Huawei, Tencent, Baidu, Xiaomi... Internet manufacturers build cars in all aspects.
Wen | a city of finance
At the beginning of the Year of the Tiger, the "war situation" in the field of Internet car manufacturing has once again reached a new level, and two Internet companies, Baidu and Xiaomi, have opened a "face-to-face hand-to-hand combat" war.
It is reported that Baidu car project "Jidu Technology Co., Ltd." has recently completed industrial and commercial registration in Beijing, and the headquarters will be located in Yizhuang. Not long ago, Xiaomi also announced the news that its car-making project "Xiaomi Automobile" will settle in Yizhuang.
At present, although the Internet companies that announced the construction of cars have not yet made substantial progress, the game in the field of "car building" has already begun and is in full swing. In fact, not only Baidu and Xiaomi, since 2021, Ali, Huawei, Didi, 360 and many other Internet companies have announced the opening of car-making plans, or the launch of smart car products, opening a new round of "Internet car-making" boom.
In addition to Internet companies, such as BYD, Geely, Great Wall and other traditional car companies are also rising to develop new energy vehicles, "new car-making forces" Weilai, Xiaopeng, ideal is even less needless to say, compared to the Internet companies that joined later, these traditional enterprises have more advantages in production and research.
In addition, the sales of new energy vehicles of traditional car companies should not be underestimated. According to the data, in 2021, the sales of new energy vehicles of traditional car companies such as SAIC, GAC and Great Wall will reach 733,000 units, 143,000 units and 137,000 units, respectively. Among the top car companies in the world in terms of new energy vehicle sales, more than 80% are traditional car companies.
Nowadays, the market share is being rapidly divided by these companies, and the time left for the Internet to "build cars" is running out.
The threshold for Internet companies to build cars continues to rise
The past 2021 is an extremely hot year for the concept of "Internet car manufacturing", and since the beginning of the year, there have been relevant information about Internet companies building cars, which has aroused widespread concern.
On January 11, 2021, Baidu announced that it will enter the automotive industry as a vehicle manufacturer; on January 13, the intelligent pure electric car jointly built by Ali, SAIC and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech was officially released; on March 30, Xiaomi announced the official establishment of Xiaomi's intelligent car business; on May 11, 360 announced its investment in Nezha Automobile and officially laid out the car manufacturing field.
Among them, the most sensational is Xiaomi's announcement of car-making plans. On March 30, 2021, Lei Jun announced the news of car building at the Xiaomi press conference, and regarded it as "the last major entrepreneurial project in his life", and the 51-year-old Lei Jun even said that he was willing to bet on his entire reputation in life and fight for Xiaomi Car.
Although the slogan of "car building" is welcomed by many Internet companies, in the process of rapid development of the industry, the threshold for car building is becoming higher and higher. It can be said that this is a "money burning war".
Li Bin, the founder of Weilai, said a few years ago, "Don't build a car without 20 billion", which has also dissuaded many entrepreneurs. Today, Li Bin has raised this standard again, he said, "There may be no 40 billion yuan can not do it", and then added, "I think the threshold of the automotive industry is much higher than we think."
In fact, not only Li Bin thinks this way, but He Xiaopeng, who is also the chairman of Xiaopeng Motors, has also expressed similar ideas. He Xiaopeng once said that it is about 20 billion yuan to build a car from 0 to 1, and it will definitely exceed 30 billion from 1 to 100. He also compared the difficulty of Internet entrepreneurship with the difficulty of building a car.
He said that the difficulty of building a car is really more than ten times higher than that of Internet entrepreneurship, or even a hundred times higher, which requires a lot of money, and it cannot survive at all by raising 5 billion yuan a year.
Nowadays, the threshold has been further raised because of the entry of Internet giants.
When Xiaomi announced the construction of the car, Lei Jun set himself an "entrance fee" of 10 billion yuan and said that he would spend 10 billion US dollars in the next 10 years. A month later, Xia Yiping, CEO of Baidu's car-making project Jidu Automobile, said that Jidu would invest 50 billion yuan in car manufacturing in the next five years.
Internet giants are not bad for money, but also dare to spend money. For them, the backwardness in speed can be compensated by more money, exchanging money for time, and smashing barriers with money. In this process, technology research and development, infrastructure, service system, team building and other aspects have been raised by continuous and huge capital investment.
The progress of "car building" of Internet giants: between virtual and real
In fact, at present, Internet companies still belong to the stage of technology research and development, far from reaching the level of mass production, which also means that there is still some uncertainty in its development in a period of time.
However, even if there is a certain distance, many Internet companies have set a "mass production target": Baidu has set the time for mass production of cars in 2023, while Xiaomi has taken 2024 as a node, claiming to achieve mass production in 2024.
Let's not say whether these companies can achieve the mass production target within the specified time, just this 1-2 years of mass production time difference, it is enough to produce many variables, no one can say how the market will change in this time.
Of course, there are also some Internet companies that have chosen other "ways", such as cooperating with automobile companies with mass production capabilities to build cars, which is also a good idea to cut into the industry.
A city of finance and economics found that the Internet "car-making" probably has two models, one is not to build their own cars, but to participate in the industry, the development of intelligent products to empower car companies, such as Huawei, Tencent; the other is to personally go down to build cars, both "lonely" solo battle, there are also joint ventures, such as Ali, Baidu, Xiaomi.
So, how is the "car-making" project of these companies progressing now?
Huawei is one of the earliest companies involved in the field of car manufacturing. In June 2019, Huawei established the Smart Vehicle Solutions BU Division to enter the automotive field. Huawei has always been under the slogan of "helping car companies build good cars", and its positioning is: supplier of incremental components for intelligent and connected vehicles.
Huawei has said that the company does not build cars, but based on ICT technology (information and communication technology), it has become an incremental parts supplier for intelligent and connected cars, and its business mainly covers five major business areas related to smart cars: intelligent cockpit, intelligent driving, intelligent networking, intelligent electric, and intelligent car cloud.
In December 2021, AITO Q&I M5 made its final appearance at Huawei's winter flagship new product launch. Although Huawei did not personally build the car, according to the information of the AITO brand conference, from the early planning, design and even the later marketing and sales are handled by Huawei.
Huawei has realized its research and development achievements in recent years on this product. However, Huawei has always said that it has no intention of participating in the ranks of car manufacturing, but relies on the core technology, software and hardware integration supply solution in the ICT field to serve car companies.
Similar to Huawei's targets is Tencent, but in specific applications, the two are very different.
Tencent currently has no real car-making plan, and its direction in this field is also very clear, that is, to build a digital infrastructure with cloud computing and maps as the core, and to help new energy vehicle companies improve their autonomous driving capabilities by strengthening the construction of autonomous driving cloud capabilities.
Previously, Zhong Xiangping, vice president of Tencent and president of smart transportation and travel, introduced the reasons why Tencent entered the new energy vehicle track and did not build cars. He believes that what is missing on the new energy vehicle track is not a new force of car manufacturing, but a "network" that can connect the upstream and downstream partners of the travel industry chain and open up the whole link of the industry.
Up to now, Tencent Eco-Vehicle Networking TAI has reached cooperation with 35 car companies, with a total of more than 7 million vehicles.
Another giant, Ali, has also long been involved in the field of smart cars. In 2015, Alibaba and SAIC motor group jointly established Zebra Zhixing, with the intention of developing an in-vehicle operating system that benchmarks Apple's Carplay.
However, if Ali really participates in car building, it is still at the end of 2020. In December 2020, Ali cooperated with SAIC and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech to inject 10 billion yuan to establish "Zhiji Automobile" and officially participated in the car-making process.
According to reports, in December last year, Zhiji Automobile's first mass-produced model, the Zhiji L7, rolled off the production line on a small scale. According to Liu Tao, co-CEO of Zhiji Automobile, the mass delivery of the "Zhiji L7" is expected to start in April 2022.
Baidu, which is also "BAT", was the first entry point to enter this field is automatic driving. After long-term business development and adjustment, Baidu has gradually formed three major business segments: shared unmanned vehicle (Apollo Go), intelligent vehicle intelligence (ASD), and intelligent transportation (ACE).
On January 11, 2021, Baidu announced that it will officially establish a smart car company, Jidu Automobile, to enter the automotive industry as a vehicle manufacturer. As a strategic partner, Geely Holding Group will jointly build a new generation of smart cars based on Geely's vast SEA intelligent evolution experience architecture.
In January this year, Jidu announced part of the design style of the automotive robot concept car, which will be officially unveiled at the 2022 Beijing Auto Show held in April and delivered in mass production in 2023.
The concept of "automotive robot" is what distinguishes Baidu from other car manufacturers. Baidu founder Robin Li once summarized the characteristics of automotive robots as "free movement, natural communication, and self-growth". This means that automotive robots are no longer just transportation tools based on new energy, but intelligent robots that can interact.
However, although the "car robot" proposed by Baidu is very large, the color is not yet known. At the end of 2021, Baidu's driverless department also spread the news of large-scale layoffs, which was later denied by Baidu.
Xiaomi, which has become a neighbor with Baidu's car-making project "Jidu", has a very high-profile plan in the field of entering the car manufacturing field.
On March 30, 2021, Xiaomi announced that it intends to establish a wholly-owned subsidiary to be responsible for the smart electric vehicle business. With an initial investment of RMB 10 billion and an estimated $10 billion investment over the next 10 years, Lei Jun will also serve as CEO of the smart electric vehicle business.
Lei Jun personally operated Xiaomi Automobile and regarded it as "the last major entrepreneurial project in his life", which naturally attracted much attention from the outside world.
However, in the past year, Xiaomi Auto has not been as high-profile as it began to say, but has silently acquired and saved people.
At the same time, in the past year, Xiaomi has also continued to invest in the upstream and downstream industry chain of automobiles, including power battery manufacturers, charging suppliers, lidar companies, and autonomous driving technology companies.
At present, Xiaomi has not yet released its first product, but it has set the mass production time in 2024. Between the virtual and the real, it seems to be even more elusive.
"Internet companies build cars, on the one hand, in order to find new profit growth points and stock price growth points under the situation that their business growth tends to be weak and their stock prices continue to decline." It is not excluded that these car-making businesses will be listed separately for financing. At present, many of them are gimmicks that outweigh the substance. An industry expert confessed to a city.
Strengths and weaknesses
At present, the road of many Internet companies to build cars has taken the first step, but there is a second step, the third step, as mentioned above, these companies are still a long way from mass production. Time is precious, if the product enters the market late, I am afraid it will not be so easy to be accepted by the market.
In addition, what is more worrying is whether Internet companies can break through relevant core technologies and make substantial progress in the process of car manufacturing.
As the saying goes, "interlacing is like a mountain", although some companies have been working in the field of automatic driving for several years, but it is only "driving" technology, and there is a big gap between car-making technology.
Internet companies start by doing software and network services, although they have accumulated rich experience in artificial intelligence, software design and other aspects in the development, but once it comes to the manufacturing field, the gap between Internet companies and traditional car companies will quickly widen.
Leaving aside the extremely difficult vehicle manufacturing, which is only a hardware product that matches the automatic driving function, it is an urgent need for breakthroughs for the current Internet companies.
IPG China chief economist Bai Wenxi also said that the advantage of Internet companies in the field of car manufacturing is to be able to innovate new models of car building, marketing and service in the form of technological iteration with user thinking, product perspective and Internet thinking; and the disadvantage is that the understanding of the automobile industry chain is insufficient, as well as the lack of manufacturing thinking and the lack of core technology for car manufacturing, which is easy to make car-making plans encounter various difficulties.
Secondly, continuous capital investment is also critical for Internet companies to build cars. A car from planning to production takes at least 3-4 years, and the period will not produce returns, if there is no strong talent, strong capital and super technology as a support, it is difficult for the company to survive.
Moreover, if the return can be achieved, if the return is still not seen in a period of time, it will become a trouble and fall into the situation of "looking for money everywhere".
And this kind of worry is not out of thin air, and Tesla's founder Musk has been in such a dilemma.
"I put all my money in, I didn't have a house, so I had to borrow money from my friends to pay the rent." Musk once described it on Twitter, waking up every morning to find himself crying in a dream all night, his pillow wet, chewing on the glass while gazing into the abyss.
Jia Yueting, who will always "return to China next week", also experienced the pain musk faced after 2 years of building the car.
At every press conference, Jia Yueting had tears in his eyes. Some people say that he is a show, in fact, it is not easy to say, just between this kind of virtual reality, true and false, the LeTV empire with a market value of 100 billion has collapsed.
In fact, almost all car builders have been anxious about finding money. Nowadays, although Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal among the new car-making forces have survived the most difficult years, these three car-making companies are still losing money, and with the deepening of research and development and the expansion of production capacity, they are even facing the situation of aggravated losses.
However, the status quo of the industry with continuous losses has not stopped some of the confidence of enterprises in the field of "car manufacturing" that actively enter the market, at present, there is no result of Internet car manufacturing, and there is a wave of new car-making forces, such as midea in the field of home appliances, "fruit chain giant" Luxun Precision and Foxconn, which is also a part of the "fruit chain", and so on.
With the increasing number of entrants, the competitive pressure in the industry is increasing, and on the intricate battlefield of "car building", a world-class giant "cross-border war" is starting.
QuanYu, a well-known investor, said that the future development space of this industry is bright, and the industry will be integrated in the long run, especially companies that can truly play the full combination of new car technology and consumer experience will stand out.
"Whether from the perspective of investors or Chinese consumers, we also hope that Chinese car companies with comprehensive advantages can appear in the global market." Quan Yu said.
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