On December 17, 2021, Nengchain Group completed the E2 round of financing , which is the fourth round of financing it has completed in the past year, and so far, Nengchain has completed more than 10 rounds of financing. The investors behind it include not only head RMB funds such as China Merchants Capital and CICC Capital, but also US dollar funds such as Bain Capital and Joy Capital, as well as strategic investors such as Xiaomi Group and WEILAI Capital.
The company, which has been established for more than five years, has become the most gold-sucking unicorn.
Up to now, the energy chain business has covered oil, electricity, hydrogen, gas and other energy categories, with six major businesses: tuan oil, fast electricity, energy chain cloud, energy chain technology, energy chain integrated energy port, energy chain convenience.
How did the energy chain grow? What are the highlights of the Energy Industry Internet that it represents? Where are the challenges and risks of the energy chain? This article will break it down for you.
01
Do Alibaba in the energy industry
The 3 trillion yuan refined oil retail market has always been a mouth-watering cake, and countless entrepreneurs have tried to use technology and business model changes to promote industrial digitalization.
The predecessor of The Chain was the "owner state" established in 2016, starting from the refueling needs of commercial vehicles rather than private cars, and this entry point later proved to be a key first step.
From 2013 to 2015, refueling O2O companies are competing for the transaction volume of private cars.
At that time, Didi had not yet started, and platforms such as Shenzhou, Shouqi, Fast Dog, and Lalala had just been established. The gas station is in the stage of lying and earning, unwilling to let profits, O2O refueling company can only subsidize customers themselves and make GMV bigger. However, the fuel frequency of private cars is low and the stickiness is not strong, and this model is difficult to sustain.
An executive of Sinopec, who did not want to be named, said: "The Internet of energy industry is based on 3 prerequisites. First, there are a large number of local refineries; second, there are a large number of private gas stations; third, there are large customers who purchase in bulk, such as large logistics companies. ”
With the rise of online ride-hailing platforms and urban distribution platforms, online has also made it possible to refuel large-scale commercial vehicles. Commercial vehicles have high refueling frequency, large flow range and price sensitivity, and fuel costs account for about 40% of the total operating costs. This is a real pain point.
From the perspective of the industrial chain, the upstream refinery has an overcapacity of 30%, and the number of gas stations is excessive, and the industry needs some transformative forces. Dai Zhen, the founder of Energy Chain, has the idea of building a platform structure of "Internet + energy + commercial vehicles".
For cost reduction, commercial vehicle platforms cannot be sought.
For petrol stations, innovative profit models are needed. At the B+ round of financing conference, Dai Zhen, founder of Energy Chain, said that the company wants to become the "Alibaba" of the energy industry, "We do not have a gas station, do not have a charging pile, and want to become the largest online energy retailer in China." ”
Diao Junhuan, a partner of Oriental Fuhai, once introduced at the B+ round financing conference of the owner of the car: "The layout of the energy chain is the opportunity for this company to go out in the future. Because in the 1.0 era when the entire e-commerce Internet changed the traditional industry, there were industry platform companies like JD.com and Ali; in the 2.0 era, companies like Ctrip, Toutiao, and Douyin appeared in the subdivided industry; in the 3.0 era, there was a perfect combination of traditional industries and the digital economy, and many companies you can't imagine have appeared, and the energy chain may be one of them. ”
From the consumer Internet to the industrial Internet, from the traffic side, with a large number of orders to transform the upstream supply chain, and finally to achieve the synergy of the whole industry chain. Wang Yang, co-founder and president of Nengchain, believes that all companies that want to do industrial Internet will end up on the same destination. "Everyone is talking about the model from upstream to downstream, basically doing the whole chain, depending on which angle you choose to cut in."
Some companies cut from the upstream to help the gas station to do collection and production; some companies cut from the middle, do SaaS to improve operational efficiency; the energy chain feels that the greatest common divisor is the flow cut. "For gas station owners, it has a lot of demand, but the core demand is to sell more oil."
02
From 0 to the beginning of the ecology
Wang Yang summarized the development process of energy chain into several stages:
2016, "Validation Mode".
In May 2016, the predecessor of Neng chain, the owner of the car, was registered and established. After more than half a year of product research and development, in November 2016, the owner of the car app was launched, and it took 3 months to achieve profitability. During this period, the owner state completed the verification of the business model and technical reserves.
In 2017, "latent".
This year, the owner of the car bang quickly laid out the urban distribution platform and the online car platform. Head platforms such as Lala, Fast Dog Taxi, Dida Travel, Shenzhou Chauffeur, and Shouqi Ride-hailing have all opened up interfaces during this period. "With the fast dog taxi, cargo lala these platforms completed the interface docking." Drivers operating on these platforms do not need to download the Owner State App, and can directly complete all operations through the driver's terminal. Wang Yang added.
In 2018, quick copy.
The number of core cities covered by the owner state has grown from 26 to 70 cities, and strategic cooperation with Shell has been reached, and the number of gas stations, transaction volume and team have achieved rapid progress. The 70 cities on the supply side and hundreds of interfaces on the demand side have enabled the owner state to quickly open up the situation, and by the end of 2018, the scale has jumped to the first place in third-party energy suppliers.
In 2019, the brand was upgraded.
This year, the owner state has built the country's largest professional driver refueling and charging network. At the same time, the company carried out a brand upgrade and changed its name from the owner state to Energy Chain.
Wang Yang explained: "'Energy chain' is a very thick word, it is the connection of energy, but also the connection of the industry. When we first started with only one business, we felt that some of them could not carry the word 'energy chain'. When we started to want to do upstream supply chain and midstream gas station transformation, we renamed the company NewLink. ”
This year, the number of cities on the line of the owner state is expected to exceed 350, and by the end of the year, the company's annualized GMV will reach 50 billion yuan.
In 2020, accelerate replication.
In 2020, energy chain has ranked among the top ten domestic e-commerce companies, ranking first in the field of digital energy, and second only to FleetCor in the United States in the world. "In 2020, the company's main energy is still focused on the replication of the oil, which is more of a copy of the original business from 10 to 100, from 100 to 1000." The richness and development speed of products are very fast, and energy chain logistics and integrated energy ports are in the bud. ”
In 2021, the ecology is just beginning.
If you use one word to describe the 2021 year of the energy chain, Wang Yang believes that it is "ecology". "I think it was a physical reaction before, and there will be a chemical reaction in 2021."
The upstream energy chain logistics is directly connected to the refinery, so that the transportation of dangerous chemicals is visualized; the energy chain cloud has armed the gas station, and the comprehensive energy port has added retail scenarios such as charging, convenience stores, maintenance and maintenance, becoming an upgraded version of the gas station.
Ecological synergy is becoming a moat for energy chains.
For more than 5 years, multi-point layout, the energy chain has group oil and fast power aggregation traffic at the retail end; the technical end has the energy chain cloud to provide SaaS, AI, big data, and IoT services; and also explores the future retail business such as the energy chain integrated energy port and the energy chain convenience.
In the refined oil industry, energy chains try to cover the full-link transaction chain of the refined oil retail industry from upstream refineries to downstream consumers.
In the charging and replacing industry, on the one hand, fast power interconnects charging pile operators of different brands, and on the other hand, through brand upgrades and service extensions (charging station adds catering, rest and other services), it helps charging pile operators improve the utilization rate of charging piles and the operation efficiency of the station, enhance profitability, and shorten the return on investment cycle.
One business after another continues to grow, Wang Yang called the internal "chaotic vitality", "mainly the energy industry has great opportunities, giving everyone a lot of free space." ”
The Neng chain logistics team has grown up and obtained independent financing in 2021, and the company has left equity for the team in addition to options. The autonomous driving team has been in Suzhou for a long time.
In the process of continuous revision and iteration, Nengchain summed up its own management system "MARK" in 2020.
M refers to map, making maps. When they encounter different problems, they will find out all the relevant companies on the Internet, classify them, and then go to consult.
A refers to ability, which summarizes the ability to do something. For example, the BD team of Neng chain, every time they meet a potential partner, they will summarize what is right and wrong today, what the words should look like, and then do a simulation exercise.
R is a review, repeated over and over again. Wang Yang believes: "There is no good culture without continuous repetition. ”
K is the key result, taking the result, that is, the culture of battle achievement. Wang Yang believes that winning the battle is the best team building, and is also willing to issue various project awards to let those who get the results more profitable.
Regarding the future, Wang Yang believes that "in the future, the entire industry will be in the general direction of the energy industry." The first branding, people will believe more in brand endorsement; second, decarbonization, energy will become cleaner; the third digitalization, data to help production decisions. The general direction does not change. In the whole process, there will be many large and small companies, to find their own living space. ”
03
From the stock refueling market to the incremental charging and replacing market
In the post-epidemic era, digitalization has become a consensus, and the energy industry is accelerating its reconstruction under the role of the industrial Internet.
Refined oil is a stable stock market, with 3 trillion yuan of retail sales per year, and what the chain can do is to move the industrial chain from offline to online.
Wang Yang expects that the online rate of the entire industrial chain, refineries, gas stations, transportation, and retail links will not exceed 2% in 3 years, and the overall rate will not exceed 5% last year.
Charging and replacing is a nascent online industry, with an annual growth rate of more than 60%.
"No matter how high your market share today, it doesn't mean much, because there may be a hundred times more room for growth in the future." Wang Yang concluded, "How oil moves the stock online, and how electricity is bigger into a new industry, these are two different sets of logic." ”
Energy chain hopes to become a promoter of energy change, on the one hand, it aggregates the decentralized consumption demand on the energy demand side, and on the other hand, it must integrate the decentralized layout of the energy supply side to form a nationwide online and offline retail network connecting the energy demand side and the supply side, driving the digitization of energy consumption.
The energy market is too large, starting with the opening of the refined oil policy in 2015, bringing an opportunity for structural transformation to the industry; the popularity of new energy will bring about a huge change in the energy structure; and traditional gas stations have also shown a strong demand for digital upgrading.
At the same time, energy supply is almost the only high-frequency large-value consumption scenario in China that has not been penetrated and restructured by the Internet.
Dai Zhen, founder of Energy Chain, judged: "The energy industry will usher in historic changes. With the gradual opening of the market, the trillion-dollar energy market may incubate hundreds of billions of large companies. ”
This seems like a good historical opportunity: logistics companies are eager to reduce costs; gas stations are hungry for digital talent; upstream refineries are also overcapacity. The industrial chain seems to have a need for restructuring.
But there are also crises.
For refined oil, international crude oil price fluctuations fluctuate with the international political game, and the supply of refined oil products also fluctuates; upstream refineries are too concentrated and bargaining power is very strong; and with the popularity of digital infrastructure, logistics companies seem to only need an interface to connect to the refueling network, rather than a platform.
The energy chain has stuck the historical opportunity of the opening of the energy market, and also seen the structural gap of the two tracks of oil and electricity, but they also need to balance the interests of all parties in the industry at the same time, connect the scattered consumer demand and the decentralized energy supply, and integrate it into an online and offline retail network covering the whole country, so that energy becomes smart and consumption becomes convenient and environmentally friendly.
It was a doomed exploration, but also a run on the cusp.
Wang Yang hopes that "the whole team can continue to be humble and diligent and continue to output valuable solutions for the industry." She also saw that "from the general direction, the energy industry is gradually liberalizing, but for this kind of industry involving the national economy and people's livelihood, the state will still have more supervision, and everything can grow healthily in such supervision." ”