Shortly after the start of the Lunar Year of the Horse, autonomous driving pioneer MINIEYE (02431) has been operating at full capacity. Following the recent official announcement of strategic partnerships with DiDi's freight unit and Gecko Tech to jointly launch a new phase of scaled unmanned logistics, MINIEYE has now promptly revealed another significant development. The company has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with CATL's subsidiary, CATL Smart. The two parties will engage in deep technical collaboration and business planning within the field of intelligent driving.
From a market perspective, MINIEYE's rapid succession of strategic partnerships with strong players across various segments indicates that its autonomous driving business is entering a critical period of accelerated implementation and value realization. Earlier this year, MINIEYE secured a major order exceeding 1.3 billion RMB from a well-known automaker. Facing the rapidly approaching wave of autonomous driving, as an industry leader, MINIEYE must leverage robust technological innovation and continuously evolving supply chain integration capabilities to capture the opportunities of this era.
It is understood that CATL Smart, the partner in this collaboration, specializes in skateboard chassis business. As a key enabler for differentiated experiences and technological iteration in intelligent electric vehicles, the intelligent chassis—including the skateboard chassis—is essential for achieving high-level autonomous driving. CATL's Chief Scientist, Wu Kai, once offered an analogy: "The vehicle body is the car's cerebrum, the intelligent space. The chassis is the cerebellum, the carrier for energy and motion units." The skateboard chassis, by fully decoupling the upper and lower vehicle bodies, is considered one of the ultimate forms of by-wire chassis.
From a technical compatibility standpoint, the collaboration between MINIEYE and CATL Smart is expected to promote deep coupling between the "intelligent brain" and the "intelligent carrier" in autonomous driving. This is just the tip of the iceberg; by extension, this partnership is set to further expand MINIEYE's long-term potential. The mere qualification to partner with a CATL affiliate serves as strong testament to MINIEYE's superior technical prowess and compliance capabilities. As cooperation deepens, MINIEYE has the potential to further integrate into the CATL ecosystem, gaining access to more potential opportunities. Concurrently, the endorsement from the "King of Batteries" is anticipated to amplify MINIEYE's brand influence both domestically and internationally, undoubtedly strengthening the company's future growth momentum.
The main players in this partnership, MINIEYE and CATL Smart, are complementary forces with distinct competitive advantages in their respective fields. As a leading enterprise in autonomous driving and smart logistics, MINIEYE has already accumulated substantial technical strength and rich experience in real-world scenario implementation. Its forward-looking dual-track strategy, focusing on both L2 and L4 products, allows it to achieve algorithmic iteration through mass production in the front-end market while accumulating vast amounts of real-world data in innovative scenarios like L4 unmanned logistics, creating a virtuous cycle of technology and commerce.
Backed by CATL, CATL Smart's core product, the Rock底盘, highly integrates key components such as the battery, drive, braking, and steering systems, providing a standardized, scalable "cerebellum" for the upper-level "brain." It is reported that the Rock底盘 reserves various expandable hardware and software architectures and standardized interfaces. If automakers adopt this底盘, vehicle mass production time can be shortened from the traditional 36 months to 12-18 months.
In the current era of rapidly advancing autonomous driving, the chassis is no longer merely a mechanical execution component but a foundational cornerstone that determines whether algorithms can be accurately implemented and user experiences truly delivered. As a core driver of the transition from "mechanically driven" to "by-wire driven" vehicles, the value of the intelligent chassis, including the skateboard chassis, lies in its ability to translate the "brain's" decisions into wheel trajectories with millisecond-level precision. However, the degree of compatibility between algorithms and the chassis remains one of the industry's most significant hidden barriers. For passenger vehicles, this directly impacts the driving experience during high-speed cornering or emergency obstacle avoidance; for commercial vehicles like unmanned logistics vehicles, it affects delivery efficiency and operational costs. Without a precisely controllable "cerebellum," even the most powerful algorithms remain impractical.
This is precisely where the value of this collaboration lies: MINIEYE possesses vast amounts of real-world scenario data and continuously evolving algorithmic capabilities, while CATL Smart offers the highly integrated Rock底盘, underpinned by CATL's foundational support in batteries and energy replenishment. Integrating MINIEYE's "intelligent brain" with CATL Smart's "super carrier" is expected to not only significantly reduce R&D and adaptation costs across multiple scenarios but also precisely address existing pain points in high-level autonomous driving, such as reliability and energy replenishment efficiency, adding further impetus to the scaled implementation of L2 to L4 autonomous driving.
If deep technical coupling is the most immediate change brought by this cooperation, then, viewed over a longer time horizon, the deep empowerment MINIEYE gains from the CATL ecosystem is likely to accelerate a qualitative leap in its fundamental business and investment value. Within the automotive industry chain, CATL has consistently deeply integrated key upstream and downstream segments through internal incubation and external investment, forming a high-quality, integrated industrial ecosystem. The fact that MINIEYE can establish a strategic partnership with CATL Smart inherently signifies that its technical strength and compliance capabilities have passed CATL's stringent vetting, serving as the strongest possible endorsement of its industry standing.
This partnership can be seen as a new starting point. As timing matures and cooperation deepens, MINIEYE will "unlock" further new possibilities. On the business front, deep integration of supply chain resources appears imminent. MINIEYE's advanced autonomous driving technology, massive long-tail scenario data, mass production and delivery experience covering 42 OEMs, and operational experience accumulated by its "Xiao Zhu" unmanned vehicles in logistics scenarios will all serve as "data fuel" for CATL Smart to iteratively upgrade its intelligent chassis products based on real-world data. In turn, CATL Smart and its parent, CATL, complete the critical puzzle pieces for MINIEYE in chassis and battery supply, helping it form a comprehensive capability闭环 encompassing "vehicle + algorithm + chassis + battery + operations." This means MINIEYE will be able to offer more competitive bundled solutions to diverse clients, such as OEMs seeking integrated hardware-software solutions, thereby broadening its market moat.
Simultaneously, as L4 business scales up, MINIEYE is gradually assuming the role of a "service operator" in addition to being a product and solution supplier. Leveraging CATL Smart as a bridge, MINIEYE is poised to further integrate into CATL's vast, high-quality ecosystem, potentially securing incremental orders across multiple dimensions including automakers, logistics companies, and industrial parks, thereby achieving a dual "breakthrough" in both capability boundaries and business scope.
Looking towards the broader international market, CATL's brand influence could provide a powerful boost to MINIEYE's globalization efforts. As a global power battery giant with production bases and R&D centers in Europe, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, CATL enjoys high brand recognition. MINIEYE is currently advancing its "Going Global 2.0" strategy, progressing from breakthroughs like a thousand-unit unmanned vehicle order in the Middle East to a wider global layout in the next phase. CATL's endorsement is expected to effectively reduce compliance costs and trust barriers in overseas markets, clearing obstacles for MINIEYE's international order fulfillment and scaled expansion.
Finally, from a capital markets perspective, CATL is an undisputed core Chinese asset. MINIEYE's entry into its ecosystem will inevitably bring MINIEYE into the view of more investors. Catalyzed by accelerating technological value realization and rising future growth expectations, MINIEYE's long-term investment value appears to be on a clear upward trajectory.
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