Introduction: "Liar", often called this way when new car-making forces appear. When I think about it now, it's still like yesterday. This time, the word "liar" appeared again in the circle of new car-making forces, only this time it was passive to active, and the not-so-glamorous hat was put on their latecomers.
(Text/Pan Yuchen Editor/Lou Bing) A few days ago, a gap between the "new forces" and the "new forces" of car-making was publicly staged on the Internet and triggered heated discussions.
The incident began on January 5 this year, when a new auto retail platform called Tuanche.com announced its entry into car manufacturing through Weibo, and @ Weilai, Ideal, and Xiaopeng three head car-making new forces.
A week later, on January 14, Wen Wei, founder and CEO of Tuanche.com, said in an interview with a small range of media at the company's headquarters that the biggest driving force for Tuanche to build cars came from an external team with more than 100 people.
Two days later, Li Xiang, the founder of Ideal Automobile, wanted to post a Weibo, and more openly "fired" at Tuanche and Wen Wei, saying that "those entrepreneurs who hope to find a super savior, those entrepreneurs who hope to be incompetent by opening the second pulse of Ren Dou, and finally find liars, or most likely they are also liars." ”
What attracted Li to want to "mouth a lot" was the mysterious "foreign team" in Wen Wei's mouth.
According to Wen Wei, this foreign team has more than 20 years of experience in car manufacturing, and can undertake product planning, modeling design, engineering development, testing, chassis, three electrics, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, systematic integration program, production support, supplier management and almost all car manufacturing processes, and "can do more than 20 million yuan of cars, but also can do cars below 50,000 yuan." ”
"The car manufacturing cycle of the international manufacturers in the era of fuel vehicles is 48 months, the domestic manufacturers have achieved 36 months, and the team of the group car can do 18-24 months." According to Wen Wei's description, this team is almost omnipotent, and has manufactured a number of semi-finished models, and the first pure electric model of Tuanche Network is from these semi-finished models, priced in the range of 100,000-200,000 yuan, and this year's "Golden Nine Silver Ten" can open pre-sale, quality, quality control is also fully mature and controllable.
Since building cars from scratch is a long-term, high-investment, asset-heavy business, Wen Wei's remarks about car building have also surprised many netizens.
For Wen Wei's remarks, Li wanted to be even more angry at his "shamelessness" and "refreshing the bottom line of entrepreneurs".
"I didn't expect that the first shot of the Long March came from Mr. Li Xiang. Apart from rhythm and patience, have you forgotten your vision and judgment? In the face of Li Xiang's anger, Wen Wei was not convinced, and on the same day, he replied through Weibo: No one should regard himself as a prophet, nor should he become the group of people he hates the most.
He also specifically mentioned that Volkswagen China CEO Feng Sihan had "looked away" at the ideal car.
In September 2020, Feng Sihan said in an interview with the media that range-extending power technology is an "outdated technology" and a "bad solution" and has been remembered by Li Xiang, who specializes in range-extended powered cars. With the rapid growth of the number of ideal ONE deliveries, the sales of one model of ideal ONE in 2021 exceeded the sales of all medium and large SUVs of Volkswagen combined. Li Xiang immediately posted a Weibo sarcastic remark, "Thanks for the spur, continue to work hard." ”
And this time Wen Wei took Feng Sihan as an example, it seems that he is also satirizing Li, who has become a defender, to look at the tuanche network with the old eyes, just as the public looked at the ideal at the beginning.
Li Xiang did not give any further response to Wen Wei's recoil, but Wen Wei still "did not follow and did not forgive", and on January 18, he posted Weibo again, saying that he wanted to thank Li Xiang for his attention and questioning, and invited Li Xiang to participate in the first product launch of tuanche.
"The only constant in the world is the change itself, and the reason why the new forces are new is the accumulation of predecessors and the fearlessness of future generations." Wen Wei insisted that he "doesn't make a car for a play."
Take a look:
Perhaps in Wen Wei's view, before Li wanted to create the ideal car, he was only the founder of the vertical portal portal - Autohome, and his own entrepreneurial experience is similar, so Tuanche Network has the prospect of reproducing the ideal car experience.
However, unlike the era when Li wanted to enter the car, the current new energy automobile industry is in the process of transformation from blue ocean to red ocean. In addition to traditional car companies involved in this field, it also includes a number of cross-border car-making Internet companies, including not only well-known industry giants such as Xiaomi, Baidu, and Huawei, but also some less famous enterprises. Compared with the "Wei Xiaoli" 7 years ago, the external environment has long been unfriendly to the "new forces".
More importantly, car manufacturing is a heavy asset business that requires continuous capital investment, but sufficient capital reserves are precisely the biggest pain points of Tuanche Network.
According to official disclosures, Tuanche.com, founded in 2009, is a new retail platform specializing in automobile trading and services, and its business has now covered 29 provinces and more than 140 prefecture-level cities across the country.
However, what Tuanche is most talking about is that it was listed on the NASDAQ in the United States in 2018, becoming the first Chinese auto new retail concept stock to land on the US stock market.
However, after landing on the US stock market, the performance of tuanche network has suffered losses for consecutive years. Since 2020, the new crown epidemic has dealt a heavy blow to the main business of Tuanche.com.
According to the financial report data, in the first three quarters of 2021, the operating income of Tuanche Network was only 274 million yuan, but the net loss attributable to the parent company reached 59.362 million yuan. More importantly, at present, the total cash and cash equivalents and restricted deposits on the network account of the group car are only 134 million yuan, which is only a drop in the bucket for the costly car manufacturing.
As a listed company, the recent downturn in the stock price of Tuanche.com has not helped it to obtain more financing. As of the close of the US stock market on January 18, Tuanche's stock price was only $2.76, and the total market value was only $55.79 million; in contrast, ideal cars, which were also listed on the NASDAQ, had a total market value of $31.471 billion, which was 564 times that of Tuanche.com.
In addition, Wen Wei's series of layman statements that violate the common sense of the development of the automobile industry, such as "18-24 months car manufacturing cycle", "undertaking almost all car manufacturing processes", and "completing the pre-sale of new cars within half a year", have further intensified the outside world's doubts about it.
Of course, whether Wen Wei is a "liar" or not, and whether Li Wants is a "prophet", everything still needs to be verified by time. But for the group car network from scratch, there is neither sufficient cash reserves, nor high valuation as the basis for financing, and it is facing an external environment like a wolf... Now all it can rely on is the external team that can be called "heaven and god".
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