Wen | Han Ling
Editor| Mao Shiyang
Once relying on a Chery QQ, in 2007 Yin Tongyue led Chery to become the champion of its own brand, and the title of "Automobile Huaijun" came from this. Who knows that after 6 years, Chery's sales fell out of the top ten, and now the new car-making forces are gathered in Hefei, Anhui, and the old rivals Geely and BYD will also shift their focus to the new energy track, Yin Tongyue is also leading Chery to step up the research and development of "one liter of oil running 100 kilometers" fuel vehicles, while reminding the industry to be vigilant about a large number of intelligent applications, which will bring challenges to automobile safety.
Yin Tongyue wanted to overtake
After 24 years of establishment, Chery is still close to the door from the annual sales of 1 million vehicles.
At the beginning of this year, Chery Holding Group announced its annual sales data in a good news tone, and Chery's annual sales reached 960,000 vehicles in 2021. This is Chery's best sales performance since its establishment in 1997.
"Chery is okay again?" This is the first reaction in the industry after the release of sales. However, 960,000 vehicles still did not hand over Chery Chairman Yin Tongyue's ideal answer sheet. At the listing of the Tiggo 8 Kunpeng edition in July last year, Yin Tongyue said when taking stock of Chery's sales that it was not a suspense for Chery Group to impact the "million mark" at the end of 2021.
But in today's public opinion, not many people pay attention to Chery's ambitions. Since the sales volume fell out of the top ten of its own in 2013, the gap between Chery and domestic independent brands has become wider and wider. When Geely, Great Wall and Changan and other car companies have already achieved annual sales of millions of vehicles for many years in a row, Chery in the same period was still struggling on the passing line.
At that time, Yin Tongyue had begun to repeatedly mention Chery's target of 1 million vehicles.
In the high-end market, Chery has successively launched three brands of Ruilin, Qoros and Xingtu, and also established a joint venture with India's Tata Group, Chery Jaguar Land Rover. Later, Ruilin failed, and Qoros became a springboard for the real estate company Baoneng to enter the market to build cars, and the annual sales of Chery Jaguar Land Rover always stayed between 50,000 and 60,000 vehicles.
Although he has been behind for many years, Yin Tongyue never thinks that Chery has no chance to turn over, or even that there is a problem with the strategy.
At last year's Chongqing Automotive Forum, the host said that Chery is a company that plays "first-hand chess" (the first hand in Go refers to the other party's initiative, which often means the advantage of the chess game and even the winning momentum), Yin Tongyue said in the subsequent speech that the "first-hand chess" is a new force like Weilai Automobile and Ding Lei (chairman of Gaohe Automobile).
"Chery is a person who plays backhand chess, and a company that plays backhand chess." Yin Tongyue said.
In his eyes, Chery's fall in the past few years is only a pain that must be experienced in the transformation, even if it falls in the middle, chery can still overtake in the corner. More than a decade ago, Chery relied on "high cost performance" to win, experienced a period of rapid development stage, and later, Yin Tongyue realized that Chery's low-end cheap image must change.
"At that time, Chery stopped some products and engaged in positive development and independent research and development, such as mid-to-high-end brands." Yin Tongyue believes that the decline in Chery's sales is due to the increase in new products during this period that has not made up for the sales of discontinued products.
At the time of chery brand upgrade, other independent car companies, such as Geely and Great Wall, are also adjusting. As a result, the upgraded Chery sales fell sharply, the brand gradually declined, and several other car companies took advantage of this opportunity to usher in an outbreak.
Yin Tongyue once reprimanded the media for only seeing Chery's bad performance and not seeing how they had made Chery bigger and stronger step by step. "Today, to make a state-owned enterprise so big (scale), why can't we see this?" 25 years ago, Yin Tongyue and 7 other people took the 200,000 yuan given by Wuhu City in Anhui Province, almost from scratch to make Chery an independent first-line big brother position, and later these 8 people were called "Eight King Kongs" and written into the annals of Chery's history.
At that time, in order to produce the first car, Yin Tongyue hired Ford experts at a high price and asked for help to roll off a car production line, and several months later, these experts did not make a production line. Yin Tongyue, who was angry and frustrated, thought twice and decided to remove the experts, and the parts, engines, and production lines were all built by themselves. When a city government official learned the news, he immediately called Yin Tongyue and asked him solemnly: "What should I do if I can't do it?" ”
"If you can't do it, jump the Yangtze River!" Yin Tongyue replied emphatically. This oath, which can be called a military order, has become a label that Yin Tongyue cannot take off in the future, and it is also the epitome of Chery's ups and downs in the past twenty years.
Yin Tongyue "dead bump" high-end
From the first Chery car off the production line in 1999 to the 1 millionth car of Chery off the production line, Chery only took 8 years.
When Yin Tongyue first founded Chery, he showed a stubborn side of his personality. This kind of personal trait of a bit of "axis" has been running through Chery's development process.
In China, Chery is known as the "polytechnic man", this label on the one hand has everyone's ridicule of the appearance of Chery models, on the other hand, in fact, it has a certain relationship with Yin Tongyue's own experience. Yin Tongyue studied automobile manufacturing at Anhui Institute of Technology in his early years, and after graduation, he went to FAW Group as a craftsman, and then served as the director of the assembly workshop and the chief of the logistics section at FAW-Volkswagen. In 1996, he became the deputy general manager of Chery.
Yin Tongyue has very deep experience in automobile manufacturing, and at the same time, he has also brought this "science and engineering man" practical spirit to Chery.
He built his own engine, which was the "shaft strength" that Yin Tongyue first showed when building a car. In the domestic automobile industry at that time, except for Chery, there were no car companies that independently developed and manufactured engines from scratch. In such a poor and white background, Yin Tongyue still insists that Chery must build the engine itself.
"The engine is the core technology, if Chery can build the engine itself, the whole vehicle will naturally not be too much of a problem." Later, when Chery has become the top three domestic independent brands, and the cars are sold at home and abroad, Yin Tongyue also joked that Chery is making engines, and by the way, it is made of complete vehicles.
Thanks to Yin Tongyue's "dead bump" engine at that time, when Santana still had to sell more than 200,000 yuan, Chery's first car "Fengyun" was officially off the production line, and the price was only one-third of Santana's, which became a hit in the country for a time. Since then, Yin Tongyue has launched the National God Car QQ, and Chery has begun to enter thousands of households. It can be said that those years were the most beautiful times for Chery and Yin Tongyue.
In 2010, Yin Tongyue tried high-end for the first time and founded the Ruilin brand. At that time, Ruilin invited international football star Messi to endorse, and at the 60th anniversary of the National Day military parade, Ruiqi G5 was also inspected as a representative of its own brand, and the scenery was unlimited for a time.
However, due to the high price and unclear product positioning, Ruilin's sales volume is extremely dismal. Four years after its birth, the total sales volume was only 120,000 units, of which the high-end G5 and G6 models sold less than 1,400 units in total.
This is Yin Tongyue's first high-end folding.
However, Ruilin's defeat did not repel Yin Tongyue. In 2013, Qoros Automobile, a joint venture between Chery and Israel Group, officially launched the Qoros 3 sedan, which was priced at 119,990-16.79 million yuan against Volkswagen Sagittarius, and 3 years later, Qoros 5 was listed with a price range of 139,900-194,900 yuan.
In terms of vehicle quality, Qoros crushed a large number of domestic cars at that time, but Qoros' sales gave Yin Tongyue a heavy blow. In 2014, the sales volume was less than 7,000 vehicles, 14,000 vehicles in 2015, and 24,000 vehicles in 2016, and in these three years, Qoros accumulated a loss of 6.6 billion yuan.
"The impression of domestic consumers on their own brands is still stuck at low prices." Earlier, the general manager of an independent brand car company told the "Finance world" weekly that in his view, Chery started too early to do high-end brands, and the time was not ripe. A few years later, "Geely did Lynk & Co, relying on marketing, saying that it was on the same platform as Volvo." ”
In the end, Yin Tongyue watched Chery overwhelmed and helplessly sold Qoros to Baoneng. At this point, Yin Tongyue tried to high-end for the second time, and failed again.
At that time, the domestic automobile market had already changed. After the failure of Yin Tongyue's high-end in the first world war, in the same period, the Great Wall Wei Jianjun took a unique path and aimed at the SUV market below 100,000 yuan, and did a good job. The final results also prove that Wei Jianjun has indeed accurately grasped the opportunity of this take-off, and the Haval brand has become one of the most influential SUV brands in the world.
Looking back at the success of hot-selling models such as the Haval H6 and GAC Trumpchi GS4, Yin Tongyue may regret why he missed the opportunity and did not concentrate on refining a model.
Today, 56-year-old Yin Tongyue is challenging high-end for the third time. This time, he took out the "shaft strength" of Chery's single-handed engine decades ago, and shouted out "Starway is Chery's Audi".
However, this high-end brand, which has been pinned high hopes on by Yin Tongyue since its inception, has not brought many surprises to Yin Tongyue in terms of sales. In last year's sales report, Chery's new high-end brand, Xingtu, sold only 37,000 units for the whole year, with cumulative sales of 14,000 units in 2019 and 18,000 units in 2020.
Although sales are increasing year by year, compared with other independent high-end brands in China, the gap is still large. Geely's high-end brand Lynk & Co sold 170,000 units in 2020, Great Wall Motor's high-end brand WEY sold 78,000 units in 2020, Lynk & Co sold 220,000 units in 2021, and WEY also sold more than 58,000 units.
At the scene of the listing conference of Xingtu Lanyue at the beginning of last year, Yin Tongyue said, "This year's Sales of Xingtu reached 50,000 vehicles, and I took away the 'deputy' character before Ye Lei's title (executive deputy general manager of the marketing center). Unfortunately, the "deputy" word before Ye Lei's title may not be removed this year.
Xingtu's results Yin Tongyue is naturally not satisfied, not only the sales results can not look up in front of peers, more importantly, this is already Chery's three battles of high-end, the market left Yin Tongyue not much time.
Why has Chery repeatedly lost in high-end? Yin Tongyue had also asked himself this question countless times. In fact, whether it is the failure of Chery's first two high-end brands, or the fall from its own first-line brands many years ago, the reason is related to Yin Tongyue's multi-brand strategy of "having more children and fighting", and later this strategy has also profoundly influenced the development of Chery.
These "children" of Yin Tongyue are not fighting with others, but beating their own people. All along, Chery's internal brands have been seriously internally involved, and the blurring of brand positioning is almost a recognized problem from the outside world. In 2009, Chery released a multi-brand strategy to expand Chery into four brands: Chery, Karry, Ruiqi and Weilin.
In the lineup of product lines, Chery, Weilin and Ruiqi are highly similar, because the new brand influence is not as good as Chery, which eventually leads to Ruiqi and Weilin being forced to stop production due to poor sales, and only Chery and Karry can be retained. The Kaiyi brand in 2014 is highly similar to Chery's product line, and even its appearance is highly similar. In the end, Chery sold more than 51% of its stake due to poor sales of Kaiyi.
After several twists and turns, Chery fell behind in this competition.
In July last year, Yin Tongyue decided to upgrade Jietu from a product series to a brand, and currently Chery Holding Group operates four major brands: Xingtu, Chery, Jietu and Chery New Energy. Jietu focuses on the low-end market, with a total of 9 models and a price range of 64,900-149,800 yuan. According to last year's sales data, in addition to the Tiggo series, the sales volume of the Jietu brand is the highest.
The year of the establishment of Jietu was the first negative growth in the production and sales of China's automobile market in 28 years. Since then, there has been three consecutive years of negative growth. In the past three years, the growth rate of Jietu's main SUV market has also slowed down, when some people said that Yin Tongyue's Jietu launched at this time was a bit out of time.
In fact, Jietu made Yin Tongyue really raise his eyebrows and breathe a sigh of relief.
Since its official release in early 2018, sales have been remarkable throughout Chery Group. Cumulative sales were 40,000 units in 2018, 138,000 units in 2019 and 126,000 units in 2020. In 2021, a total of 154,000 new vehicles (including exports) were sold, an increase of 17.9% year-on-year, and the cumulative total sales of Jietu Automobile exceeded 460,000 units. Li Xueyong, deputy general manager of Jietu Automobile and general manager of the marketing center, said that if it were not limited by the shortage of chips, it might break 200,000 vehicles in 2021.
Yin Tongyue: The wind has stopped, it's time for us to take off
After missing the target of 1 million vehicles, this year Yin Tongyue set a goal for Chery that seems more difficult to achieve - "to ensure annual sales of 1.5 million vehicles, strive for 2 million vehicles, and annual operating income of 200 billion yuan." This means that Chery must double all indicators on last year's basis to achieve the target.
At the beginning of 2017, Chery Holding Group had proposed the goal of "ensuring 900,000 vehicles and striving for 1 million vehicles", but Chery Holding Group only achieved about 70% of the sales target that year. From 2017 to 2020, Chery Holding Group's annual sales were about 680,000 units, 753,000 units, 745,000 units and 730,000 units, respectively. Some insiders believe that judging from Chery's current sales, it will be difficult to achieve this goal in 2022.
Looking at several chery brands, the sales of new energy and high-end models directly affect Chery's overall sales performance. Chery sold 95,000 new energy passenger cars last year, of which the micro-electric vehicle Ant sold nearly 80,000 units a year, accounting for nearly 85% of Chery's new energy sales, while Chery's medium-sized SUV Big Ant only had 902 units, and sales in November were only 50.
Under the wave of electrification, as a traditional independent first-line brand, this number undoubtedly makes Yin Tongyue feel embarrassed.
In fact, in addition to investing the "QQ" IP in the micro-electric vehicle market, Chery's focus is still on the fuel vehicle market, impacting Yin Tongyue's high-end target and millions of sales that Yin Tongyue has not been able to complete.
According to the 2021 car sales data released by the China Automobile Association, the retail penetration rate of new energy vehicles in China's auto market reached 22.6% in December last year, and in February last year, this figure was only 8.2%. The penetration rate from January to December 2021 was 14.8%, which was significantly higher than the penetration rate of 5.8% in 2020.
This means that new energy vehicles will cannibalize the market share of traditional fuel vehicles at a faster rate and achieve accelerated replacement for the fuel vehicle market. In 2021, the wholesale number of new energy passenger vehicles was 3.312 million units, an increase of 181.0% year-on-year, and retail sales reached 2.989 million units, an increase of 169.1% year-on-year. The wholesale volume and retail sales of traditional fuel vehicles in 2021 have declined year-on-year.
"The original sales of new energy passenger vehicles in 2022 were expected to be 4.8 million units, but now it should be adjusted to more than 5.5 million units, and the penetration rate of new energy passenger cars has reached about 25%. New energy vehicles are expected to exceed 6 million, and the penetration rate of new energy vehicles is about 22%. Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the Association, said.
BYD's "new energy brother" sold 730,000 passenger cars last year, of which 594,000 new energy passenger cars were sold, accounting for more than 82%. It can be seen that new energy has not only become the growth point of BYD's future sales, but also an important reason for maintaining BYD's high market value.
Yin Tongyue realized the urgency of electrification transformation, and in October last year, he succeeded Li Lizhong and personally became the chairman of Chery New Energy, not only that, Chery also resurrected the classic model of the year, QQ - Chery QQ Ice Cream. Both in terms of price and appearance, this car is almost exactly the same as the Hongguang MINI EV.
Chery hopes to quickly increase its market share through A00-class electric vehicles, and this year, QQ Ice Cream and Little Ant need to contribute 300,000 sales to Chery New Energy, of which QQ Ice Cream may be about 200,000 units.
Can QQ Ice Cream complete the heavy lifting? In the A00-level electric vehicle market, there are already many brands such as Wuling Hongguang, Euler, Zero Run, Reading, etc., and the gap between them is not obvious. More importantly, A00-level products have low profits, low technical content, and low premium capabilities, and they still need to rely on high-end products in the middle and late stages.
In the past one or two years, whether in high-end or new energy, Chery's action has accelerated a lot. The outside world interpreted Yin Tongyue's actions as preparations for Chery's listing.
"Chery should have been listed more than a decade ago." This is almost the common voice of Chery employees.
In 2007, Yin Tongyue publicly stated for the first time that he would start the listing financing plan as soon as possible, but the plan dragged on for more than ten years, and although there were several listing news in the middle, it was finally gone. In contrast, many independent vehicle companies such as Geely, BYD, and Great Wall have been listed for many years.
Chery's listing plan has been delayed so far, which is related to the poor profitability of its main business.
In 2020, Chery's core asset, Chery Shares, had an operating income of 34.761 billion yuan and a net profit of 7.3717 million yuan, compared with the profits of up to several billion yuan such as Great Wall Geely, and the thin profit of more than 7 million yuan was simply not worth mentioning in the automotive industry. In the previous few years, Chery has also been in the middle of a loss. In 2014, Yin Tongyue publicly stated that Chery achieved its first profit in 10 years. Four years later, Chery shares turned from profit to loss for four consecutive years.
Chery's listing has made new progress. In July last year, Yin Tongyue revealed that the funds for participating in Chery's mixed reform have been 100% in place, and the listing of relevant sectors of enterprises after the end of the stock reform is being promoted in an orderly manner. According to the data, Chery Automobile, Chery Huiyin, Chery New Energy and Chery Parts all have listing plans, of which Chery Automobile plans to be listed on the A-share main board in 2022, Chery Huiyin plans to list in Hong Kong, and Chery New Energy plans to be listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board or NASDAQ.
In 2019, Yin Tongyue said: "When others fly on the cusp, we are really lying on the ground, building systems and processes. Now that the wind has stopped, it's time for us to take off. ”
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