According to the prospectus, Tucson is currently operating 70 L4 semi-autonomous driving cars in the future, of which 50 are in the United States and 20 are in China.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “Hunting cloud network” (ID: ilieyun), Author: Riemann.
As the fruits of autonomous driving in passenger cars are far from coming, Tucson will represent the first stock of autonomous driving in logistics trucks in the future.
On March 23, Tucson Future, a global driverless truck unicorn company, formally filed an IPO prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), planning to be listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market with the stock code “TSP”, the expected number of shares to be issued and the range of issuance price have not yet been determined.
Tucson is a rather low-key Chinese company in the future. It was established in 2015 and is headquartered in Shanghai, with branches in the United States and Beijing. Although it has received 10 rounds of financing in 6 years, investors include Micro Ventures, Nvidia, CDH, etc., but there is still little news on the market.
Once Tucson is successfully listed in the future, it means that the maturity of autonomous driving is recognized by the capital market, and it also means that L4 autonomous driving will be commercialized. At the same time, this also gave many players in the autonomous driving industry a powerful booster and accelerated squeeze.
Cargo capacity increased, losses doubled and expanded
In the future, Tucson will mainly provide customers with computer vision-based commercial L4 autonomous driving solutions, high-speed scenes and unmanned transportation solutions for container trucks in the port.
Its service model mainly includes three types.
One is to cooperate with the shipper. In the future, Tucson will use its own unmanned vehicle fleet operating in an unmanned network to provide shippers with unmanned freight services calculated by mileage.
The second is to cooperate with the carrier. Carriers can purchase driverless trucks, operate them in the driverless freight network, and connect to Tucson’s future driverless systems when necessary.
The third is the team. Fleet owners can buy and operate their own fleet of driverless trucks. These unmanned trucks will operate in the unmanned freight network according to the mileage-calculated charging mode.
The above service models benefit from the establishment of “AFN” (Unmanned Cargo Network). In July 2020, Tucson Future launched the AFN ecosystem, which consists of fully automated semi trucks, high-definition digital map routes, strategically placed terminals, and a cloud-based proprietary autonomous operation supervision system TuSimple Connect. However, “AFN” is still in the early stages of development and commercialization.
The prospectus shows that Tucson’s future revenue growth will also mainly come from this. In the three years from 2018 to 2020, Tucson’s future revenue will be US$9,000, US$710,000, and US$1.843 million, respectively, and the freight capacity will be consecutive years.increase.
However, in general, from 2018 to 2020, Tucson will always be at a loss in the future, and the loss will increase year by year. In the past three years, their net losses were 45.03 million U.S. dollars, 84.883 million U.S. dollars, and 177 million U.S. dollars. A total of 306.9 million US dollars, about nearly 2 billion yuan.
This is mainly related to the company’s exponential increase in R&D expenditures. From 2018 to 2020, the company’s research and development expenditures (including both personnel costs and equipment costs) were 32.278 million U.S. dollars, 63.619 million U.S. dollars, and 132 million U.S. dollars. These research and development expenses are mainly used to increase the number of semi trucks and personnel in the fleet. This is understandable, the autonomous driving industry is an industry highly dependent on R&D personnel.
As of December 31, 2020, Tucson has a total of 839 employees (full-time) in the future, of which 673 are R&D personnel (full-time), accounting for about 80%. Most of its employees work in San Diego, California, which is also the main R&D location for Tucson in the future. The remaining employees are located in Arizona and Beijing. Next, the company will continue to recruit and retain talented software developers and engineers to enhance its strength in key technologies and consolidate its continued leading position in the industry.
In addition, Tucson’s future general and administrative expenses will be 12.175 million U.S. dollars, 21.962 million U.S. dollars, and 37.3 million U.S. dollars, respectively. Including R&D expenses, general and administrative expenses, revenue costs and marketing expenses, Tucson’s total costs in the next three years will be 45.538 million U.S. dollars, 87.99 million U.S. dollars, and 175.9 million U.S. dollars.
The prospectus stated that the performance of the above financial performance is to a large extent to maintain the leading position in the industry. Therefore, a lot of resources are used for research and development, and a lot of funds are invested to attract talents, especially for engineers with rich experience in artificial intelligence and the design and development of autonomous driving-related algorithms to accelerate the pace of innovation.
In terms of the use of funds, the main purpose of the raised funds is to improve financial flexibility and visibility in the market, and hope to use the net proceeds from the issuance for working capital and other general corporate purposes. In terms of financial income, Tucson said in the future that it does not intend to make a profit. Tucson may use part of its net income in the future to acquire or invest in complementary products, technologies or businesses.
Tucson Future was established in 2015. It is an early-stage company with a history of loss and is expected to incur a large amount of expenses and in the foreseeable future.In other words, we are more motivated to open up the American market. The U.S. policy is relatively friendly to autonomous driving operations and can be operated for a fee. At home, we need to consider more factors. “
At present, the American truck freight market should be the world’s largest market. The annual revenue of the total freight market in the United States is US$1 trillion, and truck freight accounts for about 80% of the total freight market. The annual revenue of the global trucking market is approximately US$4 trillion.
Truck transportation accounts for about 80% of the American freight market. The main reason is that trucks are relatively flexible compared to other modes of transportation and have a unique combination of cost and speed. According to the national conditions of the United States, automated logistics trucks generally run on highways and suburbs, often point-to-point transportation, and the road conditions are relatively simple, and they are more suitable for American terrain.
In addition, the US truck freight market is characterized by its strong economic cycle adaptability. The number of miles driven each year has continued to grow for a long time. The compound annual growth rate from 1990 to 2018 is about 3%. Recent industry trends (including electronics The increase in business penetration rate has also brought growth momentum.
Although truck transportation is the most commonly used method of freight, the current characteristics of the industry are low levels of technical differences between carriers, minimal barriers to entry, and high levels of price competition. This has resulted in a highly fragmented market, with existing operators’ operating profit margins usually being less than 10%. In the United States, major players in the trucking industry include asset-based carriers, freight brokers, shippers with dedicated fleets, and semi-truck OEMs.
Tucson Future is the first and only company to demonstrate these features and realize fully automated semi-truck driving on highways and surface streets, and is the first company to autonomously transport paid goods.
In the future, Tucson, which is in a leading position in the industry, has the following advantages:
First of all, technically. Using lidar, millimeter-wave radar and high-definition cameras, Tucson will develop a full-stack autonomous driving solution for truck transportation in the future.
The high-definition camera can see objects 1000 meters away, the lidar can detect objects 200 meters away, the millimeter wave radar can detect objects 300 meters away, and the road conditions ahead can be seen for 30 seconds. This sensor configuration is very Suitable for high-speed truck driving.
The vehicle autonomous driving computing platform can perform 600 trillion operations per second to determine the best course of the vehicle. At the same time, Tucson’s future autopilot system is faster and more scientific than human drivers, and can react up to 15 times faster than humans.
