The author | Li Dapeng
| Electric Guild
The capital market has finally ushered in the Nezha moment.
01
In the past year, Nezha Automobile has become a dark horse in the team of new car-making forces, not only the annual sales of the three brothers of "Wei Xiaoli", but also the road of financing has gone quite smoothly, Nezha is like stepping on the hot wheel, continuously promoting C and D two rounds of financing.
On February 21, it was reported that Nezha Automobile has recently completed a new round of financing of more than 2 billion yuan, and the main investment institutions include CRRC Fund under CRRC Group and Shenzhen Venture Capital with a state-owned background in Shenzhen, etc. This round of financing is the third round of Nezha's Series D financing.
We checked, Nezha D series financing was launched in the middle of last year, SoftBank Vision Fund, Abu Dhabi Investment Bureau, GIC (Singapore Government Investment Corporation) and other capital giants have contacted Nezha, some of which are very close to investment, but due to time and other reasons did not participate.
Until October 2021, Nezha announced the completion of a D1 round of financing of 4 billion yuan, of which 360 Group led the investment of 2 billion yuan; in December of the same year, Nezha disclosed the D++ round of financing in which CATL, 360, and BAIC Production and Investment participated, and the financing amount was also 2 billion yuan.
Behind the introduction of 360 and CATL as a new shareholder, we can see the ambition of Nezha Automobile to impact the IPO and rank among the first echelon of the industry.
After the completion of the D series financing, according to people familiar with the matter, Nezha brand entity, United Automobile, has officially launched the Hong Kong stock listing plan, and the sponsors are CITIC, CICC, Morgan Stanley and UBS.
Although the official did not respond positively to this, the urgent need for Nezha Automobile to land on the capital market has been extremely obvious to the outside world.
02
Many people will ask, why did this new power brand, which debuted not long ago and borrowed the animation movie "Nezha's Devil Boy Descending", which was popular for a while, suddenly get thousands of favors from capital?
Speaking of Nezha, we have to mention The United Cars. Founded in 2014, founder Fang Yunzhou is not only a veteran of Chery Automobile for 16 years, but also a postdoctoral fellow under Ouyang Minggao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the creation and development of United Automobile, Chery department and Tsinghua department of talent, technology and capital play an important role.
Nezha is an electric vehicle brand that United Automobile has been planning to build for many years. At the beginning of its establishment, United Automobile chose a steady and progressive way of playing, obtained the production qualification of new pure electric vehicles in April 2017, officially launched the Nezha automobile brand in 2018, and launched the first mass production car Nezha N01 at the end of the year.
Different from the high-profile "Wei Xiaoli", the founding team of Nezha Automobile is not like Li Bin of Weilai and Li Xiang of Ideal Automobile, who have an Internet entrepreneurial background and bring their own traffic.
On the contrary, the founding team of Nezha is from a traditional car company, and the market attention is low. Daniel Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Nezha Automobile, once revealed, "At the beginning of its establishment, we did not have much experience in capital operation, and we only wanted to do a good job in the car and do a good job in the enterprise, so we did not build a VIE structure from the beginning." ”
The VIE structure is the standard design for domestic startups to go overseas, and "Wei Xiaoli" takes the lead in listing in the United States. These disadvantages in financial technology and traffic have made Nezha Automobile once wander on the fringes of the industry in the new forces of the first generation of car manufacturing, and was not optimistic about the outside world.
The inflection point happened in 2021.
In May of that year, Zhou Hongyi, the leader of the Red Cloth Sect, announced that 360 Group would invest in Nezha Automobile strategically, and after completing all the investment, it would become the second largest shareholder of Nezha Automobile. At that time, Zhou Hongyi said that he and Nezha were not only in love, but also married and had children.
Since then, the development of Nezha Automobile can be described as "leaps and bounds", and the cumulative sales of Nezha Automobile in 2021 will reach 69,674 vehicles, an increase of 362% year-on-year. Sales increased nearly four times, heavy investment entered, Nezha Automobile has become a well-deserved dark horse in the past year's new car-making forces.
In the past January, Nezha Automobile sold a total of 11,009 new cars, an increase of 402% compared with the same period last year, directly surpassing Weilai Automobile to squeeze into the top three camps of new forces. The market rumor of "Wei Xiaoli" changing into "Xiao Li" has also become a reality.
03
The main reasons for the growth of Nezha's outbreak are twofold:
One is accurate brand positioning; the other is the unanimous optimism of capital.
Unlike some new car-making forces that choose to start from the mid-to-high-end electric vehicle segment, Nezha aims at the low-end model segment. Daniel Zhang, CEO of Nezha Automobile, once said that only by letting smart electric vehicles enter the homes of the people can the real popularization of electric vehicles be realized.
360 Company also took a fancy to the characteristics of Nezha. In fact, 360 has been planning to build cars for a while, and from 2020 onwards, it has put car construction on the agenda and set up a 10-person project team. After researching new car brands such as Gaohe, Tianji, Zero Run, Nezha and Singularity, 360 finally decided to work with Nezha Automobile.
In the 3 months of in-depth contact with Nezha Automobile, Zhou Hongyi has visited Nezha Automobile Factory to investigate and experience products, and he also led a team to appear at the Nezha booth at the Shanghai Auto Show last year and listened to relevant reports. Zhou Hongyi said, "The main reason for choosing Nezha is that its positioning is more close to the people, in line with the market estimate of 360." ”
In addition to 360, Nezha Automobile has also been recognized by many large and famous investment institutions, among which Huading Capital, which led the C round, is also a big winner. Huading Capital has long focused on the investment of the intelligent electric vehicle industry chain, with an equity investment fund of nearly 50 billion yuan, and the main investment cases include CATL, Huading Guolian, Beiterui, Chendao Fund, Ruizhi Technology, etc., which shows its strength.
Another important investor is the CATL era. On November 8, 2021, Nezha announced that CATL will participate in the D2 round of financing and fully open strategic cooperation in the fields of technology research and development and supply chain assurance.
Cataline Times is the leader of the new energy automobile battery industry with a market share of more than half. According to the data of China Automotive Power Battery Industry Innovation Alliance, the cumulative loading volume of Power Batteries in China in 2021 was 154.5GWh, an increase of 142.8% year-on-year. Among them, the installed capacity of The Ningde era is 80.51GWh, and the market share is 52.1%.
In addition to the two star shareholders, Nezha Automobile has always been deeply bound to the three local governments of Tongxiang, Zhejiang, Yichun, Jiangxi and Nanning, Guangxi. Daniel Zhang has revealed that before the C round of financing in 2020, the equity of local industrial funds accounted for more than 60%; the team accounted for more than 20%; the remaining less than 20% was Tsinghua and social capital.
In addition, Nezha Automobile also obtained a credit line of 5 billion yuan from China CITIC Bank in March 2021, and a comprehensive credit line of 2 billion yuan from the head office of Bank of Shanghai again nine months later, mainly for the research and development of intelligent technologies such as intelligent cockpit and intelligent driving of Nezha Automobile.
After the introduction of a number of new shareholders in 2021, Nezha Automobile, which has been in existence for four years, began to shine in the new energy market and fully laid out the entry-level pure electric SUV market. Up to now, the cumulative sales volume of Nezha automobiles has exceeded 100,000 units.
04
In the eyes of many people, the ultimate goal of the new car-making forces is to go public, and Nezha Automobile seems to be taking this road.
Financing, delivery, and hematopoietic capacity are indeed the three mountains in front of the new forces of car manufacturing. Nezha Automobile has carried out a total of 8 rounds of financing, with a total amount of more than 13 billion yuan, but this bit of money, in the "burning money" new energy car industry, the advantage is not very obvious. Also a new energy vehicle company in the second echelon, WM Motors will reach 10 billion yuan in 2020's Series D financing amount, not to mention the "listed system" such as Weilai, Ideal and Xiaopeng.
For the new car-making forces that need huge capital investment after entering the large-scale delivery, the promotion of listing is the most important way to obtain a source of funds, and it is also the key to maintaining the company's operations and products to continuously promote research and development with brand competitiveness, which has become the consensus of the new car-making forces.
Weilai Automobile, Xiaopeng Automobile, and Ideal Automobile have all gained respite in this way, and their market value has exceeded 10 billion US dollars. At the same time, Xiaopeng and Ideal also completed the secondary listing on the Hong Kong stock market, which was favored by capital.
The news that Nezha Automobile is going to be listed has been circulating in the industry for a long time, but it has never been able to achieve positive results.
As early as July 2020, Nezha Automobile officially said that it planned to IPO on the Science and Technology Innovation Board in 2021, but it was stranded due to the stricter review of the Science and Technology Innovation Board, and since then, it has also been reported many times about its listing. Now, after completing the D round of financing, Nezha's listing may already be on the string.
From the current point of view, in addition to Nezha Automobile, many new car-making forces such as Weima, Tianji, and Singularity have also released the news of preparing for the IPO, and the horn of the second round of sprints of new car-making forces has been fully blown.
Nezha Automobile, which once shouted the slogan of "keeping up with the team and waiting for the opportunity to surpass", is likely to take the lead in breaking through under the blessing of 360, Ningde times and other capitals, and greet the "Nezha moment" in the capital market with the attitude of an attacker.
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