Image source @ Visual China
Wen 丨 Finance no taboo, author 丨 rice
On February 24, 2022, Faraday Future held a press conference at the Hanford plant, saying that FF's first quasi-production vehicle has been completed and is expected to be officially mass-produced in Q3 2022.
Although this aspect is caused by Faraday Future's repeated financial crises, the deeper "root of the disease" may still come from founder Jia Yueting.
Jia Yueting's "root of the disease"
Image source: LeEco
But at this time, Jia Yueting is ambitiously promoting the "ecological anti" strategy based on smart phones and smart TVs. For example, the 50-inch super TV S50 launched in 2013 costs 2499 yuan, which is only about 30%-50% of the price of the same size TV on the market.
According to Jia Yueting's vision, smart cars are important, but because of the stronger funds required and the more complex industrial chain, Faraday Future will assume more of a "storytelling" function at this time.
However, what makes Jia Yueting unexpected is that due to the sudden changes in the mobile phone industry, coupled with the radical strategy of LeTV mobile phones to buy members and send hardware sales, the sales cash flow continues to be short, thus generating arrears to the upstream supply chain, which eventually leads to the LeTV debt crisis.
Image source: leiphone
At leTV's 2016 annual shareholders' meeting, Jia Yueting frankly said: "The crisis of LeTV's capital chain is far greater than imagined." Times Weekly revealed that in 2017, LeTV's overall debt was nearly 35 billion yuan, "as the chairman of LeTV, Jia Yueting bears joint and several liability for most of these debts." ”
In 2019, Faraday Future issued an announcement that Jia Yueting's debt repayment has reached 3 billion US dollars, about 20 billion yuan, considering that LeTV's total debt exceeds 35 billion yuan, which also means that Jia Yueting is still in debt of more than 15 billion yuan.
And the haze of Jia Yueting's debt has always made Faraday's future like a fish in the throat.
"Finding money" became the main theme of Faraday's future
Car building is originally a money-burning track, coupled with the boss is saddled with huge debts, Faraday's main theme of the past few years in the future is not so much to build cars, but to find money.
Image source: World Wide Web
Originally, when the first mass-produced electric vehicle, the FF91, was launched in January 2017, Faraday Future had begun to build a $1.375 billion plant in Nevada, but the construction of the plant was semi-stagnant for a long time due to lack of funds.
In order to find funds for Faraday to operate in the future, Jia Yueting once again sacrificed his "storytelling" talent.
Since he could not get the trust of the "gold lord", Jia Yueting began to beat the idea of retail investors.
On July 22, 2021, when Faraday Future listed on the NASDAQ through the acquisition of SPAC, Jia Yueting announced that "FF91 will begin to be delivered in the next year or so, and he will make every effort to prepare for delivery." ”
Considering faraday's future and repeated official announcements of the rising number of predetermined quantities, many investors have watched Tesla and "Wei Xiaoli" stocks soar, missed a wave of wealth express, and naturally will not easily let go of the upcoming delivery of the "Tesla killer" FF91.
According to U.S. stock data, Faraday Future's issue price was $13.78 per share, and the opening price on the first day of listing was $16.8 per share, up 22% from the issue price, with a total market value of about $6 billion.
Unfortunately, Faraday's future pie was punctured by the short-selling agency.
图源：J Capital Research
In October 2021, the US short-selling agency J Capital Researc released a survey report saying that although Faraday Future had officially announced that it had received more than 14,000 orders, after investigation, only a few hundred of these orders were actually paid, and "FF91 is still 1.4 billion US dollars away from mass production delivery... No investment institution will provide funds and loan support to FF. ”
Since these 300 paid orders may also have a certain "moisture", Faraday has really survived on Jia Yueting's "story" in the next eight years.
Jia Yueting "Golden Cicada Shelling"
Considering that Jia Yueting is already notorious in the capital market, if Faraday Future still wants to have a future, then the first thing to do is naturally to cut off the connection with Jia Yueting as much as possible.
From this point of view, Jia Yueting's resignation as CEO can be described as a wonderful chess piece with three eagles.
But paradoxically, considering that there are still half a year to go public, at the press conference on February 24, Faraday Future did not announce the detailed parameters, price and other information of FF91. As a comparison, when Weilai released the ET7 delivered a year later in early 2021, it not only announced the performance and technical advantages of the car, but also announced the price at the same time.
Could it be that Faraday Future once again tells the story of "the wolf is coming"?
Since it will take some time to deliver, it remains to be seen whether FF91 will skip the ticket, and what we can be sure of at present is that with the maturity of the new energy vehicle market, FF91 will face only a lot more challenges even if it is recently listed.
Taking the core technology involving new energy vehicles as an example, Faraday Future's self-developed charging equipment has a power of up to 200kW, and the output power of the three-motor integrated drive system is as high as 783kW and 1800N·m.
Image source: future car
But as competitors catch up, the technological advantage of Faraday's future products is shrinking. For example, Tesla's third-generation supercharger "V3 Supercharger" has a maximum charging power of 250kW. In terms of three electrics, BYD, Tesla and so on are also making efforts.
As for the market level, Faraday Future, which is at the forefront, has long been far away from the latecomers.
Taking January 2022 as an example, The sales volume of Xiaopeng, Ideal and WEIlai was 12,922, 12,268 and 9,652 respectively. In contrast, FF91 will have to wait until "2022 Q3 delivery". The rising sales volume has also made "Wei Xiaoli" gain good attention in the capital market. According to media statistics, as of the middle of February 2022, the stock prices of the three "Wei Xiaoli" companies have risen by an average of about 140%.
In the final analysis, due to the fact that it is already in the industry of burning money, coupled with the "root of the debt disease" brought by the founders, Faraday's future strategic direction has become extremely short-sighted, compared with the long-term market strategy, more concerned about its own survival.
Throughout Faraday's future growth history, it has fallen into bankruptcy several times, but fortunately, Jia Yueting's storytelling ability is first-class, and he has repeatedly obtained new financing. But the problem is that when financing is obtained and then develop new technologies, it is difficult to compete with competitors who have sufficient cash flow to bet on new technologies in advance.
Considering that the window period of the new energy automobile industry is about to close, if FF91 is not listed again, then Jia Yueting's next story will not be easy to tell.