"As long as the country needs it, we can mobilize all the supply chains and build anything."
Wen 丨 Hua Shang Tao Li Jun
In 2019, Toyota and BYD jointly built cars, BYD was responsible for providing technical support, and Toyota was marked. A Chinese car company, to one of the world's most cattle car companies as a master?
Wang Chuanfu responded: The West has been ahead of us for hundreds of years, and now Chinese is leading, and everyone is not used to it.
In just over two years, under the support of the rapid rise of Chinese companies such as BYD, Chinese lead and have begun to become a habit.
【 DM-i sales myth】
In March 2021, Officer Lei announced the news: Xiaomi is about to start building cars.
A few days later, he gathered with a group of car builders at the Huaxia Classmates' Meeting. In the photos that flowed out, in addition to the three new Forces of the Internet "Wei Xiaoli", there is also a person with a special identity - the "big brother" of the car-making industry, BYD Wang Chuanfu.
The relationship between the two is delicate, BYD is Xiaomi's mobile phone foundry, and now they are meeting on the narrow road to build cars.
"Lei Jun took 3 years to build a car, and it was impossible to buy it with money in these 3 years." If your strategy goes in the wrong direction, it may not be a lot to lose 5 billion, but you lose 3 years of time, which is very important. In the face of the "provocation" of many descendants, Wang Chuanfu, who has been suffering in this line for nearly 10 years, said meaningfully.
Soon, he used real money and silver to teach the new forces that were about to move.
DM-i super hybrid turned out, BYD opened the explosive valve: in 2021, the cumulative sales of more than 730,000 vehicles, of which the sales of new energy vehicles is close to 600,000, which is more than 2 times the annual sales of Xiaopeng, Weilai and Ideal, and the monthly sales volume reached 3 times that of Tesla, sitting firmly in the position of China's new energy vehicle sales.
BYD's stock price has also soared, and its market value once reached the trillion mark.
The report card handed over by Wang Chuanfu is a landmark victory.
This is not a sudden victory.
Founded BYD in 1995 to enter the battery field and become a leader, cross-border automobile manufacturing in 2003, comprehensive transformation of new energy vehicles in 2014... Wang Chuanfu, who was "selected" by Buffett, has been crossing borders. But looking back now, whether it is carefully designed and prepared, or by chance, all his big moves have actually been making breakthroughs around new energy vehicles.
With nearly 30 years of accumulation, Wang Chuanfu has advanced step by step and completed almost all the technical layouts related to car manufacturing.
China's car manufacturing ushered in the era of Wang Chuanfu.
【"Competitors have no chance"】
The power battery and semiconductor industry is an important link in Wang Chuanfu's overall strategy.
While BYD's new energy vehicle triumph is playing, Wang Chuanfu's battery and semiconductor businesses that entered the game in the early years are also frequently reported.
The momentum of new energy vehicles is fierce, and it is bound to have a huge demand for batteries and chips. These two businesses not only support BYD's vehicle battle, but also allow BYD to penetrate deeper and more steadily in the entire industry, and have a greater imagination.
The power battery is one of the core "three electricity" systems of new energy vehicles, and it is also the starting point of Wang Chuanfu's entrepreneurship.
In 1995, Wang Chuanfu, who was originally doing research in the system, threw away the "iron rice bowl" and created a BYD battery manufacturing company in Shenzhen, he dismantled the expensive battery production lines imported from Japan one by one, using a large number of cheap manual substitutions, making the production cost 40% lower than that of Japanese manufacturers, firmly occupying the price advantage, and two years later sold 150 million nickel-cadmium batteries, becoming the world's fourth largest battery, providing services for Motorola, Nokia and other brands.
In 2003, BYD made history and surpassed Japan's Sanyo in one fell swoop to become the "world's first" mobile phone battery supplier.
After that, although Wang Chuanfu transformed into a car, the battery has always been BYD's "reserved program".
"BYD's batteries will not be sold for the time being." Recalling that in 2016, when the battery business was still in the position of the king, Wang Chuanfu, who took the route of internal integration and vertical integration, refused to sell technology and insisted on "fertile water does not flow to outsiders' fields".
But such closed-door construction gives competitors more opportunities.
Although BYD's main lithium iron phosphate battery is highly secure, its endurance is slightly weaker. The Ningde era relied on the ternary lithium battery with higher energy density and high mileage to emerge, and the performance was high-speed and upward, quickly occupying half of the domestic battery market.
In the first half of 2021, the domestic installed capacity of the Ningde era reached 25.76GWh, with a market share of 49.1%; although BYD ranked second, its market share was only 14.6%, and the gap was getting wider and wider.
When the opponents were fighting fiercely, BYD batteries were once in an embarrassing situation of making money inside the company and eating a big pot of rice.
"Subsidiaries earning BYD's money is not called skill, dismantling it to make money is called skill!"
Zeng Yuqun climbed all the way to the top, so that Wang Chuanfu, who had been the king of China's batteries, realized the seriousness of the problem and worked hard to retrieve the lost crown.
In 2018, he began to adjust his strategy from "vertical integration" to "supply chain openness", initiating reforms within the company and promoting THE spin-off of BYD's business. In 2019, 5 subsidiaries, including Fordy Battery, were successively established, and the motors, batteries, powertrain and other businesses were killed to participate in market competition.
For lithium iron phosphate batteries that have been betting on, BYD has opened a large door to supply all car companies.
The Fordy battery, which was thrown out of the "greenhouse", quickly expanded its territory, the circle of friends for battery supply continued to expand, and the installed capacity continued to grow. In addition to local brands such as China's FAW, Changan Automobile and Zhongtong Bus, it is reported that many multinational car companies such as Tesla, Volkswagen, Daimler and Hyundai Motor are also in contact with BYD.
In 2020, Fordy Battery has launched an innovative blade battery, whose battery pack volume energy density is close to ternary lithium battery, and models equipped with blade batteries can meet the needs of more than 600 kilometers of endurance, and are expected to be equipped with models with higher cruising range in the future.
Blade batteries have now passed the needle prick test known as "Mount Everest" in the power battery safety testing community, and in Wang Chuanfu's words, blade batteries "will completely erase the word spontaneous combustion from the dictionary of new energy vehicles."
The layout of self-developed power batteries has built a moat for BYD's car manufacturing, and has also brought continuous performance growth points.
▲BYD blade battery
Another sword of Wang Chuanfu is BYD Semiconductor.
Since 2020, the global automotive industry has suffered from a "chip shortage", and in such a difficult situation, BYD Semiconductor, which was founded in 2004, has begun to shine.
TSMC Zhang Zhongmou once said: The mainland cannot make chips.
"As long as it is man-made, not created by God, and others can make it, we can." Wang Chuanfu, who was ridiculed by foreign media for "not measuring his own strength", really made the chip.
In 2009, before the outbreak of the chip crisis, BYD Semiconductor's R&D team successively attacked core technologies such as chip design and wafer manufacturing, becoming the only enterprise in China with a complete industrial chain of IGBT.
In December 2021, on the basis of its previous research and development achievements, BYD Semiconductor successfully independently developed and mass-produced the 1200V power device driver chip BF1181, and achieved large-scale production, breaking the monopoly of Japan's Mitsubishi for decades.
After more than ten years of dormancy, with the help of semiconductor "side business", BYD has become a unique "all-round player" in the new energy automobile circle.
In addition to providing services to the BYD Group, BYD Semiconductor today also supplies other major automotive component manufacturers, industrial and household appliance companies for a long time.
Among the IGBT component manufacturers of China's new energy bus power system in the past three years, BYD Semiconductor ranked second, ranking first among domestic manufacturers.
In 2021, BYD Semiconductor's half-year revenue has approached or even exceeded the annual revenue of previous years, becoming China's "power semiconductor leader".
Today, BYD Semiconductor has embarked on a separate listing, and the CHINext IPO has been successfully held on January 27.
In the future, Fordy Battery will also seek to go public. The smart transportation and photovoltaic energy storage businesses related to future transportation and travel laid out by Wang Chuanfu will also be spun off and listed after having stable profits.
In order to make these companies more independent and autonomous, Wang Chuanfu also distributed 10% of the equity of these subsidiaries to the management team to cultivate more "Xiao Wang Chuanfu", which in fact allows BYD to have a stronger foundation in the entire new energy vehicle and even the field of travel.
Wang Chuanfu once said that before retiring, he would "stabilize BYD's framework and management committee system." "If all goes well, then BYD's scale advantage will form, and competitors will not have a chance."
【Not only made by the most cattle】
An epidemic has allowed everyone to witness bydderING's "terror" again.
At the beginning of 2020, almost all factories in the country were shut down for production, but BYD's factories stayed up all night.
The COVID-19 pandemic has left masks in short supply, so BYD decided to build it itself. More than 30,000 engineers were dispatched, drawing drawings in 3 days, mask machines were made in 7 days, and it took 3 weeks to create meltblown cloth.
Two months later, BYD produced 100 million masks per day, and three months later, it became the world's largest mask factory.
How strong is BYD's manufacturing capabilities? Wang Chuanfu summed it up in one sentence:
When Foxconn responded to the call of Lao Mei and stopped giving Xiaomi and Huawei OEM, it was also BYD that stood up and accepted all the orders.
Before Wang Chuanfu, for car manufacturing, everyone tacitly agreed to the "refined division of labor" car manufacturing idea: go around the world to buy parts, and then assemble and sell.
"If you want to compete with others, you also have to take the road that others have taken, that is, to seek your own death." You play exactly the same way as others, why do you win? So, it has to be 'you hit yours, I hit mine'. ”
Wang Chuanfu insisted that only the research and development of the whole vehicle could find another way.
This wave of reverse operation can be called "madness", both can do batteries, can do motors, but also can do electronic control of car companies, at present, there is only BYD in the world.
These three things, in the early stage of the need for huge resources and financial investment, BYD personally engaged in the field, but also made their own core technology. In the Sino-US trade war, it is the only manufacturer in China that is not stuck in the neck and independently handles the three major pieces of electric vehicles.
But BYD is not without shortcomings. For example, for a long time, it was labeled "low", started cheaply, and even fought many "copycat" lawsuits for imitating foreign cars. For example, the cheap F0/F3 opened up the early market, but also left the impression of low-end goods on the public and dragged down its brand power.
Even today's explosive BYD DM-i models, the price is generally below 200,000, taking the 2022 Song Pro as an example, the starting price of new cars after subsidies is 135,800.
Seize the high-end market, so it became the last fortress that Wang Chuanfu wanted to conquer.
Relying on the accumulation of more than 10 years of manufacturing capacity, in the past two years, BYD has begun to accelerate various attempts at new energy high-end vehicles.
Wang Chuanfu established a high-end brand project within the company and transferred his sales general Zhao Changjiang to be fully responsible. According to reports, in the second half of this year, BYD will launch high-end brands, and the price range is expected to be more than 500,000-1 million yuan.
The brand is new and independent from the product to the sales service network and the operation team, and the first model is a hardcore off-road vehicle.
If it can be successfully launched, it also means that BYD has begun to face the mid-to-high-end market.
If the first half of the new energy vehicle is compared to the hardware, the second half is the competition of software, which is truly intelligent.
Even though it has become the core promoter of the new energy automobile industry, Wang Chuanfu has been shouting to build Tesla in minutes, but BYD is considered to be not competitive enough in terms of intelligence.
Compared with Tesla and new car manufacturers, BYD does not have an advantage in the openness and intelligence of automatic assisted driving. On social platforms, BYD's car machine caton and assisted driving system are also the objects of key criticism.
This short board, Wang Chuanfu is also accelerating to fill, and equally confident.
"It's just not released yet." He said, "We have a series of talents in the second half of the whole set of software and chips, and we also have a large market share, a big application platform, and a big application scenario in the first half, and the second half is easier." ”
【Chinese to be a little backbone】
In March 2021, Wang Chuanfu and Yu Minhong had a drink and chat.
After three rounds of drinking, the two elder brothers exchanged heartfelt complaints, and Wang Chuanfu confided some unknown past events:
"The first time I went to the United States, they always asked me to show him the return ticket, and I felt very uncomfortable, as if I was going to rely on your America and not come back, why should I rely on your America and not come back?" 」
Recalling the scene when he first went to the United States, this insult made Wang Chuanfu "quite uncomfortable", when he went to Britain, he was locked up in a small black room for interrogation for half a day, and in a fit of anger, Wang Chuanfu did not even want a passport and left.
"We are not stupid Chinese, and our industry will not be worse than yours, or even better than you."
The competition between countries is the competition of industries, and the real economy will always be the most solid chassis. What Wang Chuanfu, who has long been rich and free, is doing now is more like fighting for this breath.
This engineering-born technology maniac believes that technology changes everything, and only technical self-improvement can win victory and dignity for China's manufacturing industry.
In 2008, Buffett sent his general David Sokol to China on whether to invest in BYD. In the factory, Sokol somewhat questioned the safety of the battery, in order to prove that the electrolyte is non-toxic and recyclable, Wang Chuanfu immediately poured a cup of electrolyte, drank it in front of him, and made Sokol stunned.
The fanaticism and reverence for technology thus became the soul of BYD. Wang Chuanfu, who calls himself the "Chief Engineer", controls all the technical directions and details of the company and shows absolute authority.
For a long time, Chinese companies have generally faced "technology phobia" and are intimidated by their opponents.
Technical confidence and continuous output ability gave Wang Chuanfu the "backbone" to fight back, and it was a counterattack with strong Chinese colors.
In May 2021, BYD sounded the clarion call to conquer Europe, and the first batch of 100 Tang EVs was sent to Norway, and then entered the Latin American market. These export cars are named after the dynasty, with buttons with Chinese, and many people are worried that the Chinese is not foreign enough, which will affect sales.
"A distinctive feature of the Chinese nation is Chinese characters, why can't they be used?" I bear the responsibility for the mistake, and I am willing to sell this little. ”
For him, using Chinese keys is a must, and it can never be changed.
Looking back at all the decisions Wang Chuanfu has made since founding BYD, he is like a lone dictator.
The battery business decided to build a car when it was in the middle of the day, and was "beaten" by the capital market, and it took 3 years to acquire the Shaanxi Qinchuan Automobile Factory before producing the first car with a look. The transformation of new energy vehicles has been smashed into hundreds of billions, and has been adhered to to today.
He stood in the time and space dimension 10 years later to seek the current industrial layout, more than 10 years ago in the power battery, semiconductors, hardware, vehicle technology to invest in accumulation, and now plant melons.
China's new energy vehicle battlefield, smoke is everywhere, the track is more crowded, and the fight will be more tragic. However, Wang Chuanfu, who has been working for more than ten years, is more confident in the future and puts forward great goals:
"No. 1 in the world in 2025!"
This is the common dream of Chinese automakers who have been beaten for decades, held their breath and worked hard for decades, and are truly pursuing, and it is also a dream that should and can eventually be realized.
【References】
[1] "Dialogue with Wang Chuanfu: "Subsidiaries earn BYD's money is not called skill, dismantling it to make money is called skill", financial magazine Li Yang
[2] "Wang Chuanfu and BYD 'Myth of Creating Wealth'", 21st Century Business Herald Song Doudou Zuo Maoxuan
[3] "BYD's circle of friends for external supply continues to expand, and the countdown to the independent listing of the battery business is countdown? Daily Economic News Li Xing
[4] "Persuade Lei Jun not to build a car? Wang Chuanfu Urgent Clarification" Chinese entrepreneur Chen Ruiya
[5] "Chip shortage, exposing the terrifying strength of BYD" e-commerce newspaper Li Ying
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