"I don't understand at all, why do you still buy fuel trucks now?" How nostalgic will you be to buy a gas car? “
"I can't think of anything better than a gas car but smell a little gasoline?"
On December 18, an interview with NIO head Li Bin on NIO Day caused an uproar online. In the case of Weilai's poor sales in the second half of the year and the stock price fell by more than 20% in one month, what kind of courage did Li Bin have to shell the oil truck?
It turned out that while breaking out the shocking remarks, Weilai released a new model ET5 on Nio Day. If you choose the battery rental plan, it only costs 258,000 yuan. Its performance and parameters from the data released at the press conference, compared to the same level of models is very competitive.
This is undoubtedly a signal to the major friends, weilai, which only did high-end cars before, finally extended its hand to the cake of "200,000-300,000 range". In this battlefield, there are sales ace Tesla Model 3, Xiaopeng P7 and Ideal One, which are also new car-making forces, and even the cross-grade model Extreme Kr 001 and the Volkswagen ID series that have recently sold a lot.
So what impact will this ET5, which is full of topics after its release, bring to Weilai? Will Weilai's sluggish sales in the second half of the year be saved? What kind of spark will Weilai rub with opponents of the same level after exploring the price range?
What is the current situation of NIO?
Starting in the second half of 2021, Weilai's road is not very good.
Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal are the three most talked about new car-making forces in China's new energy vehicle market. Since the first half of this year, Weilai has always been in the position of big brother with the sales champion, so everyone will habitually refer to the three brothers as "Wei Xiaoli".
However, since July this year, NIO has lost its championship throne, and even in October, it sold only 3667 units. In November, when the new energy vehicles collectively rushed to the performance at the end of the year, they only barely managed to climb the sales volume of 10,000 units, while Xiaopeng and Ideal handed over excellent answers of 15,613 units and 13,485 units at the same time.
I have to sigh that the former "Wei Xiaoli" has slowly become "Xiaoli Wei".
Image source: Wired travel
The performance of sales in the second half of the year directly affects the performance of the financial data of the "three fools of car building" in the third quarter of this year. In the third quarter of this year, WEILAI, Xiaopeng and Ideal achieved revenue of 9.805 billion yuan, 5.720 billion yuan and 7.780 billion yuan respectively, an increase of 16.1%, 52.1% and 54.3% respectively.
Not only did Weilai fall behind in the sequential growth, Niolai's net loss in the third quarter was 835 million yuan, compared with Xiaopeng and Ideal's 1.595 billion yuan and 0.215 billion yuan, in terms of month-on-month expansion, Weilai was as high as 42.4%, the highest of the three.
However, judging from WEILAI's third-quarter financial statements, Weilai's cash reserves are still 46.99 billion yuan, and the capital chain is normal. Can't help but let the netizens who often complain lamented "how to lose money every day, there is still so much money on the account", and even took out 2.5 billion yuan to buy back 1.418% of the shares of Weilai China in the third quarter, I think this repurchase is a win-win situation.
NIO urgently needs its own "Model 3"
For the dismal sales of 3667 units in October, although Weilai announced that it was changing its production line to the use of its flagship sedan ET7 released at the beginning of the year, resulting in a decline in deliveries.
But putting aside the core issue of production capacity, must WEILAI's sales prospects be bright?
Compared with the performance of other friends this year, Xiaopeng P7 sold 45,000 vehicles, and there is a volume model P5 is about to be delivered; the sales volume of the ideal one in the medium term after the mid-term redesign continues to break through, or the sales champion of a single car; not to mention that the monthly sales of Tesla's "ace" model Model 3, which has never been less than 20,000 units since March.
Weilai has laid out its models in medium and large SUVs, and in addition to the ES8, which has been on sale for nearly 4 years, only twin brothers ES6 and EC6 are left. For the new energy vehicle market that changes every day, most of the potential customers are young people, and they need constant freshness to impact, and Weilai's operation this year is inevitably "too unintentional". And the pricing of the three models is positioned in high-end electric vehicles, it is difficult to achieve real volume, coupled with the product is not upgraded or updated, which naturally affects the decline in sales in the second half of the year.
Therefore, the emergence of ET5 is too significant for Weilai, which is a "Model 3" belonging to Weilai.
Although the unit price of Nio's bicycles is as high as more than 400,000 yuan, even higher than BMW and Audi, Weilai really needs a blockbuster model to occupy the market.
What is the basis of ET5?
So why does ET5 make Li Bin have the courage to shout out the sentence "I don't understand that there are still people who want to buy oil trucks"?
First take a look at the ET5 labels and you will understand: positioned in a medium-sized intelligent electric coupe; standard frameless electric suction door and 23 speakers; front and rear dual motors, front and rear five linkages, acceleration of 4.3 seconds; 75, 100, 150kWh three kinds of batteries up to 1000km endurance; with high-definition lidar, high-precision maps, V2X; 4 Nvidia Orin chips with computing power of 1016TOPS; the cheapest BaaS solution is only 258,000. Just like the Chinese mobile phone market in recent years, new energy vehicles have also reached the time of spelling parameters.
In addition to the performance configuration of ET5, Weilai also has its own unique core competitiveness.
First of all, the value of the brand, Weilai's initial strategic direction is mainly high-end luxury electric vehicles, and then the price will be lowered to the range of 300,000, which is not like Mercedes-Benz BMW? Consumers have a sense of identity with the brand; the second is that Weilai's service has maintained a high level, has an excellent reputation among the industry and car friends, and has a huge and mature car club system to give consumers a unique sense of belonging; and finally, Weilai's most unique power exchange system, which is currently unique on the market, there is no second company that can achieve the layout and scale of Weilai.
Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of WEIO, is full of confidence in this model, and even said, "We pay more attention to the comparison relationship with the mainstream traditional fuel luxury models such as 'BBA'." As WEILAI enters the high-end market and forms an alternative to high-end mainstream luxury fuel vehicles, we should be able to turn the 'BBA' pattern into an 'NBA' in the future. ”
Needless to say, the "B" here must refer to the BMW 3 Series. NIO has shown great ambitions, not only to punch the luxury electric car sales crown Model 3, but also to kick the BMW 3 Series, which has been at the top of the sales list of medium-sized luxury cars for many years.
But we have to realize one thing, NIO has never directly competed with model 3 and BMW 3 series or even good brothers Xiaopeng P7 and Ideal One before. Weilai previously relied on its own unique high-priced high-end luxury electric vehicles, steadily eating the market share of that price range.
This time to pull ET5 to the price range of less than 300,000, joined this big fight with various gods, in the end who loses and who wins, we wait and see.
End
Let's go back to the highly controversial words that Li Bin said at the beginning, does Li Bin really feel that new energy vehicles can now completely replace traditional oil vehicles?
Of course not. As the founder of e-car. He said that this passage is nothing more than to create momentum for Weilai's new car ET5 to increase the topic, and the other is to make the cake of new energy vehicles bigger.
This dialogue on the Internet after the fermentation of Li Bin also made a response, he said that the original meaning of this paragraph is that the previous few years of charging and replacing infrastructure is indeed not convenient enough, good electric vehicle choices are also less, now the infrastructure development is very fast, there are many good products to choose from various stages, now is the time to choose new energy vehicles, which can be demonstrated from the rising penetration rate of electric vehicles in China this year.
Li Bin's response actually said the current situation of the new energy vehicle industry, although more and more people have accepted and purchased new energy vehicles, but the automobile market is still the world of oil vehicles, and many families will not buy new energy vehicles as the first car in the family. The controversy over the oil truck and tram on the Internet is also overwhelming, and the entire automobile market is also changing with each passing day. At present, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles is less than 20%, and the new energy vehicle strategies formulated by the state are planned to 2025 or 2030.
We have reason to believe that new energy vehicles must have a future, but the future must be Weilai? Let the market prove it all.