Image source @ Visual China
Text | Deep sound, the author | Li Tingting
The mobility industry has completed a new financing. On December 21, GAC's travel platform Ruqi Travel announced that it has received a strategic investment from autonomous driving company Wenyuan Zhixing, which A week ago announced a strategic investment in Wenyuan Zhixing. The two investment events before and after have closely bundled the implementation of the three parties of the main engine factory, the travel platform and the artificial intelligence company.
The smell of smoke in the field of travel is getting heavier and heavier. In Q4 this year alone, the shared travel market has successively reported several large-scale financing and giant entry news:
At the beginning of December, it was reported that Geely Group would launch the online ride-hailing aggregation platform "Happiness Ten Million Homes", which will be Geely's fourth sub-brand in the field of travel after Cao Cao Travel, Courtesy Travel and Yao Travel;
In November, Alibaba took a 10% stake in Volkswagen Travel and continued to increase the number of online ride-hailing;
In October, T3 Travel, jointly initiated by FAW, Dongfeng and Changan, completed the A round of financing.
The shared travel market, which has experienced several years of fierce battles and chicken feathers, has once again been crowded with players from all walks of life, and has once again ushered in the attention of capital. Behind this is the joint action of many variables: the frustration of giant Didi, the change of travel habits under the epidemic, the revolutionary wave of the automobile industry, and most importantly, the breakthrough of technology and the favorable policies, which promote the future of commercial operation of autonomous driving.
The pattern of the travel industry is loose, and the continuous financing news has started the second half. But fortunately, compared with the endless subsidies, burning money, and expansion, platforms and capital pay more attention to growth and endurance in the new round of technology-driven competition.
The OEM background is favored
With the technological breakthrough of automobile electrification and intelligence, the overall travel market has entered a period of change. The new car-making forces are setting off huge waves for the traditional automobile industry chain and the international capital market, and at the same time, the new travel forces are also stirring up the travel market controlled by the Internet manufacturers.
Capital agitation is a signal that the industry has entered a window of opportunity. Compared with the wave of financing of online ride-hailing platforms around 2012, the preferences of capital at present have changed significantly.
According to IT Orange data, there were 31 financing incidents in the transportation industry in 2021. After sorting out, the financing of the transportation industry is mainly divided into two categories.
The first type of enterprises that provide smart mobility solutions are mostly younger entrepreneurial companies, focusing on a certain link in the travel ecosystem and providing infrastructure for more efficient transportation operations in the future. For example, Zhuoshi Zhitong, which is engaged in the application of face recognition and transportation big data, won two consecutive financings from Qualcomm and Yaotu Capital in May and June; Fengxing Zhitu, which is engaged in technology services in the field of maps, completed a series B financing in November, and the investor is Trusttrust Capital.
The second type is the emerging new travel forces, unlike the new car-making forces that have come from across the border and started from scratch, most of the travel platforms that harvest financing at present have the background of the main engine factory and have stable operating capabilities.
Cao Cao Travel, which has completed financing twice this year, T3 Travel, which has raised a single financing amount of up to 7.7 billion yuan, Hello Travel, which has once again received alibaba's increase, and Mass Transportation, a veteran taxi company in Shanghai, all have many years of operating experience and occupy a certain market share. This clearly reflects a change in the attitude of capital, preferring to bet on market-proven old players in the competition of the second half of the industry than the emerging platform full of uncertainty.
In addition to preferring platforms that are in a stable period of development, capital has also paid special attention to travel platforms with OEMs this year. In addition to the above-mentioned Cao Cao Travel and T3 Travel, GAC's Ruqi Travel also reported in November this year that it was promoting a financing scale of about 1 billion yuan, of which Guangzhou Automobile Industry Group invested 350 million yuan to participate.
The "Golden Triangle" of mobility
Primary market investors are always the most acutely aware group, and the trajectory of capital flow in the travel market this year outlines two major trends in the development of the travel industry.
The clearest trend is that smart technologies are redefining mobility. Capital's focus on To B AI mobility solution startups, the cross-border entry of technology giants, and the strategic cooperation between mobility platforms and autonomous driving companies are all industry ecosystems preparing for the future of travel with Robotaxi's participation.
The commercialization problem that has been plaguing Robotaxi's actual operation is also approaching the inflection point step by step - according to McKinsey's forecast, Robotaxi's cost advantage after the cancellation of security personnel and large-scale deployment will be highlighted, and it will reach an inflection point between 2025 and 2027 compared with the cost of traditional taxis - which further stimulates all walks of life in the travel market to actively prepare for the battle and promote the large-scale normalization of Robotaxi's operation.
Technological breakthroughs have led to another trend, namely the innovation of industrial value chains. In an article on autonomous driving in The Economist, the question was asked, the combination of the ride-hailing model and driverless technology has made the business model of automakers face the most profound challenges in a century, so who is the future? Ride-hailing, automakers, or tech giants?
The answer to this question is emerging.
Once, the shared travel track was put on the limelight and fell off the altar, on the one hand, because of the hard wounds in the business model with large upfront investment and long return cycle, on the other hand, because the fanatical capital will blow the bubble infinitely. After experiencing painful lessons, both platforms and capitals have deeply realized that blindly burning money cannot burn the future, and the travel industry needs a new way out.
Therefore, mobility platforms with regional advantages have gradually emerged in recent years. Ruqi Travel, which focuses on the Greater Bay Area, and T3 Travel, which is deeply rooted in Wuhan and Chongqing, are representatives of regional platforms, combined with the regional resource advantages radiated by the main engine factory, bypassing the route of burning money and expanding, and effectively realizing the optimization of costs and the construction of service ecology.
In addition, the travel platform with the background of the main engine factory has been more deeply involved in the research and development and landing of Robotaxi relying on the resources of the industrial chain of the main engine factory. For example, the cooperation between GAC, Ruqi Travel and Wenyuan Zhixing means that the integration of data, resources and technologies between OEMs, travel platforms and autonomous driving companies will reconstruct the business model and cost structure of the entire ride-hailing market.
The answer to The Economist's question is now obvious: the future of mobility may not be controlled by a single industrial actor. The main engine factory grasps the vehicle driving data and the resources of the whole industry chain of travel, the travel platform masters massive travel data and operation experience, and the autonomous driving company continuously optimizes the algorithm based on the data, and the "golden triangle" composed of the three can build a solid foundation for the future of the travel industry.
What to fight in the second half?
When the industry returns to rationality, when the future industrial model becomes clearer, capital will give more expectations to the new travel forces with the background of the main engine factory.
With the support of capital, the new travel forces have begun to compete in market expansion, ecological construction, technology layout and other aspects.
The stronger in terms of market expansion is T3 Mobility. At the end of last year, T3 Travel released the 4833 strategy, the online ride-hailing business landed in 48 cities across the country, accelerated and landed the "online ride-hailing business + patrol network integrated super taxi + automatic driving ecological operation alliance" three major strategic sectors, and by the end of 2021 to achieve the daily average order target of 3 million for all business lines. On December 11, according to its latest disclosure, the order volume of the T3 travel platform exceeded 3 million on December 10, refreshing the single-day peak record, and has now landed in 66 cities across the country.
However, after experiencing the lessons of the online ride-hailing war, most of the new travel forces are more cautious about burning money and expanding. Therefore, for example, Cao Cao Travel chose to tap the increment in the subdivision scene and launched the enterprise version; such as Qi Travel, it adopted the "ripple model", did not line up in the national market, but focused on the Greater Bay Area, expanded the market according to local conditions, penetrated the central city such as Guangzhou, and then spread to the surrounding areas.
Although intensive cultivation does not have an advantage in the expansion speed, it can devote more efforts to the construction of service quality and service ecology, which is more beneficial than harmful to the long-term development of the platform. As Jiang Hua, CEO of Ruqi Travel, expressed in a recent interview with Caijing: "The goal of large car companies to enter the travel industry is to grasp the market's demand for future cars and travel. In terms of strategic trade-offs, intensive farming is far more important than blindly pursuing scale and expansion speed. ”
The competitiveness of the service ecology is the long-term competitiveness of the travel platform after the subsidy war, and will occupy a greater weight in the future development of the travel platform. Cao Cao Travel has also expressed a similar recognition that shared mobility has now moved from the 1.0 era of single-dimensional competition to the 2.0 era of ecosystem competition, including how to manage the experience of large-scale driver services. At the recent Guangzhou Auto Show, Ruqi Chuxing revealed that it is about to launch Ruqi car service, layout the after-car service market, not only do online car-hailing, but also bring vehicle maintenance, insurance, charging and other business circles into the business circle, which the major shareholder behind Ruqi Gac Group can provide strong support.
Of course, it can completely leverage the future travel market pattern, or a breakthrough in autonomous driving technology and commercialization.
Travel platforms have also gathered into the field of automatic driving, such as T3 Travel initiated the establishment of the first autonomous driving ecological operation alliance - Aotou Alliance; CaoCao Travel and Geely Group's automotive sector and automatic driving team to promote the application of autonomous driving technology; Xiangdao Travel, with the support of SAIC's resources, cooperated with autonomous driving start-up Momenta to open Robotaxi pilot services in Shanghai; Ruqi Travel is a deep strategic cooperation with Wenyuan Zhixing. It is planned to build a Robotaxi fleet of more than 200 vehicles in 2022 and a V2X fleet of more than 1,000 vehicles.
The action of the travel platform, together with the main engine factory and the autonomous driving technology company, once again confirms that the transformation of the travel industry requires the joint efforts of the "Golden Triangle". In this process, the operational strength of the travel platform, the resource strength of the main engine factory, and the technical strength of the autonomous driving enterprise are all factors that affect the future victory or defeat.
The first half of the travel industry is a dangerous road burned by huge capital, and the second half is a thorny road driven by technology. Compared with fighting marketing and subsidies, the first thing that the new forces of travel need to overcome at present is the battle of technology, and in the future long-term development, they will also face the cost war and operation war of Robotaxi.
The future competition may not be as crazy and dramatic as it was in the "ride-hailing subsidy war", but it will require more sustained patience and more solid investment. This tests the health of the mobility platform – whether it can survive the fierce competition and serve users well, and whether the platform grows – whether it has the strength to promote and implement the commercial operation of Robotaxi.
At this year's Shanghai Auto Show, Ruqi Chuxing unveiled the strategy of "dual axle drive", which pursues the coordinated development of health and growth. On the one hand, we have established a "technology axis" with autonomous driving technology as the core, and on the other hand, we have implemented an "ecological axis" with the travel service ecology as the core.
Technology and ecology are also the two most important focus points of the current travel industry, and the supply-side structural reform brought about by it will fundamentally reshape the business model and drive demand expansion.
With the "Golden Triangle" combined, Robotaxi's future may come sooner than imagined.