Following the construction of rockets and satellites, the establishment of universities, the study of flying cars, the manufacture of wearable devices, the power exchange field, the layout of semiconductors, etc., Geely has entered the mobile phone industry and wants to take Meizu under its umbrella. Li Shufu led Jili, on the road of "not doing the right thing", why did he go farther and farther?
1. Geely Automobile started to build mobile phones?
In September last year, Li Shufu founded The Star Era and personally served as the chairman, officially entering the field of mobile phones, which surprised people. Now there is more accurate news, Geely will acquire Meizu mobile phones, Li Shufu's determination to make mobile phones seems to have been quite obvious. In fact, in addition to mobile phones, Geely has many other "unprofessional" businesses, such as manufacturing rocket launch satellites, founding Geely University, laying out semiconductors, setting up chip affiliates, acquiring Lifan into the field of power exchange, manufacturing wearable devices X Watch watch tapes and so on.
2. Li Shufu is on the road of not doing his job?
Some people believe that as a car company, Geely is good at doing a good job, but it always engages in some that are not, and it goes farther and farther on the road of not doing business. What's more, the advantages of Geely's auto business have seriously declined. First of all, in the first half of last year, Geely's sales have been stepped on by Chang'an. Although through the power of the second half of the year, Geely barely won the independent sales championship in 2021, but in fact, it has been approached by the Great Wall, and the annual sales gap is only 40,000 units. Among the three independent strong, the wheezing of the Great Wall and Chang'an chasing after Jili has been clearly audible. In addition, there is a "big dark horse" BYD, whose sales continue to soar, and is eyeing the tiger.
Secondly, in the face of unprecedented changes in the automotive industry in a hundred years, Geely failed to reproduce its success and glory in the era of fuel vehicles, and the new energy vehicle business was left behind, not only could not see the shadow of the leader Tesla and BYD, but also could not compare with the Great Wall and the new force of car manufacturing "Wei Xiaoli". Geely's previous new energy enterprise business was blocked, mainly due to the compromised technical route of oil to electricity. Li Shufu, who is painfully worried, has newly established a pure electric brand, Extreme Krypton. However, in the middle of last year, it was questioned that there were problems such as disguised price increases, allocation reductions, and delayed deliveries, and there was a "mooncake" accident during the Mid-Autumn Festival, and Extreme Krypton suffered a word-of-mouth crisis, and the road ahead was still long.
3. Why are you getting farther and farther away?
In the case of a serious decline in the advantages of the main automobile business, why does Li Shufu still take Geely to continuously expand the business boundaries through acquisitions, mergers and acquisitions, etc.? On the one hand, this may be related to Li Shufu's successful experience along the way. Born as a cattle herder, he was a continuous entrepreneur at the beginning of the sea, opening a photo studio, producing refrigerators, building motorcycles, and constantly changing the path of entrepreneurship. After entering the automotive industry, the snake swallowed Volvo, which laid a solid foundation for Geely to become an independent brother. Li Shufu is good at using, absorbing and digesting, integrating external forces, achieving great success, and he continues to replicate the successful cases of the past.
On the other hand, Geely is separated from its own main business, "not doing business" involved in other related fields, in fact, it also has its own very reasonable needs, the fundamental purpose is to open up the upstream and downstream, to build a pan-automotive industry ecological chain. For example, in the future intelligent car use scenarios, mobile phones and cars interact more closely, so mobile phone manufacturers such as Apple and Xiaomi enter the automotive industry, and Car companies such as Tesla and Geely make mobile phones. Geely satellites, like Tesla's StarLink, are building the advantages of the intelligent technology ecological chain. There are also semiconductor chips, power exchange business, etc., all around the layout of the automotive ecological chain.
But the key is that Li Shufu's pace is so fast, the business boundaries have been expanding, and whether Geely's own system strength has the ability to digest and integrate, and exert greater synergy. To know that in the automotive sector alone, Geely's sub-brands have already exceeded 12, and the number is even comparable to Volkswagen, but Volkswagen is an annual sales volume of tens of millions, while Geely's annual scale is only more than one million. Coupled with the large number of businesses outside the automotive sector, does it distract Geely's strategic focus? Geely's most urgent task at present is to sort out the automotive sector, integrate a variety of businesses, step on every step, and then move forward steadily.