January 2022 news: Volkswagen China CEO Feng Sihan said that due to the chip shortage, 3.3 million vehicles were delivered in China last year, down 14% year-on-year. Among them, the Volkswagen brand (and its Jetta sub-brands) delivered a total of 2.428 million vehicles in Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, down 14.8% year-on-year.
In contrast, luxury and ultra-luxury brands perform well. Audi delivered 701,300 vehicles, and Porsche, Bentley and Lamborghini achieved year-on-year growth of 7.5%, 40.0% and 54.8% respectively, setting new annual sales records.
Founded in the 1930s and headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany, Volkswagen Group is the largest car company in Europe. According to the "2021 Global Auto Brand Value Top 100" list released by Brand Finance, the group's brand value reached 116 billion US dollars (about 738 billion yuan), ranking first.
The Beetle series is Volkswagen's most successful and legendary model, designed by genius designer Ferdinand Bossel, and because of its unique rounded shape, it is dubbed the "Beetle" by the American media. In July 2019, the last Beetle model rolled off the production line at its Mexican plant. In the 81 years from its inception to its discontinuation, it sold more than 21.5 million vehicles.
Volkswagen's history is also a history of acquisitions. Since the mid-1960s, audi shares have been acquired from Daimler and new water-cooled front-wheel-drive models have been developed with the technology of the Audi 80 model: passat, Scirocco, golf and polo. After tasting the sweetness, between 98 and 2009, they successively acquired brands such as Skoda, SEAT, Bentley, Scania, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Porsche and so on.
In the 1980s, SAIC Motor wanted to introduce a car assembly line, and successively found GM, Ford, Citroen, and Renault, but they were all rejected, and only Volkswagen agreed to the joint venture. Subsequently, Santana was introduced to China as the first model of the joint venture company, becoming a generation of "national god cars". Volkswagen, which is backed by the Chinese market, has jumped from the fifth place in the world's automobile companies at the time of the joint venture to the first place.
However, in the past two years, Volkswagen's global sales have been surpassed by Toyota. With the rise of Tesla and a number of new car-making forces, the auto giant has undergone a difficult transformation. The ID. family, which has high hopes, sells well in the European market, but does not seem to be popular in China, the world's largest single market.
Last year was a key year for the electrification transformation of the Volkswagen Group, with a total of five models launched in China, namely ID.3, ID.4 (including SAIC Volkswagen ID.4 X and FAW-Volkswagen ID.4 CROZZ) and ID.6 (including SAIC Volkswagen ID.6 X and FAW-Volkswagen ID.6 CROZZ).
Since its launch at the end of March, a total of 70,625 units have been delivered, failing to achieve its target of selling 80,000 to 100,000 vehicles. For comparison, Xiaopeng, NIO and Ideal delivered 98,155, 91,429 and 90,491 vehicles last year, respectively. As for Tesla China, the number of deliveries reached 70,847 units in December, surpassing the Volkswagen ID. family's annual data.
Why does Volkswagen not sell electric vehicles in China? Some insiders said that compared with the advantages of tesla, "Wei Xiaoli" and other new forces in software systems and intelligence, the Volkswagen ID. series is like a "traditional oil car with a battery". The low cost performance is also the reason for consumer criticism, and the official guidance price of SAIC Volkswagen ID.3, which was listed in October last year, was 159,888 yuan to 173,888 yuan. For the same money, you can buy an A+ class car.
But then again, with the gradual advancement of the agency marketing model and the ramping up of production capacity, the overall delivery volume of new cars of the ID.family has shown a trend of month-by-month increase, which has exceeded 10,000 for four consecutive months. This also makes the doubts a lot less, but to achieve the goal of surpassing Tesla in 2025, the performance of the Chinese market is crucial. It is necessary to develop products with a higher degree of intelligence and networking for Chinese consumers.