Great Wall Motors' "core changing door" is still fermenting.
A few days ago, Great Wall Motor's "net red brand" Euler Good Cat car chip was exposed as "Li Dai Tao Zombie". According to media reports, Euler Good Cat said in its external publicity that Euler Good Cat is equipped with Qualcomm 8-core on-board chips, which can achieve rich on-board functions. As a result, many users reported that the car's in-car function was slow to react, running stuttering, and could not be compatible with many mainstream applications.
Subsequently, many users found that Euler Good Cat was not using the claimed Qualcomm 8-core chip, but an old Intel 4-core A3940 chip released in 2016, which was very different from what its sales materials advertised.
In fact, domestic users are usually more tolerant of domestic brands, and in the context of insufficient global chip supply, as long as the Great Wall explains honestly to users, users are not incomprehensible. However, what makes many users dissatisfied is that the same model listed in overseas markets such as Thailand and India uses Qualcomm's 8-core chip, which is quietly replaced in China.
This undoubtedly reminds many users of Lenovo's approach, typically "I take you as a brother, you take me as a cousin". It is precisely because of this practice that Euler's good cat "core changing door" has been on the hot search many times, and has also been criticized by CCTV reviews.
For the "core changing door", the Great Wall Euler Good Cat has apologized and said that the owner of the car who purchased the model enjoys a lifetime warranty and sends 10,000 yuan for electricity.
Can the Great Wall salvage the brand image that has already been questioned?
01 Disadvantages of walking on one leg
Great Wall Motors, in the domestic auto market is more like an "outlier", most of the car manufacturers are based on cars, while the Great Wall is mainly SUV, the proportion of cars is very low.
In 2019 and 2020, Great Wall Motors ranked seventh in annual sales, and in the first half of this year's sales ranking, Great Wall Motors ranked eighth. These sales were earned through SUVs. In the first half of 2021, Great Wall Motor sold 614,000 units, of which SUVs accounted for more than 70%,000 units; while the sales volume of 53,000 cars accounted for less than 10%, even lower than the sales level of 114,000 pickup trucks.
Great Wall currently has five brands: Haval, WEY, Euler, Tank and Great Wall Pickup Truck. Among them, All models of Haval, WEY and Tank are fuel-type passenger SUVs, and only the Euler brand has new energy cars, and there are fewer models. This product structure determines the proportion of SUVs in the final sales performance.
The era has achieved the Great Wall, And Chinese families have higher comprehensive requirements for cars, both through good levels and to meet the needs of family cars, and SUV just fits the comprehensive requirements of Chinese families for cars.
Therefore, around 2003, the domestic SUV market rose rapidly, and the Great Wall has also been greatly developed. In 2014, the proportion of SUVs and cars sold was almost the same, and the Great Wall also achieved great success.
However, when the Great Wall, which ate the dividend of the development of the last industry, faced with a new market dividend, it seemed to be a little weak. With the development of new energy vehicles (whether the industry has a bubble or not, the entire industry is developing rapidly is an indisputable fact), Great Wall's SUV strategy began to drag down the overall development, and Great Wall's profits began to decline.
Because SUV will be larger than car in terms of weight, wind resistance coefficient, etc., under the same conditions, the endurance of electric cars is much higher than that of electric SUVs. According to the new energy sales ranking released by the Association of Automobile Manufacturers in the first half of 2021, only 2 of the top 10 models in terms of sales volume belong to SUVs, and the overall sales volume is not high.
This also led to the dilemma of the Great Wall. From a revenue perspective, Great Wall Motors grew from 1.22 billion yuan in 2000 to 98.6 billion yuan in 2016, an increase of 80.1 times in 16 years. However, after 2017, the company's operating income has stagnated, remaining at a level of about 100 billion yuan. After net profit peaked at 10.55 billion yuan in 2016, growth also stagnated, hovering around 5 billion yuan for four consecutive years.
Partial science has made the Great Wall rise rapidly, and it has also put the Great Wall into the current predicament.
In stark contrast to the Great Wall, BYD, under the premise of having two popular business sectors of batteries and new energy vehicles, BYD's operating income and net profit have achieved substantial growth in 2020.
In the future, with the implementation of strategies such as carbon neutrality, large fuel vehicles such as Great Wall Motors will inevitably enter the adjustment period. But where exactly is the direction of the adjustment?
02 New Energy or Overseas?
In March this year, Tesla sold a total of 35,478 vehicles in the Chinese market, once again setting a new record for the highest monthly sales. The new forces of car-making, Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal Monthly Delivery also exceeded 10,000. The new energy vehicle market has formed a scale effect.
In addition, Apple, Baidu, Millet and other Internet companies have gone down to build cars, and traditional car companies have also laid out new energy, and the market seems to have begun to roll in.
Naturally, the Great Wall naturally could not sit still, and set a goal for itself: by 2025, it would achieve global sales of 4 million vehicles, of which 80% would be new energy vehicles, and the operating income would exceed 600 billion yuan.
However, the Great Wall's sales of new energy vehicles in 2020 were 57,400 units, accounting for 5.14%. To achieve the 2025 strategic goal, in the next 4 years, the efficiency growth rate of the Great Wall's new energy vehicles should achieve the goal of 52 times in 4 years.
Originally, with the differentiated positioning, Euler also gained a wave of female users, which can have a good start, but after the "core door", the New Energy Vehicle of the Great Wall is still unknown.
Perhaps it is the inspiration brought by Euler's good cat, the Great Wall has also launched a "mecha dragon" for male users, after watching this car, perhaps for the Great Wall's goal, there is a clearer understanding - this is to put satellites.
In addition to the action of new energy vehicles, in order to expand the development space, the Great Wall has also aimed the incremental direction overseas. Wei Jianjun once said, "If independent brands want to develop, they must go global, and globalization is the only way to achieve sustainable profitability." 」
From 2016 to 2020, Great Wall Motor's export volume increased from 15,000 units to 68,000 units, and the data seems to be good. However, there is no harm without comparison, and in 2020, SAIC motor exports reached 390,000 vehicles.
In order to realize its overseas strategy, on October 8 this year, Great Wall Motors has officially landed in Pakistan. On October 12, in response to the news that Great Wall Motors will acquire Nissan Motor's plant in Barcelona, Spain, Great Wall Motor insiders said that the global layout is an important business development direction of the company, and at present, Great Wall Motors' factories in Russia and Thailand have been put into operation and achieved profitability, and the Plants in Brazil and India are in the process of acquisition, and the possibility of acquiring corresponding factories in Western Europe is not ruled out.
But the last Chinese brand that was internationalized and scolded was Lenovo. The Great Wall Euler good cat because of the overseas market and the use of different chips in the sea, but also made domestic consumers very unhappy.
In addition, according to media reports, Great Wall unveiled two new models at the Thailand Auto Show: the 2.0T hybrid version of the tank 500 and the Haval H6 plug-in mix, these two models did not appear in the domestic declaration information, and the time of appearance and listing is uncertain. As a domestic brand, the new car does not choose the Chinese market as the starting place, and the chip also uses a low level, it is no wonder that it is criticized by some netizens: eating inside and outside.
In any case, for the Great Wall, how to appease domestic consumers and lay out new energy vehicles as soon as possible is the top priority. And the bragging thing, and so on, is really not in a hurry.