Wen | Han Ling
Editor| Mao Shiyang
Chery "white pick" southeast car
Following Lixun Precision's 10 billion yuan stake in Chery, in less than a month, Chery exposed the "big news".
Recently, a planning plan for chery commercial vehicles and Southeast Automobile was exposed, and the content of the plan showed that Chery Commercial Vehicles will acquire Southeast Automobile. However, unlike the capital acquisition, Chery will realize the acquisition of Southeast Automobile through technology investment.
In the agreement, Southeast Automobile will exchange 80% of its equity for Chery's "technical support", while Chery will invest technology in Southeast Automobile, and if it can complete the sales target stipulated in the agreement, Southeast Automobile will give 80% of its equity to Chery free of charge.
To the outside world, this looks more like a VAM agreement between the two sides.
"Finance and Economics" Weekly asked Chery Holdings for verification, and as of press time, the other party did not respond. Southeast Auto "will not comment". According to industry media reports, Chery Holdings responded that "this is a matter of the entire group's strategy", and according to Chery insiders, "the group is investigating the source of this information leak, and more information is inconvenient to disclose." ”
But no matter how the plan ultimately lands, the rescue of Southeast Motors has already begun and is imminent.
"Finance and Economics" Weekly learned that at the end of 2021, the relevant departments in Fujian organized a special action of "attacking the stronghold for 120 days" and set up 12 special work classes to help Southeast Automobile Company resume work and production At the end of 2021, the four major shareholders of Southeast Automobile brought the first phase of capital increase of 2 billion yuan to Southeast Automobile to save the dying Southeast Automobile.
But this is not a long-term solution, no core technology and no research and development capabilities of Southeast Automobile, the need is not only capital, but also technical and product support.
In the cooperation plan revealed in the plan, this cooperation will use Southeast Automobile as the main body, operate with the Southeast Jietu Automobile brand, and strive to achieve annual production and sales of 400,000 vehicles within 3-5 years. In the next 10 years, it is expected to sell 3.06 million vehicles, automobile revenue of 273 billion yuan, and drive parts and related industries worth 217.8 billion yuan, a total of 500 billion yuan.
This is a challenging goal. The data shows that in the whole year of 2021, Southeast Automobile only sold 7265 new cars, down 51.85% year-on-year. This means that in order to complete the VAM agreement, the new shareholders need to increase the production and sales scale of Southeast Automobile by more than 55 times in five years.
In fact, as a veteran independent car company, Southeast Automobile has had a period of "glory". In 2006, Mitsubishi Motors joined the shareholder SOUTH Motors, southeast motors received support from Mitsubishi vehicle manufacturing and research and development, and successively introduced products including Gelan, Lanse, Yishen and other products, while Southeast Motors independently developed Models such as Lingshuai, Lingshen and Lingli based on Mitsubishi Motors. In 2013, Southeast automobile sales reached an all-time high of 116,000 units.
After 2012, Mitsubishi gradually faded out of Southeast Motors until it completely withdrew in 2021, and its 25% equity interest in Southeast Motors was transferred to the new shareholder, Fuzhou Transportation Construction Investment Group Co., Ltd.
After Mitsubishi withdrew, Southeast Motor underwent several equity changes. Current shareholders include Fujian Automobile Industry Group (47.3297%), Fuzhou Zuohai Holding Group Co., Ltd. (26.0651%), Minhou County Construction Investment Group (21.0806%) and Huawei Co., Ltd. (5.5246%).
However, these funds are not enough to support the layout of Southeast Automobile in the transformation of new energy. With the increasing threshold for entering the field of new energy vehicles, Southeast Automobile does not have advantages in technology or funds, and it is very difficult to enter the new energy field on its own.
However, after losing Mitsubishi's technical support, Southeast Automobile's market performance was unsatisfactory. From 2018 to 2022, the cumulative sales volume was 89,279 units, 30,502 vehicles and 14,654 vehicles, respectively, and the sales volume showed a downward trend year by year.
In 2021, Southeast Auto released a brand renewal plan, and announced a new generation of product LOGO, released three new products are DX9, Southeast N7 and a pure electric Southeast A7, the new car will be announced in 2022 details. But so far, the official has not announced the latest progress on the three models.
The head car companies take over the tail car companies with poor profits, which occur frequently. For example, Geely merged cheetahs and Lifan, and great wall took over the Linyi factory of Zotye, etc., all of which obtained high-quality resources at lower prices.
In this regard, Ji Xuehong, an automobile analyst at the North China University of Technology, told the Weekly That is, due to the slowdown in the growth rate of the automobile market, the competition between car companies is more concentrated in the stock market. This has caused many marginal small brands to fall into development difficulties and have to maintain the subsequent development of enterprises by "selling themselves".
Can "VAM" bring a win-win situation?
Chery's takeover of Southeast Automobile is, in a sense, part of Chery's strategic expansion. From Chery's completion of mixed reform in 2019 to Lixun Precision's investment in Chery from the business level, this information has released Chery and is now preparing for full expansion.
But even so, whether Chery can successfully "pick up" to Southeast Automobile and complete the production and sales betting agreement seems to be full of challenges.
Judging from the current exposure information, the future cooperation is divided into three stages, the first stage will begin this year, Chery's new energy models will be affixed to the Southeast Automobile brand for sale, to achieve the sales of 24,000 Southeast Automobile, which is mainly to preserve the qualification of Southeast Automobile. Chery needs to manage Southeast Automobile, do adaptive development and export certification costs of 300 million yuan in 3 existing models, logistics subsidies of 0.5 million yuan per vehicle, sales costs of 10,000 yuan per vehicle, and start three model modifications, with a cost of 1 billion yuan.
In this way, although Chery is invested in technology, the cost to be paid by Southeast Automobile is not low. In addition, even with the help of Chery's new energy models, Southeast Automobile will achieve the target of 24,000 units and support the project expenditure, which is not a small pressure. On the one hand, Chery's new energy vehicles are mainly composed of small cars such as small ants and QQ ice cream, and 70% of its sales share comes from QQ ice cream. Whether the labeling of Southeast Automobile will be recognized by the market remains to be questioned; on the other hand, Southeast Automobile's own sales have suffered Waterloo in 2021, and the sales of its entire series of models are less than 8,000.
The second phase starts in 2023, and Southeast Automobile will apply for a bid replacement of Chery models, sell its modified model products, ensure that Southeast Automobile will sell no less than 75,000 units, and locally produce Southeast new energy vehicles or OEM Chery Automobile. The Fuzhou government will undertake factory investment and start the construction of a factory with an annual production capacity of 250,000 units to ensure that the total annual production capacity is not less than 400,000 units.
When Chery helped Southeast Automobile achieve its sales target of no less than 75,000 units, 80% of Southeast Automobile's equity was transferred to Chery free of charge in the first quarter of the following year. At the same time, 3 billion yuan will be invested in the development of three platform models, of which 2 billion yuan will be invested in 2023.
2024 is the third phase of the agreement. The two sides jointly developed and completed three new models, with annual sales of 150,000 units, and a new southeast automobile production base of 250,000 units, and Chery will invest the remaining 1 billion yuan in development costs in 2024.
"Finance and Economics" Weekly learned that the acquirer of Chery Commercial Vehicles has two major brand series, Kerry and Jietu. The sales volume of the Jietu brand increased significantly last year, with a total of 154,000 new cars sold (including exports) in the whole year, an increase of 17.9% year-on-year, and the cumulative total sales of Jietu Automobile exceeded 460,000 units. Jietu and Chery New Energy are considered to be the main products that will be introduced into Southeast Automobile.
In fact, since the official launch of Jietu in 2018, the sales performance in the entire Chery Group has been better, with cumulative sales of 40,000 vehicles in 2018, 138,000 vehicles in 2019, and 126,000 vehicles in 2020. Li Xueyong, deputy general manager of Jietu Automobile and general manager of the marketing center, said that if it were not limited by the shortage of chips, it might break 200,000 units in 2021.
This year, Jetway's annual sales target is 200,000 units, with sales of 400,000 units in 2023 and 1 million units in 2026. It should be noted that Jietu does not have its own separate production line and R & D center, and will be shared with Chery Automobile in the future. The annual production capacity of Jietu Kaifeng factory is 300,000 units, of which the production capacity of commercial vehicles such as Karry New Energy accounts for about 100,000 vehicles, and the production capacity of Jietu Automobile is only 200,000 vehicles.
However, the sharp increase in Jietu's sales target means that Chery needs to expand Jietu's production capacity. Therefore, the cooperation with Southeast Automobile has also been interpreted by the outside world as Chery looking for production channels for Jietu, with the intention of expanding production capacity.
For Southeast Automobile, Chery's shareholding can not only expand the product layout, but also allow itself to "survive". In terms of Chery, it has completed the expansion of production capacity at a price lower than the market. Of course, the premise of all this is that this VAM agreement can be successfully realized.