Source | Deep Blue Finance (id:shenlancaijing)
Author | Wu Ruixin
New energy car circle, there is no shortage of news.
Looking back at the most high-profile figures in the recent year, the new domestic car-making forces on social media must be li xiang, the CEO of Ideal Automobile. From female journalists being insulted by ideal employees, "mercury doors", to high-profile questions about BYD blade batteries, calling for the unified use of Chinese terminology standards for autonomous driving... Lee wants to take his ideal car with him and brush up on the sense of existence in this year.
Recently, Li Xiang has a new dynamic on social media. Li Xiang's spearhead points to the new player who announced his entry into the car-making field in 2022 - Tuanche.
1
Lee wanted to make another move
Shelling the regiment car "most likely a liar"
At 1 p.m. on January 16, Li Xiang, the founder of Ideal Automobile, forwarded and commented on Weibo the content of the media interview after Wen Wei, CEO of Tuanche, announced the construction of the car, and publicly shelled Tuanche, saying that it was "most likely a liar" and refreshing the bottom line of entrepreneurs.
Li xiang said that Tuanche announced that the car was "hoping to find a super savior" and "counting on opening the second pulse of Ren Dou", believing that it "the last to find is generally a liar, or a high probability that he is also a liar", while also criticizing it for "refreshing the bottom line of entrepreneurs". And emphasizes that the essence of entrepreneurship is: rhythmic and patient long-term growth.
Subsequently, Li Xiang sent a separate 2800-word long article to explain in detail what is rhythmic and patient long-term growth, he said that any startup must first complete the verification from 0-1 to 1 in order to move from 1 to 10. Failed entrepreneurs are often executives of multinational auto companies who "do not have Apple's life (people and resources), get Apple's disease (random recruitment and spending money)", and "any enterprise facing a new productivity and production relationship, it is impossible to skip the 0-1 stage."
To put it simply, Li wants to feel that the idea of "quick-build cars" of the group car is very unreliable, ignoring the complexity and objective laws of the automobile industry.
What the hell is going on?
This started more than a week ago. On January 5, the auto trading and service platform Tuanche announced that it will enter the field of electric vehicle manufacturing by forming a new electric vehicle business line including design, research and development, production, etc.
Just like xiaomi, easy car and many other companies announced the car manufacturing before, the group car network announced that the car manufacturing has also been questioned by the outside world. Compared with Xiaomi, although the tuanche network is a little bit on the side of the car, but the main focus is on the car marketing, trading business, in the car manufacturing has not been involved before, such a company suddenly announced the car, the market will naturally be full of questions: has never been involved in any business of car manufacturing Why should the group car build a car? How to build a car? What kind of car to build? How to stand out in the increasingly competitive new energy vehicle market?
In the content of the interview with Wen Wei in the "Automotive Business Review" that Li wanted to forward, Wen Wei said, "When I saw that 'Wei Xiaoli' first started to build cars, I actually had an impulse, but the conditions were not mature at that time. The real determination was in the second half of 2021, after matchmaking, we began to contact the top team in the industry and saw the possibility of successful car building. "It has been less than half a year since the group car has the idea of building a car to the official announcement of car manufacturing, and many problems have not been thought out." That is to say, the idea of building a car for the first time was born, which coincided with the "climax" of a number of domestic manufacturers announcing car manufacturing in 2021.
In the interview, Wen Wei revealed the driving force of tuanche: a foreign team of 100 people. This team can undertake almost all the car manufacturing processes including product planning, engineering development, intelligent driving, and has more than 20 years of car manufacturing experience, can build more than 20 million yuan of cars, can do less than 50,000 yuan of cars, not only can do passenger cars, but also can do commercial vehicles, logistics vehicles, can be called all-round.
In addition, the external car team can even reduce the car construction cycle from 36 months to 18-24 months, and can reduce the cost of mass production of a car to about $50 million.
As for the source of funds for car manufacturing, Wen Wei said that Tuanche.com is a U.S.-listed company, and many investors and local governments are interested in car-making projects. And said that "Niu Chuang got $500 million, we may be one-tenth of him", implying that Tuanche is about to get a lot of investment.
In the interview, Wen Wei also said that he was not afraid of failure, "It doesn't matter if our first car fails, we can make another one in 3 months." ”
In his mouth, making a car baked flatbread is as simple as it is. All kinds of amazing remarks add up, which really gives people a very unreliable feeling.
2
What is the origin of the group car? Who is Wen Wei?
According to public information, Wen Wei, CEO of Tuanche, is a serial entrepreneur who has no relevant work experience as an executive of a multinational automobile company. It is understood that Wen Wei graduated from the Northern Jiaotong University in his early years, majoring in industrial foreign trade, and later entered the Shanghai Mitsubishi Electric Company to engage in channel sales, and since 2000, he has done 4 consecutive ventures, but all of them have failed. Tuanche.com is his fifth venture. In 2009, he found that some people gathered in the community and went to the 4S store to bargain for a car, which gave him inspiration and founded the group car network.
According to the official website, the group car network has covered more than 100 cities in more than 30 provinces across the country, and its main business model is to frequently hold car group buying meetings in different cities, covering almost all mainstream car brands and price ranges in the market. Consumers can choose to attend the meeting or ask the group car staff to help run errands and book the car.
The official website of the group car declares that the service is completely free. But as for whether it can really save money, there are many opinions on the Internet. Some people say that depending on the brand model, you can get 5%-40% discount, but some netizens reflect that there is no discount, and even higher than going to 4S point to negotiate.
In November 2018, Tuanche.com was officially listed on the U.S. stock market. But the embarrassing thing is that since the listing, Tuanche Network has not achieved profitability, losing 670 million yuan in five years.
In recent years, auto e-commerce has burned money seriously, and it is also facing fierce industry competition, including Tuanche Network, Uxin, RenrenChe, melon seeds, etc. are facing the same problems. The industry is cold, and the emergence of the epidemic has made the automotive e-commerce industry worse. Under the double influence, the cash flow of auto e-commerce is weak and cannot resist risks.
In the case of an increasingly difficult living environment, in early 2021, Tuanche.com considered privatization and delisting. At that time, Wen Wei proposed to buy all the issued ordinary shares at a price of $4.25 per share in cash, which Wen Wei did not yet own. Compared with the market value of $626 million at the beginning of the listing in November 2018, the valuation of Tuanche.com at this time was only $85.45 million, and the valuation evaporated by 86.3%. In November 2021, Tuanche.com announced that in order to open more opportunities for the company, the company's CEO Wen Wei decided to withdraw the privatization offer issued at the beginning of the year.
Although there were rumors at the time that Tuanche.com might enter the car-making field, the official did not disclose the reason for withdrawing the privatization. It was not until the official announcement of the car in January this year that the reason for the withdrawal of privatization by tuanche.com was conclusive.
3
Tuanche responded: Don't think of yourself as a prophet,
Don't be the one you hate the most
For Li Xiang's shelling, Wen Wei's heart may be happy.
Two hours after Li wanted to shell Weibo, Wen Wei, CEO of Tuanche, responded quickly.
Wen Wei echoed Li Xiang's comments through his weibo post of personal real-name authentication, saying that in addition to rhythm and patience, there is also vision and judgment. For example, the public China Feng Sihan was repulsed because he had looked away and sprayed too early, "No one should think of himself as a prophet, nor should he become the group of people he hates the most."
Wen Wei's content in the face of the media interview obviously caused Li Xiang's dissatisfaction, which led to Li Xiang's high-profile bombardment on Weibo. So what does Wen Wei's reply mean?
It is understood that in September 2020, Volkswagen China CEO Feng Sihan directly attacked the range extended electric vehicle in order to support his own plug-in hybrid vehicle. At that time, Feng Sihan said, "From the perspective of environmental protection, range-extended electric vehicles are the worst solution." Subsequently, Weisman, head of Volkswagen Group's China R&D department, made a second repair, saying that the range-extended electric vehicle was completely obsolete.
The only model ideal ONE currently on sale is the range extended range electric vehicle.
After the return was completed, Wen Wei also manually @ Li thought, the purpose is all in the word.
Previously, on January 5, when the official micro-official of the regimental car network announced the car manufacturing, it also @ the Weibo of the three new car-making forces of Weilai, Ideal, and Xiaopeng.
However, obviously, the news of the announcement of the car construction of the group car network did not attract the attention of netizens, and two of the only four comments were expressing that they did not know the group car network, and one questioned whether its liquidity was sufficient.
Tuanche network to build cars, is it a scam or is it really emboldened? Let the time take to give us the answer.