True Detective AlphaSeeker original
Author | Li Tingting
From the "production capacity hell" that almost dragged down Tesla before the mass production of The Model 3, to the recent joint statement issued by the prospective owner of Xiaopeng P7 on Xiaopeng's refusal to deliver, the four words of "delayed delivery" are the nightmares that the new car movement has opened so far.
In 2018, Robin Li, the head of Baidu, who has not officially joined the car-making army, once explained: "Car building is not the same as building PPT, and car manufacturing will often have delays in delivery." Behind this, the difficulty of mass production of new cars does not need to be repeated, and the relationship between the supplier and the supplier, the error control in mass production, and the repeated test between software and hardware make many car builders who have dreams "suffocate" in the complicated process.
Even Tesla, Wei Xiaoli, etc., who have passed the mass production checkpoint, still cannot control the rhythm of production and delivery.
At this stage, whether the new forces can deliver is more up to the "supply chain to decide". The severe situation of lack of cores has made the entire automotive industry tremble for a whole year, and the shortage of power batteries has become another major problem, the epidemic, weather, port congestion, and supply chain congestion caused by any factor may make the new forces helpless.
In addition, the booming market demand benefits from favorable policies, and the operating conditions of continuous losses still need to rely on capital transfusion. Subsidies, tariffs, investments, and the foundries, dealers, and even banks that lend to car owners in the production and delivery process constrain and challenge young new forces.
The automotive and energy revolution, this is a choice made by the times. The new forces selected are fierce, but they are still too young in the face of a large and intricate car-making industry chain.
Delay and delay
The good news is that the lack of cores that has plagued the automotive industry chain for a whole year is gradually alleviating. Of course, supply improvement can not be achieved overnight, the lack of chip supply and structural imbalance on the automotive terminal constraints still need time to dissolve, according to Bosch's forecast, next year's core shortage rate will be restored from the current 50% to about 20% by the end of 2020.
But the bad news is that the shortage of lithium resources and the soaring price of lithium have made the "power battery shortage" begin to attack the new energy automobile industry. The report released by Bank of America even announced that the power battery supply or "sold out" in 2025-2026 was even calculated according to the model.
The lack of core is a big test for the entire automotive industry, and the lack of batteries is a precise blow to the electric vehicle industry, especially the new forces.
The new forces are already suffering. In January, Musk stated on an earnings call that battery supply has become "the bottleneck of the current popularity of electric vehicles." In recent months, Weilai's delivery volume ranking has repeatedly declined, and the battery is one of the core constraints it faces, and even Li Bin said that "the supply of batteries is the ceiling of delivery". Xiaopeng has recently been attacked by prospective owners due to the delay in delivery of P7, and the reason behind it is the tight supply of lithium iron phosphate batteries, making it difficult for the P7 480 version to go offline.
In addition to the capacity gap of parts, various disturbances that may occur in the logistics process will also lead to chaos in the automotive supply chain and affect delivery.
The congestion in global ports, which has not improved so far, is dragging down the import and export of complete vehicles and parts. At Tesla's shareholder meeting in early October, Musk said that one of the biggest challenges encountered in the third quarter was whether it could get enough ships, and tesla once again warned investors that port congestion could affect its production capacity in the Q3 earnings report.
Outbreaks, power outages and extreme weather, some unexpected factors may also have an incalculable impact. At the end of 2018, WM fell into a storm of user billing after the battery accident and spontaneous combustion incident, and one of the reasons for the dissatisfaction of users at that time was that it was difficult to deliver it, but because of the fog in East China, the car could not be driven.
Unexpectedly, or by chance, challenges from all sides make "delayed delivery" the norm for new cars. In the face of high-frequency disturbances of occasional factors, the helpless new forces are exposing their fragile anti-risk capabilities and supply chain management capabilities.
Supply chain wrestling
New forces are "constrained" by supply chains.
The supply chain problem of the automobile is an old disease. In the development process of the automobile industry, the automobile supply chain is also increasingly globalized, complex and multipolar, but the lack of flexibility often leads to a sudden accident in a certain link that will "move the whole body".
And the car is the product of tens of thousands of parts, Musk once explained the reason for the difficulty of mass production of the car: "As long as there is 1% (parts delayed delivery), we must manufacture these parts by hand, followed by a much more expensive cost or a sharp decline in the mass production schedule, manual manufacturing, rather than machine mass production, will bring 10 times 20 times 30 times the cost of climbing." ”
Interior of the Tesla factory
The supply chain occupies such an important role in automobile production, so in order to seize the right to speak and ensure the smooth supply, traditional car companies adopt relatively "wolf" management measures and control core suppliers through equity participation and holding. However, it is already a big project for the new forces to screen and establish contact with suppliers from scratch, and the competition for the right to speak with suppliers is a long-term tug-of-war.
In 2019, in the early stage of mass production of new forces such as Weilai and Xiaopeng, the new forces can only accept the harsh terms of suppliers. China Auto News has interviewed a number of new force suppliers, some said that "because of their instability and scale problems, we will propose a stricter payment ratio or even require advance payment, and the price is relatively higher", and some said that "now the car companies that book high-energy density batteries need to queue up on the production line, first-come, first-served".
With the expansion of the new forces' own strength and resources, it is believed that their right to speak in the face of suppliers will be improved to a certain extent. However, unlike the supplier network that has been precipitated for a long time by traditional car companies and the bargaining power brought about by large-scale demand, the ability of the fledgling new forces to control the supply chain is still relatively weak.
In addition, the types of suppliers that the new forces need to contact and coordinate are more diverse.
For example, the "three electricity" that is not needed by traditional fuel vehicles. In particular, the power battery in the three electrics is highly concentrated in the market, which further strengthens the right to speak of suppliers. At present, the absolute leader of the domestic power battery market, Ningde Era, has a market value of nearly 1.5 trillion yuan, more than four Weilai (market value of about 350 billion yuan), five Xiaopeng (about 260 billion yuan), seven ideals (about 207 billion yuan), the value and status in the industrial chain can be seen.
Regarding how much power the Ningde era has, there are many rumors in the market: car companies become party B, and even directly build factories near the headquarters of the Ningde era, and car dealers can't get batteries if they have money. Rumors are mixed, but it is certain that the electrification of automobiles has promoted the shift of discourse power to upstream battery manufacturers to a certain extent.
Similarly, the intelligent trend of automobiles is also reshaping the value distribution of the industrial chain. Autonomous driving solution providers represented by Waymo are increasingly deeply involved in the "four modernizations" of automobiles, and CICC automotive industry analysts pointed out that in the long run, the automotive value industry chain centered on car companies will be biased towards the party with the ability to integrate autonomous driving systems.
Therefore, in the automotive industry chain, although the new forces that are in the limelight are the protagonists at this stage, they are actually subject to many forces.
The new forces are also looking for their own solutions, while checking and balancing with suppliers and games, while investing heavily in the self-development of chips, batteries, and autonomous driving technologies. Just a few days ago, Nio emphasized its full-stack self-operated capabilities at a media communication meeting, saying that NIO has a battery research and development team and a battery pack assembly team, and only purchases batteries and modules; in terms of motors, it has achieved a one-stop from research and development to manufacturing to supply chain; in terms of electronic control, it only buys power modules in electronic control.
Weilai, Ideal, Xiaopeng, the head force of domestic new cars have all stood before the threshold of annual delivery of 100,000 vehicles, and in the longer term future, they still need to chase the definition and control of the upstream and downstream industrial chains.
New forces "can't help themselves"
In the lengthy production and sales chain of car building, the failure of every link may set off a storm that attacks new forces.
In the production link, in addition to the tug-of-war with many suppliers, most of the new domestic forces at present also have to bear the risks brought by OEM. In the early stage, considering the qualifications, funds, utilization rate and other reasons, including Wei Xiaoli, they all chose the more efficient production mode of OEM, but this also means that the production rhythm and quality control cannot be fully grasped in their own hands.
The overall trend of the new car industry is to achieve independent production through self-built factories. The second phase of the Xiaopeng Zhaoqing factory project began in August this year, the ideal Beijing factory broke ground in October, Xiaomi also determined the plan to build its own factory in Beijing Yizhuang, and in May this year, the appointment of JAC Weilai again remains a strong supporter of the OEM model.
In addition to the dispute between OEM and self-construction, one of the differences in new cars is direct operation and distribution. Although Weilai President Qin Lihong asserted that "the definition of new forces is not the car companies established in recent years, but whether you use direct sales", in fact, many of the new forces in the market definition are still forced to use the distribution system due to cost and other reasons.
For example, WM, which is helmed by traditional automaker Shen Hui, mentioned at the end of 2019 when explaining the reasons for the delivery delay that the execution ability of "Zhixing partners" in various regions, that is, WM dealers, affects the delivery experience, and the partnership system needs to be further improved and standardized. The automobile distribution system has long been plagued by various chaos, and WM wants to use the channel capabilities of dealers and establish a transparent and compliant ecology that is different from the traditional, but the new forces with insufficient precipitation can not be able to manage dealers.
Not to mention the barbaric growth of dealers, even financial channels such as banks, are biased against new forces. Also at the end of 2019, when the ideal ONE officially opened a week of delivery, cooperative institutions such as China CITIC Bank stopped lending to ideal ONE users. Later, founder Li wanted to publicly apologize in the official community of Ideal Auto: "I'm sorry. Blame us for not being strong enough, causing users to be bullied by banks. ”
About two years have passed, as the new forces have gradually developed in scale and prestige, unexpected events such as banks stopping lending have not happened again, but behind the scenes that are not known to users, how much heartache, the new forces can only break their teeth and swallow to the stomach.
In the final analysis, cars are different from the Internet, the industrial chain links and roles involved in offline manufacturing are too complex, and it takes patience and time for fledgling new forces to open up chains and establish rules, before that, they need to obey the rules more often.
To some extent, the new forces that are regarded as the outlet of the times and the darlings of capital are pushed to this position by the times and capital, and they are still not independent enough, so it is inevitable that they will not help themselves.
Over the past few years, the new car industry has fluctuated with the ups and downs of policies. In the four months after the subsidy decline in 2019, China's new energy vehicle sales fell by 4.7%, 15.8%, 34.2%, and 45.6% respectively, while the subsidy decline was delayed under the epidemic in 2020, which is a major driving force to promote the revitalization of the new energy market. So far, the new energy automobile industry is in the process of switching from policy-driven to market-driven, but the attitude of policy will always be an important factor affecting the development of new forces.
Moreover, money is still stuck in the lifeblood of new forces. So far, the three domestic new car head echelons of Weilai, Ideal and Xiaopeng have still not been able to achieve sustained self-hematopoiesis, and building factories, building new cars, doing markets, and smashing research and development still require huge capital investment. In the stage of failing to stabilize the operation, no one can guarantee that the scene of Tight Cash Flow and investors refusing to raise funds will not repeat itself.
New cars are bustling at the moment, but everything is still too early, Wei Xiaoli will be able to cross the node of 100,000 deliveries next year, and Baidu, Xiaomi, and Apple's auto products are still on the string. While players from all walks of life staged a chase, the wrestling of multiple forces such as policy, capital, and industrial chain jointly restricted the direction of the fate of the new forces.