Following "Wei Xiaoli", another new car-making force is about to rush to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
On March 17, Zhejiang Zero Run Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Zero Run Auto") submitted a listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for listing on the Main Board, with its co-sponsors being CICC, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and CCB International. Zero-run automobile mentioned in the prospectus that it plans to use the funds raised for intelligent vehicle research and development, improve production capacity and other directions.
As a new energy runner in the same second line as Weima and Nezha, the popularity of zero-run cars is obviously not as good as "Wei Xiaoli", but the background of this car company still makes it appear full of potential. Founded in Zhejiang in 2015, its founder Zhu Jiangming is also the co-founder and CTO of Dahua Shares, which is second only to Hikvision in the field of security technology.
Back against the tree to cool off, with the support of Dahua, zero running at the technical level also seems quite confident, and even shouted out a full range of self-research slogans. Of course, over the years, it has indeed produced a lot of results, such as the eight-in-one electric drive assembly "Heracles", and the intelligent driving chip "Lingxin 01" jointly developed with Dahua, known as China's first self-developed intelligent driving chip. Zero-run Auto also stressed in the prospectus that its R&D employees have reached 1,082, accounting for 33.9% of the total number of employees, the same as manufacturing employees.
The technical background and the support from the Zhejiang Provincial Government make Zero Run able to occupy a certain advantage in the market. From the delivery data in the prospectus, it can be seen that zero-run cars will deliver a total of 43,748 electric vehicles in 2021, ranking fifth among new power brands.
However, it should be noted that the second model T03 released by it is still the second model T03 that supports the zero-running sales beam, which is positioned as a long-endurance intelligent pure electric car with a price of 60,000-70,000 yuan, and it is difficult to say how much revenue it can contribute to zero-running.
Perhaps because it does not want to make the car synonymous with itself, zero-run has been quite attentive to the main model in the past two years, and launched the zero-run S01 and the medium-sized SUV zero-run C11 that position the coupe in 2019 and 2021 respectively. As far as the prospectus is concerned, the C11 model can only be said to be slightly better, with 3964 deliveries in the whole year, which is barely enough to pass the standard compared with other new forces; and the S01, which has been launched for more than two years, is even worse, with a total of 634 units sold throughout the year, less than a fraction of the sales of T03.
At present, zero running is still trapped in the mud pit of "the more you sell, the more you lose", and the self-hematopoietic ability has not yet formed. According to the prospectus, the revenue of Zero Run in 2019-2021 was 117 million yuan, 631 million yuan and 3.132 billion yuan, respectively, but the high cost of sales led to its gross profit margin being almost all negative, -95.73%, -50.63% and -44.3% respectively. Based on this, its annual losses are 731 million yuan, 870 million yuan and 2.89 billion yuan respectively, which is not a small number among the current new car-making forces.
On the other hand, the high R&D investment of zero running is also the key to its delay in achieving profitability. In the past three years, Zero Run's expenditure on research and development has been 358 million yuan, 289 million yuan and 740 million yuan, respectively, all higher than its sales and administrative expenses.
Nevertheless, at least in the short term, zero-run car does not have the risk of capital chain rupture, after all, it has so far obtained nearly 10 billion yuan of financing from many companies and institutions such as Dahua, CICC Capital, Sequoia and Shanghai Electric, and from the prospectus, its total current assets are about 8.955 billion yuan, and as of the end of 2021, its cash and cash equivalents are 4.338 billion yuan.
In this case, Zero Run still announced the seemingly impossible "five-year plan" last year - launching 8 models by 2025, covering the price range of 350,000 yuan, and entering the overseas market in 2022. Before this, Zhu Jiangming even released harsh words at the strategy conference, saying that "three years to surpass Tesla, 2023 into the new force Top 3", causing an uproar.
Of course, no matter how ambitious zhu Jiangming and zero-run cars hold, finding money is still the most important task for zero-running at present, otherwise it would not be so eager to go public. But at a time when the sales of the main vehicles are not good and the hematopoietic capacity has not yet been formed, how much goodwill will the capital market give to zero running? You know, at present, the new energy sector has reached the time of squeezing the bubble, in this track where even "Wei Xiaoli" is inevitably falling, how long can "polytechnic man" Zhu Jiangming run with zero? Let's wait and see.
*The picture is from the official website of Zero Run Automobile and the prospectus