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author | chen helin

edited by yang ruiqi and liu yukun

phoenix technology news: on september 19, the first low-altitude economic innovation and leadership conference "phoenix yufeng·leading the low-altitude" was held in fengtai, beijing. wang jianfei, general manager of beihang investment co., ltd., delivered a keynote speech entitled "focus on the low-altitude industry and invest in scientific entrepreneurs". when sharing his investment experience in the low-altitude economy, wang jianfei emphasized the importance of the supply chain and proposedchina has the opportunity to keep the future evtol supply chain in china. as long as the supply chain stays in china, in places like shenzhen,ofmanufacturingthe city wins.

he pointed out that the low-altitude economy is about creating a new industry from scratch, rather than competing within the existing market.in the past, drones were expensive, maintenance was very complex, and it was difficult to make a profit. however, with the advent of technologies such as evtol and multi-rotor, the cost of aircraft has dropped by an order of magnitude, and general aviation companies have suddenly become profitable from operating at a loss, turning into a truly good business.

when talking about the investment experience in the low-altitude economy, wang jianfei mentioned the new characteristics of the new generation of entrepreneurs. he said frankly,for them, the benefits of the internet came to an end starting around 2018.in the new era, many entrepreneurs come from top science and engineering universities, laboratories, or r&d centers of large companies. "it is no longer possible to innovate by just taking a ppt and thinking of an idea. such opportunities are very rare."

at the same time, wang jianfei made a judgment on the future development of the low-altitude economy in the country. he predicted that in the next ten years, in the field of low-altitude economy,the country will open up many scenarios and provide some companies with initial subsidies to support them in developing the low-altitude economy.

the first low-altitude economy innovation leadership conference was themed "phoenix yufeng leading low-altitude with wisdom" and was co-hosted by the beijing low-altitude economy industry development alliance and phoenix.com. the conference brought together top experts and scholars to discuss industry development trends, release the latest innovative achievements, and jointly draw a new picture of low-altitude applications through in-depth exchanges on cutting-edge science and technology.

the following is the full text of the speech, edited and published:

hello, leaders, guests, entrepreneurs and audience. i am wang jianfei from beihang investment. today i will mainly talk to you about our company’s investment logic and cognitive thinking on low-altitude economy and other aspects.

the title is "focus on low-altitude industries and invest in scientific entrepreneurs", and scientific entrepreneurs are also our investment portraits. 2024 is the first year of the low-altitude economy, because many policies will be released in 2024, and it is also in this year that many institutions begin to pay attention to the low-altitude economy. draw a coordinate axis for human transportation from tens of meters below the water surface to 10,000 meters high, from the shortest bicycle to the longest high-speed rail, covering almost all human transportation methods. it can be found that a monopoly pattern has been formed from low altitude to high altitude. and this pattern cannot be broken in a short time, because it is very difficult to seize the market, and it also requires the strength of the whole country. there is only a blank in the middle, with only some industrial-grade drones, and helicopters and general aviation aircraft that used to use oil. this is why the country is now beginning to open up this part of the airspace and then open up a new space for low-altitude economy.this is also very much in line with the concept of new quality productivity, because it is about building a new industry from scratch, rather than involution in the existing market.

recently, many technologies in the world have brought such opportunities. i would like to propose three important technologies: electrification, intelligence, and unmanned operation.

electrification has brought about a very obvious cross-era change in the automotive field. in the past, china has been developing fuel engines for decades but still cannot beat bba. however, in the field of electric motors, china can surpass them all at once, because there are many industrial manufacturing involved. if you look at the manufacturing technology of mercedes-benz engines, it depends on many industrial mother machines and many advanced manufacturing equipment. however, in the electric era, these difficulties have been reduced, so at a deeper level, the cost has been reduced, making the manufacturing of the entire aircraft as simple as that of a car, so that it has the opportunity to be applied on a large scale. at the same time, in terms of intelligence and unmanned operation, we can see that the development of unmanned driving has entered the reality of human beings. these will bring about fundamental changes to the logic of the entire low-altitude economy and the entire business of flight. to give a specific example, for example, we have seen that the general aviation companies of drones basically did not make a profit before. perhaps only citic haizhi and state grid general aviation could make a profit, because drones are expensive and maintenance is very complicated.however, if evtol and multi-rotor aircraft are used instead, the entire maintenance cost, including the aircraft cost, will be reduced by an order of magnitude, which means that general aviation companies will suddenly become profitable from their original loss-making operations and become a truly good business. this is all brought about by electrification, intelligence and unmanned operations.

globally, china has a large number of drones, 1.268 million, more than 50% of the world's total, and there are many drone companies. in fact, china may have very few airports compared to the united states. this is a big gap in infrastructure, as well as cultural differences and differences in the adventurous spirit of the people. however, in the evtol era, the limitations of airports have also changed. the rooftops of many buildings can be turned into airports. there is no need to build many general airports or infrastructure. this will also profoundly change china's low-altitude economic industry.

any industry that has formed a monopoly will have vested interests and a force that will hinder the development of the industry. china's general aviation will never be the dominant player in the era of fuel-powered aircraft, but it can cross over and overtake in the era of electrification and evtol, because we now have no giants to hinder this from happening.

for a new industry, there is a balance point. if there is no government subsidy and policy support at the beginning, the initial r&d costs may make the company unable to survive. therefore, the government will open up some scenarios at the first time to give these companies a drink of water so that they can survive. in the era of low-altitude economy, such things will be written into the country's strategic emerging industries in 2023, and will start in 2024.it is conceivable that in the next ten years or so, in the field of low-altitude economy, the country will also open up many scenarios and provide some companies with early subsidies to allow them to develop.

since then, so many provinces have included the low-altitude economy in their government work reports. this must be overheated. every time development is promoted at the beginning, it will definitely be overheated. for us, we must stick to our original intention and find companies that can truly create value all the time.

for china, developing low-altitude economy has both advantages and disadvantages. the advantage, in my opinion, is that china has accumulated the entire supply chain resources in the era of new energy vehicles, including motors and many industrial chains. low-altitude economy evtol and new energy vehicles overlap to a large extent. these are also china's advantages as a manufacturing power. at the same time, china has a lot of aviation talents in the past, no doubt.therefore, china has the opportunity to keep the future evtol supply chain in china. as long as the supply chain remains in china, in places like shenzhen,ofmanufacturingthe city wins.however, we don’t know what the final outcome of the fight among evtol oems will be. for example, there are emerging new-energy vehicles such as nio, xpeng and li auto, as well as traditional gac. in the evtol field, we can now see emerging new-energy vehicles like volante. similarly, we don’t know whether xiaomi and byd will enter the evtol market in the future.

in addition, i would also like to talk about beihang university. low-altitude economy is very important to beihang university.，it’s the turning point of an era.we are called beihang university. we have done a lot of things related to aviation since the beginning. beihang has trained a large number of academicians, doctors, and masters, and a large number of graduates have entered state-owned enterprises such as avic. whether it was when the aviation industry was founded or the academician daxiang who is here today, they are all pioneers in the aviation industry, including the chief designer of the latest model who is from beihang.

in the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem, you can see that many of the entrepreneurs in the low-altitude economy field are alumni of beihang university. almost every low-altitude economy startup company has a beihang alumni in the founding team, which is a huge ecological force.

for beihang investment, what we need to do is to be based in beihang, be a "farmer" in the era of science and technology innovation, and invest in "scientific entrepreneurs". why do we say this? because after we were established in 2016,the main purpose is to build a full-chain scientific and technological innovation ecosystem around beihang university.we have also done a lot of things. we have been offering entrepreneurship courses in schools, discovering some seed-stage investment projects in the courses, and investing in some small cases. many undergraduate graduates of beihang university have a certain probability of starting their own businesses, and we support their first step.

we also held the beihang global science and technology innovation competition, which has been held for seven years. it is also a big stage for beihang entrepreneurial projects and investors to meet each other and do investment and financing matching. the school has always been very supportive of the competition, and this year it opened the student group to 60 universities around the world.

in recent years, we have also developed many carriers and science and technology parks around the beijing-tianjin-hebei region, the pearl river delta, and the yangtze river delta. we hold very professional exchange meetings and matchmaking meetings almost every week to attract entrepreneurs from beihang university and form an entrepreneurial community.

in such an ecosystem, i believe that the new generation of entrepreneurs are different from those in the 1990s.for us, starting around 2018, the benefits of the internet came to an end.many institutions have started to invest in early, small and hard technologies. we have been doing this since our establishment. what is the profile of the new batch of entrepreneurs? we can see that many of them have certain industry technologies, generally have doctoral degrees, and have years of experience in researching a certain technology in scientific research institutes. so in the new era,many entrepreneurs come from top science and engineering universities, laboratories, or r&d centers of large companies. they no longer think that they can innovate by just taking a ppt and coming up with an idea. such opportunities are very rare.if you want to start a semiconductor, commercial aerospace, low-altitude economy, or even start a top medical technology business, you will need at least a lot of testing equipment, a good environment, and a lot of technical knowledge. it takes hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from the country to give them the opportunity to come into contact with cutting-edge technology, which also raises the threshold for entrepreneurship.

in this big context, we proposed to invest in scientific entrepreneurs. the portrait of a scientific entrepreneur is simply scientist + entrepreneur, or engineer + entrepreneur. to put it more deeply, it means that they must have the spirit of engineer's expertise in technology, the understanding of technology, and the entrepreneurial spirit that we often talk about.

in terms of technical judgment, we prefer companies with certain core technical barriers or systematic integration advantages. we define them as high-tech, high-barrier, and high-growth projects.ofinvestment logic.based on this logic, we have invested in a number of projects in recent years, about four tracks, future aerospace technology, medical and engineering intersection, advanced manufacturing and new generation information technology. the founders of these projects all fit the profile of what i call a scientific entrepreneur. for example, liu baiqi of galaxy power, we are his angel round shareholder, and now the valuation is 15 billion. he has a ph.d. from beihang university and has worked in the aerospace hospital for many years. he has a deep understanding of the rocket field and is very focused on entrepreneurship. he has grown into a very powerful ceo. we basically meet on sunday afternoons. his company executives and he himself will arrange a day of interviews. he is all in on the business, and this is the company we want.

in this context, the first track we invested in is future aerospace technology, and part of it is low-altitude economy. we are also continuing to lay out this field and believe that it is a large track. this track will not be short, flat and fast. it is a very long chain from the upstream to the downstream, including the upstream materials, various core supply chains in the midstream, and then to the downstream applications. such a long slope and thick snow track will experience several waves of gartner curves, including this wave may be accompanied by bubbles, may fall to the bottom in two years, and will rise again after some time, and may last for ten or even twenty years. for example, from the initial concept to today, unmanned driving is far from reaching a commercial closed loop. more than ten years have passed. however, it does not prevent the emergence of many excellent unicorn companies in this process. because the low-altitude economy is far from the end, we believe that investing in hosts now is of course a little more cautious, and we are more optimistic about the core supply chain. no matter how the host develops, there will eventually be some supply chains that will stand out and provide support for these good host manufacturers.

the low-altitude economy era is the best time for beihang people to start businesses, because it took 70 years for beihang to take over. we often hear about aviation serving the country, but never about semiconductors serving the country, or laptop computers serving the country.because aviation is still hard and there is no money to be made for many years, the ideal of serving the country through aviation can support generations of beihang people to strive. today, we finally have the opportunity to achieve a commercial closed loop based on the sentiment of serving the country through aviation.i think this is a very good era, and i really hope we can seize the opportunities of this era and build a career.

we will always be the earliest and most important companions of beihang entrepreneurs. this is also our mission. we hope to accompany the growth of generations of scientific entrepreneurs. our goal is to gather global scientific and innovative forces. we hope to have the opportunity to work together with you and develop together. thank you.