Written | July
Source| Chief Business Review
Li Yinan, the former prince of Huawei and the founder of Xiaoniu Electric Vehicle, announced that he built a car.
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.
NIUTRON self-touring car platform
The new energy vehicle track has ushered in a new player, and the reason why the outside world pays attention to it is because of the aura of its founder Li Yinan, and there are media reports that Li Yinan has begun to prepare for new energy vehicle projects since November 2018.
Who is Li Yinan? Li Yinan, 51 years old this year, has experienced great ups and downs in the first half of his life.
Li Yinan has been a child prodigy since he was a child, and at the age of 15, he was admitted to the junior class of Huazhong University of Science and Technology at that time, and when Li Yinan was in his second year of graduate school, he was introduced to Huawei by Zheng Baoyong, a teacher in Central China, to do a graduate thesis.
In 1993, Li Yinan went to Huawei after graduation, and his promotion speed was comparable to that of a rocket: he became an engineer on the second day of Huawei, and directly became the chief engineer and president of the central research department of Huawei 2 years later, and sat on the vice president of Huawei at the age of 27.
At that time, Ren Zhengfei's attention and love for Li Yinan was also well known, so that many people thought that Li Yinan was Ren Zhengfei's "dry son" and successor.
However, soon, Li Yinan resigned from Huawei, and the reason for his resignation was also a variety of opinions, some people said that Li Yinan could not stand Ren Zhengfei's bold axe, and he also felt that he had wings and wanted to do it alone. Ren Zhengfei believes that Li Yinan is still too young and needs more experience, so Ren Zhengfei transferred Li Yinan from the research and development department to the marketing department, but this became the fuse for Li Yinan's departure. In 2000, Li Yinan, then vice president of Huawei, left his post.
And Ren hopes that Li Chuangye can at least cooperate with Huawei, so in the early stage, he gave Li Yinan some resources to the harbor network founded by Li Yinan to represent Huawei's business, so that although Li Yinan is starting a business, he is actually helping Huawei. But Li Yinan's ambitions were even greater, and then he gradually took away a lot of technical talents, and then became a competitor of Huawei, which made Huawei and Lao Ren unbearable.
Followed by the story of the old Ren "righteousness and extermination of relatives", and finally Li Yinan was forced to sell the harbor, after Huawei, Baidu, and China Mobile took office, in 2015, Li Yinan founded Maverick Electric again.
However, no one expected that a few days after the release of the first new car of Xiaoniu Electric, Li Yinan was arrested for using internal information to speculate in stocks, and was finally sentenced to two and a half years in prison and fined 7.5 million yuan.
After Li Yinan's arrest, Maverick Electric also fell into quality problems, and was complained by consumers, and some consumers said that its real endurance was inconsistent with the publicity, the battery life was short, and it was fragile. Locator failure, difficult refund, short service life, etc., the days are not good.
Unfortunately, after Li Yinan was released from prison at the end of 2017, he did not have the qualifications to continue to manage the case, and when Niudian Technology went public in the United States in 2018, the main bell ringer was not him.
From the latest financial report released by Xiaoniu Electric, the revenue in the third quarter of this year was 1.226 billion yuan, an increase of 37.1% over the same period of 2020 of 894 million yuan, and the net profit of Xiaoniu Electric in the third quarter was 0.92 billion yuan, compared with 0.80 billion yuan in the same period last year, while the adjusted net profit in the second quarter of this year was 104 million yuan.
At the beginning, Maverick Electric still took the high-end route, and the back layout sank the market, and continued to grow the scale of stores, but Maverick Electric still could not withstand opponents such as YAG New Day.
In terms of sales, Maverick Electric is far from being a competitor such as Yadi Xinri, in the first half of this year, Maverick Electric sold more than 400,000 vehicles, while Yadi Electric two-wheelers sold a total of 6.54 million units, and Maverick Electric is only one-tenth of its sales.
At the same time, Xinri YAGER has also entered the field of intelligence and high-end, such as Xinri has become the first partner of Hongmeng Zhilian industry, and the newly released new product XC3 Pro, in addition to having a practical vehicle-machine interaction system, interconnects the vehicle and the mobile phone, and also increases the linkage function of the vehicle-mobile phone-smart helmet.
YAG electric vehicles have also launched a lot of high-end products, not long ago also released a new high-end intelligent replacement tram Yadi replacement series, independent research and development of OKAWA mid-mounted motor, the total riding test mileage of more than 100,000 kilometers, in addition to YAG also has wireless charging, fast charging and other black technology, and constantly strengthen the experience of their own products, after adding intelligence, the two-wheeled electric vehicle industry competition is becoming more and more fierce.
After being released from prison and stepping down as ceo of Maverick Electric, Li Yinan kept a low profile for a long time, until the end of 2021, when he reappeared as the founder of Niu Innovative Energy, which was a heavy news, directly announcing the "ALL in" intelligent electric vehicle.
Li Yinan said that Niu Chuang will explore cooperation with all leading suppliers and has nothing to do with Xiaoniu Electric.
Li Yinan is looking for the second curve of entrepreneurship on electric vehicles
On December 15, Li Yinan prepared for the 3-year car-making project Niu Innovative Energy release, The English name Neutron, the first car is a 5-seat SUV, with two versions of extended range and pure electricity.
After a few years of going around, Li Yinan and Ren Zhengfei once again became a competitive relationship, Huawei and Niu Chuang laid out the new energy vehicle track separately, one positioned the car company Tier1 supplier, and the other positioned the vehicle manufacturing.
Li Yinan once said, "In 2014, I judged that I could not raise 3 billion US dollars to build a car, and now I have a high probability of being able to raise funds to concentrate on car building." ”
In August this year, the registered address of NiuXin Energy was officially changed from Wujin District of Changzhou to Jintan District of Changzhou. Subsequently, Jiangsu Jintan Mahayana Automobile Technology Industrial Park was officially renamed NIUTRON.
It is reported that Changzhou R & D and production manufacturing base occupies about 770,000 square meters, is expected to have an annual production capacity of 180,000 units, is currently undergoing the final stage of commissioning and transformation, will be put into use in March 2022.
New energy vehicles are not easy to build
The key threshold for car manufacturing lies in funds, He Xiaopeng once said that it takes at least 20 billion yuan to be a new energy vehicle brand, and it needs to add another 30 billion yuan after the first phase, Wei Xiaoli and other new forces have not yet come out of the curse of loss, Li Bin has also become the "worst man in 2019".
In terms of funds, at present, Ziyoujia has completed a round of 500 million US dollars of financing, and investors include IDG Capital and COATUE. Li Yinan said, "The next round of financing has not yet started, but there is no shortage of money in the whole (advancement) process." ”
After all, with Li Yinan's jianghu status, there are still people who want to raise funds, and before the electric vehicle came out, it obtained a $50 million Series A financing from many institutions such as GGV, IDG, sequoia and so on.
However, such a scale of funds is not generous for a new car-making force, and the investigation shows that Li Yinan's shareholding in Maverick Electric has rapidly reduced from nearly 40% to 5% in the past year, which is estimated to be for the sake of building cars.
Xiaomi, a heavy player who announced all in car manufacturing, took out 10 billion yuan in the first phase and said that it would invest 10 billion US dollars in 10 years, and the investment was not small, and Xiaomi Auto also settled in the Xiaomi Industrial Park in Yizhuang, investing in many companies related to car manufacturing.
It can be seen that the competition in the new car market is very fierce, Phoenix Network Technology reported that the pricing of the new car will be more than 300,000 yuan, the target user will be about 32 years old "90" initial crowd, the high-end market has tesla to occupy the upper hand, and there are also competitive models such as Weilai and Ideal in China.
Data show that in 2021, China's new energy vehicle sales exceeded 3 million, and there is a big problem: the two-level differentiation is serious, most of the sales are contributed by a small number of head enterprises, the Matthew effect is prominent, the entire industry competition is very fierce, and it is not friendly for latecomers.
From the perspective of time, Li Yinan is a few years later than his peers, the market is no longer a blue ocean, and it is still unknown whether the late entrant ox innovation car can break out of the siege.
In addition, the reduction of delivery, replacement of chips, delivery delays, etc. are also common problems in new energy vehicles, and recently there have been a number of mainstream brands of new energy vehicles that have broken out the news of insufficient production capacity, many traditional car companies have been greatly reducing production capacity this year because of insufficient chips, and news about upstream lithium ore, lithium extraction in salt lakes and so on is also emerging.
The road of building a car is obviously not easy to walk. Li Yinan's plan is, "Small-scale trial production will be carried out in March next year, and the product will officially roll off the production line in September next year." But when the media asked about "market goals and expectations after the new car is launched", Li Yinan admitted frankly that "I can't answer it".
In the face of the car-making project that is still in the exploration period, can Li Yinan regain his previous glory in the second half of his life?
Resources:
"Li Yinan: A Life of Ups and Downs, Not What I Want", 36Kr;
"Genius" Li Yinan: It's Hard to Build a Car, Wall Street
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