On the big screen of Liu Xiaolin, a dark world map opened up, and four major areas were lit up. Standing in front of the screen, Weilai CEO Li Bin introduced to everyone in the audience that these highlights are the next stop that Weilai will arrive. The specific goal is that by 2025, NIO will enter more than 25 countries and regions around the world. After landing in Norway in 2021, in 2022, WEIO will land in four European countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark.
The people in the audience filled the Suzhou Olympic Stadium for a small part, and together with more live viewers, witnessed Li Bin's excited gesture standing at the gate of the "New World" at the end of 2021.
The day after the map was displayed, Li Bin couldn't help but remind the media at the communication meeting that there were "Easter eggs" on the map. The reporters replayed this picture, compared with the sea battle plan that Li Bin has released, and saw that there were no surprises in several major highlight areas, and although Saudi Arabia, Hawaii, and Singapore in the small highlights had something to circle, the industry did not have the same interest in cities as foreign media.
According to experience, Li Bin is so happy, indicating that in the matter of going to sea, the strategy and the "careful machine" have been drawn up. But anyone who has been in the "ICU" should also know that fatal blows often come unexpectedly.
The "new world" in Li Bin's eyes not only unfolds on this map, but its other entrance is more interesting to the outside world. The listing of the "most beautiful" NEW CAR of Weilai, the intelligent electric coupe ET5, which costs less than 300,000 yuan, has allowed Weilai to explore the list of impulse shopping for more Chinese people.
The rhythm of one new car a year has also been broken: in 2022, THERE will be three new cars delivered and released by NIO, and a new popular brand will also surface. Li Bin announced that NIO has stepped into a larger market, one where Chinese auto consumers are most concentrated.
"I feel that the development of our next few years is a new chapter". Li Bin said.
Before the arrival of the "New World", Li Bin took Weilai to stay in the "Old World" of the car for 7 years. In the past 7 years, behind the two major emotional labels of "selling misery" and "light madness" given by the outside world, Li Bin, He Xiaopeng and Li Xiang have joined forces to vividly interpret the "destruction" of self-made cars on personal spirit and survival attitude, and also carried out "punching the face" of "lowering the threshold for car manufacturing" and the so-called "asset-light model" for 7 years.
Although in the long river of the automobile industry for more than a hundred years, 7 years can only be regarded as a start, far from enough to talk about standing firm, but Li Bin obviously can't wait, he believes that the "smell of gasoline" should disappear from people's lives faster.
As a "voice-over", the communication meeting of the 100 Electric Vehicles Association at the end of 2021 conveyed the same exciting conclusion: China's new energy vehicles have completed the switch from the growth period to the high-speed growth period, from oversupply to short supply, from policy-driven to market-driven.
Of all the predictions related to smart transportation and electric vehicles in China, 2022 has been labeled as the "first year of the outbreak". In the heat wave, can Li Bin continue to become the chief "flag bearer"? In the face of sales data, the answer is not uniform.
But Li Bin threw out the goal hidden in his heart for 7 years: to turn the BBA (Mercedes-Benz BMW Audi) into the NBA, and it does not matter which "B" to replace. In the first 11 months of this year, BBA sales in China were between 600,000 and 700,000, while NIO's full-year sales in 2021 were 91,429 units. In front of this Flag, "not understanding why there are still people buying fuel cars" is really not a "wild talk".
Overnight in Suzhou, it seems to have become a new starting point.
Imagine Berlin
"I don't understand, why do you have to go to Berlin? Berlin is not a modern city! A few days after Weilai announced that it would make Berlin, Germany, the next stop in Europe, a German car company in China when the top management of the Economic Observation Network chatted about this topic, could not help but "spit".
Although he did not understand, in the past few years, more than one new car brand has made Berlin its first stop in Germany. In 2019, Tesla confirmed that it will build a factory in Berlin, and on the last day of 2021, tesla Model Y has been witnessed being shipped out of the Berlin gigafactory. Including Weilai, China's new high-end brands, especially smart electric vehicle brands, will also drive into Berlin as an important symbol of entering the heart of Europe.
Although Suzhou NIO DAY let Li Bin fall into the "crazy" controversy again, Li Bin himself does not seem to care about it. The new situation that is about to open up overseas has given him the imagination of seeing Nio fans on the streets of Berlin and Hawaii.
In the face of this imagination, the outside world's concerns about Weilai's loss of new car sales crowns for several months and the continuous decline in stock prices have become narrow "short-sighted". Li Bin's logic is that the trade-off within the camp of new car brands is not looking at each other, and their common "enemy" is fuel vehicles. In the fuel vehicle position, the right to speak is not in the hands of Chinese car companies. To solve the fact that "why do people still buy fuel vehicles", which makes him extremely frustrated, Li Bin needs to occupy the hinterland of fuel vehicles.
This logic is combined with the reason why many Chinese car brands must go global, making Germany the first major station in Europe after Nio's test of Norway.
As an automotive empire with Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi and Volkswagen, Germany faces the most severe emission reduction task in Europe and implements the most severe carbon emission penalties for automobiles. For NIO, this is a real opportunity and a challenge.
In addition to Berlin, NIO has also set up a research and development site in Munich, Germany. But there are BMWs in Munich, and no car brand will rush to use this place as a landing point into Germany.
Although in the era of electric vehicles, the opportunity to go to sea is considered to be greater, but Li Bin is unusually cautious - the tension of entering Berlin, so that he does not have a little arrogance to release.
"For a car brand with a Chinese background and positioned in a mainstream high-end market, it is a very big challenge to enter a very mature market like Europe and the United States."
"The challenge is great" — a rare assertion that Li Bin repeatedly emphasized in an interview. He tirelessly explained where the challenge is: "We have to adapt to some local regulations, including data protection, privacy and many other aspects, we have to carry out a lot of software and product development, and the local service system also needs time to build." There are a lot of challenges. ”
First of all, "next year will go into Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, and in Germany, next year there will be a lot of emphasis on building service networks, and I think this challenge is much bigger than we think." ”
Secondly, "if you go to the United States, the challenge will be very big, not only others are relatively unfamiliar with our brand, but also including carbon border taxes, many data protection regulations, etc., very strict." ”
It is interesting to note that another original intention of having to go to sea is - "only in China to develop, it is very hard." China, Europe and the United States together account for almost 90% of the world's mainstream high-end market, and Li Bin believes that the future of Weilai cannot be only in China, and cannot be imprisoned by the trend of "internal fighting" and more monks and less meat. On the other hand, China is the largest market, and if Weilai can kill from this Red Sea, it can gain a foothold in other markets, "Where will the competition be fiercer than China?" ”
There is not much outside world doubt about the decision to "go to sea", but Li Bin has made so many theoretical and practical logical arguments, which is not only for external export, but also like convincing himself. Objectively, this can at least allow Weilai not to doubt the rationality of the starting point when facing unforeseen obstacles in 2022.
"We never expected anything to go viral, there is no such good thing." Li Bin said he was ready enough patience. And his partner, Weilai co-founder and president Qin Lihong, pointed to his increasingly penetration rate of white hair, saying that Li Bin has adapted to the jet lag experience of holding European meetings every night and continuing to hold American meetings in the morning.
In addition to the patience of fighting a protracted war, Li Bin insists on all self-operation abroad, which means that in the next 4 years, Weilai's capital and industrial chain layout will enter a new level of pressure. However, the soldiers and horses did not move, and the grain and grass went first. After another additional issuance in November 2021, Weilai already has 50 billion yuan in cash lying on its account.
After 7 years, reserve funds are still Li Bin's top priority. The stalls were getting bigger and bigger, and the despair of "cutting off the grain" could not stand the second time.
The qualification of "can't hold on" is gone
The auto ambitions of punching Europe and sweeping the United States are not only strategically implemented overseas. WEILAI's fifth mass-produced model, the ET5, directly shouted "5 is greater than 3", and it is two "3s" - BMW 3 Series and Tesla Model 3. These are German and American models, as well as two mainstream benchmark models in the field of fuel and electric vehicles.
From the perspective of sales, from January to November this year, the total sales volume of the BMW 3 Series in China was 158,900 units, ranking first in the luxury car sales list; Tesla Model 3 sold 128,000 units in November. Both cars sell at an average of more than 10,000 units per month. The ec6, Nio's best-selling model in the first 11 months, sold 36,535 vehicles, with an average monthly sales of more than 3,000 vehicles. It ranks 19th among new energy passenger cars.
At the rate of doubling sales of new energy vehicles every year, few people comment on this goal. However, the domestic Tesla Model 3 took only about 5 months from the official delivery to the sales of more than 10,000 - this is the peak in front of the Weilai ET5.
Talking about the sales gap, Li Bin frankly said that he could not outperform the market in 2021, but he believes that Weilai's "no run" represents the overall characteristics of the market: the penetration rate of the high-end market has not improved much, but the proportion of electric vehicles in the range of more than 200,000 has increased significantly. "The cars launched by several of our competitors this year don't seem to be particularly capable of fighting," he said, referring to the traditional luxury car brand.
In Li Bin's eyes, this shows a huge opportunity: in the mainstream high-end market of more than 300,000, electric vehicles are still too few. He believes that as the cheapest model available to NIO, ET5 can seize this opportunity to open the bright road of NIO's 20% share of the 4 million vehicle market.
Et5 set a record for new car orders, so that Li Bin has the desire to stand on a high place and "point out the car market". He has seen the "problem": although neither his or his competitor's electric car has outperformed the market, the competitor's fuel luxury car is still selling in full swing.
"There are also a lot of gasoline car users who don't trust electric vehicles, and I think that although this (new energy vehicle sales) ratio has risen, it is still a bit small." This line of thinking seems to explain why Li Bin "said the wrong thing again" in Suzhou.
Turning "BBA" into "NBA" may be an effective way to reduce the likelihood that Li Bin will be convicted of "one sentence.". But a hidden problem is that the BBA represents a solid camp of the three giants of luxury cars, and Weilai has defined its territory with the "mainstream high-end electric vehicle market" since its birth.
In the segmentation of automotive products, "high-end" and "luxury" do not mean the same thing. Each BBA has its own interpretation of "luxury" and has become part of the brand's DNA. With the rise of the high-end intelligent electric vehicle market, the traditional old luxury car has more than once emphasized meaningfully that luxury electrification is not a simple accumulation of electronic functions. On Baidu, the topic of "whether Weilai is a luxury brand" has also been continuously concerned.
However, in the "new world" of Nio, the existing NIO brand, or "NIO brand", will be held higher by the launch of a parallel new brand. Li Bin said that the next step is to enter the mainstream mass market, and hundreds of people are already busy with the new brand.
The new brand will echo Li Bin's observation that "the proportion of electric vehicles in the price range of more than 200,000 has instead 'penetration' risen". The accurate news is that the relationship between the new brand and the existing Nio brand can be compared to "Volkswagen" and "Audi".
From the "mainstream high-end" to the "mainstream public", starting from more than 400,000 yuan, the product line is gradually moved down, and after the downward brand ceiling is opened, where will Weilai be brought, the imagination space and uncertainty of this topic are large enough.
The outside world is more concerned about whether Weilai can return to the top of the new car sales list in 2022. Starting from the second half of 2021, except for September, NIO lost all the sales champions in the remaining 5 months. The annual sales volume was 91,429 vehicles, ranking second below Xiaopeng.
For the existence of the "new car sales ranking list" and the name of adjusting the combination of "Wei", "small" and "rational" according to the sales ranking, Li Bin said with a helpless face that it was meaningless, and the new car manufacturers should join hands to grab shares from fuel vehicles. This gives the media the illusion that "the new car manufacturer is one" and "the meat rots in the pot does not distinguish between you and me".
"The two-year meeting between the present and the next year (2021 and 2022) is the (time period) for Weilai to carry forward the upper and lower levels," Li Bin concluded. In the past year, NIO's employees have grown from more than 7,000 to 16,000. Matching the concept of "Da Wei Lai", from research and development to operation, Wei Lai's front line is getting longer and longer, and Li Bin shoulders the sadness and joy of more and more people. Compared with two years ago, he seems to be less qualified to "hold on".
Four years to see?
Within NIO, 2021 is set as an inflection point. In the eyes of the outside world, in the next 4 years, Weilai will face a different angle from the previous 7 years, but it is also full of unknown distances. And Li Bin turned Tesla into coordinates.
"In terms of sales, we're almost 4 years behind Tesla, which is equivalent to Tesla before the model 3 delivery in 2017." A CEO who does not "care" about short-term sales rises and falls, positioning the state of the enterprise from the perspective of sales volume, it is easy to taste a lot of subtext.
Four years ago, in 2017, Tesla sold 100,000 cars and lost $2.2 billion, and its revenue exceeded 10 billion to $11.75 billion. In terms of sales and revenue, Weilai is indeed very similar to Tesla in 2017.
More similarly, Tesla rolled off the Model 3 in 2017 and entered China, the world's largest new energy vehicle market, in 2018, opening up explosive growth. Tesla announced its global sales in 2021: up about 87.4% year-on-year to 936,000 units. Although no specific sales in the Chinese market were announced, from January to November 2021, sales in the Chinese market accounted for 47% of Tesla's total sales.
According to normal logical deduction, for Weilai, who is also about to enter the international market, his goal is obviously to become the current Tesla four years later.
"Tesla has done the efficiency orientation very extremely, how do we do the degree of intelligence, while doing an efficiency-oriented car, in short, it can be cheaper." Complying with the efficiency orientation to achieve high cost performance is the large-scale sprint road set by Li Bin. This can be seen from ET5's constant questioning of why new cars do not use lidar, and why the pixels of the camera have "dropped" to 3 million.
In contrast, NIO may be following this path in product development, but in terms of operation, it is obviously far from efficiency-oriented. To this day, the "results-oriented" approach around "user satisfaction" at any cost is still controversial.
From the perspective of the suspension and reduction of production in the hot season due to chip and factory upgrades in 2021, with the continuous extension of the front line, how to keep the pace of development and efficiency not disconnected will be the ability that Li Bin always needs to improve as a manager.
Before the scale is reached, more "cost" and more than expected challenges will be Li Bin's daily work: supply chain security, production capacity breakthroughs, European and American market thresholds, global replacement power station construction, maintenance of the huge Weilai community, and as the most eye-catching new car brand, it will have to face a variety of "gray rhinoceros" events that have been lurking on the road.
Facing the future, Li Bin is also responsible for two figures: first, the continuous maintenance of software and hardware of existing models "until 2038"; second, NIO has delivered a total of 156,600 new cars, and the scale of users has more than doubled compared with last year. The expansion of the user base has brought about an increase in service contacts, which Li Bin admits has become a challenge.
However, for the outside world to more for Wei, Li Bin has used sometimes the time dimension is extended a little longer, many perspectives are different to understate the answer. In the "long-term" thinking, Li Bin can already make fun of "the stock price has been more than one piece before".
But people are clearly more focused on the present. There are no eternal friends, only eternal interests. As China's new energy vehicle market enters an era of full market competition, it is only a matter of time before the "inner volume" of smart electric vehicles becomes a reality.
The theme of NIO DAY at the end of 2021 is "Hello, world", and Li Bin explained that this theme does not correspond to the large-scale overseas strategy that NIO is about to start, but specifically responds to the diverse world that has made everyone feel uneasy and anxious this year.
Standing at the entrance of the "new world", with 50 billion yuan of cash lying on his account, enough to repeat himself on the road to build a car, is there no longer the uneasiness and anxiety of 7 years ago?