Event:
Recently, the national development and Reform Commission, the central network information office, the Ministry of industry and information technology and the National Energy Administration jointly issued a notice, agreeing to start the construction of National Computing hub nodes in 8 places, including Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macao, Dawan District, Chengdu and Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and planned 10 national data center clusters, It marks the beginning of the “counting from the east to the west” project planned in the early stage.
Comments:
1. Policy background analysis: the new infrastructure policy continues to be implemented, and computing power has become the forefront of competition in the science and technology industry. A new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial reform are reshaping the global economic structure. As the core productivity of the digital economy, computing power has become a new focus of global strategic competition. The project of “counting from the east to the west” is essentially a new infrastructure of digital economy. Constantly consolidating and optimizing the computing power can accelerate the process of digital industrialization. In May 2021, the national development and Reform Commission and others issued the implementation plan of the computing hub of the collaborative innovation system of the national integrated big data center, which clearly put forward the layout of the national hub nodes of the national computing network, started the implementation of the “East West computing” project, and built the national computing network system. In December 2021, the State Council issued the economic development plan for the 14th and 5th digital characters, which also focused on “optimizing and upgrading digital infrastructure and promoting the development of cloud network coordination and computing network integration”. After combing, we can see that the policy is continuous and consistent. In the future, it will be implemented in the support and guidance rules of relevant provinces and cities, and the later industrial guidance policy will play a supporting role in IDC capacity expansion.
2. Industrial expansion opportunities: IDC service providers usher in development opportunities. (1) Industrial scale ushers in capacity expansion: the most basic supporting facilities of the computing hub are the data center represented by computing / network / storage. The newly built eight computing hub nodes indicate that the IDC industry will usher in capacity expansion. According to the data of China Electronic Information Industry Development Research Institute, there were about 74000 data centers in China in 2019, and the market scale of China’s IDC industry reached 156.2 billion yuan. It is estimated that the scale of IDC industry will exceed 200 billion yuan in 2021. Up to now, the scale of IDC in China has reached 5 million standard racks, and the computing power has reached 130 eflops (1.3 trillion floating-point operations per second), which is expected to maintain a growth rate of more than 20% every year. (2) Significant increase in the western region: at present, most IDC are distributed in the eastern region. Due to the increasing shortage of land, energy and other resources and the superposition of requirements for carbon reduction and energy conservation, the number of new IDC in the eastern region has slowed down. Compared with the western region, the western region is abundant in resources, especially renewable energy. This project focuses on the construction of IDC in the western region, It is expected to drive a very significant construction increment. The expansion and acceleration of IDC industry scale and key construction in the western region will bring good development opportunities for IDC manufacturers and drive the development of server computing equipment / network equipment / storage equipment industry chain.
3. Pay attention to the important opportunities of the server industry chain. The most basic hardware form of IDC and cloud computing is all kinds of servers. With the decline of capital expenditure of global cloud computing manufacturers, the server industry cycle is still at the bottom. According to the prediction of IDC, a well-known consulting firm, the global server sales of 2021q3 increased by 8.8% year-on-year to US $24.68 billion, and the shipment volume increased by 9.6% year-on-year to 3.376 million units. Compared with 2021q2, the downward trend was reversed, and the 2021q3 market recovered positive growth. From a regional perspective, the sales of 2021q3 server market in China increased by 15.1% year-on-year. Server manufacturers represented by Inspur are actively reserving computing power and continuing to explore the public cloud and government cloud markets. The expansion of the Chinese market is bringing significant incremental market opportunities for server manufacturers.
Investment suggestion: along the above logic, we mainly recommend Dawning Information Industry Co.Ltd(603019) (603019), the leader of domestic server manufacturers, and Beijing E-Hualu Information Technology Co.Ltd(300212) (300212) of cold data driven by the construction of data lake. At the same time, domestic server leaders Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.Ltd(000977) (000977) and other companies will also benefit fully.
Risk tip: the industrial promotion is less than expected, and the competition in IDC and server industry is intensified.
