Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618)
Wen | Qiao Xue
Cover source | Visual China
Zero running, not a new face in the new energy tram track, founded in 2015, zero running, can be called the "old man" in the new forces of car manufacturing.
At that time, Li Bin, the founder of Weilai Automobile, went through several turns, and returned as an entrepreneur from an entrepreneur to an investor. Took out his entire wealth of 150 million US dollars and invested in his car-making entrepreneurship project; and He Xiaopeng was still enjoying the joy of entrepreneurial success, UC Browser was acquired by Alibaba for 4 billion US dollars, becoming the highest M&A price on the Chinese Internet; ideal car also called car and home, Li Xiang did not want to really devote himself to the car-making track, and LeTV's Jia Yueting also sold all the stocks worth 40 billion yuan in his hand.
Seven years have passed, after Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal have gone to the United States to list, some have started or have completed the secondary listing of Hong Kong stocks, becoming the top three of the new car-making forces, and even Jia Yueting's FF911, which has not yet been released as a mass production car, has also been listed in the United States, and the zero run that started earlier has just submitted a listing prospectus and is still waiting for a notice at the listing gate.
Time has changed easily, and the new energy market is far from the pattern of that year. The grand situation of doubling the market value on the first day of listing is also difficult to reproduce. What kind of future will there be when the slogan is shouted to surpass Tesla, and the actual sales volume is less than one-tenth of Wuling's zero run?
The leading big brother of the second echelon, listed only for blood transfusions
For new energy vehicle companies in the second echelon, this year's goals are all the same: listing.
"Delay" previously reported that Nezha Automobile plans to start an IPO in Hong Kong this year, and the total financing amount of 450 million US dollars has exceeded that of Wei Xiaoli's "Wei Xiaoli" before the listing of WM Motors, and the listing news has been reported for a long time. But if there is no accident, zero running will be successful, becoming the leading big brother who landed in the capital market in the second echelon of new cars after "Wei Xiaoli".
Listing and financing is not a rare thing in new energy vehicle companies, after all, this is a track that burns money for survival, but how much money is lacking in zero running? According to its recently released prospectus, from 2019 to 2021, the company's operating income was 117 million yuan, 616 million yuan and 3.059 billion yuan, respectively; the net profit attributable to the mother was -901 million yuan, -1.10 billion yuan and -2.846 billion yuan, and it is expected to continue to lose money in 2022.
The cumulative loss of 3 years is 4.8 billion yuan, which is for the car-making track that bought 20 billion tickets, it has to be said that it does need to be listed to save ammunition, not only that, zero running is also facing the problem of tight cash flow. According to the prospectus, by the end of 2021, the restricted cash and cash equivalents of zero-running cars will reach 5.714 billion yuan, and as a comparison, the cash reserves of the three "Wei Xiaoli" companies are all more than 20 billion yuan.
It can be said that Zero ran to a point where it had to IPO. In the early stage of the development of zero run, the desire for capital is not large, from its inception to the present, a total of eight rounds of financing, the total amount of more than 10 billion, the amount is not much compared to "Wei Xiaoli".
However, it is worth mentioning that last year alone, 8.8 billion yuan was raised, accounting for nearly 80% of the financing amount since its inception, and zero run skipped the C round of financing and directly carried out the Pre-IPO round of financing. Through this move, it is not difficult to see that Zero Run is eager to go public and raise funds at low cost in the secondary market.
On the other hand, is to choose the listing node, at present, Hong Kong stocks are in a downturn cycle, this time to list, the company's valuation is not good, so if it is not particularly short of money, the desire for funds is particularly urgent, will not choose this node to list, before WM has been rumored to be listed, and has not been listed probably have such reasons to consider.
However, the company has to face the situation of burning money every day, and in 2021, it has sold 43,748 vehicles for calculation, and the company's cost is 4.52 billion yuan, which is much higher than the revenue of 3.13 billion yuan. For every extra car sold, you have to lose 30,000 more.
The automobile manufacturing industry has very obvious characteristics of Lyt's law, which can be simply understood as the scale of manufacturing expands, the cost will gradually decrease, which is why Tesla can resurrect from the death line as the car buys more and more.
Secondly, in order to make the car sell more, it is necessary to invest more research and development and marketing accordingly, especially when the tram gradually leads the selling point to intelligence and software, and the investment in research and development has become an arms race that has to be paid.
In research and development, zero run shouted out the slogan of "three years more than Tesla", for which not only the cost of software research and development, but also hardware costs, according to the previous zero run 2.0 strategy meeting, CEO Zhu Jiangming revealed to Tech Planet and other media that zero run from the power system to the intelligent network system, and then to the intelligent driving system, all of which are mainly "global self-research", and even all start from 0 code, and the research and development expenditure in 2019-2021 is 358 million yuan, 289 million yuan and 740 million yuan, which is also further increasing costs.
In terms of sales model, Zero Run has adopted a model similar to that of other trams combined with direct and authorized stores, and expanded rapidly last year, as of December 31, 2021, Zero Run has 23 direct stores, while its channel partner stores have increased from 95 at the beginning of the year to 291 at the end of the year, an increase of 215.4% year-on-year. The increase in stores not only helps to sell more cars, but also further increases costs.
In order to survive, listing zero runs is a choice that has to be made.
Unusual and slow half-beat zero runs
Zero run entrepreneurial story began with a Big Dream, in 2015, one of the founders of the original security giant Dahua shares, Zhu Jiangming, began to find another way to devote himself to entrepreneurship, according to his entrepreneurial original intention, he is more than 50 years old and has a dream of a 100 billion company, but dahua is in the security field, the entire market adds up to only 100 billion scale, and the car is indeed a big track that can carry dreams and ambitions, so a polytechnic man with no car manufacturing experience poured into the tide of new car manufacturing.
However, the zero-running team is all from a technical background, and the security field is also a B-end market, so entering the C-end market that directly faces consumers, zero-run products and consumer insight capabilities have no advantages.
The first model of the zero-run car was the S011, which chose a relatively niche two-door coupe route, and the market sales were very general, only about 1,000 units were sold in 2019, leaving it slightly behind in the first wave of competition.
The failure of the first product, so that zero running must embark on a different path, the company then quickly changed the strategy, launched a cost-effective boutique car T03, benchmarking Wuling Hongguang, priced at 65,000-70,000 yuan A00-class electric vehicle, this move seized the dividend of the mini car, in the car market quickly opened the situation, quickly obtained good results, it can be said that T03 is the top pillar of zero running.
The big sale of T03 has also allowed Zero Run to quickly surpass in the past 1 year, reaching a result second only to the three "Wei Xiaoli", and even in some months, Zero Run has ranked among the first echelon.
With an annual sales volume of 40,000, it is indeed the fastest progress among the new car-making forces. However, Wuling Hongguang MINIEV became the top monthly sales for 16 consecutive months, with a cumulative sales volume of 426,000 units in 2021, with zero running less than one-tenth of it.
Even aside from the "national god car" Wuling Hongguang, according to the data of the Association of Automobile Associations, in January 2022, the 100,000-yuan electric vehicle market, followed by Hongguang MINIEV, are BYD Dolphin, Chery QQ Ice Cream, Changan Ben E-Star, and Chery Ant. In contrast, the zero-running T03 is not a top student.
But it is worth noting that until this time, zero-run has not been comparable to other new car companies, and the best-selling of mini cars is not enough to reassure the market, after all, no one will think that Wuling Hongguang is a car company that can threaten Tesla.
In October 2021, Zero Run finally ushered in a regular model, and the zero run C11, known as the "Half Price Model Y", was opened for delivery. Earlier, Zhu Jiangming, CEO of Zero Run Automobile, said in an interview with the media that the sales of Zero Run C11 are expected to sell more than 6,000 units in 2021. But in fact, as of December 31, 2021, the Zero Run C11 has only completed the delivery of 3965 units. According to the data of the Association of Passenger Transporters, the january and February insurance volume data of C11 this year were 2103 vehicles and 1144 vehicles respectively, which failed to become the main model of the new energy market.
S01 in 2019, T03 in 2020, C11 in 2021, zero run basically maintains the rhythm of one model a year, but from the perspective of models, the three products of zero run, only T03 has eaten a wave of market dividends, and has not come up with products that can really be played, and zero run into the mainstream track is still a bit slow.
Trapped in the sinking, the breakthrough is difficult, and the impact on the high end is even more difficult
But Zero Run has not forgotten the dream of 100 billion. Last year, Zero Run released the 2.0 strategy, zhu Jiangming released a harsh word at the press conference, "3 years beyond Tesla, 2025 sales target of 800,000 vehicles." ”
Zero Run is indeed learning from Tesla and embarking on a cost-effective path. Tesla is using model 3 and model Y step by step to reduce prices, with the price to kill a blood road. At present, the zero run to tear off the label of the mini car takes out two mainstream models, the C11 is priced at 159,700 to 199,700.
The zero-run prospectus revealed that a medium and large sedan C01 will be released in the second quarter and delivered in the third quarter. According to the zero run 2.0 strategy, C01 will also be in the price range of 150,000-200,000 yuan, and the cost performance is still its main selling point.
In the SUV range, BYD Song PLUS DM-i, EV, Tang DM, Xiaopeng G3, Nezha U, GAC AION V and dozens of new energy models of the same level are piled up, and the competition is particularly fierce; in the car range, Xiaopeng P5, GAC AION S and BYD Qin Plus will become strong competitors of zero-run C01.
Moreover, the cost performance is to have a strong configuration and product force, zero run before the highlights of the vigorous promotion, such as the first domestic car-level AI intelligent driving chip "Lingxin 01", in fact, the computing power is only 4.2TOPS, the performance is far behind Tesla HW3.0's 144TOPS chip, not to mention the upcoming HW4.0. Not to mention, Xiaopeng's P5 at the same price has been equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon SA8155P vehicle specification-level chips, and the computing power also has 30Tops.
In the prospectus, zero running has no longer mentioned the follow-up research and development of the planning "Lingxin" series, and the low computing power will become a masterpiece, for which zero running has paid too much cost. The quality control and technology of zero running is still a big problem, and some car owners told Tech Planet that the zero-run C11 they bought has already had problems such as abnormal noise and reversing caton.
On the other hand, in the planning to surpass Tesla, the full model is another ambition. According to the prospectus, Zero Run plans to launch eight new models by the end of 2025 at a rate of one to three models per year, covering sedans, SUVs and MPVs of various sizes. At that time, the leader will become a car company covering different price points and models, radiating to every market. I have to say that the ambition is very large, but it is also easy to fall into a situation of all-round attack and all-round mediocrity.
The future road trapped in the cost performance is that the low-end start, the upward road is difficult, and the high-end will be more difficult after that, and the comprehensiveization of all models may also face the contradiction of their own brand fighting, left and right hand fighting, but even so, if the sales do not go up, it is still the most fatal problem.
Daniel Zhang, CEO of Nezha Automobile, who is also in the second echelon, thought more thoroughly, "There is no point in briefly surpassing, according to this logic, only 3 times the ideal can be said to be stronger than him." ”
The current dilemma is that the head of the new car-making force "Wei Xiaoli" tends to be stable, the waist competes for a small number of seats, the advantage of zero running is not obvious and the entry into the runway is late, and the brand awareness is lacking. To survive, you have to face a market without brand loyalty, and the horizontal comparison of product strength must be absolutely crushed before it has the opportunity to be included in the potential list of consumers.
Baidu, Xiaomi, Foxconn, Ningde era, more and more players to join it, for zero run, listing is only the beginning of the challenge.
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