Ranger Auto adds equity freeze information, investing 11.5 billion yuan in factory "rotten tail"

Another new car-making force could not hold out.

Recently, Tianyancha information shows that Shanghai Ranger Automobile Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Ranger Automobile") has added new equity freezing information, the executor is Wei Jun, chairman of Ranger Automobile, the amount of frozen equity is 45 million yuan, and the enforcement court is Shanghai Minhang District People's Court.

Ranger Cars is regarded as the "elder" of the new car-making forces, and as early as October 2013, the Ranger Cars project was established. In 2014, Ranger Motors was officially established in Shanghai, mainly producing pure electric vehicles. In July 2015, Ranger released a production model concept version of the Ranger X, less than two years after the establishment of Ranger Cars. At that time, the founder of Ranger Automobile, Huang Xiuyuan, positioned it to build China's Tesla, at that time the electric vehicle market was not hot, coupled with the comparison with the traditional car companies in three or four years of car manufacturing time, Ranger Automobile was questioned by the industry. Building a car requires huge research and development expenses, and Ranger Cars, which has never announced financing news, has even been rumored to be about to break up.

However, at the end of 2015, Wei Jun's addition brought Ranger Cars back to life, and he served as the chairman. Prior to joining Ranger, Wei Jun was the former chairman of Xituo Industrial Group. Wei Jun believes that the opportunities in the era of electric vehicles are huge, and China is expected to give birth to two or three local auto companies with annual sales of 2 million to 3 million vehicles and a valuation of more than $300 billion. His participation has enabled Ranger Auto to make breakthroughs in capital construction, talent recruitment, supply chain system construction and government cooperation, which has directly contributed to several rounds of financing for Ranger Auto. According to Tianyan, Ranger Auto has completed three rounds of financing in series A, B and B+, with a total financing of 8.7 billion yuan, the most recent round of financing was in August 2018.

A piece of information that Ranger Auto once provided to reporters said that since Wei Jun joined, the brand connotation and product positioning of Ranger Auto have also been reorganized and expanded, and the core highlights focus on appearance, performance, and intelligent performance. However, after Wei Jun joined, Ranger Cars has also been relatively low-key. Until more than a year later, in 2017, Ranger Auto announced that it would invest 11.5 billion yuan in Huzhou to build a super factory with a production capacity of 200,000 vehicles per year, and the plant is expected to be completed within 2018. Unlike other new car-making forces, Ranger Motors has adopted the method of building its own factory and production line, but the factory has not yet been completed, and in 2019, it was exposed that the factory was shut down and the vehicle was not mass-produced. Because of this, Ranger Cars is known as "PPT Car" in the industry.

With Wei Jun's stake frozen, the Ranger car is likely to collapse. In the past few years, there have been many new car-making forces such as Byton, Sailin, Yangtze River Automobile, bo county and so on. However, the development of the new forces of head car manufacturing has been relatively stable, the annual sales of Weilai Automobile, Xiaopeng Automobile and Ideal Automobile have approached 100,000 vehicles, and the new forces of second-tier car manufacturing have also begun to gradually increase, which means that the pattern of new car-making forces has gradually formed.

The top brass of a new car-making force once told reporters that there are multiple factors in the failure of car-making enterprises. There is actually no problem with the products of car manufacturers, mainly because many automakers feel good about themselves, and they are too inflated to lead to failure. In addition, car builders lack strategic vision, while the lack of understanding and experience in the automotive industry, they generally let professional managers manage, including in products, the use of funds and other aspects, while some professional managers fail to effectively manage, so that enterprises gradually fail to fail.

It is worth noting that although a number of car-making companies have fallen, there are still new car-making companies emerging, and the heat of the new car-making movement has not decreased. At the end of last year, Li Yinan, founder of Maverick Electric, released the NIUTRON brand and announced his official entry into car manufacturing. Not long ago, the group car network also announced that it will enter the game to build a car, its CEO Wen Wei said that it does not matter if the first car fails, it can be done in 3 months, this remark triggered the ideal car CEO Li Xiang's bombardment. The new energy heavy-duty truck cutting-edge - Yuandong new energy vehicle brand was officially launched in Shanghai Center on January 8, and the brand entered the new energy market to create heavy-duty truck models. In addition, Internet giants such as Baidu and Xiaomi have also announced that they will build cars, and their first models will be listed around 2024.

Pan Helin, member of the Information and Communications Economic Expert Committee of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and executive dean of the Digital Economy Research Institute of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, believes that the popularity of new energy vehicles has allowed the technical barriers of the automotive industry to be reset, such as the patent barriers for gasoline engine technology accumulated in the past gasoline vehicles have been broken. With the continuous maturity of the new energy automobile industry chain and supply chain, the threshold of the new energy automobile industry will become lower and lower in the future, and there will inevitably be more and more entrants.

However, new energy vehicle companies should be wary of blindly launching, in November 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission launched the first mapping of domestic new energy vehicle production capacity, and announced that it will comprehensively inventory investment projects within 5 years. The Notice on Effectively Strengthening the Supervision and Management of Investment Projects and Risk Prevention and Control in the Automobile Industry issued by the Jiangsu Provincial Development and Reform Commission also shows that from 2016 to 2020, the province's automobile capacity utilization rate dropped from 78% to 33.03%, a reduction of nearly half, and about 20 percentage points lower than the national average. Due to the construction of projects, the delay in promotion, and the low capacity utilization rate, many car companies have been publicly named.

In addition, car manufacturing requires a lot of money, and even the new forces of head car manufacturing are still in the stage of burning money. For the car manufacturers who entered later, how to obtain the favor of capital is crucial, and it is not easy to survive. Although the global capital market preference is concentrated on new energy vehicles, the attitude of capital to car manufacturers has become more rational. On the other hand, the competition in the new energy vehicle market is becoming more and more fierce, and the challenges faced by new entrants are still large.