Produced by Radar Finance and | Zhang Kaijing, editor| deep sea
Li Xiang, the ideal car CEO known as the "first person to scold the street founder of the car company", has "fired" again, but this time Li Xiang is not "defending" his own company, but against Wen Wei, ceo of Tuanche.com, who has just officially announced that he wants to build a car.
In 2022, the fiery new energy vehicle track is still pouring in new players, Wen Wei is one of them, and is regarded as the most high-profile among new players, because he has an "omnipotent" team.
According to the situation revealed by Wen Wei at the press conference, the foreign team of more than 100 people owned by Tuanche Network has more than 20 years of experience in car manufacturing, and can almost undertake all the car manufacturing processes of new energy vehicles, which can not only shorten the car manufacturing cycle of international manufacturers and domestic manufacturers in the era of fuel vehicles by half, but also have no fear of failure. "It doesn't matter if our first car fails, we can make another one in 3 months."
It is worth mentioning that after being "shelled" by Li Xiang, Wen Wei stood up again and said: "Fearless is not blind, and building a car is not a drama." And sincerely invited Li xiang to attend the first product launch of the group car.
The market value has evaporated by more than 90% of the day after the listing of the group car network, is there really the magic that Wen Wei said?
Li wanted to accuse him of being a "liar", what did Wen Wei say?
"I can't help but have to make a big mouth." On January 16, Li, who was fast-talking, wanted to see a report by Tuanche.com Wenwei and immediately expressed his views.
"Those entrepreneurs who hope to be incompetent by opening the second vein of Ren Dou are generally liars in the end, or most likely they are also liars." There are still people who can openly speak out of this view without shame, which really refreshes the bottom line of entrepreneurs. ”
In fact, not only for the group car network Wenwei, "big mouth" is one of the characteristics that Li Xiang has been impressed with before. In public, Li Xiang has sprayed Lu Zhengyao as a "fraudster" and scolded his peers: "A bunch of stinky technology, every day rushes us BB." "People who spread rumors about us with mercury, I wish your brains are full of mercury." But for the first time, against the bosses of other "new forces."
According to reports, on January 5, the auto trading service platform Tuanche.com officially announced that it had joined the army of new car-making forces, and nine days later, Wen Wei gave a small media interview at its Headquarters in Beijing to answer basic questions such as why Tuanche.com built cars, how to build cars and what cars to build.
And it is the core content revealed by this interview that has become the "fuse" that Li wants to spray.
According to Wen Wei, in addition to industry opportunities, the biggest driving force for car building comes from an external team of more than 100 people. This team can undertake product planning, modeling design, engineering development, testing, chassis, three electricity, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, systematic integration program, production support, supplier management of almost all car manufacturing processes, with more than 20 years of experience in car manufacturing, in technology, sample cars have precipitation, but also done solar energy, hydrogen energy.
"This team can make cars with more than 20 million yuan, and can also do cars with less than 50,000 yuan, including commercial vehicles and logistics vehicles."
In addition, the team came with semi-finished models. "The first car adopts mature programs, mature technologies, mature suppliers, and the quality and quality control of the product itself are completely mature and controllable", priced at 100,000 yuan to 200,000 yuan, and in 2022, the golden nine silver ten can be pre-sold.
"The international manufacturers of the fuel vehicle era of the car manufacturing cycle are 48 months, the domestic manufacturers have done 36 months, and our current team can do 18-24 months."
"I think there's at least a 50 percent chance of winning." Wen Wei said that in his view, although the source of funds is not yet eyebrow-raising, there are many interested investors, and the team can reduce the funds used in mass production of a car to one of the new forces. "Niu Chuang got $500 million, and we could be 1/10 of him."
Even if it really fails, it doesn't matter, after all, "3 months can do another one", and Wen Wei believes that if the market capacity is 20 million and 30 million units, there is still room for the differentiation of electric vehicles and new operating models, business models, and profit models. "The next two years are the last window period for my understanding."
However, regarding the product positioning, how to differentiate, brand concept, and target market, Tuanche Network has not yet determined. "There's so much room for differentiation in the car. From what we know about our users, there are better ways to satisfy them, and most brands now deserve to redo it. Wen Wei said.
The ideal is very full, the reality is very bone
Although Wen Wei himself is right, he also declared that he "believes that by efficiently combining the existing platform with the top design, development and production teams in the industry being formed, coupled with the in-depth cooperation with various potential strategic partners, the synergy effect will be maximized and the group car will occupy an important position in the future electric vehicle market", but in the eyes of many industry insiders, it is quite difficult for the group car network to share a piece of the new energy vehicle market.
Lee thought he was one of them. Although when the tuanche network officially announced that it entered the field of car-making, it was also on Weibo @ Weilai, Ideal, and Xiaopeng, but Li Xiang's reply can be described as a little ruthless.
Li wanted to say that the essence of entrepreneurship is rhythmic and patient long-term growth, and then he wrote a long article describing "the importance of rhythm control for entrepreneurship."
"Whether it is an enterprise or a manager, the specialty is not to open the second pulse of the governor, but to invest solidly, concentrating on a firepower point, ten times the investment of talents and resources of others, and there is no shortcut." Don't try anything, either do it with all your might or die early. ”
Auto analyst Zhang Xiang also told Radar Finance that the probability of Wenwei's success is not high. "In terms of car-making standards, the first is to have money, like last year Xiaomi invested 10 billion yuan in the first year, and then invested 10 billion US dollars in the next ten years; if there is no money, at least there must be the endorsement of investment institutions, but the information revealed at the press conference is that the group car network has none of these."
In this regard, Li Bin also expressed a similar view, which has said that 20 billion yuan is the minimum threshold for car manufacturing, and Wei comes from the third quarter report from 2016 to 2021, and the cumulative net loss attributable to the mother has reached nearly 60 billion yuan.
In terms of funds, the group car is not abundant. As of the third quarter of 2021, the company's cash on the books is only more than 100 million yuan.
There is still some truth to what Li thinks. Now the enterprise car manufacturing is generally the first financing, the eight characters have a skim and then develop the conference, the group car network is secretly unable to raise money, and then want to find money through the conference, this is very difficult. Now there are so many car-making enterprises, the group car network is one of the poor qualifications, it is not a leading enterprise in its own track, it is still in the transformation stage, which makes the capital how to invest? Zhang Xiang said.
However, as a listed company, Tuanche.com is not nothing. For the new car-making forces, it has always been a pain point sales network, but it is one of the few advantages of the group car network.
Previously, the direct sales model of new energy vehicles away from the offline scene made many brands encounter challenges after leaving first-tier cities, which also led to both Tesla and Wei Xiaoli having to incorporate the construction of offline networks into strategic considerations.
According to the information currently released, the sales network of Tuanche can cover more than 230 cities in line 1-5 across the country, and in terms of new energy sales, from January to October 2021, Tuanche achieved a year-on-year increase of nearly 5 times the transaction of new energy new vehicles, covering 78 brands, and the transaction covered nearly 100 cities of line 1-5.
In this regard, Wen Wei once said that the "online booking + offline direct sales store (delivery center or service center)" model represented by Tesla is a typical "light asset heavy operation", in the early stage of the brand's production capacity has not been fully released, the need to "play the brand, improve the positioning" stage, you can use this direct store model to solve the problem from 0 to 1. But this model "can't do sales" because "China is too big to cover all regions."
So, will this be a breakthrough for the group car to cut into the new energy track?
Starting with the auto show, the official announcement has been mired in the mud before the car was built
According to the data, Tuanche.com was established in 2010, and its positioning of itself is "professional automobile new retail platform".
Its founder, Wen Wei, has had many entrepreneurial experiences before Tuanche.com, including channel sales, corporate communications, hitchhiking, corporate training, etc., but all ended in failure.
The birth of the group car network is not smooth. It is understood that the model of the group car network is to try to gather consumers who are interested in buying the same brand and model through online channels, and organize them to go to offline dealerships to "buy" cars.
In 2010, when the government issued a "purchase restriction order", the automotive industry gradually shifted from a seller's market to a buyer's market, which provided space for companies such as Tuanche.com to aggregate consumers to negotiate with dealers. As a result, Tuanche.com also successfully obtained A-C round financing, with a total amount of 37.26 million US dollars.
But the company is not satisfied with this, in the process of matching transaction business development, Wen Wei set the anchor of transformation on making money through the auto show "savings".
In Wen Wei's view, in the form of an auto show to match a new car transaction, the relationship between the two parties to the transaction and after-sales have not changed, what has changed is the experience before buying a car.
Usually, consumers will assist in decision-making through car information websites before buying a car, but the real purchase of a car also requires going to the 4S store to see the car and negotiate prices. In the form of an automobile exhibition, Tuanche.com aggregates various brands, models, derivative services, etc. into the same offline scene, and at the same time, as a platform, it can also get the "group purchase price". For consumers, this can reduce costs while improving the efficiency of car purchases.
This is also the key to the successful listing of the follow-up tuanche network in the United States. According to the data, in 2017 and the first half of 2018, Tuanche held 304 and 315 large-scale transactional exhibitions respectively, which contributed to more than 193,000 and nearly 148,000 automobile transactions, with a total GMV of about 30 billion yuan and 21.4 billion yuan respectively.
Especially in 2017, Tuanche.com and Tmall Auto cooperated to organize a total of 78 urban automobile exhibitions during the Double 11 period, exhibiting nearly 100 car brands, more than 3,500 dealers, and selling a total of 96,176 cars.
However, from the performance point of view, the report behind the group car network in the large-scale promotion of transactions is not glamorous. IFind shows that since 2016, the group car has never got rid of the quagmire of loss, and its cumulative net loss attributable to the mother in 2017-2020 exceeded 630 million yuan; and in terms of revenue, the group car after experiencing the peak in 2018 is also deteriorating.
Some industry insiders believe that the position of Tuanche Network is more embarrassing, although the company is positioned as an Internet company, but the business model is still labor-intensive, and the technology content is not high. And because of the need to grasp a large number of accurate car purchase intention customers, the company needs to pay a high amount of marketing expenses, and its sales expense rate is higher than the gross profit margin.
In this case, the company also relies heavily on the single service model of auto show matching transactions, which directly leads to its weak resistance to risk.
When the epidemic struck in 2020, the number of auto shows shrank seriously, and the revenue of tuanche network was once slashed, of which the transaction volume of new car matching fell sharply by 60.41% year-on-year, and the GMV (total amount of commodity transactions) fell by 58.32% year-on-year.
It is worth noting that during the expansion of the auto show business, Tuanche Network tried to complete the sinking of third-tier cities and below, but the effect was not satisfactory.
On the one hand, the sinking market dominated by low-end brand sales has formed a basic and stable sales industry chain after years of deep cultivation by 4S stores and ordinary dealers; on the other hand, the living environment of the automotive e-commerce platform at this stage is generally difficult, and the group car network cannot stand alone.
From this point of view, the sales network can not become a life-saving straw for the group car, and if Wen Wei cannot come up with eye-catching car-making results, it is only a matter of time before he jumps from one swamp to another.
As of the end of the third quarter, the total assets of the company were less than 400 million yuan.
It is worth mentioning that in 2021, the group car was once close to privatization. A year ago, Tuanche.com announced that the company's board of directors had received a proposal from Wen Wei to acquire all of the company's issued common shares for $4.25 per American Depositary Share (ADS) in cash.
At that time, some senior analysts believed that privatization was a helpless move by Tuanche in the context of net profit loss and revenue decline. Some analysts said that the company may be worried that the market valuation is too low to cause financing difficulties.
But after 11 months, Wen Wei withdrew the privatization offer.
"The resistance may come from institutional investors or small and medium-sized shareholders, such as feeling that there is a certain difference between the price given by the repurchased shares and the valuation of the company, then the shareholders will not agree; secondly, it may be that the repurchase party cannot raise enough funds; finally, companies delisted from the US stock will generally seek domestic re-listing, but if they find that they do not meet the domestic listing conditions, they will not easily give up the financing channel of us stocks." Chan Da, executive director of Hehe Wealth, said.
Industry insiders believe that although Tuanche Network did not publicly respond to the reasons for revoking privatization, whether it was originally made an offer or finally repented, it reflected the dilemma of Tuanche's survival and financing in the market. In this case, choosing to cut into the car-making track is undoubtedly more difficult.
Note: This article is the original of Radar Finance (ID: leidacj). Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.