Ideal car to catch the "factory construction tide"

Text/Leju Finance Jin Wenyu

This may be the best era for companies that have entered the market to build cars, but it is also the era of the fastest change. In the treacherous new energy vehicle track, a group of new car-making forces show no signs of slowing down.

At the beginning of the new year, while the Beijing plant was still under construction and had not yet started production, the third plant of Ideal Automobile surfaced.

Recently, chongqing public resources transaction supervision network shows that Chongqing Chezhiyu Automobile Industry Co., Ltd. won the A16-8 plot of the A division of the Liangjiang New Area Water and Soil Group for 430.69 million, and the transaction time was January 27, 2022. The land area is 1,133,400 square meters, the plot ratio is ≧0.7, the land use is Class II industrial land, and the industry category of use conditions is transportation equipment manufacturing, and the transfer period is 50 years.

According to the enterprise investigation, Chongqing Chezhiyu Automobile Industry Co., Ltd. was established on December 9, 2021, with a registered capital of 160 million yuan, the legal representative is Li Bin, and the registered address is No. 618, Liangjiang Avenue, Longxing Town, Liangjiang New District, Chongqing, and its business scope includes the construction of permitted project construction projects, as well as the manufacture of auto parts and accessories for general projects. The company is 100% controlled by Chongqing Ideal Automobile Co., Ltd.

According to this, it can be speculated that the third factory of Ideal Automobile may have been finalized to settle in Chongqing, an important automobile town. The delivery of the ideal car that has just crossed the threshold of 90,000 in 2021 may take another important step on the road to capacity expansion.

Chongqing "Old Testament"

As an important automobile town in the southwest region, Chongqing has a solid foundation for the automobile industry cluster, and the ideal car also has a deep relationship with Chongqing.

As early as August 2018, when the company name was still Chehejia, Ideal Automobile signed a contract with Chongqing Liangjiang New Area, planning to invest 11 billion yuan to build a smart car manufacturing base, covering an area of 1,800 mu (1.2 million square meters) and planning a total production capacity of 400,000 vehicles per year. The base will be built in two phases, the first phase of the project was originally planned to build an annual production capacity of 200,000 vehicles in 2021, and put into production at least two smart electric vehicle products.

Although this cooperation between the two sides was once shelved, in December 2018, Ideal Automobile spent 650 million yuan to acquire Chongqing Lifan Automobile, obtained the car manufacturing qualification, and was able to enter the car, realizing the production of Ideal ONE in changzhou factory, becoming the first enterprise in Wei Xiaoli to break free from the OEM model.

Ideal Auto's re-investment in Chongqing this time also has early signs. On December 5, 2021, Tang Liangzhi, deputy secretary of the Chongqing Municipal Party Committee and mayor, met with Li Xiang, founder, chairman and CEO of Ideal Automobile, and his party, and Ideal Automobile signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with the Chongqing Municipal Government. At that time, Li wanted to express his position that Ideal Automobile would increase its investment layout in Chongqing, continue to deepen its strategic cooperation with Chongqing, and expand and strengthen its cooperation projects in Chongqing.

At the same time, in the 2022 Chongqing Municipal Government Work Report released on January 17, it was also mentioned to "accelerate the construction and production of high-end new energy vehicle projects such as Chang'an, Jinkang, Geely, and Ideal".

Expansion pressure

Before Chongqing planned to build a new plant, Ideal Automobile already had two complete vehicle plants, one of which was already in production and the other was still under construction.

Ideal Automobile's first plant, located in Wujin District, Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, covers an area of 750 mu (500,000 square meters) and has an annual production capacity of 100,000 units. The 90,491 Ideal ONE delivered in 2021 will all be produced at the plant, which shows that its production capacity is already stretched. It is understood that the plant is currently building a new workshop, which will reach a production capacity of 200,000 vehicles per year after completion.

In 2021, Ideal Automobile will take over the first factory of Beijing Hyundai and transform it into the Beijing Green Intelligent Manufacturing Base of Ideal Automobile, which is also the second factory of Ideal Automobile. The plant covers an area of 786 acres (524,000 square meters), ideal car after taking over the market on October 16, 2021 to start reconstruction, with a total investment of more than 6 billion yuan, is scheduled to be put into operation by the end of 2023, production capacity of 100,000 units / year, and is a pure electric model.

Judging from the land size of the newly acquired Chongqing land plot, its land area is 1.1334 million square meters, which is larger than the combined land area of the Changzhou factory and the Beijing factory, so it can be judged that its design capacity may also be greater than the sum of the previous two factories.

Ideal Auto's january 2022 delivery data shows that it delivered 12,268 Ideal ONE units in January, achieving deliveries of more than 10,000 for three consecutive months, an increase of 128.1% year-on-year. Since delivery, the cumulative delivery volume of ideal ONE has reached 136356 units.

According to the ideal car's plan, it plans to launch a full-size luxury smart range extender electric SUV in 2022 and two more SUV models in 2023. Ideal Is also developing platforms for its future high-voltage pure electric vehicles, Whale and Shark, and plans to launch at least two high-voltage pure electric models per year from 2023.

Under the intensive development, the order volume of the ideal car continues to accumulate, and the pressure is naturally given to the production capacity. With the construction of a new plant less than half a year after the start of construction of its Shunyi plant in Beijing, it can be seen that expanding production capacity has become a key part of its high-growth Xinyuan automobile market.

New forces "factory construction tide"

Ideal Auto's layout in Changzhou, Beijing and Chongqing can well cover major markets such as the southeast coastal region, the northern region and the southwest region, and such a factory layout may become a major advantage of Ideal Car.

In order to compete for the market, car companies from all sides have accelerated the construction of factories as the first step. In addition to ideals, other new forces of head car manufacturing are also actively expanding production capacity, and they are not willing to show weakness on the road of site selection and factory expansion.

In the case of Xiaopeng Motors, it delivered 98,155 new cars in 2021, successfully winning the new power sales championship; in January 2022, Xiaopeng Motors maintained the championship with a delivery of 12,922 vehicles, with a year-on-year increase of 115%. The glossy figures have also benefited from the stability of its overall production capacity.

In terms of factory investment, Xiaopeng Automobile's current factory is the most widely distributed. According to Leju Finance, Xiaopeng Automobile has four major production bases, namely Haima Xiaopeng Intelligent Factory in Zhengzhou (now discontinued), Guangdong Zhaoqing Factory (annual output of 100,000-150,000 vehicles), Guangzhou Intelligent Manufacturing Base under construction (production capacity of 100,000 vehicles) and Wuhan Intelligent Manufacturing Base (annual output of 100,000 vehicles) determined in April last year.

Compared with the "multi-point blossoming" of Xiaopeng Automobile, Weilai Automobile is very "single-minded". NIO's first plant is a foundry in cooperation with JAC, which can achieve a production capacity of 300,000 units in double shifts. Based on the "reasonable choice between the two sides", NIO's second factory still chose to settle in Hefei. The Hefei Xinqiao Intelligent Electric Vehicle Industrial Park, which is under construction, has a planned production capacity of a staggering 1 million vehicles.

The parent company is Nezha Automobile of United New Energy, and the first plant is located in Tongxiang, with a planned production capacity of 80,000 units. Nezha Automobile's second and third plants were located in Yichun and Nanning respectively, with a production capacity of 100,000 units.

According to the data, Nezha Automobile achieved sales of 11,009 vehicles in January 2022, an increase of 402% year-on-year, once again among the first echelon, ranking third in the January delivery list of new car-making forces, and becoming the bravest dark horse in the new car-making forces.

Most of the new car-making forces that have achieved mass production and delivery have achieved good results. Once sales are constrained by production capacity, there is a risk of falling behind. Whether it is Weilai or Xiaopeng, Ideal or Nezha, after breaking through the delivery pass, planning to go public or crossing the listing threshold, expanding production capacity has become the only way to increase market share, and they all hope to win market opportunities through large-scale development as soon as possible.