Stellantis – An automotive alliance born at the beginning of this year, formed by the merger of Fiat Chrysler and the PSA Citroen Group, it immediately became the world's fourth largest car group in terms of car sales, the third largest in terms of turnover, after Japan's Toyota Motor Company and Germany's Volkswagen AG. It includes 14 brands, including Citroen and Maserati, Fiat, Opel, Peugeot, Alpha Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep.
Some analysts have said that the use of the "group heating" integration strategy to cope with the cold wave of the global auto market and the new trend of the industry will become the choice of more traditional car companies, and the integration method will be significantly different from the first two integration waves of the global auto industry in history. To put it bluntly, it is the integration of the resources of several car companies, hoping to concentrate the energy.
Combined with the domestic market, although the group has a large number of brands, but in addition to Maserati can still use a certain voice in the luxury car market, many brands in the domestic performance has been marginalized, sales are sluggish, and the operation is dismal. It can be said that the establishment of this alliance is really a "weak alliance" better than a "rookie pecking at each other" as a last resort.
At the beginning of the establishment of the Stellantis Group, they have released their latest electrification strategy, with plans to invest more than 30 billion euros in the group's electrification and software development by the end of 2025. The Stellantis Group's goal is to generate low-emission models (LEV) by 2030, with more than 70% of the Group's sales in Europe and more than 40% of the Group's sales in the United States.
The group, which has put together two dozen "Huluwa" brands, wants to provide best-in-class pure electric solutions in all 14 of its automotive brands. In other words, it provides a pure electric vehicle with a range of 500 to 800 km/300 to 500 miles to meet customer needs, and provides fast charging capabilities, which can increase 32 km/20 miles of range by charging for one minute.
Not only that, but the Stellantis Group has also launched four flexible production platforms designed for pure electric vehicles in one go, each of which can support an annual output of up to 2 million vehicles, and equipped with three scalable "three-in-one" electric drive (EDM) modules and standardized battery packs, the platform products will cover the production needs of all brands and sub-models of the group.
In terms of procurement, stellantis Group, with the support of five "gigafactories" in Europe and North America, will ensure that the battery reserve exceeds 130GWh by 2025 and the battery reserve exceeds 260GWh by 2030. Additional suppliers and partners are also available to support the overall needs.
At present, the Stellantis Group has signed memorandums of understanding with two partners in North America and Europe that extract lithium from geothermal salt (brine) water to ensure the sustainable supply of "lithium". It is reported that the signing of the contract with Hive Energy also ensures the group's production capacity supply demand of 90GWh in 2025.
Seeing this, you will find that whether it is manufacturing or parts procurement, stellantis group plans have little to do with the Chinese market. This situation is very similar to the current situation of the group's brands in the Chinese market, all of which are so dismal sales that they are about to be forgotten.
Taking Citroën as an example, Citroën, the representative of the French car, has entered the Chinese market for a long time, and has been a very popular brand by domestic consumers, and has had some highlight moments. But at the same time, it can not get rid of the law of "prosperity must decline", and soon entered the stage of rapid decline in sales, and even once fell to the bottom and faded out of the public eye.
Not only that, after finding the organization, Citroën once again failed to live up to public expectations, and after joining the alliance, it has been performing mediocrely. Fortunately, this year it made its debut with Versailles, but it took almost a year for a car to go public from debut to launch, and the pace was too slow. Therefore, the popularity of Citroen alone cannot change the plight of the entire brand.
This is also the same as the experience of its "good brother" Dongfeng Peugeot. In June 2004, the Dongfeng Peugeot 307, which has a super high value, became a hit and successfully ranked among the high-end positions of the mid-level car market, and was repeatedly selected as the most popular and most willing to buy models of consumers, creating a miracle of single product brand development. All the way smooth sailing, soaring, in 15 years to reach the most brilliant peak, 15 years of brand annual sales even reached more than 400,000 units.
However, such a rapid Dongfeng Peugeot began to suffer a "cliff-like decline" in 2016, the impact of the rise of independent brands, the confusion of its own model pricing strategy, the product configuration error, the design style is more true, and the lack of publicity exposure are all important promoters to pull it down from the altar.
At present, from the perspective of Dongfeng Peugeot Automobile, the Dongfeng Peugeot brand is led by the French side, the French side accounts for 75% of the shares, Dongfeng accounts for 25% of the shares, and at the same time imports the import car business of the Peugeot brand; Dongfeng Citroen is dominated by Dongfeng, Dongfeng accounts for 75% of the shares, and the French side accounts for 25% of the shares.
For Tang Weishi, who is good at finance and capital operation, the DPCA is the biggest and most obvious scar of his automobile empire. After completing the restructuring of PSA and FCA, Tang Weishi promised the 14 brands of The Stellantis Group to prove their survival in 10 years, but Shenlong could not wait for such a long time. The Peugeot Citroen brand is back on track, or it is gradually "dying", depending on how much patience Stellantis has left!
And the jeep, which is only focused on off-road positioning, is not much better. In 2019, the overall environment of declining consumer purchase intentions has made jeeps, which are already plagued by scandals due to GAC Fick quality defects, worse. The company's operating strategy is very crotch, the dealer's backwater and withdrawal from the network, the outbreak of dealer rights protection incidents in 2018, and the departure of Zheng Jie, the sales president of the FCA Group, which is known as the mainstay of the Chinese market, have cast a big shadow on GAC FCA.
At the same time that these brands are becoming more and more depressed and Gu Ying is self-pitying, the giants of traditional fuel vehicles have already announced their transformation: in 2019, Audi's management directors released a corporate strategic restructuring plan, announcing that they would accelerate the implementation of the electrification strategy and the company's comprehensive decarbonization plan. The BMW Group has also launched many pure electric vehicle models to test the waters. Mercedes-Benz, which expects to accelerate the speed of transformation, has naturally caught up with the wave of "inner volume", and Kang Linsong, chairman of the board of directors of Daimler AG and global president of Mercedes-Benz Automobile Group, has said: "The electrification transformation is not fast enough."
Volkswagen, which is eager to express its position after the "emission gate", is even more high-profile, not only releasing four years of gestation and saying that it will successively launch electric vehicle models covering various market segments, but also replacing new standards to enhance the brand's popularity in the field of electric vehicles. Not only that, Japanese and Korean brands have also begun to compete for new energy vehicles. Hyundai Motor plans to add electric models to all of its product lines by 2020, and Toyota plans to sell more than 5.5 million electrified vehicles worldwide by 2025.
Obviously, unless the "alliance of the weak" that is already precarious in the traditional fuel vehicle market is willing to be consumed by Volkswagen, it must break through the new energy and environmental protection model competition in the future and give it a go. After all, China's mainstream market has also been divided: the 10W to 15W A+ market is basically divided by Volkswagen, Liangtian and GM; the 8-12W market is basically the main position of the "fight" of independent brands.
In the last piece of the luxury market, the brands of the Stellantis Group can not be plugged in. If there is no money to invest in new system research and integration, when the new energy vehicle really reaches the day of fierce "fighting", I am afraid that it is too late to sigh that the yellow leaves are everywhere, and the twilight cloud is deep, and it will be swept out.
Written by Liu Tianyi
Editor-in-Chief Sun Chen
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