This article is from the WeChat public account "Core Lithium Talk", author: Dong Wuying, editor: Lin Xiaochen, Pencil Road is published with permission.
At the beginning of the new year, the most popular event in the automotive industry was not the former President of Jihu joining Xiaomi Automobile, nor changjing's Luoke Automobile being led by Tencent, but a "scolding war" between Tuanche.com and Li Xiang.
Tuanche.com, a company that mainly holds vehicle exhibitions offline, was listed on nasdaq in November 2018, but its stock price has fallen all the way after listing, and its market value has now been only $42.45 million. For such a notorious company, cross-border car building is a small thing, but an interview has put the company on the cusp of the storm.
In this interview, Wen Wei, CEO of Tuanche.com, made a lot of "controversial" remarks:
Although many problems have not been thought out, there is an external team of more than 100 people who can undertake almost all the car-making process, which can "make more than 20 million cars" and "do less than 50,000", including commercial vehicles and logistics vehicles.
In the process of car building, the car mainly relies on this team, and the group car is responsible for product positioning, marketing, and channel network. One party is responsible for building the car, and the other party is responsible for selling the car.
The first car of the group car network is priced at 100,000-200,000, in 2022, the golden nine silver ten can be pre-sold, the first car fails, it does not matter, 3 months can do another one, a car mass production of the funds used to calculate is only a few fractions of the new forces of car manufacturing. ”
As of now, the group car network car manufacturing has not yet begun, and the specific situation has not been disclosed. But just these interviews have made Li want to sit still, angrily spraying the group car network as a liar.
Looking closely, there are many slots in these remarks of the tuanche network, but there are not many people who care about its car-making process, and it is not worth Li Xiang's anger.
Today, when the capital market is becoming more and more realistic, the market has begun to gradually dilute the label of "new car-making forces". Li Xiang's "angry spray" actually reflects the anxiety of new energy vehicle manufacturers: sales continue to rise, but the "new forces of car manufacturing" can no longer tell a new story.
Lee wanted to hear the "once" story
Once upon a time, "new car-making forces" was not a word worth boasting about. In the last round of car-making wars, dozens of "new car-making forces" competed in the same field.
At that time, even if it was "Wei Xiaoli", it was regarded by many people as "absurd" as the current tuanche network. It is precisely because of this that Li wants to be angry and untenable in reason. After the incident, public opinion did not lash out at the tuanche network one-sidedly, but satirized the ideal car "just got on the car and welded the door to death", Wen Wei also responded to Li Thought, "Don't become the person you hate the most."
In the last round of car-building wars, the death or survival of the "new forces" involved too many factors, and those who survived were the lucky ones. After experiencing policy dividends since 2020, the current "new car-making forces" have grown into a force that cannot be ignored in China's new energy vehicle market.
In the past 2021, the first echelon of the "new car-making forces" Weilai, Ideal, and Xiaopeng have achieved huge breakthroughs. Xiaopeng Automobile sold 98,155 vehicles in the whole year, 91,429 units in Weilai, and 90,491 vehicles in the ideal, all approaching the 100,000-vehicle mark. In the total list of new energy vehicle sales, they have broken into the top ten.
The performance of the second echelon of the "new car-making forces" is also remarkable. Although Nezha Automobile is always "ridiculed" by new forces, its annual sales are close to 70,000 vehicles, and the annual sales of Zero Run and Weima have also exceeded 40,000.
Overall, for the "new car-making forces", 2021 is a bumper harvest year. After two years of rapid development, they have changed their shotguns and gained market recognition. As Li Xiang said, Wei Xiaoli completed the verification period from 0 to 1 in 2021, and other new forces have also made great progress.
But at the same time, China's new energy vehicle market is still in its infancy, according to expert analysis, there is still a window period of 2-3 years for car manufacturing, and it is still too early to talk about the new energy vehicle market pattern.
Focus on tuanche network, after the listing of the stock price performance is bad, and even once rumored to be privatized. Today's cross-border car building is just hoping to save the precarious market value with new stories.
Although Wen Wei was very exaggerated in the interview, based on the current market situation, his description may also become a reality under certain conditions. More importantly, the group car network has not yet officially started. Out of the consideration of supporting the transformation and entrepreneurship of Tuanche.com, Li wants to directly dismiss him as a "liar", which is obviously inappropriate.
It can be expected that with the accelerated transformation of traditional cars and the entry of new car manufacturers, a new round of car manufacturing wars will soon begin. Facing China's huge automobile market, everything is possible, of course, Tuanche Network may also have a chance.
In this case, what Li wants and other "new car-making forces" to do is to seize as much market share as possible and achieve faster development, rather than trying to formulate some kind of access rules when the market pattern is undecided, which is obviously neither wise nor feasible.
The market has long been not looking forward to "new forces"
From another point of view, Li Xiang's "angry spray" has helped the tuanche network. If it were not for the addition of Li Xiang, a car-making celebrity, the group car network car-making matter may not have splashed any splash.
If it is still in 2020, when the situation of new energy vehicles is strongly reversed, then the market is very keen to find the next "new car-making force". However, after two years of development, the new energy vehicle market has moved from a dream to a reality, and gradually stepped onto the right track, the market does not seem to be looking forward to new "new forces".
Before the group car network, 5 companies have recently begun to build cars, although embracing the era of new energy vehicles, but not much attention.
In mid-December last year, Li Yinan, the founder of Xiaoniu Electric, announced the construction of a car, launched the brand "Self-Touring Home", and released its first model self-touring home NV official map in January;
In the same month, former Volkswagen executive Su Weiming founded the luxury intelligent electric brand "Binli Automobile", positioning itself at the million level, and the first new car will be released at the 22nd Beijing Auto Show;
Subsequently, the light orange era, which claimed to be the "fiercest after-wave" in new energy vehicles, was established, and the first product positioning A0 class sedan was expected to be delivered in July this year;
Box cars targeting the B-end mobility market also released two vehicles in December last year, one of which is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2023;
In addition, Chang Jing, founder and CEO of Stone Technology, announced that the car-making project "Luoke Automobile" has completed a financing of 100 million US dollars at the end of 2021, led by Tencent Group.
It can be seen that in these five "car-making incidents", in addition to Li Yinan, the serial entrepreneur's "self-traveler", and the founder of Stone Technology's "Luoke Automobile", which has attracted much attention, the other three companies have entered the new energy vehicle market, which basically did not arouse much attention.
According to this calculation, the group car network car manufacturing incident will also be like this. Although it is a NASDAQ-listed company, Tuanche.com still loses money so far, with a total market value of only $42.45 million. According to the 2021 semi-annual report, at the end of June, the cash (including equivalents) on the account of the group car network was only 126 million yuan.
For such a company that wants money and no money, scale and scale, and profits without profits, its announcement of "car building" will not have much impact on the industry at all.
At the end of the day, as the new energy vehicle market is on track, the market has begun to value sales and profits. For companies that are new to the car market, if they only focus on a certain market segment, or launch a certain model, it is not of great significance.
The "new forces of car building" that cannot tell a new story, capital does not look forward to it.
Who can tell the next new story?
The popularity of new energy vehicles in 2020 is actually a story of "dilemma reversal" plus "high-end automatic driving".
Prior to this, the decline of the subsidy policy for new energy vehicles and the retreat of capital made all new energy vehicle companies unhappy, and Weilai, the leader of the "new car-making force", was even on the verge of bankruptcy.
With the country vigorously promoting carbon neutrality, the new energy vehicle market has heated up rapidly, and the sales of new car-making forces have begun to increase. At the same time, with the growth of sales of "new car-making forces", tesla-model high-end autonomous driving has begun to become another focus of capital.
Driven by rising sales and the dream of higher-order autonomous driving, Weilai and the ideal and Xiaopeng who later listed on the US stock market quickly became popular with capital, and the stock price rose all the way. BYD and Great Wall Motors, which have made achievements in the field of new energy vehicles, have increased their market value several times in one year.
But by 2021, new energy stocks in the capital market will gradually hit the ceiling. Although the mass production has been successfully realized, but the dream of high-end automatic driving has not been successfully taken over, the so-called automatic driving at this stage is still the auxiliary driving of L2, the high-order automatic driving is far away, and the capital market is gradually becoming realistic at the same time, starting to chase the next new story.
As a result, we saw The so-called "Tesla Killer" Rivian tell a story of a "skateboard chassis", the imagination space brought by the non-carrier body, so that this new energy vehicle company that has not yet been mass-produced has just been listed, and the market value was once as high as 161.523 billion US dollars, becoming the top three car companies in the world.
But just as realistically, after its market capitalization topped $160 billion, Rivian's stock price began to fall all the way. As of January 25, 2022, its market value was only $53.7 billion, down $100 billion from its peak.
In this case, such a "small role" as Tuanche.com can no longer tell a new story by relying solely on car building. It is precisely for this reason that capital does not expect these new car manufacturers. Relatively speaking, in the absence of stories now, the capital market is more looking forward to the cross-border technology giants to break the ceiling of new energy vehicles.
Among the giants in the field of smart phones, Apple and Xiaomi have determined to build cars, and the latter's car-making plans are accelerating, while Huawei does not build cars itself, but has different degrees of cooperation with xiaokang, Changan, BAIC, SAIC and other car companies. The crossover of these technology giants may reshape the business model of smart cars.
Among the Internet giants, Baidu announced early on to build cars with Geely, and it has a deep accumulation in the field of automatic driving. Similar to the logic, there is also the "Luoke Automobile" of Chang Jing, the founder of Stone Technology, and the market is also looking forward to achieving a certain breakthrough in the field of automatic driving.
Capital is always chasing new stories. In the current new energy vehicle market, the market is not looking forward to a new "new car-making force", but who can successfully tell the next new story of subversive industry.