The problem that needs to be solved by new auto retail is how to connect the upstream and downstream of this chain. (Source: Visual China)
In October 2016, Ma Yun first proposed the concept of "new retail" at the Yunqi Conference, and the players in the automotive field who had been groping on this road for many years finally found a direction for themselves. 6 years have passed, and there are practitioners in the fields of channels, car sources, finance and other fields who have tried, but no one thinks that they have found the key to open the door to new retail of automobiles.
Channels empower new retail, and the store model is difficult to run through
Stepping out of the door of Haili Zhixing's office, Li Yimin plunged headlong into the cold sea breeze of Qingdao. At this time, he remembered that his coat was forgotten in the office behind him, but Li Yimin did not look back and ran straight to the taxi that waited for him for ten minutes dozens of meters away.
This was Li Yimin's last working day at Haili Zhixing. An hour later, he sat in Starbucks and turned on his computer to start updating his resume on the recruitment website. After hesitating, he deleted his work experience in the past few months and described the period from the departure of the previous car company to today as a "rest". After pressing the submit button, Li Yimin smiled bitterly, and the last time he saw his friend hide his work experience in Sai Lin, he joked that this was a stain on the other party's life, and he did not expect that after ten months, he would also try to erase this past.
When Haili Zhixing was recruited from the last car company, Li Yimin gave himself many reasons: the salary has risen a lot, for his parents' family in Shandong, it is closer to home than the city where he worked before, and Tsingtao Beer is more suitable for his own taste... And selling cars in Haier's stores really makes me excited.
In 2020, Qingdao Haier Home Furnishing Integration Co., Ltd. changed its name to Qingdao Hailiju JuJu Technology Co., Ltd., and began to lay out the automobile industry after the name change. A year later, Haili signed strategic cooperation agreements with Chery and SAIC and began to enter the public eye. As can be seen from the enterprise investigation data, the companies associated with Haili include Qingdao Haili Zhixing Ecological Technology Co., Ltd., Qingdao Haili Zhixing Automobile Sales Co., Ltd., Qingdao Haili Automobile Sales Service Co., Ltd. and Qingdao Haili Zhixing Supply Chain Co., Ltd. These four companies form Haier's ideal auto travel map: cooperation with car companies to customize models, Haier Zhijia APP as an online entrance, and Haier's offline stores as sales and service channels.
Li Yimin was impressed by this seemingly grand plan, especially after seeing the beautiful blueprint of Ren Xiancun, who was the vice president of Haier Electric Appliances, he decided to join it.
Selling cars in Haier's stores is one of the stories that Haili Zhixing has always told. (Source: Visual China)
Haier has nearly 50,000 sales outlets in China, thousands of stores covering all levels of market and 350 million online users, which will become Haier's core competitiveness in the field of automotive new retail in this story. As later described in the signing of the cooperation agreement with Chery New Energy, Haier will give full play to the resource advantages of the national retail industry, fully open up the existing sales channels, and users can go to Haier Mall when buying cars in the future; the two sides will also jointly explore the online communication matrix with Haier Cloud and Haier website as the platform, and the offline retail network channels based on the retail channels of Haier's various products to jointly create a new retail sales model for automobiles.
Unfortunately, this story only talks about the cooperation with Chery QQ ice cream and small ants and suddenly stopped. Li Yimin also chose to leave after a few months. After walking out of the door of that office, pulling out to look at Haier's ecological story related to new auto retail as a bystander, Li Yimin found several of the problems that were logically difficult to solve in business.
The first is to talk about the car source problem that no player can get around when it comes to new car retail. Haier, who tries to empower the new retail of automobiles with channels, can only obtain car sources through cooperation with car companies under the asset-light model of not building cars, but car companies will not give the best-selling cars that are still undersupplied in their 4S store channels to other channels, nor will they let Haier monopolize the sales rights of a certain regional market to avoid the impact of their own channels. After being rejected by great wall, geely, lantu and other car companies, the cooperation object can only be circled as a low-cost model of some new energy vehicle manufacturers.
The small ant model cooperated with Chery has made the channel profit margin extremely small due to its low price (Image source: Chery New Energy)
The car is there, and the channel is in trouble. Due to the inability to win the resources of strong brands, Haier only provided Chery QQ ice cream with a price of about 30,000 yuan for the channel, and the profit margin that the channel can obtain from the sale of vehicles is extremely small. In order to place exhibition cars in the store, the store is bound to compress the display space of the previous electrical appliances, so that when sales cannot reach the expected target, the efficiency of the store declines sharply. On the one hand, haier Zhijia's scene brand three-winged bird Shenzhen experience center has a single store ping effect of five times that of traditional stores, and on the other hand, it is an invalid space that appears in most of the time because of the display of exhibition vehicles, and the store will naturally not be happy. In addition, the staff in the store have no experience in car sales, and they cannot give a satisfactory answer to the customer's inquiry, and how to sell the car has become a problem. In addition, for the channel, the after-sales of home appliances in the past was completely solved by the manufacturer, this time Haier wants to grasp the after-sales service of the vehicle in its hands, and some stores say that "one is not, the other is trouble", and it is not surprising that the heat of selling cars is slowly decreasing.
Another traffic-related story that Haier told in the new retail of automobiles has slowly become just a story. Home appliance stores have almost zero offline traffic on weekdays, and under the impact of e-commerce, even on weekends and holidays, the flow of customers is not as good as before. As for the 350 million online users, it has become a problem, and the low-frequency purchase of home appliances makes the stickiness and daily active data of the APP are not ideal, even if the user enters the APP in order to buy home appliances, it is rare to browse the information outside the target product. The lack of consumption scenes has become the weakest link in haier's story of new auto retail.
Li Yimin is not the last outsider to choose to leave Haili Zhixing, and he has come to Qingdao in 2021 with many engineers who have previously worked in traditional car companies. These engineers are responsible for completing the lightweight custom development of cooperation with car companies in Haier's story, but this R&D team from Geely has also resigned at the end of 2021 and left Haier, not knowing whether they will hide these months of experience like Li Yimin when they refresh their resumes. The experience was like a black hole that devoured the months of Li Yimin and the young people around him, in Li Yimin's words: "I don't want people to know about my experience in this project, lest they think that my judgment is wrong." 」 ”
Haier has chosen a light model empowered by channels in the matter of new retail of automobiles, and Ren Xiancun and Zhou Yunjie both believe that this is a model that can run through. But they forgot the pits that their peers in the home appliance store had jumped over.
As early as the end of 2016, Gome Electric changed its offline stores to a comprehensive store model of automobiles and home appliances, and the previous automobile center was also expanded into an automobile business unit, which was led by Song Linlin, vice president and general manager of Gome Online. The following year, the "Measures for the Administration of Automobile Sales" adopted by the Ministry of Commerce broke the boundaries of the traditional brand authorized sales model, and Gome Electric found new opportunities to sell cars online and offline. In March of that year, Gome released the "Gome Automobile 2017 Strategy" and planned to open car showrooms in its own 1,700 stores to sell electric vehicles. According to partners who had business dealings with Gome Automobile at that time, Song Linlin's plan included building exhibition halls in offline stores, building charging piles in store parking lots, and carrying out after-sales service and parts sales business, and auto finance and insurance businesses were also included.
"Becoming the manager of the open channel of the automobile main engine factory" has become the positioning of Gome in the automotive field since it was proposed by Yang Tianyu, deputy general manager of the automotive business unit. But everything backfired, in November of that year, Gome Online's vehicle sales stores were all offline, and a series of actions in the offline store plan were also quiet, as if the business had ended without a problem. However, at the end of 2021, Gome began to recruit positions related to intelligent vehicles, including but not limited to positions such as business general manager and store investment director. On Sina Weibo, there are also netizens' dynamics showing that they have photographed the figure of Xiaopeng Motors at the scene of Gome's offline activities in Chengdu. Perhaps Gome has never given up its dream in the field of new auto retail, but it is not known whether this business will have new plans after Huang Guangyu is released from prison.
Coincidentally, Gome's biggest competitor Suning also began to try the new car e-commerce business around 2016, but the data is not ideal, and many of the stores involved in it have chosen to quit in a very short period of time, and the head of one of the stores said: "The car channel has almost no traffic, there is not even an order in a week, and the cost performance of operating this online store is too low." The person in charge also closed the store on Gome's online car channel, and the boom in new car e-commerce gradually cooled at the end of 2016.
Menkolo Bird has always been a portrayal of Suning Tesco Auto Supermarket (Source: Visual China)
By 2020, we did not see whether Suning Tesco Auto Supermarket had achieved the target of 101 stores, only the data released by Suning after the end of the double eleven of this year: 12 hours a.m. on the 11th, Suning Automobile's omni-channel sales increased by 216% year-on-year, auto supplies sales increased by 115% year-on-year, electric motorcycle category sales increased by 517% year-on-year, new car orders increased by 308%; 12-day double-line sales increased by 98% year-on-year, and new car orders increased by 283% year-on-year. Motorcycle sales increased by 198% year-on-year, and aftermarket automotive supplies increased by 85% year-on-year. However, since there is no base of sales and orders as a reference, this growth ratio does not have much practical significance. When we visited the official website of Suning Automobile Plaza, we found that almost all the goods were sold out, and the website page had not been included in the search engine for many consecutive months, so it should have stopped operating long ago.
Although Haier, Gome and Suning are all trying to empower new auto retail with offline channels, Haier is still slightly different from the latter two. Haier tried to cooperate with OEMs to customize models to solve the problem of vehicle source, gome and Suning did not care about this, their hidden business logic is to form an entrance to auto finance through car sales, which is the real source of profits. Unfortunately, without solving the problems of the first few links in this chain, auto finance has become a rootless tree, and the final fate of Gome and Suning is destined to be the same as Haier.
The bell rings, and it's time for the three players to leave.
The bell rings and Wanda enters.
In November 2021, Wanda Automotive Technology Service Co., Ltd. was formally established with a registered capital of 100 million yuan, jointly held by Dalian Wanda Group Co., Ltd. and Taiqing (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. In December, Li Hongpeng, vice president of Hyundai China, announced that he had resigned and would become president of Wanda Automobile in January 2022, and Li Hongpeng's joining finally made people feel that Wanda was not joking this time. During his tenure as Senior Vice President of Mercedes-Benz Sales & Services In Beijing, Li Hongpeng made the Chinese market the largest single market for Mercedes-Benz in the world and expanded a strong national distribution network. Subsequently, under the terms of Vice President of Sales and Marketing of Ford Greater China and President of Changan Ford's National Sales and Service Organization, Li Hongpeng promoted the integration of Changan Ford, Jiangling Ford, Ford import sales and service channels, forming "One Ford". Li Hongpeng is the most needed candidate for Wanda Automobile at present.
More and more car showrooms in Wanda Plaza have stirred up the idea of Wanda's self-built channels (Source: Visual China)
Before Li Hongpeng joined, Wanda Automobile reached a strategic cooperation with FAW, announcing that it would empower each other from three dimensions: service ecology, energy ecology and member ecology, and rely on Wanda's own channels to build a "new Hongqi supermarket experience store". In addition, Wanda also plans to use the layout of more than 7,000 parking lots and smart parking systems in major cities across the country to provide users with charging piles and smart parking services. According to Wanda's official website, as of June 30, 2021, Wanda owns and operates 380 Wanda Plazas. If according to the agreement with Hongqi, every Wanda Plaza has an exhibition hall of FAW Hongqi, which is a good thing for Hongqi, which currently has only more than 100 dealers, is it really a good thing for Wanda?
If Wanda has not forgotten, since 2016, a company called United Electric has opened electric vehicle supermarkets in more than ten hypermarkets in Beijing, including a number of Wanda Plazas, hoping to complete the sales conversion through the flow of customers in hypermarkets. But with CEO Cao Gang joining Yundu Automobile in 2020, the store model of United Electric has also come to an abrupt end. If even a highly market-oriented company can't run through this model, why can Wanda? Perhaps what really gave Wanda courage was Costco across the ocean, a supermarket chain known in China as Costco that has become the nation's largest auto retailer. In 2014, Costco sold 400,000 cars in its own supermarket. In 2017, that number became 520,000 units. In 2018, the sales figure of 650,000 units allowed Costco to leave many dealer groups behind itself. Can Wanda replicate Costco's successful model? This question takes time to answer.
Vehicle source plus finance empowers new retail, 1+1 is not necessarily equal to 2
Gome and Suning tried to do auto finance on C-end users, but the financial model serving B-end users plus the blessing of car sources can run through?
On December 23, 2020, Zheng Wei from Sichuan came to Beijing for the last time. Lao Zheng, who used to be the general manager of dongfeng Peugeot 4S store, was very familiar with the Dongfeng Peugeot office in Hanwei Building on Guanghua Road in Beijing, and at that time he would always come several times a year and was a regular visitor to the small palace opposite The Hanwei Building. A few years ago, because Dongfeng Peugeot's sales were too poor, Lao Zheng chose to withdraw from the network. In 2018, the former regional manager of Dongfeng Peugeot came to the door hoping that he would become a franchisee of Jingdong Auto Mall. When he learned that Li Haigang, the former general manager of Dongfeng Peugeot, was the chairman and general manager of Jingdong Auto Mall, Lao Zheng agreed without hesitation. For him, the two major shareholders of JD.com and Yiche are far less trustworthy than Li Haigang, a former partner.
After determining to join the Jingdong Auto Mall, Lao Zheng paid a deposit of 200,000 yuan and a door fee of 80,000 yuan. JD Auto Mall promised to return the deposit of 60,000 yuan in the 12th and 24th months of cooperation between the two parties, and the remaining 80,000 yuan in the 36th month. The cost of door decoration is also refunded in three phases after the completion of acceptance and the 12th month and 24 months of cooperation.
For the door of this Jingdong auto mall alone, franchisees will have to pay at least 80,000 yuan of door fees (image source: Visual China)
The money was paid, but the service did not arrive as promised. The entrance and priority display resources of the Jingdong Mall APP mentioned in the pre-presentation have been delayed in implementation, and the promised high-quality car sources are all second- and third-tier brands of slow-selling cars except for a number of Dongfeng Yueda Kia K3 and Zhipao, and the financial services provided for big B and small B are also a mess.
When it was time to refund the first deposit, the quarrel between Lao Zheng and Jingdong Auto Mall began, and the other party postponed the payment time for various absurd reasons. Old Zheng was a little flustered, began to ask some friends among the franchisees, and found that his problem was not a problem at all in front of them: after someone paid 2 million cars, the "package freight" promised by Jingdong Auto Mall was adrift, and he had to pay nearly 100,000 yuan of freight; someone paid a deposit of nearly 100,000 yuan to order 40 Kia K3s, whether it was a car or money was gone; someone paid nearly a million yuan to order 12 Chevrolets, but the car has not been delivered... In this way, almost every car dealer familiar to Old Zheng has generated hundreds of thousands of yuan of bad debts with the Jingdong Automobile Mall.
In August 2020, more than 60 franchisees of the JD Auto Mall came to Beijing after fruitless communication with them, blocking the door of JD.com's headquarters, and their demands were almost humble: a refund of the security deposit and the door fee. But after some twists and turns, there was still no result. Four months later, the old Zhengs came to Beijing again and blocked the door of JD.com's headquarters, and disappointment once again hung over them.
Old Zheng confessed, lost it, and decided to use the later time to earn the money back. Old Zheng said in a phone call to his wife: "I will fly back tonight, the money is gone, these Beijing companies are too foolish." Other franchisees found another shareholder of Jingdong Auto Mall, Yiche, after fruitless communication with JD.com, but the dialogue that occurred in Tengda Building was still inconclusive.
Eight months later, Wuhan Cheqian Line Automobile Technology Co., Ltd., an affiliate of Jingdong Automobile Mall, was filed for bankruptcy reorganization by Jiangsu Jingdong Information Technology Co., Ltd. According to Lao Zheng's understanding, except for a few franchisees, others still have not received the deposit, door fee and unknown payment that should be refunded earlier.
How did Jingdong Auto Mall, which was considered to have a new meaning in the auto new retail market at the beginning of its establishment due to the dazzling aura of the two major shareholders and the original team of Dongfeng Peugeot of Li Haigang, have come to this step? The failure of new retail with car sources and financial empowerment is a problem of model or a problem of people? We interviewed the middle and high-level team members of the former Jingdong Auto Mall and spelled out the whole process little by little.
At the press conference of Jingdong Auto Mall in 2018, Li Haigang said that the project will create a one-stop standardized automobile consumption sharing channel platform in the third-tier to sixth-tier markets, and build a new channel model based on channels, transactions as the body, finance as blood, and data as the soul, and the main income will come from automobile sales, franchise fees and financial products. At least then, Li Haigang and Jingdong Auto Mall still seemed to want to do something.
The first batch of franchisees in Jingdong Auto Mall came from 4S stores of loss-making brands in third-tier cities, conventional second-network dealers trying to get rid of the control of 4S stores, second-hand car dealers who want to increase new car products, and auto financial service providers who expect to promote traditional business with new car sales business. For these franchisees, Jingdong Auto Mall promises to provide 5 to 6 batches of resource car quotations per month, and the price will be five or six hundred yuan lower than the conventional price on the market; if the franchisee needs, Jingdong Auto Mall will also provide them with a financial policy of three-tenths of a day, which is slightly better than the cost of other supply chain financial service providers with a daily interest rate of four thousandths. In addition, in order to help small B (small and medium-sized dealers) among franchisees to sell cars to C-end users, Jingdong Auto Mall also provides financial services for car buyers.
The story looks beautiful, but all the stories that look beautiful will be ruined in the hands of people.
The management team from the former Dongfeng Peugeot was extremely uncomfortable with the development speed of the Internet company that the two shareholders were accustomed to, and the fission-like growth of user data could not be done at all, so when there were only more than 600 franchise stores at the most, Jingdong Auto Mall began to recruit franchisees to open offline membership stores. Member stores can also enjoy the financial policy of 3/10,000 per day, but the monthly batch of high-quality car quotations has become 1 to 2 batches. In the work report of the management team, the data growth rate and speed of franchisees and member stores are ideal. But Zhang Qiang, who once held a middle-level position at Jingdong Auto Mall, told us: "Fake, mixed with water." In Zhang Qiang's memory, only fifty or sixty of the more than 200 member stores that had been reported really existed. Some of the cats in the traditional car companies have once again appeared in this company that is trying to change the new retail pattern of automobiles.
Jingdong Auto Mall has released sales data for 2018 - 65,000 units. Zhang Qiang also said: "Fake. Trial operation began in June 2018, and the real business cycle was only half a year, and less than 3,000 cars were sold. Even in 2019, when Li Haigang believed that he had run through the business model, Zhang Qiang revealed that the real transaction was only about 6,000 units, and most of the "beautiful" data released by the public came from the sales team's crazy brushing orders in Hunan, Hebei and other places. If this real transaction volume is apportioned to more than 600 franchisees, and then the sunk cost of 200,000 yuan is calculated, Zhang Qiang and several other former employees of Jingdong Auto Mall said: "No franchisee can make money." ”
"Finance for blood" has also become a heavy burden that overwhelms the Jingdong Auto Mall. In the financial services provided to C-end consumers, most of the funds come from third-party loans, and Jingdong Auto Mall uses interest differentials as a source of profit in the design of financial products, which is also a common model in the industry. However, Jingdong Auto Mall did not expect that some dealers would "play this game to death", due to the problems in the key links in the loan credit review chain, many loans have become bad debts that cannot be recovered. There are also some franchisees that get vehicles from the financial services of the Jingdong Auto Mall almost in the form of full loans by making high invoice prices, and pass on all the cost risks to the Jingdong Auto Mall. The attempt to empower new auto retail with supply chain finance combined with consumer car purchase credit loan financial services has failed in the Jingdong Auto Mall.
The fact that Jingdong Auto Mall does not run through this model does not mean that others cannot find a way. Several of the founding team executives are from Yongda Group's Niu Niu Auto, once jokingly called "Big Yellow Bull", according to CEO Chen Yanjun: "In the early days, I took it as my goal to become the Alibaba + pulse of the car business community. "The number of registered car dealers on the platform has exceeded 100,000. The 2016 Cow Car is indeed like a traditional scalper, providing a source of distribution for these small Bs.
According to the internal documents of Niu Niu Automobile, after the start of the epidemic, the industry as a whole was in a state of undersupply due to a series of problems such as lack of cores, and the supply of traditional fuel vehicles was seriously insufficient, Niu Niu Automobile adjusted the offline trading direction to the pure electric market of online car and the manufacturer's customized market, completed nearly 10,000 offline naked car transactions throughout the year, and formed a good cooperative relationship with the new energy product lines of BAIC, Chery and SAIC Volkswagen. "Do a good job in the most difficult channel source trading in the industry, so that we do not make money in the project that others can only lose money to do, and the most difficult thing must be the most valuable thing." In addition to the car source transaction, Niu niu auto in the supply chain finance and C-end car loan business to expand more partners to share costs and risks. Also from the traditional automobile industry, Niuniu Automobile has done what Jingdong Auto Mall has not done.
The same thing that goes with Niu Niu Automobile is that at the beginning of its establishment, it tried to sell good cars by selling cars for profit, and the company founded by Li Yanzhu, a Taobao No. 162 employee and head of the founding team of Taobao Mall and the flower name Hu Fei, first defined itself as a parallel import car e-commerce company. After entering the e-commerce track in 2015, due to the parallel import of cars "too muddy", Hu Fei paid a lot of tuition, and finally transformed into a B-end car source, finance and marketing service provider in 2016, and the name of the platform was also changed from "buy a good car" to "sell a good car".
Selling a good car to get to where it is today relies on four services for the new retail of cars (Source: Selling Good Cars official website)
Today's good car sales with car source trading, finance, logistics, warehousing services to explore a new road to empower the new retail of automobiles. In this link of providing high-quality car sources for small Bs, selling good cars is not much different from other "scalpers", but starting from financial services, selling good cars has become different. Hu Fei said that selling a good car provides dealers with a set of standard financial products, in the trade finance link, "order treasure" from the downstream to initiate demand, the platform to provide advance service; "seller treasure" from the upstream to initiate demand, the platform to ensure rapid payment; "car treasure" by the platform to provide logistics advances, improve transaction efficiency. In the easing of inventory financing, "Kurongbao" and warehouse sales provided inventory financing services for suppliers, solved the problem of suppliers' inventory occupation of funds, and improved the turnover rate of current assets. Logistics and warehousing services are refined management based on traditional services, so that the cost of dealers can be reduced.
Some independent auto circulation basin analysts said that if the advantages of cattle and cattle cars and selling good cars can be combined, it may be a feasible way to empower new retail of automobiles with car sources and financial services. If you only use the car source as a lever to leverage the industry, the end of early players such as Xingyuan Automobile is a lesson for the past.
Channels plus technology deeply empower new retail, can Huawei's model run through?
"We plan to sell cars in 1,000 stores by the end of the year, assuming that each store sells 30 units per month, monthly sales can reach 30,000 units, and this year Huawei will challenge the sales target of 300,000 units." In this way, the annual sales of cooperative car companies reached 100 billion yuan. Our goal is to build huawei's in-depth cooperation partners into the most profitable car companies in China. This sentence comes from Yu Chengdong, managing director of Huawei, CEO of consumer business, and CEO of smart car solution BU. Wang Jun, head of Huawei's smart car solutions, gave a footnote to this goal: "Nothing is impossible. The first look at whether the product is good enough, the user can not buy the bill. The second is to see whether the sales channel is strong and perfect enough to sell the car. ”
What is the concept of selling 300,000 units per year? In the "2021 China Auto Dealer Group Top 100 List" provided by the China Automobile Dealers Association, we can see that the annual sales volume of Zhejiang Wushan Yuantong Automobile Group, which ranks seventh, is 298112 units, and the dealer groups we are familiar with, such as Beijing Yuntong, Jilin Changchang, Dongfeng South, Renfu Automobile, Huitong Luhua, Hunan Yongtong, Beijing Aojitong, Beijing Xianglong Borui and other dealer groups, are all ranked behind. Founded in 1998, Wushan Yuantong now has 95 4S stores, and Huawei wants to complete the road that Wushan Yuantong has traveled in 24 years in one year.
In the Huawei experience store, SF5 has also been on fire (Image source: Visual China)
Let's first look at the question of "whether the product is good enough, and the user can't buy it" in Wang Jun's mouth.
When the Xilis F5, which was previously displayed and sold in Huawei's offline channels in the name of "Huawei Smart Choice", was listed in April 2021, in addition to the brand's own sales channels, it also opened reservations simultaneously on the Huawei Mall and the offline experience store, which was a gimmick. At that time, users did vote with their wallets under the aura of the Huawei brand: two-day orders broke 3,000 vehicles, one-week orders broke 6,000 vehicles, and January orders exceeded 10,000 vehicles... The SF5, which sold less than 1,000 units in 2020, seems to be soaring under huawei's blessing, and Xiaokang's stock price also broke through the 80 yuan mark in June last year. However, due to various reasons, the delivery speed of SF5 has not been improved, and the reputation of users for both products and services is not ideal. Finally, on December 23, 2021, after the release of the AITO Q&I M5, which Huawei and Xilis have deeply cooperated with, the product information of Cyris SF5 can no longer be found in the Huawei Mall, and instead of Huawei's new joy - Q&I M5, and the stock price of Xiaokang has fallen all the way to less than 40 yuan today.
And Yu Chengdong said that "Cyris is responsible for research and development, vehicle manufacturing and industrial production" of the AITO asked the M5, the official website shows that by Thelis and Huawei "joint design", in addition to a high-end SUV should have the appearance, the attraction of users is the Hongmeng OS intelligent cockpit developed by Huawei, and can be seamlessly circulated between M5 and other intelligent terminals, breaking through the barriers between "people, cars and homes". At that press conference, Yu Chengdong's public diss competition model behavior made the outside world see it as a performance of his all-out platform AITO. The order data also did not live up to Yu Chengdong, and by the beginning of January, the order volume of the M5 had reached nearly 10,000 units. From this point of view, the M5 will become the main player to achieve Yu Chengdong's sales target of 300,000 this year.
In addition to the M5, Huawei has another model with deep roots, that is, the Avita 11, which has just appeared in the product announcement of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. This positioning of the medium and large coupe SUV models in the design and data are better than the Q&I M5, from the current public information, Huawei provides it with hardware and software support for driving motors and high-end assisted driving. This model will also be launched in the second quarter of this year and officially begin delivery in the third quarter.
In addition, models that will likely enter Huawei's Fun Road include the Jihu αS HI and the BAIC Rubik's Cube, which is planned to be equipped with the Hongmeng OS system in the future. In September last year, Beiqi Blue Valley announced that it had signed a cooperation agreement with Huawei to sell products in Huawei's online and offline channels within a 96-month validity period. However, as of press time, there is still only one model of the M5 in the Huawei Mall. This also means that the one-year Q&Avita 11+ with a six-month sales cycle of Avita 11+ will not know when to enter the Huawei channel sales of the Pole Fox αS HI and BAIC Rubik's Cube to undertake the sales target of 300,000 this year. Wang Jun, president of Huawei's smart car BU, has previously said that Huawei is already trying to rebuild Huawei flagship stores in some shopping malls to wait for more car brands to arrive. Does this mean that in addition to the brands that Huawei participates in cooperative research and development, there will be models of other brands that will enter Huawei's channel sales?
Only Huawei flagship stores at this level are suitable for displaying and selling cars (Image source: Visual China)
As for whether the sales channels are strong and perfect enough, Huawei has 12 flagship stores and more than 5,000 high-end experience stores and 60,000 retail service outlets around the world, and more than 10,000 authorized experience stores in China by the end of 2020. Yu Chengdong said last year that he would expand the number of experience stores selling cars to more than 1,000 by the end of 2021. According to this calculation, in order to complete the sales target of 300,000 vehicles, each experience store must sell an average of 300 cars, which is a relatively reasonable data for a small integrated car dealer with a store area of about 300 square meters, but it is a big challenge for Huawei dealers who do not have rich experience in selling cars. Especially for Huawei's more than 10,000 authorized experience stores, most of the hardware conditions do not have the conditions to display and sell vehicles, and the most concentrated problem is the store area, and only large experience stores have the premise of transformation. Perhaps, powerful but not perfect, is an accurate description of Huawei's own channel transformation of the car sales process. Fortunately, it is reported that Huawei has actively promoted the construction of diversified sales centers in first- and second-tier cities since 2021, and these stores will take into account the preconditions such as area and whether they can enter the car when selecting the site, and should become the main channel to achieve the sales target of 300,000 units in 2022.
Huawei's model can be seen as grasping the definition and pricing power of products from the upstream, and can provide a series of services such as consumer car purchase loans when selling in its own channels, and may really make a difference in the field of new auto retail. When Yu Chengdong released the 300,000-unit sales target satellite, he had a clear understanding of the difficulty behind it: "At present, Huawei's brand marketing capabilities, retail channel capabilities, and product competitiveness can support the annual sales target of 300,000 units, but considering that the product has just climbed, there are huge risks in the supply chain, and the serious shortage of goods in the industry cannot be underestimated, and there are still many challenges in 300,000 units." ”
The worst one may be that the Huawei model will also be difficult to achieve for various reasons, and I am afraid that Huawei really only has the road left to officially announce that the car will go down in person, when it will embark on the same direct road as Wei Xiaoli.
At that time, there will really be no winners in the new retail of automobiles.
(In the text, Li Yimin, Zheng Wei, and Zhang Qiang are pseudonyms)
(This article was first published on the Titanium Media APP, and the author |.) Cui Zhiqiang; Editing | Cui Zhiqiang)