Across the 0 to 1 road, Li Xiang and his ideal car still face many challenges.
(Text/Zhang Jiadong Editor/Lou Bing) If Yu Chengdong is recognized as a "big mouth" in the mobile phone industry, then Li Xiang may also be one of the few "golden sentence makers" in the automotive circle.
Since the official listing of the ideal car, Li Xiang's speech in the social circle has always seemed to be a little out of place with his peers: angrily scolding industry experts for not understanding the range extender hybrid; the seat "mercury door" against the public opinion to spew rumors; after the sales boom, the Volkswagen CEO satirized the criticism of himself.
Just after 2022, Li wants to open up again, just finished in January CEO Wen Wei believes that the other party is not down-to-earth; at the end of February, he said at the earnings meeting that he would do the Apple of the automotive industry in 10 years.
Perhaps in Li Xiang's eyes, he always has the self-perception of "everyone is drunk and I am awake". However, "revenge" and even somewhat conceited self-confidence have become the most distinctive label in the eyes of outsiders for the founder of the ideal car over the years.
Confident Lee thought
Becoming the Apple of the automotive industry, this is not the first time That Li wants to express similar ideas, 1 year ago, on February 22, Li wanted to release an internal letter saying that the strategic goal of Ideal Auto in 2025 is to gain 20% of the market share and become China's first intelligent electric vehicle company; the vision of 2030 is to create a mobile home and become the world's first intelligent electric vehicle company.
At first glance, Li Xiang's vision is a bit of a dream, but from Li Xiang's control of product logic and market feedback, it is not difficult to find that Li Xiang's confidence is not "empty mouth".
In the financial report of Ideal Automobile, Ideal calls itself "an innovator in China's new energy vehicle market", and in fact, Ideal has indeed achieved a different product strategy from other new forces. Unlike Xiaopeng and Weilai, who habitually aim their attention to aviation, mobile phones and other fields, in the inertial thinking, the new forces of cross-industry car manufacturing enterprises have become accustomed to using the development thinking of the Internet and electronic products to expand and integrate horizontally, but the ideal car is more focused on the vertical and in-depth exploration of the automotive products themselves at the operational level.
Li Xiang has expressed its product logic: First, we must understand the needs of users, which includes our target user groups, their explicit needs, implicit needs, and our insights into user needs. We launch the right product through a more comprehensive perspective. Second, we need to understand the price at which users are willing to buy.
On the ideal ONE, the only model on sale, Lee wanted to achieve the "market-oriented" product he wanted. The unique product positioning fits the fundamental needs of consumers for the electrification and space of medium- and large-sized SUVs. Driven by this philosophy, ideal ONE has achieved excellent feedback from the market, and from the fourth quarter of 2020, the sales volume of ideal ONE has remained at an average of more than 10,000 units per quarter. By the second half of 2021, with the dual boost of market heat and product strength, Ideal ONE reached sales levels of 25,000 units and 35,000 units in the last two quarters.
Excellent market performance, but also for Li wants to continue to implement their own logic on the product side has brought the possibility, Li wants to say: "For the (upcoming) X01 model, on the one hand, we can meet the needs of users in the ideal ONE model can not be achieved, on the other hand, we will create some new needs, which is not realized by all new energy models on the market today." ”
At the same time, the day before the release of the fourth quarter financial report, Jiangsu Chehejia Automobile Co., Ltd. increased its capital by 400 million yuan to obtain 3.21% of the shares of Sunwoda Auto Battery, which means that the ideal is making research and development reserves for the next generation of power battery technology. In addition, Beijing Chehejia Automobile Technology Co., Ltd. and Hunan Sanan Semiconductor Co., Ltd. will establish a joint venture, hoping to lay out in advance in the silicon carbide industry to master the core technology of the high-voltage pure electric platform.
The synchronous development of many technical businesses has given Li the confidence and confidence to face the future, but on the other hand, it has also brought many uncertainties to the ideal car.
Conceited "ideals"
Although on the business side, Ideal Auto is gradually on the right track, Ideal ONE's sales are enough to rank at the top of the list of new forces. However, the problems facing the development of the ideal car have not diminished with the rise of the business.
Becoming the apple of the automobile industry means that the ideal needs to have sufficient technical reserves and uniqueness in the automotive field, for Apple, the explosion stems from the ecology built at the bottom of the IOS system, but it seems too early to talk about these ideals.
It is true that according to Li Xiang's business logic, Ideal Auto can continuously create differentiated products that best meet the market demand, and use the money earned from selling cars to continuously develop new products and technologies, and then create more explosive models to achieve product innovation closed loop. However, in the face of the continuous enrichment of product definitions of automotive products, whether the ideal has the ability to keep technology and products at the forefront of the times still needs to be marked with a big question mark.
According to the logic proposed by Li Xiang in 2021, analogous to the development rate of the smartphone market and the global automotive industry, by 2025, the annual sales of ideal cars need to reach 1.6 million; in 2030, it needs to reach 10 million vehicles to achieve the set goal in Li Xiang's mind. Even without talking about these "almost insurmountable" market and capacity increase targets, ideal cars are facing huge pressures of technology and capital competition.
According to the financial report, ideal automobile operating profit was 24.1 million yuan (US$3.8 million) in the fourth quarter of 2021, compared with the company's operating loss of 78.9 million yuan in the same period last year and an operating loss of 97.8 million yuan in the third quarter of 2021. This is the first time that the operating profit of the ideal car has achieved quarterly positive, which also means that the company is relying on the main business of car manufacturing to achieve the ability of "self-hematopoiesis".
Compared with other new forces that are still losing money, the ideal business capacity will undoubtedly help enterprises enter a benign stage of development as soon as possible. However, it is not easy for Ideal Auto to maintain a long-term balance of 20% gross margin and 10% R&D investment. According to Ideal Auto's estimates, vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of 2022 were 30,000 to 32,000 units, with total revenue of RMB8.84 billion to RMB9.43 billion. This figure is significantly lower than the 35,000 unit deliveries and $10.62 billion revenue level in the fourth quarter of 2021.
For the ideal, under the long-term development, how to achieve revenue balance and sales increase while the new product is differentiated from the existing products, is the problem that must be considered with each step forward, as we all know, the range extender technology in the face of new energy subsidies has come to the edge of the policy, when the policy is fully retreated, the ideal ONE in the market is doomed to be difficult to maintain its unique position as always.
At the same time, at the level of the capital chain, the ideal of just turning positive income is difficult to reach the top level of the industry, and regardless of the R & D investment of tens of billions of yuan under the comprehensive transformation of traditional car companies, only compared with Weilai, which invested 5 billion yuan in research and development in 2021, ideal car's R & D investment of 3.29 billion yuan last year can only keep itself in the ranks of not falling behind.
On the other hand, the ideal car that has been invested in range extender power technology for a long time is still lagging behind in the trend of pure electric and intelligent industry development direction. Li Xiang himself has predicted that by 2030, L4 level autonomous driving technology will become the standard for every smart electric vehicle. However, the ideal of upgrading the NOA navigation assistance function and the self-developed AEB (automatic emergency braking) function was just pushed to users last December, and how long it will take with R&D investment to make up for the gap between them and their predecessors is obviously difficult to predict.
Take a look:
In 2021, He Xiaopeng, the founder of Xiaopeng Motors, once said that Li Xiang was the most moist one among the "three fools of car building", but looking to the future, Li wanted to face no less difficulties than the two competitors with his ideal car.
Although Li Xiang's "exaggerated remarks" most of the time are suspected of speculation, Li Xiang often makes some "sober" summaries and suggestions. Just the day after the "shelling" of the group car, Li Xiang released a long article "The Importance of Rhythm Control for Entrepreneurship" based on his entrepreneurial experience.
In the article, Li wants to divide entrepreneurship into three stages: 0-1, 1-10, and 10-100, corresponding to the verification period, growth period and maturity period, respectively, Li xiang also said that rhythm control is the most core ability requirement for entrepreneurs and the number one position. As a manager, the competition from 0-1 is to understand oneself, and from 1-10 is to improve the understanding of others.
Whether it is "Wei Xiaoli", who has gained a firm foothold early, or zero running and Nezha that have come to the fore, most of the new forces that survive in the market today have crossed the 0-1 verification period. But on the road of 1-10, the forerunners and latecomers, without exception, are still in the exploratory stage.
This article is an exclusive manuscript of the Observer Network and may not be reproduced without authorization.