Baoneng car dream, is still a dream?

Painting: Yang Jia

On March 22, the public account of Baoneng Group released the news that Yao Zhenhua, chairman of Baoneng Group, conducted a work inspection at the Shenzhen factory of Baoneng Automobile, accompanied by a number of photos of Yao Zhenhua in the workshop, which can be described as "on-site".

This somewhat "special" article reveals two key pieces of information: First, Yao Zhenhua, who has been involved in multiple debt disputes and has been listed as a dishonest executor, is not "unaccounted for"; second, Baoneng Automobile's Shenzhen plant has fully resumed work in four major craft workshops and functional departments.

However, even so, it is difficult to cover up the embarrassing situation of Baoneng car manufacturing: affected by debt disputes, it once acquired production lines with deep pockets and caught up with the early collection of new energy vehicles, but now it is a new car brewing for a long time, still hovering on the starting line, Baoneng Automobile's Qoros brand last year sold less than 10,000 vehicles. Yao Zhenhua's dream of building a car now seems to be a dream.

● Southern Daily reporter Wei Hongquan

The financial dilemma behind the "misunderstanding"

With 700 million yuan of debt, Yao Zhenhua "ran away"?

On March 17, the Intermediate People's Court of Guangzhou Municipality, Guangdong Province, said in an online announcement that the defendant Yao Zhenhua was "unaccounted for" and that the dispute over the financial loan contract involved a loan principal of RMB700 million and interest, penalty interest and compound interest.

The reason why this announcement has aroused the sideways attention of the capital circle is because Yao Zhenhua and the whole Baoneng have been suffering from debt disputes for a long time. Subsequently, Yao Zhenhua also clearly responded: "The two sides strive to reach a settlement as soon as possible", and claimed that this time Baoneng encountered temporary liquidity difficulties, the company is highly valued, taken seriously, on the one hand, decisively dispose of a number of high-quality assets, while comprehensively strengthening operation and management, has achieved phased results, is constantly improving.

However, behind this "misunderstanding", it also reveals the dilemma of Baoneng Group, and the investment layout covers finance, real estate, manufacturing and other fields of Baoneng, and constantly breaks out into a capital flow crisis. Since June 2021, a number of companies in the Baoneng Department have broken out problems such as layoffs, arrears of salary and social security, and the funding crisis has gradually emerged.

On February 22, Shaoneng Shares, a "Baoneng" company, announced that because of the contract dispute case, 142 million shares of the company's shares held by the largest shareholder, HuaLitong, were applied for compulsory enforcement, accounting for 13.11% of the company's total share capital.

According to the Tianyancha APP, Baoneng Group now has a total of 38 pieces of information on the executors, more than half of which were filed this year, and the total amount of execution reached 17.1 billion yuan.

According to the official website of Baoneng Group, the group includes five major sectors such as comprehensive property development, finance, modern logistics, cultural tourism, and civil production industry, and once had more than 180,000 employees at the highest light moment. As of the end of 2020, Baoneng Group's total consolidated assets were 565.303 billion yuan, total liabilities were 506.123 billion yuan, net assets were 59.180 billion yuan, and the asset-liability ratio was 89.5%.

In order to withdraw funds as soon as possible, in October 2021, Baoneng disclosed that it was ready to sell assets of 100 billion yuan, including the Shenzhen headquarters of Baoneng Group, and 8 key special assets were sold, including the headquarters Shenzhen Baoneng Center, the old renovation project, the Qianhai high-quality project, and the logistics park asset package project. As of now, there is no public information that Baoneng has completed the sale of the above projects.

The construction of cars can not open the situation for a long time

The life of finance and real estate enterprises is sad, it is already an indisputable fact, the Baoneng Group, which deeply presses these two barrels of gold, has a huge capital gap, but what burns more "money" is Yao Zhenhua's car-making dream.

In 2017, Baoneng acquired a 51% stake in Qoros For $6.63 billion. As of 2021, Baoneng automobile has acquired more than 4 million square meters of industrial land, and the total amount of public investment exceeds 100 billion yuan. Yao Zhenhua also said that Baoneng Group will invest 10 billion yuan per year in the research and development of Qoros automobiles from 2018 to 2022.

Once, people thought that Bao could build a car, and it was targeted. After all, as soon as Baoneng made a shot, he copied the bottom of the "seed player" Qoros Car. At that time, although Qoros Automobile continued to lose money, it was a high-end automobile brand with advanced positioning and a certain reputation and strength, and most importantly, through it, Baoneng Group obtained automobile design, research and development, and production capacity in one fell swoop.

Immediately after that, Baoneng's layout of the automotive sector can be described as all-in. According to public information, after investing more than 50 billion yuan in the early stage, Baoneng Automobile successfully landed a complete industrial chain covering "research and development - parts - vehicle manufacturing - aftermarket", including the high-end brand DS factory that "took over" to withdraw from the Chinese market, and had a layout in the core components of new energy such as power batteries, motors and electronic controls, and automotive software.

At the same time, the Baoneng Group recruited a Japanese senior management team represented by Toshiaki Otani, Kazuo Yajima, and Tosso Hirai. In June 2020, Guangzhou Development Zone strategically invested in Baoneng Automobile, a world-class new energy automobile group with international competitiveness...

However, five years have passed, and Baoneng's car has not been found for a long time.

Yao Zhenhua once said that by 2022, Qoros will launch 26 new cars. However, after Baoneng took over, Qoros only launched two new cars, from a new high-end brand in China to an annual sales volume of only 10,000, Qoros Automobile fell more and more fiercely.

The delay in building cars cannot open the situation, which is inseparable from the tightening of funds. In July 2021, Baoneng Group was exposed to large-scale layoffs, and the automobile business was laid off from more than 20,000 people a year ago to more than 8,000 people. The number of employees of Qoros Automobile has dropped from 2,000 to 800.

What is more crucial is that sitting on huge resources, in the face of the car-making system smashed down with money, after five years of running-in, Baoneng is still a "layman" in the automotive circle.

Is there still market space in the future?

Since the beginning of this year, Baoneng Automobile announced that its three major brands and their respective new products, including Qoros, have planned to position high-end, mainstream and entry-level respectively, of which Baoneng Automobile has high hopes for high-end brand BAO, the first model is expected to roll off the production line in July this year. In fact, the car was originally planned to go on sale in 2021.

From January to February this year, the share of independent brands in China's auto market has reached 44%, an increase of 4.7 percentage points year-on-year, and the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in February is as high as 41.9%. The sales growth of new car-making forces is particularly obvious, with a market share of 5% in January and February, an increase of 2.8 percentage points year-on-year, which has had an impact on traditional car companies, making the market concentration of key enterprises in January and February lower than that of the same period.

Intuitively speaking, the head camp of the new car-making forces sells more than 10,000 vehicles a month, and is expected to achieve annual sales of 100,000 vehicles, which has become a color, the market does not lack new brands, the real competition and washing has just begun, and Baoneng Automobile, which started with them at almost the same time, is now not even willing to talk about sales data. How much room for development will a strong rival and a rapidly changing market leave for Baoneng Automobile?

In fact, since the decline in Qoros sales, Baoneng Automobile has fallen into a huge disadvantage: sales cannot be opened, lack of scale effect, delay in mass production listing, and serious damage to reputation. Baoneng not only failed to successfully start, missed the golden period of the development of new forces, did not establish a technical advantage, and so far there is no clear direction for breakthrough.

The new energy vehicle industry has been a large-scale "volume", into the second half of more vigorous technical competition, research and development, mass production, marketing, after-sales, which link is a hard bone. Baoneng, who has not kept up with the rhythm, can continue to catch up now, is it still too late? At present, the planned production capacity of all plants of Baoneng Automobile is as high as 3.3 million units, including 2 million new energy production capacity, can this huge data be realized in the future?