Author| Pan Tao Editor| Luo Lijuan
The year is approaching, and the circle of friends of Evergrande auto people has posted a recruitment message: Evergrande New Energy Automobile Tianjin Company, 2022 grade waiting for you. As can be seen from the accompanying picture information, there are hundreds of recruitment positions.
"Massive recruitment has begun." Yang Guo (pseudonym) of Evergrande Automobile Tianjin Company revealed to All-Weather Technology that there is currently a resurgence plan to allow departing employees to return to the company.
Just a few days ago, Li Yilong (pseudonym), who is also a Evergrande automaker, just received his year-end award, which reached 6 figures. This surprised him a bit. "When Hengchi 5 went offline, it had already sent everyone a downline bonus, and I didn't expect to wait until the year-end bonus."
However, such benefits do not benefit all Evergrande employees, according to employees of another business segment of Evergrande Group, there is no year-end bonus this year.
The downturn in the real estate business has made the new energy vehicle business that is currently on fire the hope of Evergrande's turnover. The group as a whole has begun to shift towards the automotive business.
Xu Jiayin announced at a "special meeting on the resumption of work and production" in October last year that the sales scale of real estate would be reduced from more than 700 billion yuan to about 200 billion yuan per year within 10 years, and at the same time complete the industrial transformation from real estate to new energy vehicles.
On January 21 this year, Evergrande announced that Shaun was appointed as an executive director and Liang Linlin was appointed as a non-executive director. Sean, 50, is the executive director and chairman of Evergrande Automobile and the executive president of Evergrande Group Co., Ltd. This adjustment may mean that the auto sector will officially pick up the girder.
In order to revitalize the automobile business, Evergrande Automobile shouted the slogan of "three months of big work" after the eleventh of last year, and tried to ensure that the first car of Hengchi in Tianjin Factory rolled off the production line. To this end, Evergrande Automobile took turns to transfer employees from Shanghai and Nansha bases to Tianjin for support.
In January this year, Hengchi 5 sent a good report of "12 days ahead of the line". This has made some Evergrande Automobile employees see hope.
"The internal saying is that Hengchi 5 will be mass-produced in the second half of this year, and then Hengchi will roll off the production line at the end of 7." Employees of Evergrande Automobile Nansha Base revealed to all-weather technology that the pricing of Hengchi 7 is higher, or more than 200,000 yuan.
But there are also employees who are not optimistic about this. Ye Liu (pseudonym), who participated in the "car-making" of the Tianjin factory, believes that the factory's current production line has many problems, and the lack of materials is serious, even if it is mass production, the final form of Hengchi 5 is not what is currently seen, "it is very likely to reduce the allocation." ”
Regardless of whether it can be mass-produced as scheduled, it seems that there is no way back for Evergrande.
In the view of Wang Xianbin, director of the Gaz Automobile Research Institute, the acceleration of mass production may also be related to Evergrande's eagerness to maintain its automobile production qualifications.
In 2012, the Notice of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on establishing an exit mechanism for the automotive industry broke the "lifelong system" of automobile production qualifications. According to this document, automobile manufacturers that cannot maintain normal production and operation will implement a special publicity management for a period of two years, and enterprises that have not applied for the assessment of access conditions or failed to pass the assessment after the expiration of the special publicity period will suspend their "Announcement", and will not be allowed to change the basic situation such as name change and relocation.
After Evergrande acquired Guoneng Automobile in 2019 and obtained production qualifications, its Tianjin plant almost came to a standstill. This means that Evergrande Automobile is at risk of losing its production qualifications.
In 2022, can Evergrande Automobile successfully achieve mass production? After mass production, what are the prospects for waiting for it?
Cast the die
After the shortage of funds, Evergrande's attitude towards its auto business underwent a 180-degree turn.
In August last year, Evergrande issued an announcement that it was "approaching several potential independent third-party investors to discuss the sale of some of the company's assets", and Evergrande Automobile was among these "some assets". At this time, the market has news that Xiaomi has contacted Evergrande in this regard, but Evergrande quickly issued a statement saying that it only had "preliminary exchanges with Xiaomi Group and has not in-depth negotiations to advance".
At the same time, the loss of the automobile business has made Evergrande more and more unbearable.
According to Evergrande Automobile's profit warning announcement in the first half of 2021, it recorded a net loss of 4.8 billion yuan in the first half of 2021. Since the debut of Hengchi in 2019, as of the first half of 2021, its cumulative loss has reached 17.4 billion yuan.
Evergrande Automobile soon reported arrears of employee wages, provident funds and other situations. "It started to pay in September, for two consecutive months, and only started to make up for it in November." A number of Evergrande employees confirmed that they had basically made up for it in December, but the compensation for the layoffs was still not in place.
During this period, in order to throttle, Evergrande Automobile began to let some employees take vacations, but the standards of various departments were not the same. For example, in the Tianjin factory, the proportion of employees on leave in some departments is only 20%, and some can reach 50%.
During the vacation period, employees can only get the final salary. Taking Guangzhou as an example, from December 1, 2021, the minimum wage standard for full-time employed workers in Guangzhou was adjusted to 2300 yuan / month, compared with 2100 yuan before. For a time, the team of resignation and labor arbitration continued to expand.
But Li Yilong revealed that there were not many choices after leaving Evergrande Automobile: "Evergrande Automobile initially recruited people for the same position and offered about 50% higher salaries than its peers." There are even HR from Evergrande Automobile to other new car manufacturers, facing former colleagues who came to apply, bluntly saying that "the salary cannot exceed Evergrande, and it is necessary to reduce wages."
People with only Evergrande automobile background are considered to have "equal to zero" car-making experience, and it is more appropriate to change careers, Li Yilong mentioned.
An employee who just left Evergrande Automobile Tianjin Company not long ago, who was previously an employee of Guoneng Automobile, said bluntly: "Every time the car is loaded for the outside world to see, there is no actual production and research and development process, I have been in this company for 4 years, and I have not experienced formal car manufacturing." ”
Such sayings as "Evergrande will not build cars" are endless. However, Evergrande Automobile, which sold fruitless results, had no more choices and shouted the slogan of "building a car" to the outside world again. On October 11 last year, Evergrande Automobile hung up the banner of "Three months of great dryness, the first car of Hengchi in Tianjin factory rolled off the production line".
Source: Pacific Auto Network
It's not easy to get back on track. Especially in front of partners and suppliers, how to relieve the crisis of trust? In order to stabilize the supplier, Evergrande chose to pay the project acceptance fee in advance. "During the construction period, the acceptance payment was paid, and the people promised him to resume work, otherwise they would not do it at all." Ye Liu revealed.
But another factory logistics staff said that at present, it is still not necessary to return all the money to the supplier in time, "every day is urged, but there is no way." ”
The people who remained in Evergrande Automobile began to be reorganized, and some of them went to the empty departments of the building to be merged. Xu Jiayin also "pumped" the car at the meeting many times.
Xu Jiayin mentioned many times in his internal speech that now Evergrande's focus is on building cars. Probably every month there will be a group meeting or Liu Zong (Liu Yongzhuo) to give everyone a 'chicken blood'. Li Yilong said.
The production line transformation of the Tianjin factory is also being carried out simultaneously, with some equipment purchased through suppliers and partly dismantled directly from other factories.
During this period, employees of the Nansha and Shanghai bases in Guangzhou were also sent to Tianjin in turn to provide support. "Guangzhou Nansha will probably send more than 100 people per batch." The above-mentioned Evergrande Automobile employees said that the original three factories each plant has thousands of people, and now the three factories add up to about 1,000 people, and the single factory production is obviously insufficient.
In addition to the personnel, several Hengchi 5s produced on trial at the Guangzhou plant were also transported to the Tianjin plant for testing with the models of the Tianjin plant.
On January 12, the call for "three months of big work" ushered in the results - Evergrande officially announced that hengchi 5 first car was officially rolled off the production line, 12 days earlier than the original time.
Source: Xiaoxiang Morning News
After the first car rolled off the production line, the mass production of Hengchi 5 seemed to be in front of us. However, according to an employee of Evergrande Automobile's Tianjin base, this is actually not the first time that Hengchi 5 has rolled off the production line. Before the launch, Hengchi 5 has already experienced "rehearsal of the downline" internally, the time is last November, after which liu Yongzhuo visited the Tianjin factory, Evergrande Automobile arranged a Hengchi 5 off-line for it.
The wide range of media reports has been the third time that Hengchi 5 has actually gone offline. It's no surprise that it's 12 days in advance.
Real estate imprint
In the past year, in the capital market, the new energy vehicle sector as a whole has encountered heat, an increase of more than 20%.
But this is not the case with Evergrande Automobile. In February 2021, its stock price climbed all the way to HK$69, corresponding to a market value of more than HK$600 billion, exceeding the market value of Great Wall Motor and SAIC Motor in the same period. But now its share price has fallen to about HK$3.5, corresponding to a market value of HK$38.2 billion – even if the First Car of Hengchi 5 goes offline, investors have voted with their feet.
If Weilai's label is a user and a fan, and Xiaopeng's label is intelligent and has a sense of technology, then the biggest label of Evergrande Automobile is "real estate".
The real estate background has left countless imprints on Evergrande Automobile, which has exacerbated its current "loss" to a certain extent.
According to the information of a number of Evergrande Automobile employees, the automobile personnel component also introduced the Toyota faction after holding Guoneng and poaching a large number of Geely employees. However, one-third of Evergrande Automobile's employees are still transferred from Evergrande Real Estate, especially in management.
In Ye Liu's impression, after the slogan of "three months of big work" was shouted, the team began to respond quickly. One of the most important things is actually to make plans and do PPT.
"After the plan, there must be expectations, and there must be an incentive process, and this set of things is very complete." He said that these are already common things within Evergrande, and PPT usually can not appear too many professional terms, can not be too difficult, so as not to lead "can't understand".
But because of this, between the real estate faction and the automobile faction, many times "do not agree with each other". "Let's say this car we think it's going to have a problem when it's loaded. But the leader will tell you to put it on first, and then say that if there is a problem, you may hand over the difference first in order to complete the target. The aforementioned departing employee complained.
And in terms of organizational structure, Ye Liu believes that there are more people giving orders and fewer people working.
For example, in March last year, in order to speed up the process of car manufacturing, Evergrande Automobile introduced two senior management talents from Geely, and some lower-level employees followed suit. In order to smoothly arrange these employees, the relevant positions have swelled rapidly. "There are not only directors and deputy directors in a workshop, but also senior managers and managers in various subdivisions of the workshop, and there have been up to 4 directors in a workshop."
Factional and bloated structure, but what may be most oppressive to employees is "marketing".
A Evergrande automobile employee in Guangzhou told All-Weather Technology, "Since shouting out to build a car in 2019, it has been very busy, working overtime until late at night, similar to the rhythm of Evergrande Real Estate." Each employee carries a KPI for selling and managing money. The financial KPI of small management can be as high as 800,000, and the sale of houses is to sell one set a year, and the daily is to take a look. If it can't be done, performance will be deducted. ”
The same is true of the Tianjin plant. Before the Tianjin factory began to transform the production line for Hengchi 5, for a long time, the focus of employees' work was marketing, such as pulling people to see houses and selling Evergrande Wealth's wealth management products. These marketing tasks are planned as indicators of varying amounts. For example, full financial management, a workshop, a 10-person production team is also allocated to the amount of financial management of 200,000 yuan.
In the real estate industry, national marketing is not a new thing, there have been public reports and statistics, in the top 100 housing enterprises, 40 launched national marketing.
Within Evergrande, all the marketing actions of employees have detailed records, and some employees have been notified of criticism and deducted bonuses because the marketing work is not in place. "But the thunderstorm began in September last year, and these KPIs are no longer mentioned today." The above-mentioned Evergrande Automobile employees said.
Evergrande Automobile is now such a car-making miracle, in fact, in the early days of Evergrande car-making, there are signs of appearance.
In 2019, Xu Jiayin shouted out "buy, buy, close, circle, big, good", trying to use acquisition, alliance and strategic cooperation to do big and fast.
By acquiring a 51% stake in the automotive company NEVS, Evergrande Automobile will acquire its production qualifications. In the following year, Evergrande has successively acquired and invested in a number of automotive industry chain companies, harvested technology and intellectual property rights in many aspects such as powertrain, chassis architecture, wheel hub motor, etc., and gathered "production factors".
Externally, it uses real estate play: crazy smashing advertising to create momentum.
Whether real estate people can build a good car, Evergrande has reached the time to prove itself.
Energy production?
Evergrande has invested tens of billions of dollars in Evergrande Automobile, and in order to raise funds, evergrande Automobile raised HK$500 million and HK$2.7 billion in just one month last November.
At the same time, Evergrande Automobile also sold some assets, including electric drivetrain company e-Traction, and British wheel hub motor manufacturer Protean Electric.
Among them, the sale price of e-Traction is 2 million euros (about 14.52 million yuan), while the price bought by Evergrande two years ago is 500 million yuan. As part of the deal, Evergrande also waived a loan of about RMB155 million from e-Traction. In October last year, it was reported that Evergrande was also planning to sell Guoneng's Swedish parent company, which would not affect its production qualifications.
For Evergrande, which lacks money, mass production can not only maintain the automobile production qualifications, but also the cash flow brought by the subsequent sale of cars may also help it solve its urgent needs.
Today, Hengchi 5 has been rolled off the production line, and the price is expected to be less than 200,000 yuan. Evergrande Automobile hopes that the Hengchi 5 LX can compete on the same stage with Audi Q3, BMW X1 and other models.
In general, the first car off the production line will generally open the booking process synchronously. However, Hengchi 5 has not disclosed the relevant information at present.
Similarly, the general first car off the production line often means that mass production is not far away, at this stage, the production of the car has been fully run. In order to cope with the upcoming production capacity, in the next 3-4 months, the workshop will prepare production and materials, continuously optimize the production process and improve efficiency.
Today, the Hengchi 5 has rolled off the production line, but can this car really achieve mass production in the next few months? Industry views diverged.
Some industry insiders believe that Evergrande Automobile can achieve mass production this year, and the greater difficulty may be funds.
However, some former Evergrande automobile employees believe that Evergrande not only has no intention of mass production, but also cannot achieve mass production. "There are a lot of hidden things here, outsiders don't know, Hengchi 5 has a lot of hard injuries, relatively big problems include high-voltage flameout and battery overheating." In the eyes of our insiders, there is no hope of mass production. ”
However, some internal employees said that the information they received was that the mass production of Hengchi 5 was expected after August this year. After the Spring Festival, the Nansha plant will start the research and development of Hengchi 7.
Putting aside the question of whether Hengchi 5 can be mass-produced, even if this car can be successfully listed, its market competitiveness is also questionable.
KPMG analyst Cao Fei believes that "in the domestic market, the competition for new energy SUVs is more fierce, and the current promotional content of Hengchi 5 has not yet found a better selling point, if there is no outstanding feature, coupled with the current brand power is difficult to gain a firm foothold in the market." ”
If it is true as the above Evergrande employees said, Hengchi 5 still has the possibility of reducing allocation, then the competitiveness will be further weakened.
However, in Cao Fei's view, Evergrande's real estate resources in China can help it build sales channels. "For example, the real estate resources in the 3rd and 4th tier cities to arrange exhibition halls may open up a world."
Channel construction has become an important ability of electric vehicle competition, "Wei Xiaoli" is also accelerating, just by virtue of the real estate resources in hand, Evergrande can sit firmly on the Diaoyutai?
In the context of Evergrande's "baojiao building", consumers may need full courage when they enter Evergrande's stores to buy a car.
Of course, whether Evergrande Automobile can eventually mass-produce and whether the product can withstand the test of the market, everything has to be answered by time.