Original debut | Golden Horn Finance (F-Jinjiao)
The author | Xiaodi
Edit | Silver
The auspiciousness of "abandoned by the times" seems to have recently become propped up.
On January 24, Ruilan Automobile, a power exchange travel company jointly established by Geely Automobile and Lifan Technology with a capital of 600 million yuan, officially settled in Chongqing. Geely plans to invest billions in the next five years and lay out more than 5,000 ultra-fast substations across the country.
A week ago, there was news that Geely would acquire the mobile phone brand Meizu, which was seen as the first step in Geely's 10 billion yuan investment in high-end mobile phones. This means that mobile phones, as an important part of the Internet of Vehicles, have finally entered the future planning of Geely's new energy vehicles.
In his 2022 New Year's address, Li Shufu said of the technological revolution: "We don't want to be subverted by the world, we must be ahead of the layout. He pointed out that Geely should build sustainable competitiveness around electrification and intelligence.
It is not difficult to see that Geely, the big brother of the old fuel vehicle era, is spending money to speed up the era of new energy vehicles.
However, Geely, which has repeatedly lost battles in the first half of the new energy vehicle battle, can it overtake in the second half?
difficult.
"Snake"
Jili, who is afraid of being "subverted by the world", has fallen into new energy anxiety.
On the one hand, Geely has won the Chinese brand sales crown for five consecutive years, which is a well-deserved brother of auto private enterprises; on the other hand, in 2021, Geely New Energy's domestic sales fell out of the top ten in the industry, and the sales of new energy vehicles and electrified models accounted for only 7.5% of total sales, which can exceed 100,000, ranking at the bottom of the top three independent car brands.
In other words, Geely has today's achievements, all relying on fuel vehicles. The weakness of the new energy sector has put Geely in a growth dilemma, and last year, Geely's total sales volume was 1.328 million units, an increase of only 1% year-on-year.
The sales volume of new energy vehicles of the old rival BYD has accounted for more than 80% of the total sales, and the sales ratio of new energy vehicles in the Great Wall in the low-end market is more than 10%, the former has sold 700,000 units, of which the sales of new energy vehicles are nearly 600,000, a year-on-year surge of 218%, and the latter sales are 1.28 million units, an increase of 15.2% year-on-year, maintaining a normal growth rate.
Comparing the starting time of these three companies in the new energy vehicle track, the problem can be more reflected - BYD began to lay out new energy in 2008, the Great Wall released the new energy vehicle brand in 2017, and Geely began to plan as early as 2010.
In other words, Geely, the giant of the fuel age, is moving forward at a turtle speed in the new energy era.
The time goes back to 2010, a year in which the scenery can be described as exhausting.
This year, Geely invested 12 billion yuan to acquire the European veteran car Volvo. At that time, Geely's market value was only more than 3 billion yuan, and a "snake swallowing elephant" was truly staged, and foreign media praised Li Shufu as China's Henry Ford.
Later, in an interview with Xinhua News Agency, Li Shufu said that one of the reasons for the acquisition of Volvo was that the latter had a decade + tens of billions of new energy technology accumulation.
This "Geely tradition" makes today's Geely acquisition of Meizu, although it is only "no comment" news, still arouses strong curiosity in the market.
In fact, in this decade of time, Geely, which has a lot of money, has built its own new energy sector step by step through capitalization operations such as mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, or cooperation.
Geely's capitalization operations from 2012 to 2021 (Source: Head Leopard Research Institute)
In 2015, Geely launched a five-year plan called "Blue Geely Action", which plans to achieve sales of new energy vehicles accounting for more than 90% of Geely's overall sales in 2020. Among them, the sales volume of plug-in hybrid and oil-electric hybrid vehicles accounted for 65%, and the sales of pure electric vehicles accounted for 35%.
In fact, geely's new energy vehicle sales in 2020 were 68,000 units, accounting for only 5.2% of the overall sales.
Whenever there is any movement in the Geely New Energy section, this goal will be taken out and "whipped". The goal was not achieved, but it was laughed at.
In order to catch up with this lost decade, the auspicious year of 2021 has not been idle for a moment.
In January, Geely first announced that it was a foundry for Baidu, and then established a joint venture with Foxconn to provide foundry production and customization consulting services for global automotive and mobility companies, including but not limited to complete vehicles or parts, intelligent control systems, automotive ecosystems and the whole process of the entire electric vehicle industry chain.
Subsequently, Geely announced the signing of a framework cooperation agreement with Faraday Future of Jia Yueting, planning to cooperate in technical support and engineering services.
In March, Jidu, a joint venture between Geely and Baidu, was formally established, with Geely holding 45% of the shares.
In December, Geely Holding Group announced that it has reached a cooperation with Waymo, and its brand, Extreme Kr, will create exclusive customized models based on the Haohan SEA-M architecture to provide exclusive vehicles for waymo One driverless fleet.
The signing ceremony between Geely and Foxconn (Source: CBN)
In 2022, Geely and Renault Group signed a memorandum of understanding to launch listed Renault fuel vehicles and intelligent hybrid vehicles through Renault Samsung's production base in Busan, South Korea, based on Geely Automobile's CMA structure and Raytheon hybrid technology, and expand them in overseas markets such as South Korea and North America.
Gilly is like the snake in the game, swimming everywhere to swallow ripe fruit, and his body becomes larger and larger.
However, a fierce operation, looking back at April last year, after experiencing a delayed listing, temporary price increases, and changes in suppliers, the high-end new energy vehicle brand Ji Krypton, once listed, both owners found that the window glass goods were not right, Bluetooth connection failure and other issues.
Extreme Kr 001
Feedback to sales, last year only delivered more than 6,000 vehicles.
Li Shufu's goal for Extreme Kr is to sell 650,000 vehicles a year by 2025.
And maybe 650,000 and 90% of the target is the same, but a number.
"Diehards"
Speaking of the "madman" Li Shufu, most people will think of that famous saying:
"What's so hard about making a car is that it's not a motorcycle with two wheels and two sofas."
When someone reminded Li Shufu that the difference between a car and a motorcycle is more than two wheels, he replied:
"Of course I know, the steering wheel is different."
This is a joke, but it is not difficult to see Geely's simple and extreme car-making thinking. However, motorcycles and fuel vehicles may still have commonalities to speak of, but in the era of new energy vehicles, this logic is bound to fail.
After all, compared with traditional fuel vehicles, the internal structure of new energy vehicles based on "three electricity" is as simple as possible, but the main intelligence is the greater difficulty. This is also why mobile phone manufacturers go down to build cars, and the problems that need to be broken through are far smaller than those of manufacturing giants such as Geely and Gree.
At the beginning of 2021, BYD's chairman confidently told Yu Minhong in the interview program "Discretionary View" that BYD's mobile phone is a "minute-by-minute" thing.
As for why not to make mobile phones, Yu Minhong did not ask, but believe that everyone who understands it understands - because making mobile phones is not only the hardware level reached, but also "minutes" is a good product.
In fact, Geely has been using the thinking of traditional fuel vehicles to build new energy vehicles in the past.
In 2015, the year of the release of the "Geely Blue Plan", Geely built Geely's first electric vehicle - Emgrand EV in the form of "oil to electricity".
Oil to electricity, to put it bluntly, is to replace the engine, fuel tank and other traditional power units with motors, batteries and other parts. Compared with today's "orthodox" pure electric platform of new energy vehicles, the platform of "oil to electricity" is still a traditional fuel vehicle platform, in addition to no place to place a huge battery pack, resulting in a small space in the car, from the perspective of electrification, integration and performance in all aspects, it is far inferior to the former.
Emgrand EV did help Geely blast open up the then-blank new energy vehicle market, and the data shows that in 2016, Geely occupied 1/5 of the market share with 49,000 vehicles sold.
From 2019 onwards, with the decline of subsidies, the price advantage of oil-to-electricity products has disappeared. In addition, compared with pure electric competitors, the disadvantages of low safety, poor endurance, and poor handling of oil to electricity are gradually emerging. In 2020, the Emgrand GSe launched by Geely two years ago sold just over 2,500 units, down 80% year-on-year.
Even so, until July 2020, Geely was still tirelessly launching the oil-to-electricity product Geometry C.
Last year, Li Shufu rarely admitted the failure of Geely's electrification transformation in the past five years, but he still saved enough face for himself and Geely:
"This is not a mistake in strategic direction, nor is it a failure in strategic implementation, but the historical timing is not ripe."
Putting all the blame on "timing" may be a bit self-deprecating.
It is precisely in these five years that new forces such as Wei Xiaoli have grown from PPT car manufacturing to large enterprises with new energy vehicle sales exceeding that of a number of fuel vehicle predecessors.
Moreover, in the hands of these brands, they also hold something that Geely can't buy - explosive models.
Obviously, it is not that history did not choose auspiciousness, but that auspicious did not choose the right path.
At present, it is not difficult to see that starting from the layout of mobile phones, Geely intends to change the deep-rooted fuel vehicle thinking in the past and transform it into a new model based on intelligence.
I have to sigh, it's good to have money.
Relying on the huge profits accumulated in the field of fuel vehicles, Geely's investment of tens of billions of yuan can still buy the ten years of stalling and buy the missed outlet.
This is still something that the new forces cannot envy.
Overtaking in corners?
Continuing the logic of "buying, buying and buying" in the past, can Geely overtake in curves and catch up?
If this is the case, then Geely will not lose its precious first-mover advantage.
From the failed "Blue Geely Action", the lesson that Geely should learn is that buying, buying and buying can quickly expand the business format, but if there is a lack of clear and advanced top-level design, the "historical opportunity" is still immature.
At present, geely needs to make more changes than just changing the way it replenishes energy and buying a formed intelligent foundation. After all, although the power exchange mode is ideal, it is only the first step in the long march from the key standardization and scale. For intelligence and the Internet of Vehicles, a Meizu is only a cross-border construction foundation, and the end of intelligence is still to return to the intelligence of driving.
The key is that Geely new energy vehicles lack explosive models and recognition, which is not something that can be pieced together by relying on ready-made results.
Real money is also limited. In the five years since Geely won the hottest passenger car, Geely's profit has dropped from 12.5 billion yuan in 2018 to 5.5 billion yuan in 2020, while in the first half of 2021, Geely's semi-annual report shows that Geely's half-year profit is only 2.4 billion yuan, which is 1 billion yuan less than that of latecomer Great Wall Motors.
The crisis has emerged, and although Geely's sales volume has risen year by year, its profitability has not been as good as before, not to mention that this increase has reached a dangerous 1%.
Geely has set a sales target of 1.65 million units this year
The rapidly developing automobile industry, from its birth to the present, has not been subverted by a few, although it is a victorious general, it is difficult to say that today, when the battlefield has changed, it is still brave.
After all, the style of play has also changed.
Reference Articles:
Geely New Energy "fell behind", what is the problem? Kan Technology
Pure electric platform: everyone is showing, who will be beaten in the future? Motor Home