The author | Mei Xukang
Editor| Hao Qiuhui
Core ideas
In the era of intelligent electric, the user's pursuit and acceptance of new things are constantly increasing, car companies need to adapt to the changes in technology and demand, and innovation has become the first requirement;
As vested interests in the former "partial science strategy", Great Wall and BYD must make up lessons under the current situation;
When the internal rolling of the automobile industry becomes a new normal, Chinese car companies may be able to roll out the characteristic development path.
"Mythical beasts, tanks, mech dragons, the Great Wall things are getting more and more magical." After the 2021 Guangzhou Auto Show, such discourse abounds.
To some extent, the emergence of these "magic models" proves that the market is becoming more youthful, and also represents the improvement of the speed of iterative updates of car companies' products.
Yiou Automobile believes that the logic behind it is: in the era of electric intelligence, the user's pursuit and acceptance of new things is increasing, car companies need to respond to changes in technology and demand, and innovation has become the first requirement.
As a heavyweight of new energy in the Chinese auto market, BYD's cumulative sales in 2021 were 740,000 units, an increase of 73.3% year-on-year, of which the cumulative sales of new energy vehicles in 2021 reached 604,000 units, an increase of 218.3% year-on-year.
In 2021, in the turbulent Chinese auto market, IFD is the representative of the southern car companies, and the Great Wall is the representative flag bearer of the northern car companies.
Great Wall Motor sold 1.28 million units in 2021, an increase of 15.2% year-on-year, and new energy sold 137,000 units from January to December, accounting for 10.7% of the total sales.
In terms of market value performance, BYD has soared all the way, the highest peak is close to one trillion, and the market value of the Great Wall has also risen all the way. Quietly, BYD and the Great Wall have firmly ranked among the top Chinese car companies.
01 "Partial Science Student" overtaking in the corner
In the Chinese auto market, BYD and The Great Wall are two "partial students".
Compared with BYD, the history of the Great Wall is even older, dating back to 1984.
It wasn't until 1990 that Wei Jianjun took over from Great Wall Motor Industries (the predecessor of Great Wall Motor) and chose a pickup track that didn't have many competitors at the time. In 1996, Great Wall Motors' first Pickup was launched, which quickly opened up the market, and Great Wall Motors began to gain a foothold in the Chinese automotive industry.
Around 2000, due to the characteristics of large space, SUVs began to become popular in the automobile market, and Wei Jianjun seized this opportunity to release his first economic SUV in 2002 - The Silver.
Since its release in 2011, the "National God Car" Haval H6 launched by the Great Wall has set a record of ranking first in domestic SUV sales for 101 months. This has helped the Great Wall to go to the road of domestic SUV hegemony.
However, in the development process of Great Wall Motors, we rarely see the figure of cars. In fact, the Great Wall also had a car business, Cool Bear, Great Wall C30 and C50 and other car models have been short-lived, in 2016, the Great Wall C30 and C50 stopped production, the Great Wall car business immediately stopped.
For the car business, which occupies half of the entire automotive industry, Great Wall resolutely gave up and ranked in the forefront of its own brands with only pickup trucks and SUVs.
If the Great Wall is a model focusing on SUVs and pickups, then BYD's bias is a new energy.
BYD, which started with the battery business, although it caused ridicule when it went down to build a car in 2003, the successive efforts of its F3, F6 and other fuel models have won a part of the market for BYD Automobile. But for BYD, the fuel model is only a transitional product in the early stage of its automotive business, in order to meet the market opening situation.
From the time of announcing the construction of cars, BYD's research and development of new energy vehicles has not stopped. In 2008, BYD's first DM model came out, and although sales were dismal, it also laid the foundation for its FUTURE DM-i and other technologies.
Although BYD has gone through a period of silence, after 2014, the new energy vehicle market has gradually shown prospects, BYD Dynasty series have been launched, sales have been rising, and by May 2021, BYD has successfully entered the million club of new energy vehicle sales.
Whether it is BYD's long-term layout of new energy or the Great Wall's strategy of focusing on SUVs, it has brought enough benefits to both sides in a period of time. The two are riding the wind and chasing the trend, and each of them is sitting on the same side of the current Chinese auto market.
02 The contest under "Hello Me Good"
In September last year, BYD transferred the "Wei" trademark to Great Wall Motors, staging a "hello and I am good" love drama.
But the two are bound to compete in the narrow road of the car market.
Although BYD and Great Wall are the top two in the market value of Chinese car companies today, BYD is still crushing in market value. However, from the perspective of financial data, BYD's revenue is higher than that of the Great Wall, and its net profit is slightly inferior.
BYD's financial performance in 2021 was underperformed due to the decline in the mask business, the rise in the price of upstream battery materials, the large number of accounts receivable that have not been received, and the expansion of battery and electric vehicle production capacity. In contrast, the Great Wall's revenue composition is more concentrated and its profitability is slightly stronger.
In terms of sales, although BYD's overall sales are difficult to compete with Great Wall Motors, it is firmly in a position of brother in the sales performance of new energy vehicles.
This is also related to BYD's long-term focus on the field of new energy vehicles, thanks to its long-term accumulation of electrification technology, BYD has formed a certain industry advantage, but also to a certain extent to promote its own high market value.
As far as the core components of new energy vehicles - power batteries are concerned, in 2021, the cumulative installed capacity of BYD new energy vehicle power batteries and energy storage batteries will be about 37.921GWh. The hive energy hatched by Great Wall Motors, as a rising star, is also struggling to catch up.
Great Wall Motors has taken a different path and laid out hydrogen energy with heavy gold. In March 2021, Great Wall Motor held a global conference on hydrogen energy strategy, announcing that it has built a hydrogen energy strategy covering the integrated supply chain ecology of "production-storage-transportation-plus-application", and released the strategic goal of hydrogen energy research and development and utilization - to achieve the top three global hydrogen energy market share by 2025.
According to Great Wall Motor, it has invested 2 billion yuan in research and development costs in the field of hydrogen energy since 2016, and will continue to invest more than 3 billion yuan in research and development expenses in the next 3 years to achieve 10,000 sets of production capacity.
Yiou Automobile believes that hydrogen energy vehicles have a certain imagination space, but they started late and are still a long way from their maturity.
Hybrid models, as the key transitional models from fuel vehicles to pure electric vehicles in the new energy vehicle track, are generally believed to be the main development models of major car companies for a long time in the future.
Among them, BYD DM-i and Great Wall Lemon DHT have formed a competitive trend in the market.
BYD DM-i is composed of a 1.5L Atkinson cycle engine, an EHS hybrid system and a hybrid blade battery. The Great Wall Lemon DHT consists of a 1.5L/1.5T hybrid special engine, a dual motor for power generation/drive, a fixed shaft gearbox, a dual motor controller and an integrated DCDC.
The biggest difference between the Great Wall Lemon DHT and BYD DM-i is that it has an additional two-gear transmission, based on the Great Wall to SUV and hardcore off-road as the main model, the user has higher requirements for its power, increasing the gearbox is to reduce fuel consumption while ensuring a certain degree of power, but what follows is that the complexity of the structure and the cost will rise in a straight line.
In contrast, the bydir DM-i system structure is more simple and intuitive, reducing the difficulty and cost of research and development, theoretically it will have better reliability, which will help its large-scale mass production on the car, but it has also made concessions in power output.
The difference in technical routes brought about by different user groups is beyond reproach, but the multi-party efforts of domestic hybrid technology have broken the situation in which the hybrid technology of foreign manufacturers such as Honda dominated the market in the past.
In the first half of the new energy vehicle track, BYD, Great Wall and other car companies come and go, jointly promoting the development of related technologies. However, the intelligent competition in the second half has just arrived, and it will be a "big test" that determines the fate of each car company, and the situation will be more intense.
The 03 exam is coming, and we are competing to make up the lessons
As vested interests in the former "partial science strategy", Great Wall and BYD must make up lessons under the current situation.
Previously, BYD is often criticized for its lack of intelligence, which is not the lack of BYD, many traditional car companies also have similar drawbacks, its shortcomings are mainly reflected in software services, intelligent ecological construction and other aspects, especially in the market's most concerned about the field of automatic driving.
As far as BYD is concerned, its car machine system, intelligent voice, UI and other aspects are often taken out by users to complain, and for the automatic driving plate, the DiPilot intelligent driver assistance system previously released by it has functions such as forward collision warning system, adaptive cruise, low-speed follow-up mode, lane departure warning system, blind spot detection, automatic parking and so on, but it does not have outstanding advantages. Compared with new forces such as Weilai and Xiaopeng, BYD's autonomous driving capabilities have yet to be replenished.
There is also another view in the market, BYD has always maintained a steady attitude towards autonomous driving, and does not want to be too aggressive.
The release of BYD's e platform 3.0 in September 2021 can be seen as one of the key symbols of BYD's transformation from electrification in the first half to intelligence in the second half of the new energy vehicle revolution, and a series of actions followed, and BYD is also accelerating the intelligent process.
At the end of 2021, BYD continued to make big moves, and on December 23, BYD announced that it had reached a strategic cooperation with RoboSense, a technology company with intelligent lidar systems. Sagitar Juchuang's lidar hardware, perception software and other technologies may complement BYD's technology accumulation and vertical integration capabilities.
On December 24, BYD and The intelligent driving technology company Momenta held a joint venture unveiling ceremony in Shenzhen, and officially announced the establishment of "Shenzhen Dipai Zhixing Technology Co., Ltd." According to public information, the registered capital of Dipai Zhixing is 100 million yuan, of which BYD Automobile Industry holds 60% of the shares and Momenta holds 40% of the shares.
These actions of BYD mark its attempt to further seize the heights of autonomous driving from various aspects such as automatic driving software and hardware, and are a supplement to its layout in the field of automatic driving.
On December 22, The Autonomous Driving Company, incubated by Great Wall Motor, received nearly 1 billion yuan in Series A financing from Meituan, Hillhouse Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, First Trip Holdings, and Jiuzhi Capital.
Compared with BYD, the Great Wall's autonomous driving started earlier. In 2015, Great Wall Motors dynamically demonstrated L3-level autonomous driving technology to the outside world; in 2019, Great Wall Motors demonstrated intelligent driving technologies such as L4-level urban autonomous driving, 5G remote unmanned driving, and fully automatic valet parking at the Digital Expo.
In the same year, The Company was founded, formerly known as the Great Wall Advanced Technology Research and Development Department, although it was only established for two years, the Millimae Assisted Driving Solution has been equipped with a number of models under the Great Wall, including mocha, latte, Macchiato, Haval Divine Beast, etc., and the mileage of auxiliary driving users has exceeded 4 million kilometers.
Similar to Honeycomb Energy, Zhixing is incubated by Great Wall Motors and then operated independently to empower Great Wall Motors' technology and ecology.
In bydy's long-running semiconductor field, on December 29, 2021, Great Wall Motor signed a strategic investment agreement with Hebei Tongguang Semiconductor Co., Ltd. to officially enter the semiconductor core industry.
Although BYD and Great Wall have different development routes in the intelligent track, they have the same destination and eventually return to the current core areas of the intelligent electric vehicle industry, such as batteries, chips, and intelligent driving.
In the "2021 China Auto Travel Industry Investment and Financing Market Insight Research Report" by Yiou Think Tank, Yiou Think Tank conducted statistics on the financing amount and number of financing events in China's auto travel industry segment in 2021. Among them, there were 102 financing incidents in the autonomous driving track, with a cumulative amount of 40.74 billion yuan, ranking among the top three, and other key intelligent hardware, travel technology and other fields have performed well.
Yiou Think Tank believes that 2021 is the third and final window period in the early stage of rapid growth of the intelligent electric vehicle industry.
It is not difficult to find that the first place in the figure is the new car-making forces, the amount of financing reached 77.2 billion yuan, in the face of the strong rise of many new car-making forces, BYD, Great Wall and other car companies may want to take advantage of this intelligent Dongfeng, step up the layout of intelligent tracks, and prepare for a more fierce competition situation in the future.
04 Landing "into the sea", the product rushed off
In 2022, both BYD and Great Wall will expand their product lineups.
Yiou Automobile learned that in 2022, BYD will have a number of models on the market, of which Dynasty.com will be led by Yuan Plus, Han DM-i, Song Max DM-i, etc. will be launched one after another, and in addition to the Dolphin models that have been released, there will be a number of marine life series and warship series models that will "enter the sea".
Ocean Network has the characteristics of being younger and stronger in new energy attributes, and after the gradual maturity of Dynasty Network, BYD began to try for different user groups. Among them, the marine life series is based on BYD's e3.0 platform, and the warship series is equipped with DM-i hybrid technology. At the same time, BYD is also establishing a marine network sales network to further subdivide different series of marketing channels and models.
In addition, on December 24, 2021, BYD and Daimler signed an equity transfer agreement on adjusting the structure of its joint venture, Shenzhen Denza New Energy Automobile Co., Ltd., to complete the equity transfer between the two parties in Denza. Upon completion of the transfer, BYD and Daimler will hold 90% and 10% of Denza's shares, respectively.
It is reported that in 2022, Denza will launch new models in the Chinese market, and it is expected to launch 3 new models in the next two years, including MPV and SUVs.
As a high-end new energy vehicle brand jointly built by BYD and Daimler, DENZA was once in a very difficult situation, and now BYD has embraced it again, or it will become one of the channels for BYD to cut into the high-end market.
In December 2021, BYD also revealed that it will launch a new high-end brand in the first half of 2022, the first model will be a hardcore off-road vehicle, and the price will be 50-1 million yuan.
This also means that BYD will form a complete product series including Dynasty.com, Ocean.com, Denza and high-end brands, and complete the price range coverage from about 50,000 yuan to 1 million yuan.
As the best of the Great Wall, the hardcore off-road vehicle is also moving continuously, officially opening the pre-sale tank 500 at the 2021 Guangzhou Auto Show, and is expected to start delivery in January 2022.
Previously, Great Wall Motor released its 2025 strategy in June 2021 - that is, by 2025, it aims to achieve global annual sales of 4 million vehicles, of which new energy vehicles account for 80%, and operating income exceeds 600 billion yuan.
Whether it is an annual sales of 4 million vehicles or a revenue of more than 600 billion yuan, it is an extremely challenging task.
A series of actions of the Great Wall in 2021, including the release of the coffee series, the launch of the Tank 500, and the release of the Mecha Dragon, are all in order to achieve this goal, so as to carry out brand transformation at multiple levels such as platform construction, brand image, and product innovation.
It is reported that in 2022, the 2.0T hybrid version of the tank 500, the new 2.0T Haval big dog and the plug-in Haval H6, as well as the tank 400 and other models will also be launched.
It is worth mentioning that in December 2021, the information of the electronic bidding platform of Great Wall Holdings showed that Great Wall Motors was conducting the bidding work of "Great Wall Motor Car Brand Channel Image Design Project".
To achieve the above-mentioned Great Wall 2025 goals, the development of the car business seems to have become a matter of course.
As the pillar of the Great Wall, the SUV business tends to be saturated, coupled with Changan and other companies are in hot pursuit, the Great Wall urgently needs new driving points, and the car business may be able to bring a breath of fresh air to the Great Wall, but after many years, whether the Great Wall can still grasp the taste of users is not yet known.
BYD and the Great Wall are just a part of China's auto market, and other major car companies will make great strides forward. 2022, whether from the perspective of technology research and development or product innovation, will be a wonderful year.
05 Conclusion
The automobile market has entered the situation of "division of princes", and with the gradual intensification of competition, "hoarding of food" has become a norm.
Car companies such as BYD and Great Wall are stepping up their pace in various tracks, but surpassing is not achieved overnight.
When new energy replaces fuel vehicles as a definite direction, many traditional car companies such as the Great Wall have too big stalls in the field of fuel vehicles, and the problem of "elephant turning" cannot be avoided.
Although the Great Wall is actively seeking changes, in recent years, various product sequences and various marketing methods have emerged in an endless stream.
In the view of Yiou Automobile, its new products continue to emerge, and it still takes a certain amount of time to form sufficient recognition, or it will reduce the stickiness of the user's brand due to sequence confusion.
BYD may also face the same problem, the rapid expansion of Ocean Network, the construction of Ocean Network sales network and high-end brands are BYD's exploration of different user groups, the biggest pain points come from experience and grasp of the tastes of different market segments.
Risks and benefits coexist, and these actions represent an attempt by BYD and the Great Wall to transform and transform.
Some people say that China's auto market is becoming more and more "inward-rolled", but the current smart electric vehicle market is still in its infancy.
Yiou Automobile believes that the crowd is picking firewood and the flame is high, and the current Chinese car market is in a kind of benign competition, and the "volume" culture of this benign competition will also roll out the characteristics of Chinese car companies and the development path of China's own brands.