Against Ren Zhengfei, will Niu Chuanghui be a harbor?
"Huawei's former prince" Li Yinan officially entered the new energy vehicle camp and met the old owner again in the field of car manufacturing.
On December 15, Li Yinan's new entrepreneurial project Niu Chuangxin Energy announced the English brand name "NIUTRON" and the Chinese brand name "Ziyoujia". Officials said that "Self-Traveling" focuses on the field of intelligent high-end new energy vehicles, the first product positioning medium and large SUVs, providing pure electricity and extended range two powertrain options, will be trial production in March 2022, mass production delivery in September of the same year.
There are many cross-border players who have entered new energy vehicles, but the reason why Li Yinan has attracted much attention is not only because of his popular genius teenager label, but also because he is also a double label of "Huawei prince" and "Huawei traitor".
Li Yinan became famous at a young age at Huawei, and after starting a business, he directly fought with Huawei in the field of information and communications by digging up Huawei's walls, which provoked the anger of Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei. Nowadays, Niuchuang and Huawei have bet on the new energy vehicle track, one positioning the vehicle manufacturing, the other positioning the car company Tier1 supplier, will the two sides usher in the possibility of cooperation?
In an interview with the media, Li Yinan responded that Niuchuang will explore cooperation with all leading suppliers.
Figure | Li Yinan
Li Yinan, 51, has a legendary first half of his life: with the label of a genius teenager and a Huawei prince, two in and two out of Huawei, to serve as Baidu CTO, CEO of China Mobile 12580, he also joined GSR Venture Capital and Meihua Venture Capital, during which he founded two companies, Harbor Network and Maverick Electric, of course, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for suspected insider trading.
When he founded Maverick Electric six years ago, Li Yinan once said that this was the last time he started a business in his life. But just when his scenery was infinite, he was imprisoned. On the eve of the preparation of the listing of Maverick Electric in 2018, due to the identity of "having been in prison", Li Yinan had no choice but to sell the company's chairman and CEO positions, and was forced to shift from the front of the stage to the backstage.
Moreover, in the two and a half years since Li Yinan was imprisoned, the prospects of the two-wheeled electric vehicle track to which Maverick Electric belonged were bleak, and investors have turned to a brighter four-wheeled electric vehicle. Based on this, Li Yinan began to prepare for new energy vehicle projects from November 2018.
Looking at Li Yinan's past experience, whether it is abandoning Huawei's status as a prince, being acquired by Huawei after founding Harbor Technology, or helplessly resigning as CEO of Maverick Electric, this technical genius has never been able to harvest a lasting victory.
This time, Li Yinan, with resources and connections, re-stood in front of the stage. The outside world began to wonder, after li Yinan took power again, can he successfully share the cake of new energy car manufacturing?
In an interview with the media, facing the media, "What are your advantages as a latecomer?" The answer given by Li Yinan was "I can't answer it."
A
Li Yinan's life before the age of 30 is like "opening and hanging".
Born in 1970, Li Yinan, at the age of 15, was admitted to the junior class of The Central China University of Science at that time, where a group of talented teenagers known as "prodigies" across the country gathered, and his first class was Cai Wei, who won the 2005 U.S. President's Science Prize.
When Li Yinan was in graduate school for the second year, he was introduced to Huawei by Zheng Baoyong, a teacher in central China, to do a graduate thesis, when Ren Zhengfei had just founded Huawei, the name was not as loud as later, Huawei was not yet a communications giant, and it all relied on the agent switch to earn the difference in price.
In the year of graduate school, 23-year-old Li Yinan officially became a Huawei employee: three days later, he was promoted to Huawei engineer; half a month later, he was promoted to president of Huawei's central research department. By the age of 27, Li Yinan had become Huawei's youngest vice president.
The author of the book "Ren Zhengfei Biography" mentioned that Ren Zhengfei privately recognized Li Yinan as a "dry son", and Huawei tacitly believed that he would be Huawei's successor.
Figure | Ren
Li Yinan is really a technical genius. However, in order to become a qualified successor, Li Yinan still lacks management skills, such as his unkind treatment of subordinates, treating people too arrogantly and arrogantly, etc. In Ren Zhengfei's view, these aspects still need to be sharpened.
To this end, in 1998, Ren Zhengfei transferred Li Yinan from the research and development department to the marketing department, but Li Yinan regarded it as a suppression and exile of himself.
In 2000, in order to cope with the cold winter of the telecommunications industry, Ren Zhengfei encouraged employees to start businesses internally, allowing departing employees to serve as agents of Huawei products, but prohibiting departing employees from engaging in core product research and development projects. To this end, Ren Zhengfei also wrote the industry-renowned "Huawei's Winter" article.
Coupled with the previous dissatisfaction, Ren Zhengfei's mobilization directly allowed Li Yinan, then vice president of Huawei, to join the army of departures. No matter how Ren Zhengfei retained, Li Yinan had an iron heart to leave.
Li Yinan, who left Huawei, did only do Huawei's product senior distributors at the beginning. But after a long time, Li Yinan was no longer willing to only be an agent, and began to violate the separation agreement with Huawei, gradually becoming Huawei's competitor in the field of information and communications from an agent.
For product research and development, Li Yinan frantically recruited people from Huawei. Li Yinan once mentioned in Huawei's subordinate Dai Hui that many of the management of the harbor are the elderly of Huawei, such as Chen Rin, the head of the enterprise network channel, who did not mention the resignation application, but was pried by Li Yinan's sentence "Go to the harbor to work, the procedures are done for you". At that time, there were even rumors that Li Yinan bought Huawei's R & D personnel and did not require them to leave Huawei, but only required them to avoid their own research and development fields.
What really makes Ren Zhengfei intolerable is that Li Yinan acquired Juntian founded by Huang Yaoxu, the elder of Huawei Optical Transmission, at the end of 2003, which in Ren Zhengfei's view is the cheese that moves Hua's core business. At that time, Huawei's biggest profit sources were two, one was a program-controlled switch, and the other was transmission.
A war of encirclement and suppression of the harbor began. In 2004, Huawei set up a special "Hong Kong Office" to snipe at all aspects of the harbor. In 2006, Ren Zhengfei bought the harbor for 1.7 billion yuan, ending the war of encirclement and suppression.
In the acquisition agreement, Ren Zhengfei specifically marked a clause: let Li Yinan return to Huawei for another two years. Li Yinan, who returned to Huawei, was given a fictitious position as a vice president. According to media understanding, Ren Zhengfei deliberately made the four sides of Li Yinan's office area into transparent glass. At that time, the name of Li Yinan as a "Huawei traitor" was endless.
However, Li Yinan's desire for dominance has not stopped.
As soon as the agreement expired in 2008, Li Yinan went to Baidu as CTO; two years later, he left china mobile's 12580 as CEO. The outside world interprets Li Yinan's frequent job hopping as his desire for the company's dominance.
After working with the title of 12580 CEO for a year and a half, Li Yinan joined GSR Ventures again as a partner because of the long-term constraints on various businesses by China Mobile and the difficulty of punching and kicking.
But according to Dai Hui, GSR Ventures' more famous investments in the sharing economy, such as Didi and Ofo, did not involve Li Yinan.
Since the "harbor war" with Ren Zhengfei, the former genius teenager who left the field of digital communications has gradually lost the aura of attention once given by the outside world in the process of chasing dominance.
B
When Mingshi Capital investor Huang Mingming approached Li Yinan and asked him to be the CEO of "Maverick Electric", Li Yinan did not let the opportunity slip away.
Li Yinan really values this project. In the early days of its founding, Li Yinan pulled a lot of resources for Maverick Electric, found Luo Yonghao, Li wanted to help publicize, and also found a technical team of Honda, the king of motorcycles, to cooperate in research and development.
With Li Yinan's past reputation, electric vehicles have not yet come out, and they have received $50 million in Series A financing from GGV, IDG, Sequoia and other institutions.
At that time, Li Yinan thought he saw the dawn of the future, and wrote on Weibo, "After several years of investment, watching young people's projects grow strongly, the most primitive instinct in my heart told me that it was time to do something that made me feel excited."
At this time, he probably would not have thought that he would lose his identity as the helmsman because of a prison disaster.
On June 1, 2015, Li Yinan appeared in the center of the stage riding a calf electric car, introduced the calf electric car to everyone with a smile, and said that "this will be the last business in his life."
Figure | Maverick Electric N1 launch video screenshot
Just two days later, Li Yinan, who was celebrating his 45th birthday, was taken away by prosecutors at the Shenzhen airport, accusing him of taking advantage of his position to make more than seven million yuan from stock speculation through insider information during his tenure at GSR Venture Capital in 2014. In the end, Li Yinan was sentenced to two years and six months and fined 7.5 million yuan.
In December 2017, Li Yinan was released from prison after completing his sentence, and in two and a half years, There were many turbulences in Maverick Electric: the electric vehicle problem was frequently complained about, and GGV Capital was withdrawn...
According to the 2020 annual report, The cumulative loss of Maverick Electric from 2016 to 2018 was 767 million yuan, although it turned a profit in 2019, but compared with Yadi and Emma, its market share in 2019 was less than 1%.
C
Compared with when Li Yinan entered the game in 2018, the current new energy vehicle track has long been different.
Whether it is the accelerated transformation of traditional car companies, or the millet, Baidu and OPPO of cross-border car manufacturing, they are all trying to share a piece of the new energy vehicle track.
Compared with these new competitors, Li Yinan's Niuchuang has neither the genes of traditional car companies nor the endorsement of Internet giants.
The huge amount of money needed to build a car will be the first threshold that Li Yinan will face. In the face of media interviews, Li Yinan gave an explanation, saying that he thought about building a car in 2014, precisely because he felt that he could not afford to raise $3 billion at that time. Today, Niuchuang has obtained a $500 million A round of financing from IDG Capital and other participants, and Li Yinan said that he is most likely not worried about the $3 billion financing problem.
In addition to external financing channels, according to enterprise investigation data, Li Yinan's shareholding in Maverick Electric has rapidly reduced from nearly 40% to 5% today in the past year. Industry insiders analyzed that Li Yinan's continuous reduction in cash is likely to be a blood transfusion for the car-making project.
It's just that the car has not yet been mass-produced, Li Yinan, in addition to the remaining 5% of the shares in Maverick Electric, the follow-up can only rely on continuous financing, and whether the financing is smooth or not depends on the promotion of Niuchuang's car-making. After all, after the mass production of the first model, Li Bin, the founder of Weilai, was once called "the most miserable person in 2019" by the media because he could not raise money.
The price trap is another big dilemma. Li Yinan's mentality of wanting to take the high-end path has not changed, when Li Yinan pulled the motorcycle Honda's technical team to develop the Maverick electric vehicle, it was once known as the "Tesla" of the electric vehicle industry, and its price was twice as high as the electric vehicle on the market.
The price of Niuchuang's new car, according to Phoenix Network Technology, will be priced at more than 300,000 yuan, and the target user will be about 32 years old "90" people. In this field, there are already too many competing models, such as NIO ES8/ES6, Ideal ONE, etc.
Compared with the new car brands that have achieved little success in Weilai and the ideal, niuchuang new energy vehicles with the same price point, as a new brand, how to expand the acceptance of users will be a great test.
Among the new car companies that have not yet been mass-produced, compared with Xiaomi, which also has no car-making genes, the latter not only has a strong brand effect, and a large number of rice noodle fans, but also has a tight layout behind the car-making: more than eight months after announcing the car-making, Xiaomi has frequently moved around the core links such as batteries, autonomous driving technology, car chips, and vehicle manufacturing.
Compared with Jidu, the latter has a certain experience in the automotive industry backed by Baidu. Since 2013, Baidu has bet on the field of autonomous driving and deployed the Apollo autonomous driving program.
In response to a question from the media about "market goals and expectations after the new car is launched", Li Yinan said "I can't answer it", and for "niutron advantages", Li Yinan also replied "I have no opinion".
In the face of the car-making project that is still in the exploration stage, for Li Yinan, the first hurdle to test his power is to see whether the mass production delivery in September next year can be carried out as scheduled.