Recently, a rumor of cooperation between Chery Commercial Vehicle and Southeast Automobile has attracted widespread attention in the industry.
According to a PPT circulating on the Internet, Chery Commercial Vehicle will carry out in-depth cooperation with Southeast Automobile to achieve production capacity and sales targets, and Chery Commercial Vehicle may acquire Southeast Automobile.
The PPT revealed the specific cooperation plan of the two sides in the next 3 years, Chery Commercial Vehicle and Southeast Automobile will continue to use the main body of Southeast Automobile, operate under the Southeast Jietu Automobile brand, and cooperate in depth, and strive to achieve annual production and sales of 400,000 units within 3-5 years.
The cooperation is divided into three stages: 2022 is the first stage, Chery's new energy models will be sold with the Southeast Automobile brand, and Jietu will be sold to domestic and foreign markets with Jietu's sales network after the bid change. The sales target is 24,000 units; in the second phase of 2023, three retrofit products will be put into production, using domestic and international channels for sales, and local production of Southeast brand new energy vehicles or OEM Chery Automobiles, achieving a total sales target of 75,000 units; in the third phase of 2024, three new models will be jointly developed and completed, and 250,000 units/year of new plants will be put into operation.
In addition, this in-depth cooperation model has also received policy support from the local government in Fuzhou. After the sales target is achieved, Southeast Automobile will transfer it free of charge.
For the news of cooperation and the authenticity of the circulating PPT, Southeast Automobile's response is: there is no more news to reveal at present. Some insiders in Chery said that the group is investigating the source of the leak of this news, and more information is inconvenient to disclose. In the eyes of the outside world, the non-questioning of the two parties has also increased the credibility of the news to a certain extent.
It is understood that Chery Commercial Vehicle (Anhui) Co., Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chery Holding Group Co., Ltd., which owns two major brands: Jietu and Karry. Among them, although the Jietu brand has been established for a short time, it has shown a continuous increase in sales in recent years. According to the data, the cumulative sales volume of Jietu Automobile in 2021 was 154,077 units, an increase of 17.9% year-on-year. In 2022, Jetway aims to sell 200,000 vehicles, and by 2026, it will meet its annual sales target of one million units.
However, at present, Jietu does not have a separate production line, but shares a production line with Chery. Under the increasingly high sales target of Jietu Automobile, the non-independent production line has also brought shackles to the new brand. On the other side, the performance of Southeast Automobile is sluggish sales and idle production capacity. Southeast Automobile introduced Chery models and technologies, revitalized assets, and retained qualifications, while Jietu was able to increase production capacity, which may be a win-win situation for both sides.
It is worth noting that in the ongoing 2022 two meetings, Wang Fengying, president of Great Wall Motor, proposed topics including the "Proposal on Promoting the Capacity Utilization Rate of China's Automotive Industry". Wang Fengying said that under the impetus of a new round of global scientific and technological revolution and industrial change, the transformation of the automobile industry has accelerated, accompanied by more intense market competition, the utilization of domestic automobile enterprises' production capacity has shown a development trend of stronger and weaker, and the production capacity of advantageous industries in the areas where the advantageous industries are concentrated is facing insufficient, but there are also a large number of idle production capacity in many places, bringing about the loss of resources such as funds, land and talents.
The phenomenon of wasted capacity caused by the low capacity utilization rate of marginal car companies has gradually attracted the attention of the industry, and the merger and reorganization of idle production capacity has become one of the problems that the industry needs to solve. Previously, car companies, including Geely, have joined the ranks of acquisitions, and the in-depth cooperation between Chery Commercial Vehicles and Southeast Automobile also reflects this trend to a certain extent.
However, in the cooperation plan between Chery Commercial Vehicle and Southeast Automobile, in 2022, Chery's new energy models will be introduced into Southeast Automobile. At present, Jietu is still walking on the fuel vehicle track, and its electrification process is not fast.
Previously, Li Xueyong, deputy general manager of Jietu Automobile and general manager of the marketing center, said to auto headlines that Jietu will successively launch PHEV versions of models this year, pure electric models are under development, and it is expected to achieve green labeling of all models by 2024.
In this in-depth cooperation with Southeast Automobile, the expansion of Jietu Automobile's production capacity is natural, but to what extent Chery will inject transformative elements into Jietu, the industry is waiting to see.