A few days ago, domestic electric vehicle manufacturers have handed in the "report card" in February.
NIO delivered 6,131 new vehicles, up 9.9% year-on-year; Ideal Auto delivered 8,414 Ideal ONE units, up 265.8% year-on-year; Xiaopeng Auto sold 6,225 units, up 180% year-on-year.
The ideal car ranks first in the sales list, and the ranking of the new car-making forces has changed again, but what is even more surprising is that Weilai and Xiaopeng are both overtaken by the second echelon player Nezha. In fact, in January, Weilai has been overtaken by Nezha and fell out of the top three, which occupied the third place in sales in the month with 11,009 vehicles.
A few joys and a few sorrows, but this does not include BYD. According to public information, BYD's passenger car sales in February were 90,268 units, an increase of 336.2% year-on-year, of which 87,473 new energy vehicles were sold, an increase of 764.1% year-on-year. BYD surpassed SAIC Volkswagen and SAIC-GM in one fell swoop, second only to FAW-Volkswagen, which has been sitting firmly in the first place for a long time, and even Tesla is "willing to bow to the wind".
The change in the sales list once again reveals that the new energy automobile industry is still in a turbulent reshuffle period, and this is very similar to the white-hot smartphone war that year: Tesla is unique, domestic brands are fiercely fighting, close to the hand,000, and it is not clear who is the final winner.
Referring to the domestic smartphone industry, Huawei has come to the fore by virtue of its technical strength, and in the field of new energy electric vehicles, will there be the next "Huawei"?
Price war, price war, or price war
The development process of domestic smart phones is inseparable from the price war, but the rise of the new energy automobile industry is somewhat different, and new car-making forces such as Weilai are doing the opposite, cutting into the battlefield from the middle and high end.
This line of thinking is actually correct. In the past few years, the public's understanding of the new energy vehicle is relatively vague, and the acceptance is low, and the group that is interested in new energy vehicles and can pay for it is often a group with strong consumption power and low price sensitivity. On the other hand, if new energy vehicles directly rely on low-end cars and fuel vehicles to grab business, it is tantamount to begging for food in the price war.
As a result, the high-end market of traditional car companies and new car manufacturers competing for the 200,000-300,000 yuan range has always been the main theme of the new energy vehicle market. From January to May last year, the production and sales of new energy vehicles reached 967,000 units and 950,000 units, respectively, both of which increased by 2.2 times year-on-year, of which the sales of high-end models of new energy vehicles increased particularly significantly.
However, now, Nezha has surpassed Weilai and released the consumption potential of low-end models, will this change the main battlefield of electric vehicle competition and trigger a larger price war? From the data of last year's whole year, it can be seen that the sales volume of "Wei Xiaoli" last year increased by 109.1%, 263% and 177.4% respectively year-on-year, compared with Nezha and Zero Run, which achieved a year-on-year increase of 362% and 320.04%, much higher than that of "Wei Xiaoli".
Low-end models correspond to the sinking market, in fact, new energy vehicle companies are also running to the sinking market. Xiaopeng Automobile released the entry-level model P5 on the one hand, and on the other hand, took the lead in laying a sinking sales channel with Zhongsheng Group, and Weilai also generously admitted that it is building a low-end sub-brand.
At present, the high-end market is still the core competitive position of the main models of new energy vehicles, but with the penetration of new energy vehicles into low-tier cities, the strategic position of the low-end market will undoubtedly be improved, becoming a new variable that disrupts the market pattern.
Lenovo that year, OPPO, Vivo took the "rural encirclement of the city" route, quietly in the lower-tier cities layout sales outlets and offline stores, thus ushering in the 2016 sales explosion, but also from this year, OPPO and Vivo almost did not fall out of the domestic smartphone market shipments of the top three positions.
The wave of replacement and information asymmetry in lower-tier cities has made the blue-green brothers of the year, and new energy electric vehicles are also ushering in the "car replacement tide". In December 2019, 58 Tongzhen released the "Sinking Market Automobile Consumption Trend Report", which shows that the average use time of vehicles of purchased car users in the sinking market is less than 4 years, and the replacement cycle is expected to be concentrated in more than 6 years, and it is expected that within 2 years, the car replacement demand in the sinking market will break out in a concentrated manner.
Whether the direction of car replacement will lead to electric vehicles is very likely, especially now that oil prices are soaring, car owners have lamented that they can't afford to drive a car, which will greatly boost consumers from fuel vehicles to electric vehicles.
Mobile phone models are not a lesson for the past
Prices help brands break through, but technology wins, and perhaps the same is true in the field of electric vehicles.
On the one hand, new energy vehicles can not sacrifice profits for a long time to maintain low prices, especially under the influence of factors such as the accelerated rise in upstream raw material prices and the decline of subsidies for new energy vehicles, the long-term price war will inevitably bring about a serious loss crisis. Taking Nezha Automobile as an example, in 2020 and the first half of 2021, Nezha Automobile achieved revenue of 1.297 billion yuan and 1.632 billion yuan, and net losses of 1.321 billion yuan and 693 million yuan, respectively.
On the other hand, the pursuit of cost performance in the sinking market does not necessarily equate to poor ability to pay, but consumers are highly sensitive to the practical value of cars. That is to say, brands without some hard-core technology are likely not to impress consumers in the sinking market.
New domestic electric vehicle brands such as Weilai attach great importance to independent research and development of technology. According to THE 2020 financial report of WEILAI Automobile, the company's annual R&D investment is 2.487 billion yuan, accounting for 15% of the annual operating income; the R&D investment of Ideal Automobile and Xiaopeng Automobile in 2020 is 1.099 billion yuan and 1.725 billion yuan, accounting for 11.62% and 29.52% of the operating income, respectively.
However, the high proportion of investment does not seem to have received a corresponding return, and most of the patents related to new energy vehicles are still in the hands of traditional car companies.
According to the "China New Energy Automobile Industry Market Prospect and Investment Strategic Planning Analysis Report" released by the Prospective Industry Research Institute, the top 10 applicants for patent applications in the global new energy automobile industry are Toyota Automatic Vehicle Co., Ltd., Hyundai Automatic Vehicle Co., Ltd., LG Chemical Co., Ltd., State Grid Corporation, Ford Global Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing New Energy Automobile Co., Ltd., Honda Jiken Industrial Co., Ltd., BYD Co., Ltd., and Kia Automatic Vehicle Co., Ltd.
The core of the research and development of new energy vehicles lies in battery technology and intelligence, the former's right to speak belongs to battery suppliers, while the latter is the key to the breakthrough of new brands, but in terms of automobile intelligence, Weilai, Ideal and other enterprises are slightly insufficient, and they are far from reaching the level of meeting user needs.
Such as Weilai, Weilai prides itself on high-end, and in terms of automatic driving and intelligence, there is no too amazing place, but it has made sufficient efforts in high-end brand building, marketing and service.
There is also zero running, also claiming to be the only company in the new forces with comprehensive self-development and self-manufacturing capabilities, but twice in the intelligent overturned, S01 was advertised as "Tesla-level intelligent driving assistance system" at the time of sale, and some consumers found that the function was "temporarily not opened" after picking up the car.
In fact, it cannot be said that the technical research and development strength of new energy vehicle companies is insufficient, but the key point of new energy vehicle research and development is different from smart phones is that because different routes have different research and development directions, it will lead to different results, which determines that after betting R&D funds on a certain route or a certain direction, once the long-term fruitless or itself does not work, it is easy to cause huge research and development waste.
Last July, Honda suddenly announced that it would stop production of the Clarity Fuel Cell. Although this does not mean that Honda will terminate the research and development of hydrogen fuel cell technology, the decision to stop production still reveals problems such as insufficient sales, high costs and incorrect choice of technology path. The wrong choice of technical path will affect the vehicle development and promotion process, like Honda's direct choice to stop production, the loss of this process is even greater.
Relatively speaking, the smart phone industry chain is very mature, and the technology tracks such as screens, chips, and cameras also have their own successful head enterprises, which are less troubled by path choice.
The "bottom of the house" is not thick, and the holes are difficult to fill
Huawei's ability to break through the high-end with technology in the smartphone market comes from the sense of crisis within the company and benefits from the boldness of large-scale investment in research and development by the helmsman.
In 2016, when other domestic mobile phones have followed the trend to lay offline channels or cling to the tactics of the machine sea, busy launching one product after another, Huawei still maintains a high investment style in research and development. According to the annual report, Huawei achieved global sales revenue of 521.6 billion yuan in 2016, an increase of 32% year-on-year, while research and development expenses reached 76.4 billion yuan, accounting for 14.6% of the total sales revenue. This figure exceeds the proportion of R&D investment of most domestic enterprises.
Of course, in addition to personal factors, Huawei's investment in R&D must be based on the healthy operating conditions of the group, especially before the consumer business has not yet become the pillar of Huawei's performance, and the rapid growth of operator business has provided financial support for all aspects of technology research and development.
The new car-making forces do not have this rich "family foundation", and their research and development investment currently has to rely on financing. First, product sales determine performance, and now the sales volume of major brands is not stable; second, under the influence of factors such as supply chain shortages and rising raw material prices, it is difficult for enterprises to find a balance point of profitability, let alone achieve self-hematopoiesis.
When Weilai was listed on the US stock market, Li Bin bluntly said that "listing is to raise funds", and Xiaopeng and ideals are nothing more than this.
However, Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal have caught up with the good time to go public, and other car companies may not have this luck, and many have been stuck in the listing threshold. WM Motors had announced plans to enter the Science and Technology Innovation Board, and in March last year, it was confirmed by the Shanghai Securities Regulatory Commission that it had completed listing counseling, and just a month later, WM was exposed by the media that the IPO process of the Science and Technology Innovation Board was suspended. Nezha and Zero Run have also already announced plans to list on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, and there has been no news since then.
According to Sina Finance, WM Motor's IPO process on the science and technology innovation board was suspended because many problems were found in the review of listing materials, and it was questioned that the technology content was insufficient, the proportion of R& D investment revenue was not high, and the continuous loss was questioned. An industry insider said that although the threshold for listing on the science and technology innovation board is low, it is difficult to pass the review of the science and technology innovation board if the enterprise does not have strong core technical competitiveness, such as the number of patent applications, a large amount of research and development investment, etc.
New energy vehicles hope to support their continuous investment in technology research and development through listing financing, and promote sales growth with technology, but now they are stuck at the door of the science and technology innovation board due to insufficient investment in research and development. This status quo will undoubtedly trap new energy vehicle companies in a strange circle that cannot be recycled, affecting product innovation and competitiveness enhancement.
For the car companies in the second camp, this invisibly also brings obstacles to them to further challenge the "dominance" of the first camp.
The counterattack of domestic brands is a survival map of domestic brands against international giants, and Huawei's success once provided a sample for us to go to the road of independent research and development, but now it has to sneak again, so the original expectations have shifted and concentrated on the field of new energy vehicles. It is difficult to become "Huawei", but this road must go on after all.
The Tao is always reasonable, and has used the name Crooked Dao, the Internet and the new media in the science and technology circle. The WeChat public account of the same name: Dao always has a reason (daotmt). This article is an original article, and any form of reproduction without retaining the author's relevant information is not retained.