In January 2022, 78 AIWAYS U5 SUVs were loaded and sent to Israel, which is the first batch of new energy vehicles exported by AIWAYS this year. The representative of this "new force of export car manufacturing" exported a total of 1676 vehicles last year, an increase of 62.9% year-on-year. In the 21 months since the first batch of exports to France in May 2020, a total of 2783 vehicles have been exported, becoming the new chinese car-making force with the largest sales volume in the EU market.
Many people may not have heard of this new car-making force, here is a brief introduction, AIWAYS Automobile was established in February 2017, the headquarters base and R & D center is located in Shanghai, with Jiangxi Shangrao Automobile Manufacturing Base, Jiangsu Changshu Battery Pack Factory, Shanxi Gaoping Methanol Fuel Cell System Manufacturing Base, and in Munich, Germany, established a European sales center, R & D center, in Denmark with methanol hydrogen production research center and manufacturing base.
Regarding Aiways Automobile, we must start with the founder Fu Qiang. He has rich experience in the automotive industry, having worked in FAW Changchun Automobile Research Institute, FAW-Volkswagen, Shanghai Volkswagen, Beijing Benz, Volvo Cars, and began to promote the development of FAW-Volkswagen Audi and Shanghai Volkswagen Skoda brands in China, and successfully operated the reform of Mercedes-Benz's marketing system in China.
In March 2015, Foxconn, Tencent and Harmony Automobile jointly invested 1 billion yuan to create the Internet car brand "Harmony Futeng". It has two major sub-brands, one is FMC (the predecessor of Byton), which focuses on the high-end electric vehicle market, with Dai Lei and Bi Fukang as executives. The other is a car company that mainly builds affordable electric vehicles for families, and Fu Qiang, 49, is the CEO.
However, with the withdrawal of Foxconn and Tencent, Harmony Futeng quickly disintegrated, and he could only leave with his car project. Fortunately, with rich experience in automobile marketing and management, it won the favor of Tencent, and AIWAYS Yiwei (later renamed AIWAYS Auto) was born.
However, compared with Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal, which were established in 14 and 15 years, AIWAYS has been slow in the initial stage, and then spent two years to obtain car-making qualifications, and only at the end of 2019 was the first mass-produced car AIWAYS U5 listed. The previous year, only 2600 vehicles were sold in China, and the cumulative sales from January to November last year were 2992 vehicles, which was even less than Wei Xiaoli's single-month results, and there was almost no "sense of existence".
Fu Qiang is obviously aware of this, so from the beginning he focused on overseas, trying to use his performance in the European market to increase his domestic visibility. Up to now, it has landed in 11 countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Sweden.
However, at present, aiways Automobile's overseas strategy is not yet successful. Exports reached 1,000 vehicles in the previous year, and the total customs clearance volume (1,056 vehicles) in the first quarter of last year has exceeded the total for the whole year of 2020. At that time, they set a "small target" of exporting 10,000 vehicles, but the performance of the last three quarters was almost stagnant. It is reported that it is mainly affected by the environment of overseas markets.
Some industry insiders pointed out that based on the scale of overseas markets, for AIWAYS Automobile, to survive or to find a way to occupy a place in the domestic market, and "Wei Xiaoli" and other car companies to carry out dislocation competition, mainly attacking third- and fourth-tier cities, in order to find new development space and opportunities.
epilogue
Up to now, AIWAYS Has completed 8 rounds of financing, with a total of more than 10 billion, including giants such as Didi Chuxing, Ningde Times, and Shagang Group. At the beginning of 2022, the company's management team underwent a drastic change. Investor Chen Xuanlin served as chairman and Zhang Yang, who had served as vice president of WEILAI, became CEO, and Fu Qiang served as president. The capital personally coordinated the construction of the car, can the Aichi catch up? We'll see.