The Chinese car buyer is well known for valuing digital experience above pretty much all others. So it makes sense that a company with a background of fulfilling their need for flashy graphics, multiple apps and smartphone integration should come knocking on the doors of Western car makers.
This is the plan of Ecarx, a technology company co-founded by Geely creator Eric Li 2017 with an HQ slap bang next to Tower Bridge in London
Ecarx is currently the supplier of infotainment-related software and hardware to 12 Geely brands such as Smart, Lynk&Co and Volvo. In total, the company’s computing platform is in four million cars, all Geely-affiliated. As of now, 80% of its business is with Geely Holding companies or their subsidiaries, and what’s remaining is mostly made up of sales to tier-one suppliers for products that end up in Geely cars.
In-house or not, that’s already a demanding set of customers, but the company wants to rival the likes of US chip makers Qualcomm and Nvidia by offering powerful automotive-focused SoC (system-on-chip) computers for companies outside the group as well as the software to create seductive-looking infotainment.
“The company is in a very aggressive growth phase,” Ecarx chief operating officer Peter Cirino told Autocar at a recent visit to the company’s London HQ in St Katharine Docks. As with most Geely entities, Ecarx operates independently, raising cash itself and charging other Geely companies for access to its technology. The company is currently loss-making but Cirino expects profits to come in 2024 if revenues hit the predicted $1 billion annually, double that of 2022.
The source of growth is the increasing desire of car companies to offer customers smart, software-defined cars. The bank UBS has identified this as a $700 billion revenue opportunity – a full one-quarter of automotive income – as software unlocks new features that car makers hope customers will be prepared to pay extra for. “One of the core principles of Ecarx is that the car will become a computer on wheels,” said Cirino.
At the heart of that is a powerful computer chip, and Ecarx is rolling out a number of solutions with different partners. The flagship Makalu computing platform embeds a Ryzen-architecture chip from US maker AMD – as also used by Tesla – that will roll out in a car launching in 2024 (unconfirmed but expected to be a larger model from Lynk&Co). This all-singing, all-dancing platform includes the ability to play computer games on car screens and features the 3D graphic processing skills of Unreal Engine from Epic Games, which underpins successful computer games including Fortnite.
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