「Core Tips」
In the folk, Chinese used to call the year of life "kan'er year", believing that in the year of life, a person may encounter many variables in life. 2022 enters the Year of the Yin Tiger, and the tiger represents courage, tenacity and courage. Among the business tycoons, who are the tigers? What challenges will they face in their own life year? "Leopard Change" launched this set of "The Year of the Big Guy's Life" in the Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger, tracing their life trajectory and exploring how they crossed the "hurdles" in their lives.
Author | Zhuo Yu
Edit | Xing Yun
A speech of "I don't understand why everyone still buys a gas car" has made Weilai founder Li Bin change from "the most miserable person in 2019" to "the most floating person in 2021".
At the end of 2021, Li Bin said this sentence in the communication after the NIO Day conference, offending all fuel car owners. This seems to fit Leo's character: tough and super confident, and sometimes arrogant.
However, perhaps from the moment he decided to build a car, he was ready to offend people.
In 2014, when Weilai Automobile came out, domestic smart phones were just popularized, if someone said that electric vehicles would replace fuel vehicles at that time, just like apples and millets eliminated Nokia at the beginning of this century, most of them would be considered a fool's dream.
Li Bin is that idiot. Li Bin, who was born in 1974, belongs to the Tiger according to the Chinese zodiac, and in the leadership personality test, such a person is good at controlling the situation, has strong execution, and does not give up until he reaches the goal. In the end, Li Bin not only persuaded investors, but also waited with a group of entrants who followed him until the era of new energy vehicles came.
However, Li Bin has a unique rational and gentle temperament, and he always smiles in public and has no sense of distance. This tiger has never been threatening, and the two contradictory temperaments have been fused in Li Bin, supporting him to overcome difficulties in the long and rich entrepreneurial history, and successively leading three companies to go public and ring the bell.
In 2022, the 48-year-old Li Bin ushered in the year of the tiger. This life year has always coincided with some key nodes in Li Bin's entrepreneurial career.
In 1998, Li Bin, who had just graduated for two years, left the company that he partnered with his brother Li Guoqing, started a business again, accidentally hit and bumped into the automotive field, which led to the story of the back of the EasyCar Network; in 2010, the Yiche Online Market, Li Bin experienced the most tangled year; in 2022, Weilai Automobile entered the deep water area of the new energy war, with more and more opponents, how should this tiger who does not love to threaten pave the "future"?
1, the heart has a tiger
One night in 2013, Li Bin and Lei Jun chatted in Xiaomi's office until one or two o'clock in the morning.
Li Bin began to go straight into the business, saying that he wanted to build a smart electric vehicle and hoped that the other party could invest in the partnership.
When he heard about the car-making Lei Jun, he felt a headache. At that time, the smart electric vehicle outlet just emerged, the Internet car-making team did not have thousands but hundreds, just looking for Lei Jun's people no less than 20, he felt that talking about car-making is almost equivalent to cheating money.
But Lei Jun is also a little curious, Sitting in front of him, Li Bin, who has just led the E-car online market for less than three years, has been a success, why should he suffer from the second stubble of continuous entrepreneurship?
Li Bin did not directly answer this doubt, but said, "I am willing to personally invest $150 million to do this." Years later, he still remembers clearly, when Lei Jun looked directly at him and asked, "When are you going to pull the trigger?" ”
In the end, the extremely cautious Lei Jun was "pulled down" by Li Bin, or because he rarely met entrepreneurs who asked investors for money and took out money from their pockets first.
But Li Bin seems to be born with the courage to make a desperate bet, as persistent and stubborn as a tiger, with ideas and pragmatism.
In 1974, Li Bin was born in Wuling Village, Tangquan Township, Taihu County, Anqing City, Anhui Province. In that backward mountain village, reading can change your destiny. Li Bin's first important choice in life was whether to go to secondary school or high school, when most people would choose a more popular secondary school, because after graduation, they could be assigned to work in the city and eat public meals. After a struggle with his family, Li Bin entered high school and was finally admitted to the Sociology Department of Peking University as a liberal arts champion in Taihu County.
After graduation, Li Bin first started a business to help people register domain names and rent overseas hosts; and then with Li Guoqing, the president of Peking University, he founded the predecessor of Dangdang.com, "Science and Literature Industry".
However, the brothers and sisters have been working together for less than a year, and the science documents have also become a husband and wife file model. In 1998, at the age of 24, Li Bin chose to leave and start a business on his own. After several twists and turns, the idea of creating a car website matured, and later the easy car network was born. Looking back, it was the resolute resignation in this life year and the trial and error in different tracks that allowed Li Bin to find a direction for his future career.
At the age of 26, Li Bin founded e-car.com, and nearly 10 million US dollars of financing had not yet been hot, so he caught up with the bursting tide of the Internet bubble and lost more than 4 million yuan before making money. At that time, Li Bin did something that was a bit tiger in the eyes of the outside world: let investors withdraw their investment, and he carried a debt of 4 million yuan.
In 2010, eCar was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the United States, and Li Bin ushered in a highlight moment. That year was also Li Bin's life year, and in the post-mortem review, he was not satisfied, "2010 was the year I was most troubled, more difficult than 2002 when I was in debt and had no money."
Although the listing was achieved, the work of splitting the non-Internet business before the listing was not smooth, and during the integration, he found that he had overestimated the synergies of the business in the past.
Later, when recalling, Li Bin wrote: I must deny myself and refocus on the Internet again. I also felt bad for months. Because of this decision, which was to admit my failure, I spent years, spent tens of millions of dollars, and diluted a lot of shares.
"To face failure head-on, and to admit failure" is Li Bin's biggest gain in that life year. After many years, the test once again befell Weilai.
In mid-2019, WEILAI ES6 is in the critical period of delivery, and the first step of delivery of WEILAI ES8 has successive spontaneous combustion incidents, coupled with the landing of domestic new energy vehicle subsidy policies, Weilai's sales have continued to weaken since the beginning of the year. After the release of the second quarter financial report, the company's stock price fell by 80% compared with the issue price, and it was on the verge of delisting.
At that time, the more Weilai sold, the more it lost, and it was in urgent need of funds to "transfuse blood". At the hardest time, cash flow was calculated on a daily basis, and Niolai almost stayed in the ICU for several months. Li Bin talked about the investors he could find, but no one reached out.
At the end of this year, Li Bin was called "the worst person of the year" by the media, but he joked to himself on the variety show, "In fact, I don't think so." ”
After Weilai survived this crisis, Li Bin thanked capital for not saving it in an interview, and he said bluntly that under the circumstances at that time, if there was capital to save Weilai, it might agree to any conditions. In the end, he and Wei Lai survived.
When Li Bin was studying at Peking University, he liked to play a game called "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", and when others chose cao cao and Liu Bei to start the game, he specially selected some misguided characters and led a few soldiers to see when they could unify the world.
He thought that was fun because it was hard.
2. Tiger howling dragon chant
The heart has a tiger sniffing the roses.
Although Li Bin has a strong heart of Tarzan collapsing in front of him and not changing color, he has no sense of distance and is very affinity.
Whenever he appeared, he could always see Li Bin's habitual smile and appeared approachable. If you travel back to ancient times, Li Bin is by no means like a warrior who will fight and kill the enemy, but more like a prime minister in the temple.
It is often said that a companion is like a companion of a tiger. As the helmsman who has led the listing of Yiche.com, Yixin Group and Weilai, Li Bin gives people the feeling of being just the opposite, with an ability to bring the people around him closer to his own.
Li Bin summed up this ability of trust as "calculating big accounts, not counting small accounts", counting big accounts refers to whether the cause can be done, and counting small accounts refers to how much money can be made.
When he took all the debts of Yiche in his personal name, the reporter asked him why he did this, he said: "The difficulties are short-lived, it is good to survive, I am confident." In fact, at that time, there were only a few people left in the company, and he made money every day by writing code for people to make a website.
Easy car before the listing of business divestiture needs to lay off employees, the company can not come up with money to pay compensation, Li Bin wrote an IOU to the person who left, the original easy car promised to hold the activities, as well as some of the scattered expenses in the split process, but also he paid out of his own pocket.
Liu Erhai, founding partner of Joy Capital, once revealed that when Li Bin founded WEILAI, he invested almost all his savings and rented a house in Beijing in order to create an entrepreneurial environment for himself.
The place where Li Bin impressed Lei Jun may be that the Weilai shares in his hands were bought with money, and the money he paid was the sum of several other investors.
As a result, Weilai Automobile has a fantastic start, Ma Huateng, Lei Jun, Zhang Lei, Liu Qiangdong, Shen Nanpeng, 5 top investors endorsed Weilai, and even he was the biggest competitor of E-Car Network - Li Xiang, the founder of Autohome, was attracted.
This style of li bin was later projected onto Weilai, forming Weilai's unique corporate culture and his personality as a leader.
From 2019 to the dark moment, Li Bin sent an internal letter announcing layoffs, and negative public opinion followed, when there was a "Young People Who Left Weilai" to brush the circle of friends. Although several young employees who left Weilai in the article were not optimistic about Weilai, their evaluation of Li Bin was consistently "very good", and some people even said that Li Bin was willing to follow him in starting a business.
Users are also fanned by Li Bin and Weilai to a certain extent.
At the beginning of the IPO of Weilai, Li Bin voluntarily donated one-third of the shares to set up a user trust fund, which allowed him to gain a large number of loyal fans. Li Bin is privately happy to mingle with car owners, often spending a lot of time replying to private messages on WeChat groups and Weilai APP, and at the most difficult time in 2019, he traveled almost all weekends to meet with Weilai car owners across the country.
Qin Lihong, president of WEILAI Automobile, once said that WEILAI can achieve direct dialogue between executives and users. This also builds brand penetration and cohesion for Weilai, so that in 2019, Weilai held an annual meeting, in order to save money, Weilai car owners spontaneously undertook the media and user pick-up work, and the owners were busy for the stage show.
A car owner who attended the annual meeting at the time later recalled in an interview: "I never chased the stars, but I chased Li Bin because he was good, and everything was for the sake of the user." ”
Over the years, the outside world has issued a lot of "good people cards" to Li Bin, but he is a businessman after all, and it is difficult to be a good person in business.
3. The tiger is looking at it
In the past year, Li Bin rarely appeared in the public eye, and even if Weilai's sales plummeted in October, he did not show up to explain, allowing the outside world to speculate about Weilai's future.
In Li Bin's eyes, 2021 and 2022 are the key periods for Weilai to carry forward the upper and lower levels. Especially in 2022, WEILAI enters a new product cycle, and as the new energy war enters the deep water area and encroaches on the hinterland of fuel vehicles, Weilai encounters a greater test.
Li Bin also seems to be more and more low-key. His Weibo setting has only been visible for half a year, and the latest developments stay on the retweeted WEILAI ET5 release on December 19, 2021, which was the day after he said at the ET5 release site that he questioned "why do anyone buy a gas car".
There are more than 3,000 people commenting on this Weibo, and the content of the message about Li Bin and Weilai accounts for most of the scolding, and some people have watched the video and specially downloaded Weibo to scold him. In the eyes of Weilai fans, how good Li Bin is, in the eyes of people who hate Weilai, how strong the opposite feelings are.
Li Bin has actually said a lot of "big words" and has been scolded by many people.
Shortly after the first ES8 was listed that year, he said that Weilai was the first to run in a lane change, and the electric car of Mercedes-Benz BMW was out of reach; the United States rang the clock scene, he said that it would not take five years, and it would be more convenient to refuel than to refuel, and in the CCTV program, he also released a bold statement, saying that Porsche's factory was not as good as the Jianghuai factory.
This time, Li Bin offended all the people who drove the fuel car and was ridiculed: a small factory with annual sales of less than 100,000 to the heart of fuel owners whose proportion of new car sales exceeded 80%.
Li Bin couldn't help but worry.
The latest document issued by the State Council shows that by 2025, the sales volume of new energy vehicles and new vehicles will reach about 20% of the total. In 2021, the sales volume of new energy vehicles in mainland China reached 3.521 million units, an increase of 1.6 times year-on-year, and the proportion of new car sales jumped to 13.4%, an increase of 8 percentage points year-on-year.
With such a rapid growth momentum, can Weilai maintain its leading edge under the continuous influx of new streams in the market?
The reality is that NIO's performance in 2021 will not be stable.
From the perspective of sales, since July last year, Weilai has fallen from the monthly sales champion of the new forces for many consecutive months, and in October, affected by the reconstruction and upgrading of the Hefei factory, the delivery volume suffered only 3667 units of "ankle slashing", which was once overtaken by the second echelon of Nezha and Weima.
In 2021, NIO delivered a total of 91,000 new cars, ranking second in the new forces, and Xiaopeng and Ideal sold 98,000 and 91,000 respectively. Overall, Weilai's monthly sales in 2021 fluctuate too much.
The contrast has always been regarded by Weilai as a real rival - Tesla, 2021 sales in China will be 470,000, sales exceeded 50,000 for several consecutive months, it can be seen that Weilai still has a long way to catch up.
At present, Weilai's latest debut OF5 is high hopes, this new car released after ET7, after the use of BaaS service (rental service), the lowest price dropped to 258,000 yuan.
Weilai, which has always focused on the high-end market, has entered within 300,000 yuan, and it has also been interpreted by the outside world as the loneliness of unable to withstand sales.
Only by playing a sales car can Weilai break through from a group of competitors who are "looking at the tiger", can ET5 bear this burden? According to Weilai President Qin Lihong, the PRE-sale of ET5 has reached 100,000 vehicles, and even paralyzed the WEILAI App for up to 10 minutes on the scheduled day. In the context of Weilai's propaganda, the ET5's spearhead is also directly aimed at the Tesla Model 3.
However, both THE NIO ET7 and ET5 were delivered this year, and the specific response remains to be seen.
At the NIO Day event at the end of the year, Li Bin appeared for a long time and was very busy summarizing his 2021. He had a little more gray hair in front of his forehead, a little less spirited, and a little more calm and sober.
NIO's exploration of overseas markets has given Li Bin a new understanding of the global market. In 2021, he revisited Huntington's Clash of Civilizations to help understand the impact that a company's international business could be affected by changes in the global environment. According to his plan, by 2025, WEI WILL WILL ENTER MORE THAN 25 countries and regions around the world. This means that the challenges of Weilai going to sea will only increase.
The problem of funds is still unavoidable in the new energy battlefield of extremely expensive money. Although in November 2021, Weilai once again issued more issues, but this does not mean that Li Bin has no worries. Weilai, which was previously listed in the United States, has always had plans to return to Hong Kong, and seeing Xiaopeng and Ideal successfully landing in Hong Kong stocks for the second time, Weilai's Hong Kong plan has an uncertain future. Recently, it has been reported that Weilai is considering a secondary listing in Singapore.
The expanded user base has also impacted the fan-like "car owner culture" that Li Bin and Weilai have built in the past. After experiencing the NIO autonomous driving traffic accident in August 2021, a series of turmoil caused by the joint statement of 500 NIO owners is enough to prove that there have been differences and contradictions in the transmission of NIO's brand value.
In a recent interview, Li Bin's expectation for 2022 is that he will have more time to visit users everywhere and learn about products and services from them.
2022 is the year of Li Bin's 48-year-old life. Chinese habit of amplifying the fatalisms of this life year, in fact, from the time dimension, this only means a new beginning with a 12-year cycle. For Li Bin, a tiger, whether he is threatening or not, can only be proved by actions.
References for this article:
1. "The Last Hundred Meters of Mr. Key Mr. Li Bin" Characters
2. "Weilai Li Bin, the worst person in 2019" Coldplay Labs
3. "Li Bin has no background" alphabet list
4. "Li Bin: From 2022 onwards, everyone will bury their heads in work, and the time for the real final of the industry is in...", Photon Planet