High-growth enterprise ｜ Titan Intelligence： Independent innovation regains the right to speak in the industry, and intelligent charging equipment covers 195 countries around the world.

Feng Yuyi, a trainee reporter of Southern Finance and Economics, reports from Zhuhai.

In the era of Industry 4.0, AGV/AMR (Mobile Robot for Industrial Application) has become a vital part of industrial production intelligence, and gradually penetrated into manufacturing, logistics and service industries, and the charging industry promoted by this is in the cusp of vigorous development.

At present, the 100 billion-level charging and power market formed by new energy industrial vehicles such as mobile robots, mining machines, low-speed unmanned vehicles and lithium-ion forklifts, as well as the continuation market of secondary sales of charging modules, power batteries and replacement of charging equipment, are accelerating.

According to the forecast of AGV/AMR industry alliance, it is estimated that the new AGV/AMR in China will exceed 120,000 units in 2023, and the new market will exceed 200,000 units in 2025, with a market scale exceeding 45 billion yuan. The compound growth rate of sales in the next five years will remain above 40%. Among them, AGV/AMR charging and power system are two important systems of electric industrial vehicles, accounting for over 8%.

"Electrification and intelligentization of industrial vehicles are the general trend. Even though industrial manufacturing has faced various difficulties in the past three years, the AGV/AMR charging industry is still in a period of rapid growth with strong demand and full of resilience. With the diversified application scenarios of mobile robots, the penetration rate of the charging industry will be further improved. " Recently, Zou Jianjun, founder, chairman and CEO of Guangdong Titan Intelligent Power Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Titan Intelligent"), said in an interview with Southern Finance and Economics all-media reporter.

Founded in 2016, Titan Intelligence is a state-level specialized and new "Little Giant" enterprise focusing on providing overall energy solutions and back-end data services for new energy industrial vehicles. In the context of rising industry demand and maturing technology, Titan Intelligent won the A round of financing from Zhuoshi Investment in 2022.

Compete for product pricing power

At the beginning of Titan Intelligent’s entry into the new track, it coincided with the wave of "oil to electricity" and "lead to lithium" for industrial vehicles. Under the market reform dividend brought by the "double carbon" background, Titan Intelligent stood out and quickly opened the market with its research and development capabilities and market sense.

When talking about why the track was chosen, Zou Jianjun said, "In the process of a customer chat, it was found that the AGV/AMR charging industry is generally a’ one-price’ sale, which is completely a market where the seller has the pricing power." After market research, he found that the domestic AGV/AMR and the charging products of electrified industrial vehicles were almost all imported from abroad. Although the domestic market demand was huge, there was no bargaining power.

After gaining insight into this new market trend, Titan Intelligent accelerated its layout research and development with AGV/AMR and intelligent lithium-ion charging equipment and batteries for electrified industrial vehicles as the main business, and the annual investment in research and development accounted for about 10% of its main business income. In a few years, Titan Intelligent Power has successively launched the digital intelligent charging series for industrial electric vehicles, the side charging and charging integrated machine series for intelligent manipulator of mobile robots, the power battery series for mobile robots, the power battery series for low-speed unmanned vehicles, the power charging series for low-speed unmanned vehicles, wireless charging for mobile robots and other efficient and stable overall charging solutions. The application scenarios involved run through all links of the whole industrial chain, and cover application places such as logistics and transportation, smart home appliances and public infrastructure.

"Although we started later than foreign countries, relying on China’s R&D foundation and industrial chain advantages in the field of new energy charging, we quickly mastered the right to speak in the industry in the game with foreign products, let the price return to a reasonable range, and achieve the domestic market share. First." Zou Jianjun said that more and more foreign manufacturers began to choose to use Titan smart products.

According to reports, while entering the mainstream AGV brand manufacturers in China, including Hangcha Group, Heli Forklift, Kuka Robot, Xinsong Robot, BYD, etc., Titan Intelligence has also obtained international qualification certifications such as cTUVus and CE, and is exported to 195 countries and regions such as America, Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia, reaching a global coverage rate of 85%. Internationalization has become one of the ideas of Titan’s intelligent "by going up one flight of stairs". Zou Jianjun said, "The forklift truck for lithium battery industry is our important market. 70%-80% of the demand is overseas. Expanding business overseas is equivalent to catching this blue ocean market."

According to the data of Chinafork. com, the global forklift market will be about 150 billion yuan in 2022, including 110 billion yuan in overseas market and 40 billion yuan in domestic market. Domestic forklifts mostly use lithium battery as the main power, and the trend of replacing lead-acid battery forklifts in foreign markets has accelerated significantly, or it will usher in important development opportunities.

With the iterative upgrading of new energy battery technology, it also brings more room for improvement for the mobile robot industry, and is highly expected in reducing costs, improving efficiency, and industrial transformation and upgrading.

Based on long-term observation of the market, Zou Jianjun bet on lithium iron phosphate battery. Titan Intelligent established a subsidiary-Zhuhai Titan Lineng Technology Co., Ltd., and has its own PACK factory, which mainly develops and produces AMR and AGV power lithium battery packs, further improving the overall solution of the power system.

In Zou Jianjun’s view, compared with traditional lead-acid batteries, lithium batteries have the advantages of lighter weight, smaller volume and higher energy density, so the lithium battery forklift model is more compact and the vehicle stability is higher. "And in recent years, the acceptance of lithium battery forklifts by end customers, especially high-end customers, has steadily increased. We believe that the future development prospects of the lithium battery market are very broad."

Explore and create a new model of "energy products+data services"

Walking into the research laboratory of Titan Intelligence, the wireless charger, which is called the "charging treasure" of the mobile robot, is executing the command set by the wireless energy emitting device, and automatically recognizes charging from a distance after finishing the workflow. A series of actions are flowing, and fully automatic and intelligent charging can be realized without connecting vehicles.

This is the research and development site of Titan Intelligent’s autonomous intelligent AGV charging system based on magnetic coupling resonant wireless charging technology, which has no electrode oxidation and fouling, reduces the charging accident caused by poor electrode contact, not only improves the safety and applicability, but also makes AGV charging products more intelligent.

Zou Jianjun revealed that the high-power wireless charger series independently developed by the company has built technical barriers in coil design, circuit research and core algorithm. At present, it has completed the verification in the laboratory stage and will go to the stage of commercialization and mass production next year. "The era of wireless charging has arrived, and it is expected that there will be an outbreak in the next five to ten years."

Compared with wireless charging of electric vehicles, AGV wireless charging requires fast charging mode with low voltage and high current, and the main challenge is to require small size, high efficiency and high cost performance. Zou Jianjun introduced, "We combine AGV battery and wireless charging to build an overall AGV power system, realize modular development, reduce the volume by 50%, and continuously improve the product stability, which is our design idea and core competitiveness to fundamentally reduce costs."

At present, the industrial wireless charging technology track targeted by Titan Intelligence is becoming increasingly hot at home and abroad. According to the incomplete statistics of Southern Finance and Economics reporters, there are already manufacturers in the domestic market, such as Baiyi Technology, Luyu Energy, Avant-garde Wireless, Qingdao Paworth, Taihang Jiaxin Electric, etc., who have laid out new technologies, and new scenes and new applications are constantly opening up. In foreign markets, Tesla announced in June this year that it plans to acquire Wiferion, a German manufacturer that provides wireless charging technology for AGV/AMR.

While Titan Smart continues to increase its research and development of wireless charging systems, the team is constantly exploring innovations in business models.

In recent years, with the blessing of AI, mobile robots have been continuously upgraded intelligently, becoming the "nerve center" of the digital intelligent transformation of traditional manufacturing industry, which is expected to usher in large-scale applications in new energy vehicles, new retail and big health fields.

Facing the future, Titan Intelligence is building a general power platform for mobile robots, equipped with wireless charging system, power system, drive control system and background data management system, exploring software and hardware technologies, and establishing a development model of "energy products+data services".

Zou Jianjun believes that mobile robots must be one of the best carriers of AI applications, and connecting mobile robots with data services "chain" will be the development trend of the future industry.

In Zou Jianjun’s view, AGV charging product providers not only supply mobile robot parts, but also provide end customers with overall energy solutions from warehousing transformation to material docking and maintenance services. "This requires analyzing the density and quality of information collected by mobile robots from the data level to build a new ecosystem, which is also the underlying logic of our layout of this emerging business."