The potential impact of rising material costs on the energy meter market
According to data from the Shanghai Futures Exchange, the rate of increase of Shanghai Copper in the past year in 2014 reached 68.95%, reaching a maximum of 70,740 yuan/ton, and has been at an average of 66,000 yuan/ton in the past month. According to the analysis of Da Yue Futures, in 2021, when the peak season is approaching, it is easy to rise but not fall.
Since 2021, starting from the shortage of automotive power chips, TSMC, the world’s largest foundry, has recently increased its prices three times in a row (on March 29, it raised the price of 12-inch wafers by 25%, and on March 30 it increased the generation of driver chips. Workers’ quotation and confirmation on April 1 will cancel the discount for customers from orders at the end of 2021). The global “chip shortage” continues to escalate.
At present, the global “chip shortage” has already had a serious impact on the automotive, consumer electronics and other fields.
Electrolytic copper is the main material for transformers, relays, and aluminum electrolytic capacitors. According to data from Shanghai Nonferrous Networks, the average price on April 7, 2021 reached 66,900 yuan/ton, an increase of 37.0% from the 2020 average.
Copper rods (copper bars) are the main materials for transformers and relays. According to Zhuo Chuang Information, the quotation on April 6, 2021 reached 71,000 yuan/ton, an increase of 41.9% from the 2020 average.
PC material is the main material for plastic parts, terminal blocks and other components. It’s price is nearly doubled.
Watt-hour meter materials mainly include hardware, packaging materials, plastic parts, structural parts, connectors, panels, backlight boards, cables, printed boards, manganese copper parts and other customized parts and resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes and transistors , transformers, signal relays, batteries and other electronic components.
The changes in the prices of various commodities have affected the energy meter materials to varying degrees.
Overall, the overall impact of this round of price increases on the cost of electric energy meters is expected to reach 10% to 15% or even higher.
According to the above prediction results, the price increase of material costs, with reference to the market price of electric energy meters in 2020, is sufficient for some electric energy meter companies to affect their profitability and may even make losses. How to pass the increase in cost to the market end of the electric energy meter, I am afraid it is a big matter that is difficult to decide.
It is expected that around May, State Grid and China Southern Network will successively release the first bidding information for metering products in 2021. Did the two websites take into account the abnormal price increase in this round of costs when reporting the plan? If the increased cost is completely passed on to the electric energy meter On the market side, can its investment budget cover this change? If the quotation at the time exceeds a certain range of the investment budget, it is not ruled out that some projects will be missed.
In addition to price increases, the greater risk is that chip production capacity cannot keep up, and individual devices have been severely out of stock.
In short, in 2021, the external environment will be more risky, the market will be more variable, and work will be more difficult.