Author: Gong Jinhui
After the listing of "Wei Xiaoli", the second echelon players of the new car-making force also intend to advance into the capital market. Recently, Zero Run Auto (hereinafter referred to as "Zero Run") submitted a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with CICC, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and CCB International as joint sponsors.
Founded in December 2015, Zero Run was only established one year later than Weilai and Xiaopeng, and a few months later than the ideal, which belongs to the new car-making forces that started earlier. However, on the origin, zero running is really starting from scratch, neither the Internet background of the "Wei Xiaoli" understands users, is good at capital operation, nor like WM, Aichi to accumulate automotive industry resources, understand manufacturing.
To put it bluntly, zero running is completely a layman's attitude into the new energy automobile industry, a leader Zhu Jiangming does not even know the need for automobile production and sales to enter the qualifications, thinking that the manufacturing to the China Automobile Center can be sold after testing, and does not know what professions the car is and which people to recruit. After two years of dormancy, in November 2017, zero-run's first product, S01, was officially unveiled, officially launched in January 2019, and began to be delivered in June of the same year.
At the beginning of the delivery of the S01, Zhu Jiangming confidently said, "We are very confident in the sales of this car, and the goal is to deliver 10,000 vehicles in 2019 and 200,000 vehicles by 2022." But the ideal is very full of reality and very bone, and the dismal sales of S01 have taught Zhu Jiangming a vivid lesson. Sales were zero in the first half of 2019, with only 509 deliveries in the third quarter and only 692 in the first 10 months, which is far from his expected target.
Therefore, Zhu Jiangming had to change his mouth and said, "It is too difficult to complete the previously set goals, so at present, the annual sales target is not taken as the primary task, but the current service." In other words, S01 is the first product to enter the car-making war with zero-run, and it has encountered a disadvantage, indicating that its road to car-making is doomed to be uneven, and also teaches Zhu Jiangming that he should remember that strength should be worthy of ambition.
After that, 2020 became an important turning point for zero running. In May of the same year, the second A00-class car T03 of Zero Run was launched and delivered, becoming a full-fledged sales force. In 2020, a total of 10,266 T03 units were sold, helping zero-run annual sales reach 11,391 vehicles. In 2021, the delivery volume of T03 was 39,149 units, accounting for 89.48% of the annual sales of Zero Run.
It has to be said that T03 is like the "hope of the whole village", which not only helps zero run to quickly reverse the passive situation, but also greatly boosts the morale of the zero run team. The reason why it is popular is not unrelated to the superiority of the product. T03 NEDC pure electric cruising range of 403km, and equipped with the L2 intelligent driving assistance function rarely equipped with competitors of the same level, the price is only 69,800 yuan, the market competitiveness is full.
Although the T03 best-selling has brought many benefits to Zero Run, it has also made Zero Run face two major troubles that cannot be ignored:
First, the strategic positioning is inconsistent with the actual sales. According to the prospectus, zero running focuses on the high-end domestic new energy vehicle market with a price of between 150,000 and 300,000 yuan, but the T03 with the largest delivery volume is a low-end car, and the price after subsidies is 68,900-8.49 million yuan. Even if the higher priced zero-run C11 began to be delivered in October last year, but because T03 sales accounted for nearly 90%, zero-run is doomed to be unable to adjust the product sales structure in the short term, and T03 will still be the main sales force.
The second is to pull down the profitability of zero running. As the dominant model, the low price of T03 can be sought after by users, but it is not conducive to zero running to improve profitability and fall into the embarrassing situation of low profits. At the same time, the relatively high proportion of B-end customers is also a major injury, they have stronger bargaining power, and will invisibly compress the profit margin of zero run. According to the prospectus, from 2019 to 2021, the top five customers accounted for 27.1%, 16.2% and 9.5% of the total revenue of the year, respectively.
Therefore, you will see that with the big sale of T03, the zero-run revenue has risen, and the revenue in 2019-2021 is 117 million yuan, 631 million yuan and 3.132 billion yuan, respectively. However, like other new car-making forces, Zero Run has not yet learned to support the family, but is facing increased losses, with net losses of 901 million yuan, 1.1 billion yuan and 2.846 billion yuan respectively from 2019 to 2021, and the cumulative loss in 3 years exceeded 4.8 billion yuan.
Clear-eyed people can see that zero running alone on T03 to fight the world is doomed to not be a long-term solution. Whether it is to improve its own profitability or to sell 800,000 vehicles by 2025, it is imperative to expand the product line. Therefore, in addition to the T03, Zero Run also brought a medium-sized pure electric SUV C11, by the end of 2021, a total of 22536 orders have been received, and 3965 vehicles have been delivered, which is far from the target of 10,000 vehicles set by Wu Baojun, president of Zero Run.
Although the actual delivery of C11 in the fourth quarter of last year was not ideal, the sales situation is still optimistic, and in time it will contribute more sales to zero run. After tasting the sweetness, Zero Run plans to launch its fourth model, the C01, this year, positioned in a medium and large sedan, built on the same platform as the C11, with a length of more than 5 meters, and will be delivered in the third quarter. Some people believe that the C01 will benchmark against the BYD Han EV and Xiaopeng P7.
However, the outside world is not optimistic about its market prospects. The reason is very simple, more than 200,000 yuan in the high-end market is a must for the soldiers, "Wei Xiaoli", BYD, Weima and other players have occupied a place, establish a strong brand recognition, zero run as a latecomer, it is estimated that it is difficult to bite this hard bone, Whether C01 can be accepted by the public is unknown.
In addition to the C01, which is poised to go, ZeroCar is constantly improving its product matrix, planning to launch 8 new models by the end of 2025, during which time 1-3 new cars will be launched every year, covering sedans, SUVs and MPVs of various sizes. In other words, it is difficult to sell new and easy, and it is not easy for Zero Run to create a blockbuster with sales like T03, and it is facing greater uncertainty.
Obviously, continuous innovation is conducive to pushing up the overall sales of zero-run, and it is difficult to say whether it can sell 800,000 vehicles by 2025, but to achieve the goal of becoming the top three of the new car-making forces in 2023, I see the suspense. At the end of 2020, Zhu Jiangming issued a bold statement in an internal letter, saying that Zero Run will enter the TOP 3 of the new car-making force in 2023 and obtain a market share of 10% of the domestic new energy vehicle market in 2025.
The data shows that in 2021, the sales volume of "Wei Xiaoli" exceeded the 90,000 mark, ranking the first echelon of the new forces of car-making, and the sales volume of Nezha with 360 backs reached 69,674 vehicles, ranking fourth, and zero-run ranked fifth with a score of 43,748 vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 443.5%, and sales were less than half of "Wei Xiaoli". If Zero Run wants to be among the top three new car-making forces in 2023, at least one of the "Wei Xiaoli" companies.
But the problem is that the gap between zero-run sales and "Wei Xiaoli" is huge, and it is not easy to catch up, not to mention that there is an equally menacing Nezha in the middle, which has developed rapidly under the blessing of 360. In my opinion, given that zero-run sales have become a scale, it is difficult to continue to maintain a high-speed growth trend of more than 100%, and perhaps in 2023, it will only further narrow the gap with "Wei Xiaoli", catching up is not realistic, and may even be inferior to Nezha.
Therefore, with all due respect, the hope of zero running in the top three of the new car-making forces in 2023 is very slim. This means that after the failure of the S01 sales, Zhu Jiangming is afraid that he will once again punch himself in the face.
It is worth noting that Zero Run claims to be a high-tech intelligent electric vehicle company with global self-development and self-manufacturing capabilities on the official website, and it is the only one among the new forces of car manufacturing, and the subtext is that its own research and development strength is very strong. Although the R&D strength of enterprises is not completely proportional to R&D investment, it is very necessary to maintain a high R&D investment. However, the reality is that zero-run R&D investment is not on the same order of magnitude as head players.
From 2019 to 2021, the R&D expenditure of zero-run was 358 million yuan, 289 million yuan and 740 million yuan respectively, with a total of less than 1.4 billion yuan in 3 years. There is no harm without comparison, Tesla invested nearly 2.6 billion yuan in research and development in 2021, and Weilai invested 4.4286 billion yuan and 2.488 billion yuan in research and development in 2019 and 2020, respectively. By the way, zero-run R&D investment is even lower than the ideal of "cutting doors", which invested more than 1.1 billion yuan in research and development in 2019, the year before the listing.
Despite this, Zhu Jiangming still set up a seemingly out-of-reach Flag. In July last year, Zero Run released the 2.0 strategy, and he revealed that Zero Run will put into production of lidar solutions in 2023 and achieve full-scenario autonomous driving technology in 2024. Zhu Jiangming also released harsh words, zero running in the field of assisted driving in 3 years to surpass Tesla. I think that the zero-run R & D investment is much lower than Tesla, even if the R & D efficiency is extreme, it can not beat Tesla in technology, and it is impossible to surpass.
Last year, Zero Run launched China's first vehicle-grade AI intelligent driving chip "Lingxin 01" with completely independent intellectual property rights, with a computing power of only 4.2TOPS, and its performance is far behind Tesla's HW3.0 144TOPS chip, not to mention the upcoming HW4.0. Nowadays, the major players are vigorously laying out automatic driving, mentioning a lot of Tesla, but there are very few who threaten to surpass Tesla, and I don't know where zero running confidence comes from, is it the courage given by Liang Jingru?
In fact, the fundamental reason for the fall behind in zero-run R&D investment is that it is subject to its own financing capabilities. Compared with the "Wei (Tencent Baidu) Small (Ali Xiaomi) Li (Meituan ByteDance)" with deep pockets and the support of top investors, the volume of zero-run funds is quite shabby. Zhu Jiangming's former owner Dahua initially invested 90 million yuan in Zero Run, and then in January 2018, November 2018, August 2019 and July 2021, Zero Run raised 400 million yuan, 2.5 billion yuan, 360 million yuan and 4.5 billion yuan respectively.
Up to now, Zero Run has completed 7 rounds of financing and obtained at least 12 billion yuan of funds. In the tens of billions of car-making companies, the strength of zero-run funds is not strong, even in the new car-making forces are also in the inferior position, will be in the research and development expenditure than the ideal of the door. And no money is not easy to do, zero run R & D investment is limited, will affect their own core competitiveness. It should be known that the intelligent ecology represented by automatic driving is becoming more and more important, which is a key selling point to attract users.
If all goes well, perhaps Zero Run will successfully land on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the near future. However, the listing is only a financing that has attracted more attention, and the challenges and difficulties faced by zero running will not be reduced by the listing. On the contrary, with the strong entry of technology giants such as Xiaomi, Baidu, and Skyworth, the future zero run will inevitably face more fierce market competition, and the uncertainty of the future will only increase, and it will be done and cherished!
All kinds of signs show that zero running is difficult to "run" into a better future!