00:00Let's turn our attention now to autonomous vehicles, and of course our next guest is the CEO of Citi, a
00:06Chinese tech company specializing in intelligent driving like most EV-related firms in China.
00:11It relies on automotive chips from the likes of NVIDIA.
00:15Now for more on how the company is actually viewing the Trump-Xi summits and of course what they got
00:20cooking up in their own kitchens,
00:21joining us from Changsha in Hunan province is the executive director and CEO, Albert Hu.
00:27Albert, good morning.
00:28I think the last conversation we had was when you guys went public a few months back, and certainly I'm
00:33sure you've become a lot busier these days.
00:36Give us an update of the business.
00:39We're doing pretty well.
00:41We released our earnings a month or two ago, and still doing quite well over 800 million RMB in revenue
00:53last year.
00:54So things are really picking up in autonomous mining, and so it's good for us.
01:00I'm wondering from Changsha how you're viewing what's going on Beijing, it seems like we did see some deliverables in
01:07this meeting, but not in terms of really high-tech manufacturing and the like.
01:12I'm wondering, we're still getting some clarity on that, but were you happy to see some of the developments that
01:17happened there?
01:18What was your take overall?
01:19Obviously, these are historic meetings, very high-profile visitors from the U.S., a lot of industry leaders.
01:29We're really happy to see some of the talks, some of the asks that they might have coming into the
01:37meetings.
01:39And, you know, I think China has a lot to bring to the table in terms of technology cooperation.
01:47There's a lot of areas where China is transitioning from more of a leader, from a follower, and especially in
01:58EVs, green tech, renewables, in some sense AI models, and of course robotics and mechatronics and so on.
02:06So these are, you know, very exciting times to be in a company where we're looking to cooperate with different
02:15parts of the supply chain all over the world, including the U.S.
02:22Do specific doors open up for the company because of better relations between the two?
02:27How are you looking at possibilities there?
02:29What do you hope to see?
02:33Right.
02:33I mean, in China, I think we, especially for a company like us, where we work on specifically autonomous driving,
02:43software, algorithms, products, we don't fully, we want to be in a position where we can cooperate and take, you
02:54know, take advantage of, you know, comparative advantages from, you know, all types of firms all over the world.
03:01We're open to all matters of collaborations.
03:04And lately we've had some very impactful partnerships with businesses overseas where kind of multinationals have begun to recognize some
03:15of the supply chain advantages, especially in vehicles, electric vehicles and machinery.
03:20And in mainland China, for example, recently we signed a partnership with MMD Group from the U.K., a world
03:27-leading manufacturer of mineral sizing and crushing equipment.
03:30So that has a lot of synergies with the autonomous mining businesses, business that we're in.
03:37Schaeffler, a German automotive company, an engineering company specializing in electric drivetrain.
03:43So these are, I think, that we're signaling in China that, you know, businesses are really happy to open up,
03:51to share some of their distribution, to share some of their supply chain, and trying to figure out, you know,
04:00kind of what are the next technologies to kind of to make an impact.
04:06Albert, just to clarify then, so those, you know, those partnerships that you just talked about, you know, were those
04:12for you to sell the end product to those companies?
04:14And where are those projects in China or are they outside?
04:17And I guess, sorry, related to that, and I know it's a long question, on your supply chain itself, what
04:22percentage of your inputs are domestically sourced?
04:25And what percentage of that are, you know, do you just simply, there's no replacement, but to find it outside
04:32China, as far as those inputs go?
04:36We have a number of inputs that are sourced from some of these, for example, from Schaeffler, from NVIDIA.
04:44You know, they have their very obvious advantages in some of the fields that they're in.
04:51And in terms of a lot of the vehicle technology that, you know, we sourced from China, especially in electric
04:58powertrains, in, you know, electric vehicle, you know, chassis or some of these other new developments and charging, you know.
05:09So it's really a global effort, you know, for a firm like us to kind of come up with a
05:14top product.
05:14You don't really want to limit yourself, you never really want to limit yourself to one geography or, you know,
05:20one country.
05:21It always helps to have partners from all over the world.
05:24And so that's, I think, to the extent that, you know, there's Chinese companies, technology companies specifically, they can, to
05:33the extent that can embrace more some of these opportunities where, you know, firms overseas,
05:39they're more willing to explore some of the technology offerings in China.
05:44This is a very advantageous companies like us.
05:49You mentioned NVIDIA as one of your many suppliers, but how has the company been weathering some of the bottlenecks
05:56there of not maybe getting access to some of these most advanced chips?
06:00And how does that impact your business?
06:04Yeah, so, for example, for us, we have a lot of on-vehicle computation.
06:11So these are, you know, for example, with NVIDIA, that's actually not one of their largest product lines,
06:17but they have very, obviously, excellent products having to do with onboard vehicle inference, you know, self-driving products.
06:26And, you know, obviously, these are, we, these are one of the suppliers for us in this area.
06:33We also have local suppliers.
06:35And, but, you know, most of, we see most of the, you know, previous, especially restrictions in compute really driven
06:44by the data center build outs, right?
06:47Some of the data center, you know, training and inference requirements.
06:52And that's been really, especially with memory, you know, these things have been more of the bottleneck and not so
06:58much with the automotive.
06:59So for the most part, we're okay there.
07:04Albert, so you guys did revenues 800, let's call it 900 in revenues.
07:11Market has you topping 1.8 this year.
07:15So that's 2x.
07:16By 2027, I'm looking at forecasts here, topping three and a half.
07:21Do you think you'll get to those numbers?
07:23You'll get, do you think we'll get 2x, 3x growth over the next two, three years?
07:28So we're, we're, we're trying to aim for, uh, for, uh, a doubling of, uh, of revenue, you know, every
07:34year, um, uh, in the, in the medium term.
07:38And one of the main reasons for that is the, uh, low, uh, penetration rates for, uh, autonomous mining penetration
07:45rates, uh, not really, it's probably, you know, not even a 10%.
07:50But there's a lot of opportunity for our customers to try and adopt these technologies.
07:55The market is, you know, exploding.
07:57It's one of the few scenarios where it's not, uh, bottlenecked by, you know, regulatory restrictions that we have on,
08:05in public traffic.
08:06Uh, there's really clear safety, uh, value propositions.
08:12Uh, it's a very clear economic propositions, uh, you know, economic, economic value that can provide our customers.
08:18So these are, you know, these are things are, that are really pushing some of this, uh, this growth.
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