Produced by | Tiger Sniff Car Group Author | Wang Xiaoyu
The first day of the Year of the Tiger coincides with the announcement of sales by new car-making forces at the beginning of each month.
On February 1, 2022, the new forces ushered in a good start. In January, three companies sold more than 10,000 units, namely 12,922 units of Xiaopeng Motors, 12,268 units of Ideal Cars, and 11,009 units of Nezha Motors. NIO ranked fourth with 9,652 units, zero-run cars ranked fifth with 8,085 vehicles, and Extreme Kr ranked sixth with 3,530 vehicles. As of press time, WM Motors and Lantu Automobile have not yet released sales data.
The January sales data of several new car-making forces have increased significantly compared with the same period last year, such as ideal cars, which increased by 128.1% year-on-year in January 2021, and Xiaopeng increased by 115% year-on-year. However, compared with December 2021, everyone has shown signs of decline to varying degrees. Behind this is the superposition of many factors, such as the decline of new energy subsidies, the traditional sales off-season before and after the Spring Festival, the epidemic and so on.
But aside from these objective factors, 2022 will still be a key year for the new car-making forces to take advantage of the victory. A few days ago, when Tesla announced its 2021 Q4 financial report, Elon Musk revealed to the outside world: "We will not launch new models this year." In a sense, Tesla's new product window period will become a great opportunity for new forces to counterattack.
First, this February will be more difficult
In January's sales ranking, Xiaopeng Motors led the second ideal car with only 654 units, and almost lost the crown. Compared with Xiaopeng's performance of 16,000 vehicles in December last year, the month-on-month decline was significant. The official explanation is: "Xiaopeng Automobile carried out technical transformation of Xiaopeng Zhaoqing base during the Spring Festival shutdown period from the end of January to the beginning of February 2022. Once the renovation is complete, a large number of on-hand orders brought into 2022 are expected to accelerate deliveries. ”
Nezha Automobile, which focuses on the low-end market, once again broke into the top three sales of new cars in January. Weilai, whose average bicycle price exceeded 440,000, suffered a bit of a loss in the sales ranking, and was squeezed to the fourth place after a slight decline in January (10,489 units in December).
For the overall market in 2022, Ma Lin, head of corporate communications at NIO, showed an optimistic attitude: "2022 is an important year for NIO: three new NT2.0 models delivered, the existing model intelligent cockpit upgrade, NAD autonomous driving application, 150 degree solid-state battery delivery; the second production base in Hefei Xinqiao was put into production; after Norway, four European countries began to provide full-system services." ”
There is also a new force with an extremely optimistic attitude, extreme krypton cars. On the 1st of every month, Extreme Kr is always the first car company to stand up and announce its own sales, although the sales scale is not large, the ranking is not very high, but such an attitude is worth learning from many new forces. Extreme Krypton delivered 3,530 vehicles in January, compared to 3,796 deliveries in December last year, which also showed a slight decline from the previous month.
This January of 2022, not only are new energy vehicles difficult to sell, but all automotive products are more difficult to sell than in previous years.
On January 30, the China Automobile Dealers Association released the "China Auto Dealers Inventory Warning Index Survey" VIA shows that in January 2022, the inventory warning index of Chinese auto dealers was 58.3%, down 1.8 percentage points year-on-year, up 2.2 percentage points month-on-month, and the inventory early warning index was above the boom-bust line (50% is the inventory early warning index boom-bust line; the higher the inventory early warning index, the lower the market demand, the greater the inventory pressure, the greater the operational pressure and the greater the risk). It can be seen that the demand side has been sluggish in the short term.
From the perspective of sub-indexes, the inventory, market demand and average daily sales index in January fell sharply, mainly due to the dual impact of the epidemic and the Spring Festival, and the overall demand and sales trend of the automobile market were weak. Judging the market next month: February, as the traditional sales off-season, is also a vacuum period after the Spring Festival, which is affected by the recurrence of the epidemic and the short-term market support is insufficient. Coupled with the fact that the chip problem may continue to be resolved until the second half of this year, it is expected that the sales of full-caliber passenger cars will be about 1.4 million units in February, down about 40% month-on-month.
In addition to the changes in the big market, the decline of the new energy subsidy policy has also adversely affected the sales growth.
For example, Xiaopeng Automobile announced the price of the latest subsidies for all models not long ago, of which the P7 sold by the whole series rose by 4300-5900 yuan. In addition, volkswagen ID.6 CROZZ and ID.4 CROZZ, GAC Aean LX, and Nezha Automobile have also raised their prices. In addition, Tesla's domestic Model 3 and Model Y rear-wheel drive models rose by 10,000 yuan and 21,000 yuan respectively.
In short, January is light, February is more difficult, so will 2022 be better?
Will 2022 be better?
In 2021, "Wei Xiaoli" completed the verification period from 0-1.
This conclusion comes from a recent article written by Ideal Auto CEO Li Xiang, "The Importance of Rhythm Control for Entrepreneurship". He divided entrepreneurship into three major stages: first, from the 0-1 verification period; second, from 1-10 growth period; third, from 10-100 maturity period.
Li wants to believe that the iconic feature of the verification period is from scratch to you can eat more than 3% of the market share of your segment, and you have a significant specialty that can become the ceiling of the industry. "I personally think that the three fools of our car are in 2021 to complete the verification period from 0-1, and everyone has eaten about 3% of the market share in their own market segments."
"At this stage, for enterprises, the most important thing is to give full play to their own strengths, which are easy to be ignored by the original leaders, but they are valuable to users." He further gave an example: "For example, the user service capabilities of Weilai Automobile, such as the intelligent driving ability of Xiaopeng Automobile, such as the product capabilities of the ideal car facing the family user group." ”
Entering 2022, this batch of new car-making forces are entering a period of growth from 1-10. At this stage, the most important thing for the enterprise is to adhere to and amplify your strengths from 0-1, and make up for the fatal shortcomings that will occur in competition and rapid growth.
In terms of NIO's service capabilities, in January 2022, NIO added a total of 59 new substations, including 18 highway substations, 63 overcharge stations and 29 destination charging stations. At present, Weilai has completed the high-speed power exchange network of five vertical, three horizontal and four metropolitan areas, and the total number of high-speed power exchange stations has reached 223, and from the official power exchange map, its route and node are like a city subway map.
Weilai's proposal to "make it more convenient to add electricity than to refuel" is its own specialty and has become an industry ceiling. During the Spring Festival, the author also noticed that in Hunan and other places, there was a SuE license plate WEILAI ES6 from Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, 1000 kilometers away, and a Weilai ES8 from the Hainan Haikou Qiong A license plate 1200 kilometers away, and the actual actions of these owners can prove that the layout of weilai high-speed power station has solved the anxiety of long-distance travel of electric vehicles for some users.
During the Spring Festival, the Nio ES6 with a Suzhou E license plate was replaced at a substation in Changsha, Hunan Province
If you look at Xiaopeng Automobile and Ideal Automobile, which are in the top three sales, it is also easy to find their specialties - Xiaopeng's intelligent and ideal user thinking. Even the humble Nezha Automobile has also relied on the market image of "affordable smart trams" to open up sales channels in the second- and third-tier markets. It also includes Gaohe, which calls itself a high-end brand, and harvests a large number of high-end consumers with the concept of "technology luxury". This can also prove from the side that the market and voice of the new forces of car manufacturing cannot rise, largely due to their lack of expertise.
Judging from the new products of the new car-making forces in 2022, it will be more and more difficult to maintain their own characteristics.
At present, among the products that are planned for mass production, both the technical route and the product form are beginning to converge. For example, in terms of intelligent driving, the new models launched by the new forces in 2022 will almost all use at least 1 lidar, and the autopilot chips have also used the NVIDIA Orin series, trying to seize Tesla's opportunity in intelligent driving in the way of hardware first and software supplementation.
At nio day 2021, NIO released the entry-level sedan NIO ET5, which is expected to start delivery in September this year. The NIO ET7 released last year will also start delivery on March 28, and both products are based on the NIO NT2 platform and use a lidar. At the Guangzhou Auto Show last year, Xiaopeng Motors released its new model, the Xiaopeng G9, which began to be delivered in the third quarter of this year, using 2 laser radars.
In the second-tier new force camp, Nezha S will apply Huawei's MDC intelligent driving computing platform and lidar technology, and WM M7 will use 3 laser radars, and will also be delivered to the market this year.
In fact, the impact of rapid expansion and inward competition among industry players is not all positive, and even accelerates the exposure of fatal shortcomings. Like in terms of power batteries, Xiaopeng Automobile is currently experiencing a storm of replacing the battery supply of the Ningde era. The problem of Weilai's production capacity has been continuously highlighted, and Ma Lin, head of corporate communications of Weilai, mentioned: "As in the past year, every month is delivered with production volume. "Another example is the problems that Extreme Kr 001 is currently facing in terms of vehicles and software.
Is it really a tiger, or a paper tiger, if you stretch the timeline, it is nothing more than relying on sales.
Write at the end
Therefore, it is a minority that can survive "from 0 to 1", and even a very small number of people who can survive "from 1 to 10".
According to Li Xiang, "Looking at the entire entrepreneurship, the company that can complete from 1-10 should be a ratio of one in a thousand." In short, what can be done will survive, and what cannot be done will be naturally eliminated. Keep two points in mind: 1, continue to expand the company and their own long board; 2, make up for the shortcomings, this is the necessity, not the choice of questions. ”
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