Electric motorcycles are about to give birth to the first public company.
Not long ago, Harley-Davidson, an established motorcycle manufacturer in the United States, announced that it would spin off its electric motorcycle business LiveWire through SPAC, and the new company would land on the New York Stock Exchange with the code of "LVW".
According to the announcement, LiveWire will complete the transaction with AEA-Bridges Impact (IMPX), which will bring LiveWire a net financing of $545 million, and the valuation of the combined company will reach $1.77 billion .
Once completed, LiveWire will focus on the urban electric motorcycle market, first establishing a brand in North America and Europe, and then expanding into other markets including Asia.
Retrospectively, liveWire's story began with a crisis in Halley. Born in 1903, Harley has long been one of the banners of American motorcycle culture with its classic V-shaped twin-cylinder drive motorcycle. But as die-hard user groups and American baby boomers age, Harley inevitably went downhill.
In 2019, Harley ushered in the largest sales winter in history, with global sales of 218273 units for the whole year, down 4.3% from the same period in 2018. Even in the United States, Harley's sales in 2019 fell by nearly 7,000 units compared to 2018, which is a staggering number.
It was also in this year that Harley's first mass-produced electric vehicle, the LiveWire, was officially announced. Matt Levatić, then President and CEO of Harley, said, "As part of a ten-year strategy, this includes active investment in electric motorcycle technology, because we firmly believe that electric is the dominant form of the future of motor vehicles."
The current LiveWire One has a cruising range of about 235 kilometers when riding in the city, accelerated by 3.5 seconds from 100 kilometers, and the pricing has been adjusted from $29,799 at the time of the initial release to $21,999. It should be noted that the LiveWire One has only sold 387 units so far, which shows that this model may only test the waters of the market and has not entered the mass production stage, but it does not affect the young company's sales plan for 2026, set a target of more than 100,000 vehicles, and completed nearly 3.5 billion yuan of financing.
Behind the valuation of 10 billion
A new track is on the rise
According to the data, the current annual production and sales of the world's major motorcycle manufacturers exceed 28 million units, and it is predicted that 60% of the share will be replaced by electric motorcycles in the next five years. As a result, the traditional motorcycle giants have killed one after another.
In April, new Honda President Toshihiro Mibe mentioned in his inaugural speech that he would put three electric motorcycles and a high-performance electric motorcycle on the market by 2024; followed by July, BMW released a new CE04 electric motorcycle, which can provide an endurance of about 128 kilometers and be released in the United States in early 2022; Kawasaki Motorcycle also proposed the latest plan, expecting to launch more than 10 different types of electric motorcycles and oil-electric hybrid motorcycles in 2035.
Ducati has announced that starting the 2023 season, the company will become the only official motorcycle supplier for the World Motorcycle Racing Electric Class Race, the World Electric Motorcycle Championship. Prior to this, Ducati had barely ventured into the electric field. This also means that Ducati officially began to lay out electric motorcycles, and the next goal may be civilian electric motorcycles.
At this point, electric motorcycles are regarded by the capital market as another potential track after electric vehicles. The reason behind this is not difficult to understand: electric motorcycles will bring breakthrough growth rather than alternative growth.
In recent years, electric vehicles have replaced the 20% market share of fuel vehicles driven by carbon neutral policies in various countries. For electric motorcycles, part of the growth potential comes from replacing fuel-powered motorcycles. Since 2019, electric bicycles have replaced small displacement motorcycles in large quantities.
Taking Honda as an example, in 2019, Honda motorcycle sales in the world exceeded 20 million, accounting for 1/3 of the global motorcycle market share, while in 2020, there was the sharpest decline in 72 years, with global sales falling by 24.4%, down more than 5 million units. The main reason is that the sales of small-displacement motorcycle models in ASEAN, India and China have been greatly replaced by electric bicycles. In 2020, China's total output of electric bicycles was 48.38 million units, an increase of 27.2% year-on-year. This alternative trend comes from the implementation of environmental protection policies in various countries on the one hand, and on the other hand, from the perspective of purchase cost and ease of use, electric bicycles are more in line with the commuting or transportation needs of consumers of the original small displacement motorcycle.
Compared with electric bicycles, the more considerable growth potential of electric motorcycles comes from being able to meet the more diversified travel needs of consumers, provide more flexible, more playable, and more personalized travel modes, breaking through the existing market size, thus bringing about the growth of the entire two-wheeled travel field.
Who will be the "Tesla" of the two-wheel world?
Tesla is a symbol of electric vehicles because it has created entirely new product categories and set industry standards. With this as a reference, is there any seeded player on the electric motorcycle track?
Starting in 2021, the VC circle began to notice a Chinese company called Dafen Riding Power Technology. It launched its first product in July 2021 - DC100, 100 represents a maximum power of 100kw. From this data alone, we can see that this product is not ordinary positioning. According to the official performance data: the maximum speed is 200km/h, the maximum horsepower is 135hp, the maximum torque is 850Nm, and the NEDC cruising range is 400 km/ h. It can be seen that this is an electric product that upgrades the fuel motorcycle to the standard. Officially positioned it as: a pure electric heavy-duty locomotive.
Are pure electric heavy-duty locomotives a new product category? Judging from the distribution of two-wheeled electric products that have been mass-produced in the global market, more than 99% of the sales volume is electric bicycles. Among the electric motorcycles that have been mass-produced and delivered, the performance level of the BMW CE04 is equivalent to that of its fuel model 650cc, but the specific mass production delivery time has not been announced. Some foreign brands have released concept models that can upgrade fuel vehicles against the standard public, but they have not yet entered the mass production stage.
The investment community has received the latest official news from Dafen Riding, and the DC100 mass production product is expected to start delivery in the third quarter of 2022. In this way, Dafen rides DC100 in the category of pure electric heavy-duty locomotives to occupy a first-mover advantage.
As mentioned earlier, new categories in the motorcycle space mean breakthrough growth. What kind of breakthroughs will pure electric heavy-duty locomotives bring? Due to the complex mechanical structure, the upgraded fuel heavy locomotive has very high requirements on the driver's own physical condition, driving skills and driving experience. Such a threshold invisibly turns away many consumers who aspire to heavy locomotives.
Global sales of medium and large row fun motorcycles (250cc and above) are concentrated in the United States, Europe, Japan and China. In 2019, the total annual sales of large-row motorcycles in mid-year were 18.924 million units, and the growth rate is expected to be about 20% per year in the next five years. On the basis of the performance of a heavy locomotive, the DC100 greatly simplifies the difficulty of operation and realizes the evolution of motorcycles from "manual transmission" to "automatic transmission". Precise throttle control replaces the complex oil release fit, and the intelligent combined braking system replaces the clutch, gear lever, front brake, rear brake. Reduced operational difficulty means lower driving thresholds and a certain increase in safety. As can be seen from the distribution of DC100 subscribers, 80% are novice users, of which 90% are those without a driver's license. The other 20% are substitutes or over-purchases by existing motorcycle users.
Therefore, it can be seen that the market potential of DC100 as the first mass production product of Dafen Riding lies not only in the penetration of the stock market of large-row motorcycles, but also in breaking through the existing market scale and including more electric bicycle upgrade users or pure novice users.
In addition to the market advantages brought about by category innovation, as a seed player, you also need to have the ability to set industry standards. In addition to product performance, dc100 released a point of concern in the industry is its charging method: using Sino-US and European standard automotive DC fast charging piles, about 30 minutes full. This solves the problem of long charging time and inconvenient charging that electric motorcycles are currently facing. Behind the solution to the charging problem is the ability of Dalfen to ride the underlying technological innovation of power. DC100 uses the ternary lithium battery pack of the standard grade of new energy vehicles, which supports a high-voltage platform of up to 400V and high rate charging and discharging.
Since the development of electric vehicles, it has experienced competition from the initial hardware configuration to the competition of intelligent equipment. With the continuous popularization of electric vehicles, consumers' demand for driving experience is more diversified, and the competition of electric vehicles eventually returns to the ability of deep integration of software and hardware and collaborative development capabilities of car companies.
Compared with cars, motorcycles have a more intuitive riding experience and higher requirements for riding experience, so the software and hardware integration capabilities of electric motorcycle products are also higher. From this perspective, the core underlying technological innovation of DC100 lies in the integrated development of vehicle software and hardware, and the deep integration of vehicle mechanical structure, software and hardware architecture development and vehicle control system. This is why Dalfen Ride Power is more accustomed to referring to the DC100 as a "wheeled robot". Based on the vehicle control system, DC100 has the perception, calculation and execution capabilities that only robots have, it can sense a variety of information, including ambient temperature, battery motor temperature, front and rear wheel speed and other information, and can combine the current vehicle, environmental information and user instructions to control the power system to achieve the ideal performance in various working conditions. This can make the motorcycle step from "manual gear" to the "automatic gear" era.
The continuous innovation of Dafen Riding Power in the underlying technology not only makes dc100 occupy a benchmark position in the field of electric motorcycles, but also guarantees its long-term competitive advantage. It is understood that Dafen Riding Power has reserved 3-4 follow-up models on the basis of the DC100 chassis. The DC100 vehicle has more than 3,000 chips, of which more than 20 are computing chips. Such a reserve of computing power even lays the foundation for the DC100 to achieve autonomous driving level functions. According to the official information, Dafen Riding Power is already doing the development of dc100-based self-balancing, automatic following, remote control and other functions, and is expected to be publicly released in the short term.
Finally, measuring whether it is an electric motorcycle track seeder can not ignore one point, that is, the ability to deliver mass production. The so-called "PPT" car is doomed to escape the reshuffle of the market, and the electric motorcycle track is no exception. Fabrizio Cazzoli, general manager of Ducati China, has said that it is difficult for him to give an exact timetable for the mass production of electric motorcycles, and the process of electrification of motorcycles is much slower than that of cars.
According to the news released by Dafen Riding Power, its domestic self-built factory has settled in Zibo, Shandong, and the annual production capacity is expected to be 50,000 units. Comparing electric motorcycle brands in the same category, the cycle from release to delivery of the DC100 has been greatly shortened. The Dafen Riding Power R&D team said that this is because from the beginning of the DC100 product design, it has considered the problem of mass production, and adopted the battery pack and chassis integration design, which greatly reduces the vehicle parts, and most of the electric vehicle supply chain products are used to reduce the difficulty of supply chain procurement. At the same time, the design of the integrated chassis also reduces the two costly links of stamping and welding in production, reducing production costs.
When we are discussing who is the seed player, the investment institution has actually given the answer with its own choice. At present, Dafen Riding Power has completed hundreds of millions of yuan of financing in the A round.
Back in 2005, Tesla, which released its first electric model, came out of nowhere, encountering countless ridicule and questions from the outside world along the way, and has now become a trillion-dollar market capitalization company. The electric motorcycle track is also bound to be full of thorns, but nothing can stop a heart that dares to explore.