At the Xiaomi press conference on March 30, 2021, Lei Jun said that he would personally lead Xiaomi to build a car, and even pressed his lifelong honor and reputation. 2021 can be called the first year of cross-border car manufacturing, Baidu, Ali, Tencent, Xiaomi and other Internet companies have announced to join the car industry. Because in the past 2021, the sales of new energy vehicles have reached 3.4 million. Although Huawei, as a leader of Chinese technology companies, has not officially announced that it has joined the ranks of car manufacturers, in 2021, Huawei has participated in the research and development and manufacture of three cars, namely the Polar Fox Alpha S, the Xilis SF5 and the AITO Q&A M5.
For the public, Huawei is equivalent to the symbol of China's highest technology, and Huawei continues to expand its business boundaries, which does make many Chinese people feel happy.
In particular, Huawei has also been involved in the key business of intelligent driving, three-electric system, and even laser sensors equipped with intelligent cars, which makes many people expect that Huawei's achievements in the automotive field do not belong to the German Bosch company.
However, at present, whether it is a partner, other domestic car companies, or even many car consumers, they feel that Huawei's approach is difficult to understand, and even gives a bad review.
As we all know, Huawei has always emphasized "no car" before, this concept is actually no problem, after all, car manufacturing is a system project, once the brand operation is not good, it will face huge losses, and in terms of technology and parts, it is difficult to obtain orders from other car companies.
If it is simply to provide intelligent driving technology and some key parts of the car, which means that the domestic and foreign auto giants are potential customers of Huawei, Huawei is equivalent to cutting into the business of the German Bosch company, then the future market will not be underestimated, and the profit is high, the business will be relatively stable, and the market value is also not cheap.
Therefore, when Huawei announced last year that it would not build cars, many domestic car brands extended an olive branch and were willing to cooperate with Huawei, and brands such as Weilai Automobile, BYD, Beiqi Blue Valley, and Changan Automobile were all supporters of Huawei.
However, paradoxically, because Huawei's business has been chased and blocked by many parties in the United States, revenue and profits have taken a sharp turn for the worse, and Huawei needs to expand a new blue ocean of revenue to provide the group with long-term stable cash flow and rapid growth in research and development expenditure.
Therefore, whether to build a car has become a contradiction for Huawei. Personally building a car means that if successful, Huawei cars can achieve annual sales of hundreds of billions, Huawei's current contrarian trend will also be reversed, the price is Huawei's car research and development layout, may be limited to its own car brand.
Therefore, Huawei can only consider compromise, through cooperation with some small and medium-sized new energy vehicles, improve their bargaining power and control, which also has the Polar Fox Alpha S and Cyrus SF5, which is easy to understand why SAIC Motor is unwilling to cooperate with Huawei, and the cooperation between Weilai Automobile and Huawei has also been terminated.
Even so, the Polar Fox Alpha and Cyrus SF5 are not favored by the market, which also makes Huawei feel like a needle, after all, for Huawei to enter any industry, there is a belief in doing the best.
In the end, Huawei had to go down in person, found a weak Jinkang Automobile Company to cooperate, from product design to research and development, almost single-handedly, to personally create a car.
This also has last month's Huawei AITO Q&A M5. The car is almost completely devoid of traces of Cyrus and Jinkang cars. Once released, there were 7,000 orders in half a month, exceeding the sales volume of the Xilis SF5 for eight months, but compared with the order volume after the release of popular models such as BYD, Great Wall and Changan, it is still not worth mentioning. How the subsequent sales volume is, we have to observe again.
After the release of the AITO Q&I M5, the owners who bought the Cyrus SF5 before began to be dissatisfied, because the Cyrus SF5 came out with the news of the cessation of production, and even the store did not have the Cyris SF5, and the store was also upgraded to the AITO store. Even the original phone became the official phone of AITO.
Even when the owner buys, tell the owner that the car has Huawei HICAR and car WIFI, but the car sold is only Huawei HICAR, and there is no car WIFI at all. And the time of release of the two cars is only half a year apart, the price difference is only more than 30,000 yuan, and the performance difference is very large, many car owners have said that they have been cut leeks.
After that, the official of Cyrus issued a statement that the order of Cyrus SF5 will continue to be received, and for the first owner who previously purchased Cyrus SF5, the warranty of the car and range extender will be upgraded to life. In this way, the matter gradually came to an end.
However, the release of Huawei AITO has also caused trouble to investors in many automakers, and the "1873 Davidson Innovation Lab" jointly established by Beiqi Blue Valley and Huawei before, so many investors are asking whether the cooperation between BAIC and Huawei is still continuing and how to continue.
However, it can be seen from here that Huawei's involvement in the automotive field is currently not thorough enough, and its positioning is swinging left and right, facing the doubts of partners, OEMs and consumers. It is certain that only Huawei has full control of AITO vehicles and is fully responsible for the operation and management of products, it may be possible to make Huawei AITO cars bigger and stronger, otherwise sales will still not start.