storage system, and Xiao Sun's company has already started selling it in Europe. It looks like a large speaker with multiple USB interfaces or wire sockets for power supply. "Nowadays, many anchors like to use it, carrying it with their hands to charge their mobile phones or cameras during outdoor live broadcasts." Xiao Sun plans to install a photovoltaic panel on top of this energy storage system, so that a set of products is completed.
The pitch they promote to domestic customers is to reduce household electricity costs. Taking Zhejiang as an example, residential electricity consumption is divided into three levels, namely annual electricity consumption of 2760 kilowatt-hours, 2761 kilowatt-hours to 4800 kilowatt-hours and above 4800 kilowatt-hours. The prices are 0.538 yuan/kWh, 0.588 yuan/kWh and 0.838 yuan/kWh respectively.As long as the total electricity consumption of villa photovoltaic equipment is reduced to less than 4800 degrees, it can correspond to a good revenue model.
also requires no construction, you can use it directly after buying it. Xiao Sun decided to follow suit first, cooperate with dealers through this low-unit-price product, and wait for new market changes. "Once the policy is liberalized, the market will inevitably develop rapidly based on the style of the domestic photovoltaic industry. It may not be there yet." That's when." He said.
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