The leading position of the smart meter carrier chip industry is obvious The carrier communication chip product of the Neusoft carrier is the core component that uses low-voltage power lines to automatically read meter data for the transmission medium. The carrier chip is mainly used for information acquisition equipment such as carrier power meter, collector, and concentrator in an electricity information acquisition system.

In 2010, the sales volume of carrier chip was 8.1 million pieces, which was about twice that of the second place in the industry. In 2010, the total bidding volume of the national grid and China Southern Grid was approximately 45 million, and the company’s orders for the year were approximately 11 million, accounting for the total About 25% of the tender volume. The company has obvious advantages in the smart meter carrier chip industry.

Although the company sells carrier chips, in fact, the company is only partially involved in upstream chip design work, and its core competitiveness lies in chip software embedded. It is the technical capabilities of embedded software software that ensure the high added value of the company's carrier chip, and also enable the company to have strong bargaining power for downstream smart meter manufacturers. This is the main reason why the company's carrier chip product gross margin has been kept at a relatively high level.

The current gross margin of the company's carrier communication chip is about 65%, and the pressure on the future carrier chip's future gross profit margin to drop is relatively small. The main reason is that the company has mastered the software embedded core technology of the smart carrier chip, and the product has strong bargaining power; in order to guarantee the quality of the upstream meter, the grid company sets the lowest bid price for the electric meter manufacturer. Meter manufacturers will not choose poor quality carrier chips based on the consideration of meter quality.

Using the full-load mode of the carrier chip makes the smart grid more convenient and cost-effective. Currently, there are mainly two communication modes in the current power consumption information collection system: "full load" mode and "half load" mode. In the half-load mode, the communication between the meter (ordinary meter) and the collector is realized through the RS485 communication line, and the collector then communicates with the grid back-end system through the concentrator. In the full load mode, the ordinary meter needs to be replaced with a carrier electric energy meter. Then the carrier electric energy meter and the concentrator use the low-voltage power line carrier communication directly. Finally, the concentrator directly communicates with the grid company's back-end network through the optical fiber network without passing through the middle collector.

The full-load mode uses the low-voltage power line as the transmission medium. It is only necessary to install the carrier table concentrator to quickly realize the user's power consumption information collection. In the half-load mode, the RS485 communication line plus a collector and a concentrator are required to implement power consumption information collection.

A concentrator is required for every 100 carrier energy meters in full load mode. In the half-carrier mode, every 10 ordinary meters are equipped with a collector, and every 15 collectors are equipped with a single concentrator. Ordinary electricity meter price is 80 yuan/only, carrier electricity meter is 200 yuan/only, collector is 400 yuan/only, concentrator is 2,000 yuan/only. Calculated according to 1000 power users, the equipment cost for the half load mode without considering the investment cost for laying RS485 communication lines is about 130,000 yuan, and the full load mode is about 220,000 yuan. In contrast, the full-load mode does not require the re-laying of new communication lines and direct use of low-voltage power line communications, which is more cost-effective and more convenient. It can be foreseen that the full load mode will be the best choice for the grid company to speed up the construction and transformation of the smart grid.

It is expected that the smart meter demand will maintain a compound growth rate of 55% in the next five years. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics of 2010, the number of households in the country totaled 369 million households in 2009, and the number of unit enterprises was 9.97 million, and individual industrial and commercial households were 30 million. Households and the number of new residential users each year is about 20 million. According to household users, business users, and individual industrial and commercial households, the number of household appliances per household is 1, 5, and 1 respectively. In 2010, the total national electricity meter is estimated to be approximately 470 million households.

According to the increase in the sales of newly-added commercial housing of 20 million units, and the number of resident users at a natural growth rate of 2%, it is estimated that the nation’s total electricity inventory will reach 520 million in 2015. With an estimate of 60% of smart watches, the number of smart watches will reach 320 million by then. The current number of smart meters is 35 million, which means that the compound annual growth rate of smart meter demand will reach 55% in the next five years. On average, grid companies estimate that the number of smart meter tenders will be around 60 million each year. Taking the ratio of the carrier power meter to the smart meter as 80%, the demand for the carrier chip will be around 50 million chips/year in the next five years.

According to the national grid plan, the next five years will be the phase of comprehensive construction of power grid construction and transformation. The transformation of urban and rural power distribution grids and rural power grids will have a tremendous demand for smart meters. In the next five years, we will continue to speed up the tendering of smart watches for the State Grid, and the company’s demand for carrier communication chips will maintain a long-term and stable growth.

Carrier ICs for IoT applications such as smart homes open the company's future growth space The main concept of smart homes is the use of data transmission and chip control to achieve remote control of electric lights, air conditioners, televisions, rice cookers, microwave ovens, alarms, and cameras and other furniture devices. Remote management of water, coal, electricity and security monitoring equipment.

The cost of the Internet of Things, which uses the power line as the transmission medium, is relatively low. Only by using a carrier communication chip in various types of home devices such as televisions, refrigerators, air conditioners, and washing machines, communication between homes can be realized without laying new communications. The internet. At the same time, the price of internal chip is only about 20 yuan, accounting for about 1% of the price of the entire appliance. Therefore, from the perspective of implementation costs and equipment costs, the use of power lines for the Internet of Things has a cost advantage. The carrier communication chip is the core component of low-voltage power line communication. Therefore, the development of smart home networking will drive the demand of the company carrier chip.

According to our preliminary estimation, in 2010, China’s output of five kinds of household equipment such as color TVs, air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, and rice cookers will reach 540 million, even if these 5 categories account for 80% of homes and 20% of households. The carrier chip estimates that the demand for smart-carrier chips in smart homes will reach 140 million each year, which is equivalent to twice the market size of smart meters.

For the smart home market in the future, the company has already laid it out in advance. The 4th and 5th generation carrier chips developed in the company's fundraising construction project will be able to be used in future smart home and other fields. Among them, the narrow band FSK/PSK carrier chip of the 4th generation chip will firstly solve the compatibility problem of the non-band carrier communication mode. In addition, the FSK/PSK carrier chip will greatly improve the power line carrier communication signal processing capabilities, so that it can be applied to home display units and other relatively simple smart home products. The 5th generation chip narrowband OFDM carrier chip will greatly increase the carrier communication rate, reaching the order of 100 Kbps, which can be applied to water and coal remote meter reading, smart home and street lamp control and other fields. The development of smart home internet of things will open up a larger market space for the future development of the company.