BeyonCa Founder Soh Urges Creation of New Automotive Ecosystem Amid AI Transformation

During a recent investment roundtable with Barron’s China, Singaporean Weiming Soh, a seasoned figure in the automotive industry and the founder-chairman of the premium smart EV company BeyonCa, advocated the establishment of a new industrial ecosystem to address the fragmentation in the traditional supply chain.

“China has taken the lead globally due to its first-mover advantage, cost efficiency, and robust engineering prowess in the electrification shift, emerging as the world’s largest car exporter,” Soh stated. “However, the disruption of the traditional supply chain caused by deglobalization, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, is a reality we must confront.”

“The EV industry must establish a new ecosystem with novel player roles and collaboration models, shaping the industry’s future direction and facilitating Re-Globalization,” Soh emphasized, adding that the roles between OEMs and OEMs, and between OEMs and supply chain partners, will transform from simple procurement relationships to partnerships.

In Soh’s view, the new ecosystem aligns with the changes in automotive construction, attributes, roles, and functions accompanying electric and intelligent vehicles, spanning from inside the car, around the car, and beyond the car.

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Inside the car, this involves a modular platform comprising a Skateboard Chassis, Scalable Battery Pack, E-Powertrain, E/E central computing hardware platform, infrastructure, solid state, and upper body, primarily reflected in design and connectivity, noted Soh.

Around the car, he addresses charging infrastructure, encompassing fast charging technologies, V2X, and battery swapping.

Finally, extending beyond the car aims to provide customers with an integrated user experience, incorporating services like insurance and healthcare, facilitated by AI technologies such as computer vision, natural language processing, and video/speech recognition.

“With the rapid introduction of AI foundation models into the automotive field, smart cars have become the focal point of future competition in the electric vehicle industry. This signifies a shift of the production process and the business model, indicating that OEMs can no longer operate in silos from R&D to industrial production to market and user development and operation,” he elaborated. “This inevitability heralds the emergence of a new industrial ecosystem characterized by collaborative R&D, co-IP, closed-loop data, and more.”

In 2021, Soh, alongside a distinguished team of industry veterans, founded BeyonCa. Positioned to compete with high-end car series such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi, BeyonCa aims to define the super-premium smart EV segment through its exquisite design led by former Bentley designer Dirk van Braeckel, meticulous craftsmanship, smart experiences, and scenario-driven services within, around, and beyond the car.

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Backed by strategic investors Renault and Dongfeng, BeyonCa has forged a strategic partnership with the government of Zhejiang Province, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Al Faisaliah Group Holding Company (AFG), a prominent diversified investments group headquartered in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, aiming to cultivate the EV market in the Middle East.

“The penetration rate of electric vehicles in the Middle East is expected to rise from the current 1% to approximately 20-27% by 2030, while that of Southeast Asia and the Pacific regions is anticipated to increase from the current 1% to approximately 30-45%. These regions will be the focal points of our international business expansion,” Soh disclosed during the roundtable.

He argued that a perfected supply chain is the greatest advantage of China’s automotive industry. Going global is no longer just about exporting complete vehicles; more importantly, it involves venturing abroad with supply chain partners to establish an ecosystem in local markets. This signifies ecosystem globalization, enabling better localization efforts.

“Localization should be based on the combination of local resource endowments,” Soh said. “Our AI competence & eco-system development center will be based in Singapore, which is committed to becoming a global hub, while Indonesia and the Philippines, with abundant nickel ore resources, are suitable for establishing processing bases here.”

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