Author | Shan
Original production | New energy wave
Data from November shows that new car-making forces are staging a "meat grinder war".
The pattern of new car-making forces is still Small Liwei. In November, Xiaopeng led the three with sales of 15,613 vehicles, ideally delivering 13,485 units and Weilai delivering 10,878 units, both of which reached the highest sales in history. You chase me, the competition is fierce, the temporary lead of Xiaopeng Motors, is not an excellent long-distance runner?
1. Delivered more than 10,000 yuan for three consecutive months
The wholesale sales volume of new energy vehicles in China in the first 11 months of this year reached 2.514 million units, an increase of 178.3% year-on-year. Among them, Xiaopeng Automobile's performance is quite good, with a cumulative delivery volume of 82,155 units, an increase of 285% year-on-year.
In November this year alone, Xiaopeng Automobile achieved 15,613 units in a single month and delivered more than 10,000 vehicles in three consecutive months, an increase of 54% month-on-month and a year-on-year increase of 270%. As of the end of November this year, the cumulative number of deliveries in history exceeded 120,000 units.
On the other hand, Xiaopeng currently has three products on sale, P7, P5 and G3i, involving cars, SUVs and other models, which are the most complete new forces in the existing product matrix.
From the perspective of sales, Xiaopeng has gained a firm foothold in the new forces of car manufacturing.
The rapid growth in sales volume naturally brings bright revenue. In the first quarter of 2021, Xiaopeng achieved revenue of 2.951 billion yuan, an increase of 6 times year-on-year; this data has a larger outbreak in the second quarter of this year, Xiaopeng achieved revenue of 6.712 billion yuan in the second quarter of this year, an increase of 6.7 times year-on-year, and the growth rate ranked first among the three new car-making forces.
2, Xiaopeng is not short of money now
But Xiaopeng is still loss-making, losing 79.9 billion yuan and 1.98 billion yuan in the first and second quarters of 2021, respectively, and Xiaopeng's explanation is that it has increased investment in research and development and fair value changes.
However, fortunately, since the third quarter of last year, Xiaopeng's gross profit margin has turned positive, and the gross profit margins in the first and second quarters of 2021 are 11.2% and 11.6%, respectively, showing a good trend of steady growth.
In the final analysis, the essence of car manufacturing is still manufacturing, which needs to understand both the automotive industry and technology, so it takes money to make cars, and it needs to continue to burn money. Compared with Internet giants and traditional car companies, Xiaopeng, a new car-making force, has a first-mover advantage, but does not have the ability to continue to make blood.
Xiaopeng, which is in a period of rapid development, needs to rebrand existing models and develop new cars. All of this requires money.
Therefore, the three major domestic car-making forces have chosen to go public, and Xiaopeng and Ideal are "double listing", seizing the opportunity in advance to raise money.
Judging from the current situation, Xiaopeng is not short of money. When it was listed on the U.S. stock market last year, Xiaopeng raised $1.7 billion, and raised another $2.5 billion in allotments last December. As of March 31 this year, Xiaopeng Motors had cash, cash equivalents, restricted funds, short-term deposits, short-term investments and long-term deposits totaling RMB36.2 billion.
The increase in the registered capital of Xiaopeng this time also confirms the view of "no shortage of money", and this measure has two major advantages:
1. Xiaopeng has increased its investment in technology and research and development
2. It shows the good trend of the current development of the enterprise, and the capital chain is sufficient, giving many investors more confidence
So what did Xiaopeng do after getting financing? Unlike NIO's "NIO Plan", Xiaopeng chose to deepen the cultivation of automatic driving and intelligent cockpit technology.
3. The life and death chess of Xiaopeng Motors
As can be seen from Xiaopeng's prospectus, in the first quarter of 2019, 2020 and 2021, Xiaopeng's R&D expenditure was 2.07 billion yuan, 1.726 billion yuan and 535 million yuan, accounting for 89.2%, 29.5% and 18.1% of the total revenue, which is second to none in China.
Thanks to this, Xiaopeng Automobile is fully ahead of the new car-making forces in terms of technology, especially in automatic driving technology. Among them, Xiaopeng's newly developed automatic driving system XPILOT3.0 is the highest level of autonomous driving technology in the current market.
If the current new energy vehicle companies are still fighting in terms of car performance and battery endurance, then Xiaopeng has already found another way and entered the field of intelligent cars. This is a fairly broad market, and the penetration rate of autonomous driving systems in China's passenger car market at Level 2 and above has grown rapidly from 3.0% in 2018 to 13.0% in 2020, and is expected to reach nearly 34.2% by 2025.
Xiaopeng has always planned to pay for software, because once the software is successfully developed, the cost of replication is extremely low, and the profit is just around the corner. Judging from the current situation, Xiaopeng's abacus of selling software to make money is really likely to succeed.
XPILOT3.0 was launched globally through OTA in January this year. In the first quarter of 2021, Xiaopeng recognized the revenue of autonomous driving software for the first time in the vehicle revenue, and the cumulative payment rate of XPILOT3.0 exceeded 20%, reaching about 25% in March 2021.
At present, the sales volume of Xiaopeng Automobile is rising steadily, and the autonomous driving technology developed by the company has also achieved initial results, and with the expansion of the market for new energy vehicles, Xiaopeng Automobile will also usher in a more critical take-off moment.
To some extent, the success or failure of the automatic driving system is actually Xiaopeng's life and death chess in this new energy vehicle "meat grinder war".