Entering 2022, the popularity of new energy vehicles has increased unabated, and the scale of "participating" car companies has become stronger and stronger.
Box Zhixing, which previously focused on the design and development of complete vehicles and parts, launched two MPV models at the end of December last year, aiming at self-made vehicles in the fields of online car-hailing and taxis, and the current intended pre-sale orders have exceeded 40,000 units. Niu Innovation Energy, founded by Li Yinan, the founder of Maverick Electric, is also accelerating its car-building plan after receiving a $500 million Series A financing led by IDG Capital and Coatue.
But within the industry, the new car-making forces that have climbed to the top of the pyramid have started a side business.
At the end of last year, Weilai founder Li Bin publicly "diss" fuel vehicles, and his words were quite confident:
"I don't understand at all, why are there still people buying gas trucks now?" What good is the gas truck except that it can smell a little gasoline? ”
In Li Bin's eyes, new energy vehicles are the trend of the times, and there are infinite possibilities in the future. But now, the car-making war that is gradually becoming Red Sea has already had an impact on "Wei Xiaoli".
From mobile phones to flying cars, new car-making forces are busy crossing borders
Overnight, cross-border seems to have become a new trend of new car-making forces, especially several head car companies.
On February 22, a number of Weibo big V collectively broke the news that Weilai will enter the mobile phone market and is currently in the early stage of research. For this rumor, Weilai's official response is that "there is no information to disclose at present, and further information will be communicated with everyone." This vague attitude of neither denying nor acknowledging is in line with the state of a company when conducting research before starting a new project, and the possibility of Weilai's cross-border "machine building" does not seem to be low.
A day ago, He Xiaopeng, founder and chairman of Xiaopeng Motors, posted a job advertisement on his Weibo to recruit talents for Xiaopeng's flying car project, Xiaopeng Huitian. "In particular, a VP-level HR leader is needed," He Xiaopeng wrote.
Prior to this, He Xiaopeng had already formulated a development timeline for Xiaopeng Huitian, and it is expected to mass-produce flying cars in 2024. But at present, there are only four people in the core team of Xiaopeng Huitian, in addition to He Xiaopeng himself, Zhao Deli, the founder of Xiaopeng Huitian, and two vice presidents Wang Tan and Zheng Congwei.
(Image from Weibo)
Compared with the Nio mobile phone project in the budding stage of the monk, Xiaopeng's flying car project has more dynamics worth paying attention to.
In July last year, Xiaopeng released the fifth-generation aircraft X2, and He Xiaopeng also took the initiative to promote it on Weibo, which shows the importance attached to this project within Xiaopeng. After winning a round of financing of $500 million in October last year, He Xiaopeng revealed more details of the Xiaopeng Huitian project at the press conference: including the price of less than 1 million, the ultimate goal in the future is to unify the three technical logics of aircraft + car + intelligence on flying cars.
In contrast, Ideal is more focused than Xiaopeng and Weilai, and has not yet opened a real cross-border business except for rubbing a wave of meta-universe hotspots. The reason is that the Value Institute believes that Ideal is very clear that its current priority is not to cross-border, but to first make up for the gap between itself and Weilai and Xiaopeng in product richness.
At present, Xiaopeng has three models on sale, P7, P5 and G3, and by the end of 2021, P7 and G3 have cumulative sales of 60,569 and 29,721 vehicles respectively, which basically forms a scale effect and is enough to dilute the cost of research and development. Weilai, which has the richest product library, has launched MODELS such as ET5, ET7, EC6, ES8 and ES6. The ideal of still relying on a car to hit the country, there is no doubt that it needs to fill its own shortcomings as soon as possible.
(Picture from ideal car official website)
However, in addition to the ideal that has not yet been developed, from Weilai's cross-border "machine building" to Xiaopeng's insistence on "going to heaven", behind this series of dynamics, we still see the anxiety that the new forces of head car manufacturing are escalating, and the inner volume that the entire industry is accelerating.
And the reason for the inner volume, of course, is not so simple.
The double pressure of "Wei Xiaoli"
Objectively speaking, the development speed of the new energy vehicle market in the past year has not been slow, and it is still in a stage of rapid growth from the perspective of production and marketing scale and penetration rate.
According to the latest data released by the China Automobile Association, the number of automobile production and sales in China in 2021 was 26.082 million units and 26.275 million units, respectively, an increase of 3.4% and 3.8% year-on-year, returning to positive growth after three years.
The production and sales scale of new energy vehicles has improved even more significantly, with a total of 3.521 million units sold in the whole year, and the sales of new energy passenger vehicles were 3.334 million units, an increase of 167.5% year-on-year. Statistics show that China has ranked first in the global new energy vehicle sales list for seven consecutive years, and its market position can be seen.
While sales have risen, the penetration rate of new energy in China has also made great progress. According to the data of the Association, as of December 2021, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in new cars sold in China was 22.6%, and the average penetration rate of the whole year last year also reached 14.8%, more than double that of 5.8% in 2020. Among them, the penetration rate of independent brands is much higher than that of joint venture brands, the former is as high as 39%, and the latter is only about 3%.
In the retail ranking of independent brand new energy vehicles released by the Association of Automobile Associations, Xiaopeng, Weilai and Ideal have squeezed into the top ten, ranking 7th, 9th and 10th. Although there is still a big gap between the scale of production capacity and traditional car companies such as BYD and SAIC-GM-Wuling, it has reached its own historical best level. According to the data, the distribution of new car sales of Xiaopeng, Ideal and NIO in 2021 increased by 275.2%, 177.4% and 109.1% year-on-year, all of which doubled.
(Image courtesy of the Association of The Multipliers)
Since the results are so eye-catching, why is "Wei Xiaoli" still anxious? Why are Weilai and Xiaopeng still busy crossing borders?
The Value Institute believes that the key is that this report card is not perfect: the gap between traditional car companies and Tesla is still huge, and the gap between the downward look and the new forces of second-tier car manufacturing has gradually been filled, and the seemingly unlimited scenery of "Wei Xiaoli" is actually facing double pressure.
From the data point of view, the progress of second-line car-making new forces such as Nezha, Weima and Zero Run in the past year has been greater than that of "Wei Xiaoli", and the production capacity gap between the two camps has been significantly narrowed.
According to the data, Nezha Automobile, Zero-run Automobile and WM Automobile are the new car-making forces ranked 4-6 in the number of insurance in 2021, with 64773, 43960 and 35647 vehicles respectively, an increase of 353.28%, 480.71% and 103.86% respectively year-on-year, in addition to WM, the year-on-year growth rate all overtook "Wei Xiaoli". Especially from the growth curve since the second half of last year, Nezha and Nippon, which has suffered from supply chain difficulties, are very close, and the former has surpassed Weilai in November and December.
The Value Institute believes that as the vanguard of the new forces of second-line car-making that catches up with "Wei Xiaoli", the potential of Nezha and Zero Run cannot be ignored.
According to the data, in October and December last year, Nezha Automobile completed the D1 round and D++ round of financing respectively, and the list of shareholders included 360 Group and CATL times and other predators; Zero Run Automobile also completed two rounds of financing at the end of last year, with the D1 round of financing led by PCCW led by Telecom exceeding 300 million US dollars, and the D2 round of financing led by Agile also reached 152 million US dollars.
After replenishing the ammunition, the mass production and research and development capabilities of these second-line car-making forces are expected to be further stimulated.
Under the pressure of the new forces of second-line car manufacturing, "Wei Xiaoli" can only continuously strengthen the moat and seize the market - especially in the construction of distribution channels. For example, Xiaopeng, which is known for its high cost performance, has entered Beijing Sanlitun in a high profile, and Weilai and Ideal, which take the high-end route, have accelerated their sinking, and they all want to seize more market share by expanding distribution channels.
According to the data, in the third quarter of last year, Xiaopeng Automobile's sales stores expanded to 271, of which 167 were directly operated stores. NIO's previous plan is to increase the total number of stores to 366 by the end of 2021, adding 20 NIO centers and 120 NIO spaces.
However, ever-expanding distribution channels don't solve all problems. In the view of the Value Research Institute, considering that the various technologies of new energy vehicles have gradually improved, and various price ranges have representative models, it is difficult for head car companies to find new breakthroughs at this stage.
The most direct evidence is that the continuous addition of new models has also become the norm for "Wei Xiaoli" in the past year. At the Guangzhou Auto Show at the end of last year, Xiaopeng debuted the Xiaopeng G9, positioning medium and large pure electric SUVs, adding central supercomputing, high-performance chips and smart cockpit configurations.
Coincidentally, the ES7 that Weilai mainly promotes in 2022, as well as the X01 that is not yet officially mass-produced, are all medium and large SUVs, and all aim at selling points such as smart accessories and high-performance chips. Especially in the perception hardware configuration, lidar + millimeter wave radar + 8 million pixel camera has become the unified standard of these three models.
(Xiaopeng G9 debuted at the 2021 Guangzhou Auto Show)
With the "Wei Xiaoli" from the model, configuration to the sale, the similarity of each link, the fierce degree of competition is getting higher and higher, no one can open the gap with the other party, the intensification of the inner volume is inevitable.
"Xiao Liwei" broke the inner volume and could not rely only on cross-border
In January this year, as soon as the group car network announced the news of car manufacturing, Li Xiang, the founder of Ideal Automobile, immediately went down to spray:
"Entrepreneurs who expect to find a super savior are generally scammers in the end, or most likely they are liars themselves." There are still people who can openly speak out of this view without shame, which is really refreshing the bottom line of entrepreneurs. ”
Wen Wei, CEO of Tuanche, also did not back down, directly echoing Li to think of "don't think of yourself as a prophet", and the war of words between the leaders of the two major listed companies will undoubtedly show the glue war situation of the new forces of car manufacturing.
Interestingly, in 2020, when "Wei Xiaoli" survived the difficulties of mass production and sprinted at full power, Feng Sihan, then CEO of Volkswagen (China), once said, "We can feel the challenge from these new car-making forces every day."
Now, fate seems to have completed a cycle, and the new spoilers have thrown the pressure on the new forces that are no longer new car builders.
Frankly speaking, "Wei Xiaoli" cannot prevent other companies from building cars. Tuanche may not be afraid, but technology giants such as Xiaomi may continue to come, which is a disturbing force. More new players will inevitably accelerate the saturation of the new energy vehicle market and squeeze the expansion space of old players.
From this point of view, since Xiaomi, which makes mobile phones, can rely on car building to alleviate anxiety, it is completely understandable that Weilai, which makes cars, crosses border mobile phones.
(Picture from WEILAI's official website)
But the question is, does this attempt really work?
The Institute of Value believes that it is difficult to give a positive answer.
First of all, entering a completely new industry means that everything needs to start from scratch, which is tantamount to adding to the new car-making forces that have not yet fully achieved breakeven.
In the case of the mobile phone industry that Weilai is investigating, from building a supply chain, production lines, clarifying brand positioning and formulating development strategies, to product packaging, marketing and improving the offline distribution system, it all requires a lot of money and manpower and material resources.
According to the data, in the third quarter of fiscal 2021, weilai and xiaopeng recorded a year-on-year increase of 116.6% and 187.4% respectively, but the net loss in the quarter still expanded, 835 million and 1.595 billion, respectively. The ideal of relatively healthy financial position and the highest gross profit margin also has a loss of 21.5 million. Combined with the production and sales data of the quarter, Xiaopeng, who has the highest loss in delivery and the highest, is equivalent to losing nearly 60,000 yuan for every car sold.
Secondly, whether it is the mobile phone chosen by Weilai, or the flying car that Xiaopeng is tinkering with, or the meta-universe field that the three giants are interested in touching, there may not necessarily be a bright future.
The growth rate of the smartphone market has declined, and the internal competition pattern is fixed. The most direct evidence is that Xiaomi, which is firmly in the first camp in the mobile phone industry, has to build cross-border cars, as well as the increasingly dismal shipment data.
Canalys' latest report shows that in the fourth quarter of 2021, China's smartphone market shipped 86.6 million units, a slight increase of only 3% year-on-year, and the annual shipment volume was 333 million units, an increase of 1% year-on-year. The year-on-year growth rate in the fourth quarter has been the best performance in the past three years, but the overall market volume is still shrinking by nearly 10% compared with before the outbreak of the epidemic in 2019, and the growth rate is still weak.
(Image courtesy of Canalys)
As for flying cars, the trend of inner volume is already very obvious before the prospect of commercialization is seen.
According to the data, as of the first half of 2021, more than 200 companies around the world have participated in the development of flying cars, and more than 420 models are currently under research. Two years ago, only 70 companies entered the track. Among them, there are aviation giants such as Airbus and Boeing, as well as traditional car companies such as Volkswagen, Toyota, and Geely, which are far superior to Xiaopeng in terms of capital strength and technology accumulation.
In addition, it can be seen from He Xiaopeng's personal weibo for talents that the demand for talents in high-tech industries such as flying cars is quite tight. The Value Research Institute observed that in order to compete for talents, Xiaomi, which made cross-border cars, offered unusually generous treatment: the basic salary + year-end bonus + option was only standard, and the media statistics showed that the treatment of millions of yuan was nearly 30% higher than the industry average.
Compared with new energy vehicles, the talent gap in flying cars is more serious, does Xiaopeng really have the confidence to pay a premium to recruit people from Volkswagen and Toyota? Given the loss situation mentioned earlier, the Value Institute has reservations about this.
In fact, it is inevitable that "Wei Xiaoli" is eager to develop a side business, but it is not advisable to "rush to the hospital in a hurry". Instead of betting on mobile phones and meta-universes that are incompatible with their own business, or flying cars that are extremely expensive, it may be a more reliable way to find new increments from the upstream and downstream industrial chains of new energy vehicles that are also not to be underestimated.
(Image from UNsplash)
Which track will the war of the new car-making forces spread to?
The Value Research Institute has analyzed in the previous report "The New Economy is Full of Sorrows, Which Tracks Can Establish a "New King" in 2022" that the new car industry chain is expected to continue to break out in 2022 and drive the common prosperity of the upstream and downstream industrial chains, including many super blue oceans with a scale of trillions.
So what tracks deserve our attention? The Value Institute has summarized several popular options for everyone.
1. Waste battery recycling industry chain
According to the SNE Research report, in the context of large-scale replacement of power batteries and carbon neutrality policies restricting the scale of production emissions of enterprises, it is expected that the global new energy vehicle waste battery recycling market size will reach 1.08 trillion yuan in 2030. In the past year, the number of domestic power battery recycling enterprises registered to achieve a year-on-year increase of 2611.2%, the outbreak speed is staggering.
Of course, the waste battery recycling market is only one of the examples, and "Wei Xiaoli" may not necessarily intervene in this industrial chain, but the development trend it shows cannot be ignored. For "Wei Xiaoli", the industrial chain links that are more closely related to its own business, such as new energy vehicle batteries and automotive aftermarket services, are a growth point worth considering.
Especially in the field of power batteries, it can not only open up new growth points, but also strengthen supply chain management and improve anti-risk capabilities, which is of great significance to new car-making forces.
2. Self-made power battery
Under the background of tight supply chain and insufficient production capacity of battery manufacturers such as ningde era, self-made batteries by car companies have become a trend. Tesla as early as 2020 to the homemade battery as the next stage of development focus, Volkswagen announced four batteries under development at last year's Power Day, and announced its participation in the production of power batteries, will establish 6 power battery factories in Europe.
However, the new forces of car manufacturing are not ideal in the project.
In September last year, the long-awaited WEILAI ternary iron lithium battery arrived late, nearly a year later than the original release time. And Weilai is already the farthest of the three giants.
In November last year, Xiaomi and Huawei jointly invested in Weilai's solid-state battery supplier Weilan New Energy, which raised about 500 million yuan. According to the data, the 150-degree semi-solid-state battery pack provided by Weilan New Energy for WEILAI ET7 can support up to 1000 kilometers of endurance, and the energy density of Dianchi Lake in Ternary Li is increased by 50% compared with the conventional ternary Li Dianchi Lake. According to Li Bin at the Weilai conference, this battery will be fully delivered in the fourth quarter of this year.
The investment injection from Xiaomi and Huawei reflects the attractiveness of Weilan New Energy to capital - especially note that Xiaomi is now a direct competitor of Weilai. From another point of view, with the influx of more competitive capital, WEILAI's control over the battery supply chain may be weakened, and the self-made battery plan is more necessary.
3. Autonomous driving
In addition, the new forces of car manufacturing have not spared the outlet of automatic driving. At present, "Wei Xiaoli" insists on taking the self-research route, but the direction of force is slightly different.
NIO focuses on the full-scene coverage strategy, and its automatic driving system NAD includes the NIO super sense system and supercomputing platform, and plans to gradually achieve full coverage of automatic driving in high-speed, urban areas, parking and other scenarios. Xiaopeng cuts from the parking scene, Xiaopeng G3 is the earliest model in China to achieve visual integration of automatic parking, more than 1 year ahead of Weilai and Ideal. At present, Xiaopeng is still the leader of the three giants in the visual surround technology.
As for the ideal of starting a little late, it also came up with its own development roadmap in 2020, and the rumored ideal X01 will be equipped with a hardware system that supports L4 fully autonomous driving.
According to Tianyancha data, since its inception, WEILAI has invested in more than 30 new car-related enterprises, accounting for more than half of the enterprises in the field of automatic driving. Two weeks ago, Xiaopeng just set up an autonomous driving subsidiary, Pengxu Autonomous Driving Technology Co., Ltd., in Guangzhou. After leading the investment in Neolithic, Ideal obtained capital injection from Wang Xing and continued to increase the research and development of automatic driving.
In the capital market, the three "Wei Xiaoli" have already set up a position, and the war spirit is getting stronger. The prospects for a flying car are clearer than Xiaopeng's, and it is more likely to achieve commercialized autonomous driving, and it is believed that it will also become the focus of competition for new car-making forces.
Write at the end
In 2020, Li Bin, He Xiaopeng and Li Xiang, who survived the darkest moments in the early days of entrepreneurship, got together and took a historic group photo. He Xiaopeng also wrote down on Weibo that "three bittersweets, in the memory of bittersweet..." sighs.
Time has changed, perhaps these three big guys will not think that after two years, due to a series of unfavorable factors such as the tightening of the supply chain, the intensification of industry competition, and the joint strangulation of new second-tier car manufacturers and traditional car companies, they will once again usher in a period of "bitter days".
At present, NIO is still actively improving the supply chain situation and trying to explore new businesses, ideally focusing on expanding the product library and launching new models, Xiaopeng in addition to tinkering with autonomous driving, flying cars has also riveted into the high-end market to encroach on the share of the other two competitors.
In this context, the confrontation between "Wei Xiaoli" is expected to become more intense, and the picture of the three founders' night talk around the furnace may be difficult to reproduce in a short period of time.
The future of the automobile industry undoubtedly belongs to new energy vehicles, but it may not belong to "Wei Xiaoli". In order to stabilize their position and grab a ticket to a better future, a hand-to-hand battle with bayonets is brewing.