Wen 丨 BT Finance Han
Remember the store camera black screen exposed at this year's "3.15" party? The cameras installed in some stores can be described as quite "smart", which will capture their face images without the customer's knowledge, read their gender, age, clothing and other information, and also famously provide smart marketing solutions for stores. But to put it bluntly, it is the hidden danger of forcibly collecting user privacy data, which is equivalent to applying for a membership ID card for each person in disguise, and helping salespeople to "see people and dish" to treat consumers differently.
At that time, the party also deliberately emphasized that the car 4S shop was the "hardest hit area" of such abuse of face recognition cameras, and even the chaos of customer data being exchanged between more than 100 4S stores.
Unexpectedly, Xiaopeng Automobile was also planted on such illegal face recognition products.
Xiaopeng store was fined for collecting face data
According to a number of media reports such as China Fund News, Xiaopeng Automobile was fined 100,000 yuan for collecting 430,000 face photos without authorization.
According to the administrative penalty decision of the Shanghai Xuhui District Market Supervision and Administration Bureau, the object of punishment is Shanghai Xiaopeng Automobile Sales service Co., Ltd. In 2019, its parent company, Xiaopeng Automobile Sales Co., Ltd., signed a framework contract for store passenger flow monitoring projects with a company, stipulating that the parties would purchase store passenger flow monitoring project services from a company from March 1, 2019, and would conduct statistics on the number of people entering the store, the proportion of men and women, and the age analysis.
These face recognition cameras were installed in five directly operated stores and two franchise stores under Shanghai Xiaopeng Automobile Sales and Service Co., Ltd., and more than 430,000 face photos were collected and uploaded between January and June 2021.
At present, the Shanghai Xiaopeng Automobile store has dismantled the face recognition device involved and deleted the face photos that have been uploaded. Xiaopeng Automobile also said that it fully obeyed the administrative punishment and made a deep reflection.
For this incident, there is no shortage of consumers who believe that the penalty is light. Some Weibo netizens left a message: On average, a photo is 2 cents, and now people's privacy is really not valuable.
However, BT Finance also noted that some netizens mistakenly believed that Xiaopeng's auto parts collected user privacy, and said that they may not buy smart electric cars with cameras and microphones in the future. Although such a misunderstanding needs to be clarified, it is enough to reflect that in the era of accelerated automotive intelligence, the protection of the personal privacy of consumers and car owners should be paid more and more attention.
Aggravated losses encounter "soul torture"
Not long ago, the "new car-making forces" just announced their November deliveries, Xiaopeng continued to lead the new car-making forces, with more than 15,000 monthly deliveries leading the way, which is also Xiaopeng's highest number of deliveries, the third consecutive month of deliveries of more than 10,000 vehicles.
Ideal Cars (NASDAQ:LI/02015.HK) ranked second with 13,485 deliveries in November, and NIO (NYSE:NIO) deliveries also rebounded rapidly back from 3,667 units in October, seemingly moving away from the volatility caused by factory restructuring.
Although Xiaopeng has continuously led the new forces of car manufacturing, it has recently encountered the soul torture of the market's "rising sales and declining losses".
According to the 2021 Q3 financial report, Xiaopeng Automobile's revenue, core business automobile sales revenue, and gross profit margin have recorded quite good growth, but the net loss margin has expanded sharply again, with a single quarter loss of 1.595 billion yuan in Q3, an increase of more than 30% year-on-year, and the operating loss recorded 1.803 billion yuan in the quarter, and even put on the "loss king" hat of the new car-making forces.
In contrast, Ideal Auto once achieved a single-quarter profit in the fourth quarter of 2020, while GAC Aian, a new energy vehicle brand born from GAC Group, revealed at the end of 2020 that "counting the points has been fully profitable, which is incomparable to the new car-making forces.".
The main reason for Xiaopeng's increased loss is to continue to invest in research and development and lay channels. In Q3 2021, the company's R&D investment exceeded 1 billion yuan for the first time in a single quarter, recording 1.264 billion yuan, almost doubled from 635 million yuan in the same period last year, and increased a lot compared with 864 million yuan in Q2. Marketing expenses also increased from 1.20 billion yuan last year to 1.54 billion yuan, and BT Finance also noted that Q3 is the single quarter with the largest marketing expenses of car companies such as Xiaopeng, which shows that the sales expenses of Q3 in 2021 are particularly high.
To be fair, increasing research and development, grabbing channels, at a time when new energy vehicles are still developing at a high speed, such a decision is not difficult to understand.
In the field of public opinion, Xiaopeng has recently been involved in the controversy of being suspected of defrauding the state of new energy subsidies in Nanjing. Jiangsu TV reported that consumers who spent nearly 280,000 yuan to buy a car were notified by the staff to pay 7,000 yuan when picking up the car, and the store's sales supervisor said that "if the price of the vehicle exceeds 300,000, it will not get the state subsidy." To this end, Xiaopeng responded that there was a misunderstanding, and the store sales did not explain the policy clearly.
On the one hand, the rapid increase in delivery volume, on the other hand, the high-cost R&D investment has not yet been converted into revenue. Whether Xiaopeng Automobile can sit firmly in the top seat of the new car-making forces, there are still many challenges ahead.
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