At Cuijing roadside in Pingshan District, a leading enterprise in the field of global optical communication is brewing a “big move”.
On December 29, ona group held a press conference here to launch lidar system products to help the development of automatic driving industry.
Lidar is considered as a key accessory of automatic driving, which can make up for the shortcomings of traditional cameras and millimeter wave radar sensors. In March this year, the regulations of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone on the administration of intelligent networked vehicles (Draft for comments) was issued, which will provide legal guarantee for the development of automatic driving in Shenzhen. In recent years, with the entry of Huawei, Dajiang and Suteng juchuang, lidar has become a “tuyere” track in Shenzhen.
The industry believes that raw materials such as lidar upstream chips and a number of core devices and equipment were difficult to fully independently dominate. Ona technology is a company that vertically integrates the whole industry chain from materials, devices, modules to systems. This new product may mean a major breakthrough in the localization of the whole industry chain of high-end lidar.
Na Qinglin, chairman and chief executive of ona group, recently accepted an exclusive interview with Nanfang Daily and Nanfang + for ona group’s development process, lidar technical characteristics, enterprise process and future strategy. Na Qinglin introduced that ona group is not a recruit of lidar track. As a global enterprise with photoelectric technology as the core, photoelectric technology has broad application prospects in communication, industrial sensing, artificial intelligence and unmanned driving, which directly affects the future development layout of ona group.
investors “take over” in the face of danger and “revitalize” the company
In 2000, ona group was jointly established by Shenzhen Development Technology Co., Ltd. and mandarinit fund, focusing on optical communication devices. When the time communication industry just started, it was regarded as a “tuyere” industry, but after more than a year of development, the company was in trouble and could not afford to pay wages. As an investor, Na Qinglin took over ona group, quickly revitalized the company and turned the company into a profit in 2005. In 2010, ona group landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and became a leader in the passive components industry.
The scale of the company continues to expand. In order to find greater development space, Pingshan was selected as the headquarters base and moved to Pingshan in 2013.
Ona group also continues to layout around the world: in 2012, it established a high-speed optical module R & D center in Silicon Valley of the United States, acquired 3sp of France and ITF of Canada in 2014, and has the self-production capacity of pump source and high-speed optical chip. The company has successively established R & D centers in Silicon Valley, Hangzhou, Beijing, Ottawa, Canada and Wuhan, and opened factories in Thailand.
“We are mainly engaged in optoelectronic products. Backed by optoelectronic core technology, we have established many high-end technology platforms and continuously expanded to many application fields.” Na Qinglin said.
Ona Group continues to increase R & D investment and new product development, and continues to establish a vertically integrated business model and product portfolio, including passive components, active components, lidar, coating business, machine vision, sensing equipment, etc. its customers are all over the world, such as America, Europe, the Middle East, Japan, India and so on.
At present, ona group is a key high-tech enterprise of the national Torch Program, a national enterprise technology center and a postdoctoral innovation practice base. It remains a leader in many fields such as optical communication, automation, industrial technology and machine vision. At present, in addition to 5g, ona group has jointly carried out 6G related technology research and development with other enterprises.
On October 19, 2020, ona group completed privatization and officially delisted from Hong Kong stocks. According to people familiar with the matter, ona group is actively preparing to land on China Science and technology innovation board or gem.
“3 + X” business layout, with an average annual growth rate of nearly 50%
As one of the world’s largest suppliers of optical communication devices and modules, with the core concept of “science and technology changing the world”, ona group has made a layout in the three fields of optical communication, data communication and lidar, and achieved a breakthrough in the growth of new business of machine vision and sensors.
Na Qinglin introduced that in recent years, the company’s revenue has maintained an average annual growth of more than 20%, and R & D investment has maintained an average annual growth of about 12% of sales. “The reason why R & D investment remains so high is that the industry business direction selected by the enterprise needs high investment, especially the long-term development strategic positioning.”
In Na Qinglin’s view, if managers are eager for quick success and instant benefits and simply pursue short-term stock price performance, many science and technology R & D projects can make high short-term profits and create beautiful performance without or less investment, but it is unfavorable to the long-term development of the company. “We take the second road: we do not pursue short-term performance, even endure short-term sacrifice and pain, and do long-term difficult and correct things in exchange for healthy and sound development in the next five to ten years.”
For the R & D of key chips, ona group not only needs to invest personnel and materials, but also high-end equipment, and even needs external support for streaming, which has a large capital investment. For example, the cost of a coherent module is tens of thousands, and the investment in doing a reliability test is tens of millions.
“In the early years, the company’s investment in passive component R & D was not high and was in a controllable range. Now the company is bigger and bigger. Although the revenue continues to grow, the layout scale of the industry is much larger, and the proportion of R & D expenses in sales is also increasing.” Na Qinglin said.
“For us, long-term investment is a firm thing.” Na Qinglin introduced that in the future, in the traditional markets such as passive components, the company holds the goal of “moderate growth”; The company is optimistic about the application of coherent technologies in optical communication and data center, and is expected to increase by 30-50% in the future; For the open cloud network architecture, ona will also pay attention to the layout.
“Our product line is vertically integrated in all directions from underlying materials to devices to modules and systems.” Na Qinglin revealed that in terms of core materials, after ona Group acquired overseas companies, it gradually mastered the whole chain independent ability of chip design, production and processing. Moreover, ona group began to apply some underlying technologies to many fields, such as EML laser (electric absorption externally modulated laser). Ona applied them in many fields such as communication and sensors. Moreover, after more than four years, ona has built a world-class silicon light team and production system. With the development of digital industry, silicon light is considered to be a new technology of the next generation network.
vertical integration and innovation to create the first lidar system product
At present, the sensing hardware applied to the automobile includes camera, millimeter wave radar, ultrasonic radar, lidar and v2x related hardware, but they can not achieve both excellent production cost and recognition accuracy.
As the prospect of unmanned vehicles equipped with lidar is promising, a number of lidar head enterprises at home and abroad, such as velodyne, luminar and Hesai technology, Huawei, Dajiang Lanwo, tudaton and Suteng juchuang, have emerged.
According to Sullivan’s statistics and prediction, driven by the expansion of the scale of driverless fleet, the increased penetration of lidar in advanced assisted driving, and the demand for service-oriented Siasun Robot&Automation Co.Ltd(300024) and intelligent transportation construction, the global market scale of lidar will be US $13.54 billion by 2025, which can achieve an average annual compound growth rate of 64.5% compared with 2019.
At present, the mainstream lidar mainly has two wavelengths: 905 nm and 1550 nm. In contrast, the silicon material of 905 nm wavelength lidar receiver has become the mainstream because of its lower price and more controllable cost. However, this wavelength does some harm to human retina. 1550 nm laser does no harm to the retina and has a longer detection distance, but its receiver absorption material is much more expensive.
On December 29, 2021, ona dolphin 1550 nano lidar press conference was held in Pingshan, Shenzhen. The core highlight is that it is independently developed for the whole industrial chain. The horizontal field angle of view of ona’s new product reaches 120 °, the vertical field angle reaches 30 °, and the maximum resolution is 0.05 °. Under the condition of reflectivity of 10%, it can realize obstacle detection of 250m, and many performance indexes reach a new height.
According to public information, ona group is one of the earliest manufacturers in the world to develop 1550 nm wavelength lidar: as early as 2017, the company released 1550 nm wavelength lidar light source, and the only Chinese enterprise that won the title of “best lidar supplier in 2017” at the international intelligent vehicle decision-maker Industry Conference (IVC) in the same year; At the end of the same year, the international mainstream ADAS manufacturers began to supply in batches.
Different from the outsourcing production links of many companies, ona group’s lidar products adopt the vertical integration mode to realize the autonomy of the whole process from design and R & D, production and manufacturing, quality control, product delivery and other links, including key accessories such as underlying chip materials, lasers, pump sources and passive components, which are also produced by the company. As the key component of lidar, pump source accounts for the most cost. At present, one of the three enterprises that can produce independently in the world is hona. In addition, the laser is not only expensive, but also its index performance determines the performance of lidar. It is also self-developed and produced by ona. Through high vertical integration, the products have cost-effective advantages and industrial chain security. In addition, similar lidar products of ona group have been applied in other industries (such as satellite laser communication).
At present, hona group cooperates with Tier1, the international head, to design a vehicle specification level lidar module that meets the requirements of mass production automation; It is one of the few manufacturers in the world that have passed the vehicle specification reliability test for 1550 nm wavelength light sources.
“We are the enterprise most likely to minimize the cost of 1550 nm wavelength lidar in the world.” Na Qinglin told Nanfang + reporters.
Enterprise files:
Company profile: established in October 2000, ona Technology (Group) Co., Ltd. is one of the largest suppliers of optical communication devices, optical modules and optical chips in the world, and makes efforts in many high-tech fields such as industrial applications, machine vision, coating and new materials. It has long provided optical communication devices and various semiconductor products to Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE, Intel, Microsoft, beacon and other domestic and foreign technology giants. Now it has become a leading high-tech group in many fields such as optical devices, optical chips and industrial automation.
Financing stage: on October 19, ona group completed privatization and officially delisted from Hong Kong stocks.
the deep innovator said @ Na Qinglin
“excellent companies should dare to sacrifice short-term interests and focus on long-term industrial value”
What principles should an enterprise adhere to if it wants to work in a specialized and new direction?
At the strategic level, enterprises should have a long-term development strategy. Ona group released 1550 nm wavelength lidar light source as early as 2017. In fact, it began to layout it in 2015. The company should select the focus and continue to focus after the selection. Ona has focused on the optoelectronic industry for more than 20 years and has not rubbed hot spots. So many upsurges in the market in recent years have nothing to do with us. At the implementation level, we should pay attention to the R & D of core technologies and take root. We can’t pursue “short-term and fast”, and only assemble finished products with “taking doctrine” to expand revenue. After expanding the passive electrical appliance market in the early stage, we began to layout the core technology. If you want to break through the underlying core technology, you should be prepared to sacrifice short-term and fight a “protracted war”. It is possible to invest a lot of money for several years, and the return is not ideal. You must be patient. Even if you invite world-class experts to engage in R & D, you may experience various setbacks.
For example, we have an R & D team, and the early R & D was not going well. Faced with the temptation of external headhunters, the team leader was a little excited and almost gave up. When I heard about it, I called him as soon as I got off the plane. My cell phone was almost dead. He finally agreed to stay. Finally, after more than two and a half years of efforts, we made a breakthrough in core technology. Only by making breakthroughs in core technologies and forming a moat in the industry can the company obtain high returns and achieve rapid development.
(Qingdao finance and Economics Network)
