On March 10, Beijing time, WEILAI officially landed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the trading code is HK9866, the opening price is 160 Hong Kong dollars, and the closing price is 158.9 Hong Kong dollars, which is in a broken state. The break on the opening day does not seem to be a good sign, and for Weilai, the bigger challenge comes from the relative decline in sales.
As the first share of China's new car-making forces and the second share of global pure electric car companies, Weilai has been sitting firmly at the top of the list of the market value of China's new car-making forces, higher bicycle prices, higher sales, so that the capital market has given Weilai a higher valuation, Weilai's market value once exceeded 100 billion US dollars, at that time even exceeded the market value of GM, Ford and other established American car companies.
However, investors in the secondary market found that although the stock prices of Weilai, Ideal and Xiaopeng were declining synchronously, the stock price of Weilai fell even more, and the gap between Weilai's market value and ideal and Xiaopeng was getting smaller and smaller, from the previous 2-3 times the ideal and Xiaopeng market value, to once only 10% higher than the ideal and Xiaopeng market value, which was about the gap between $33 billion and $30 billion.
In July 2021, Weilai, which lost the throne of the first brother in the sales of China's new car-making forces, is very likely to lose the throne of the first brother in the market value of the new forces of Chinese car-making in the first half of 2022. The reason is that the sales volume of Weilai is a problem, and the deep reason is the problem of Weilai's product positioning and business model.
01 Table cause: Weilai's sales growth rate is not as good as ideal, Xiaopeng
Time back to the beginning of August 2021, Wei Xiaoli Nezha zero run and other published July sales data, in July, Weilai sold 7931 vehicles, lower than the 8083 vehicles in June, but the ideal and Xiaopeng sales in July both broke 8,000 for the first time, the ideal sales is 8589 vehicles, Xiaopeng sales is 8040 vehicles. This is the first time that Weilai has lost the throne of the first place in the sales list of China's new car-making forces.
However, in September 2021, WEIlai and Xiaopeng sold more than 10,000 vehicles in a single month for the first time, and Weilai's sales of 10,628 vehicles were a little higher than Xiaopeng's 10,412 vehicles. However, this is also the last glory of Weilai in terms of monthly sales, and it has never been able to win the throne of the monthly sales champion of China's new forces, and has even been repeatedly squeezed out of the top three positions by Nezha.
For a car company, sales volume is the only measure of the success of car companies. With sales, there is better revenue, can better talk about prices and payment cycles with the supply chain, with sales means the emergence of scale effects, in order to better reduce costs and improve gross margins, etc., which is why Musk will repeatedly reduce prices when costs allow, Musk pursues sales, and sales are the basis for Tesla's desire to open the software charging business model.
For Weilai, the top hat of China's own brand pricing ceiling is the core reason why its sales cannot grow rapidly. According to Weilai Li Bin, the ticket price of Weilai's bicycle is higher than that of BBA, which is a height that Chinese independent brands have never reached before. This also provides an opportunity for independent brands to open the pricing ceiling, if there is no Weilai high pricing and achieve monthly sales of thousands or even tens of thousands of sales, there is no later Zhiji dare to price 300,000, BYD even to launch 50-1 million high-end brands.
However, high pricing means that the audience has declined, and the growth of sales is not as good as that of the lower-priced ideal, Xiaopeng and other new car-making forces. To take an extreme example, the Wuling Hongguang MINI EV, which costs 28,800 yuan, has even sold more than 40,000 units per month, which is an extreme example of low pricing. More reference significance is Tesla, Tesla in the domestic, under the premise of reducing production costs, continue to reduce the price of domestic Model 3 in order to seek greater sales.
Nio also saw this situation, is also trying to make changes, on December 18, 2021 held NIO Day 2021, NIO released its own brand's lowest price model ET5, the pricing range is still as high as 258,000 yuan, 258,000 this price also needs to spend 980 yuan or 1480 yuan per month to rent batteries Baas program. NIO claims that the order for the car is unprecedented, but the delivery of the car will not be until September 2022. You know, Xiaopeng plans to sell 250,000-300,000 vehicles this year, with an average monthly sales of more than 20,000.
In December 2021, Xiaopeng contributed a new record of 16,000 units in the monthly sales of the new forces, and the first one expected to break through the monthly sales of 20,000 vehicles is most likely Xiaopeng, without him, because Xiaopeng's bicycle prices are lower, whether it is G3, P7 or P5. You know, Tesla's highest sales are also the lower price of M3 and MY.
02 Internal factors: Weilai's core competitiveness is in services rather than products
The rise of the NIO brand relies on services that are invested at no cost.
In order to solve the problem of the ultra-short endurance of the first model ES8, Weilai provides a dad-style supplementary service, an ES8 car owner, after confirming the order, will separately establish a WeChat group, the group of several Weilai employees to provide services for the owner, and one of the performance of employees is to assess the frequency and quantity of service owners.
Most of the first owners of Weilai ES8 are businessmen, and the best thing businessmen are doing is to calculate accounts, and after the owners calculate the accounts, they think that the input-output ratio of Weilai is too large, which can also be seen from Weilai's financial reports, the most serious time is to sell a car, lose a car.
Service is the foundation of the Weilai brand, to maintain high-quality service, it is necessary to high selling prices and gross profits, which is why in tesla frequent price cuts, Li Bin said that in order to protect the interests of car owners do not reduce prices, because Weilai can not keep up with the price war, high-quality service costs are too high.
More importantly, whether it is a series of Owner Services advertised by NIO house, substations, mobile charging vehicles, etc., with the increase of the owner group, the cost of service is also linear growth, and it is impossible to achieve the downward trend of the Internet's marginal cost of infinity, which means that Weilai cannot sell more cars and will drag itself to death.
From the perspective of product strength, Weilai's favorite product positioning is the model roommate. The first car ES8, the second car ES6, ES6 endurance is higher, the price is lower, it seems more cost-effective, directly squeeze the sales of ES8, the third car EC6 is the hatchback version of ES6, which will naturally divide the customers of ES6. In front of it is the SUV, to the sedan, the ET7 released on NIO Day 2020, knows that it will be delivered on March 28, 2022, and the ET5 released on December 18, 2021, which is lower priced, better performing, and will divert et7 orders.
As for the upcoming ES7 (the high probability of the Beijing Auto Show in April 2022), this SUV is positioned as a large five-seat pure electric SUV, between the ES6 and ES8. Honestly, is there another product between the ES6 and the ES8? Purely from the price point of view, ES6 pricing 34.648-51.34 million, ES8 pricing is 45.35-61.14 million, there is an EC6 priced 35.36-51.34 million in the middle, the price difference is originally overlapped very much, ES7 pricing how to only grab their own orders, rather than to grab other orders, because there is no new price range of products.
Weilai's competitiveness has never been a product, but a service, the product itself can improve the experience by increasing technology, and can also reduce costs through technology, but the cost of services is difficult to fall, nor can it fall, once it falls, it will affect the brand. This is also why Weilai wants to launch a mid-range brand, but everything should be fast. The new energy vehicle market is to fight fast, Tesla, BYD are desperately expanding production capacity to grab the market, Xiaopeng and Ideal also have better sales targets.
More importantly, the ideal is to push the new full-size model L9, Xiaopeng push the G9 of the larger SUV, and even BYD will push a larger SUV based on tang, which will crowd out the market space of Weilai.
In Wei Xiaoli, Weilai's sales fell behind first, and the throne of the market value brother was also in jeopardy. Whether Weilai can keep the title of a brother in market value depends on the speed of the launch of Weilai's mid-range brand and the speed of sales, otherwise, it is not optimistic.