The author | Sakuragi
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"Xiaopeng intelligent driving mileage reached 140 million kilometers, assisted parking achieved 7.34 million times, intelligent auxiliary driving XPILOT3.0 user penetration rate reached 96.2%, high-speed every 100 kilometers, mileage penetration rate reached 62%. 2023 will begin to enter a new era, and in 2026 we will transition to driverless. When He Xiaopeng said this, it was difficult to hide the excitement and happiness in his voice.
In his speech on the same occasion, He Xiaopeng said the following words.
"In 2021, we thought that in the second half of 2022 (the chip problem) there might be a relief, but in the first half of 2022 we saw not only no relief, but also worsening. A certain angle to do fine products, fewer models are easier to do, more models are more difficult. ”
On March 26, 2022, at the China Electric Vehicle 100 Forum, He Xiaopeng showed his armor and weaknesses without reservation. The strength of technology and the instability of the supply chain, like the two sides of the coin, let Xiaopeng Automobile, which has always emphasized intelligence, walk up, trip with its legs, and every time it wants to exert power, it can only stagger slowly.
In desperation, He Xiaopeng could only change his strategy: "In the past, Xiaopeng Automobile expected to sell first and then deliver, but in the case of extreme shortage of supply chain, this model will have some challenges. Since the end of last year, Xiaopeng Automobile began to adjust the production and marketing model, becoming the supply chain to determine the production capacity first, and the whole vehicle will go to sales. ”
Subsequently, on March 28, Xiaopeng Automobile's financial report disclosed that it magnified this contradiction, and from the data point of view, in 2021, Xiaopeng Automobile had a total of 98,155 vehicles, with revenue increasing by 259.1% year-on-year, ranking first among new forces. But on the other hand, the total revenue of 20.9 billion is the lowest for the new forces (ideal 27 billion, WEIlai is 36.1 billion), the gross profit margin is the lowest 11.5% (the ideal is 20.6%, Weilai is 20.1%), and the loss is 4.82 billion (ideal is 320 million, Weilai is 4.02 billion), in a word: From the perspective of financial report comparison, Xiaopeng's 2021 is a year of failure the more efforts are made.
Not only that, in the long run, behind the rapid development, there are two dark clouds hanging over the head of Xiaopeng Automobile, which needs to be solved urgently.
01 Low gross margin buried hidden worries
The low gross profit margin is a long-term problem of Xiaopeng, because the selling price is low in the new forces, and there is no obvious gap in the delivery volume, Xiaopeng's gross profit margin has always been at the bottom of the new forces.
However, in 2021, the situation has changed, and Xiaopeng's gross profit margin has grown rapidly, jumping from 4% in 2020 to 11.5% in 2021, nearly 3 times.
According to the financial report, the total delivery volume of Xiaopeng Automobile in 2021 is 98155 vehicles, and the delivery of P7 will reach 60569 vehicles, accounting for 66.24% of total sales.
In the product sequence of Xiaopeng, Xiaopeng P7 fully benchmarks Tesla Model 3, and compared to Tesla Model 3, Xiaopeng P7 has a good cost performance in terms of price, intelligence and mileage. It is precisely because of this that the sales of Xiaopeng P7 have skyrocketed and become a hit in the same level. At the same time, xiaopeng P7 has a crucial role in supporting the gross profit margin of the financial report due to its higher price relative to other products of the same company.
However, the growth of gross profit margin may be challenged in the future.
The first perturbation is the price increase. Xiaopeng's price increase strategy is relatively sharp, the highest increase reached 30,000 yuan, compared with the old model promised by Weilai not to increase the price and the ideal price increase of 11,800 yuan, in the new force of Xiaopeng is very eye-catching. At the same time, from the perspective of the industry, although the price increase this time is caused by the general increase in the cost of raw materials, due to the low price of Xiaopeng products, the user portrait is more sensitive to the price than Weilai and the ideal, so the price increase has a greater impact on Xiaopeng.
The second disruptor comes from the supply chain. In the earnings report performance call, some investors questioned whether the order surge after the Xiaopeng price increase (in time to buy before the implementation of the price increase policy), some dealers said that the waiting cycle takes 16-20 months, whether it is true.
Xiaopeng's official answer acknowledged investors' concerns and said: "We are also strengthening our battery supply chain." We will strive to shorten the speed of supply. "The problem of the supply of vehicles has also become another major incentive that directly affects the growth of gross profit."
At the same time, due to the anticipation of price increases, short-term consumers form a run on purchases, to a certain extent, will overdraft the company's forward sales. This can be seen in the delivery volume guidance given by Xiaopeng in the first quarter of 2022. According to the financial report, in January and February 2022, the sales volume was 12,922 units and 6,225 units, respectively, but in March, when the price increase was announced, it was likely to reach more than 14,000 units. (First quarter delivery guidance is 33,500 units). Although this can make the first quarter performance end perfectly, after the product price increase in the second quarter, and there will be new cars on the market in the third quarter, the decline in Xiaopeng's performance in the second quarter has become a foreseeable situation.
After the release of the results, He Xiaopeng said bluntly: Xiaopeng Automobile's medium- and long-term gross profit margin target is above 25%. To achieve this goal, according to the experience of the new forces, the best grasp lies in the listing and delivery of high-margin models.
At the performance meeting, the management also said that the new car G9, which will be listed in the second half of the year, will become the company's main profit growth point. According to the evaluation of evaluators, the G9 has the potential to become a blockbuster, the latest electronic and electrical architecture, the 4.0 version of the intelligent driving system, the first 800V high-voltage SiC platform mass production car in China, and the development and design to meet international standards are the highlights of the Xiaopeng G9. Xiaopeng G9 enters a higher price range, which will further improve the overall gross profit margin level of Xiaopeng.
At the same time, at the financial performance meeting, Xiaopeng Automobile said that the high-end SUV product G9 listed in the second half of the year will become the focus of the company's sales in the future, and even hinted that the G9 will become the first guarantee category when the chip supply is insufficient: "For the G9, there is a sales target, the company has high expectations, and we believe that the sales of the G9 can reach the order of P7 in the short term." Both the G9 and P7 are our high margin products and we will guarantee that there are enough chips for production. ”
How Xiaopeng himself said, since from the end of 2021, Xiaopeng has formed a model of first determining production capacity and then selling the whole vehicle, if it is superimposed to give priority to ensuring the listing and sales of high-margin products, under the influence of multiple variables, it will form a great challenge for the flexible adaptation of the supply chain, as well as how to allocate resources and optimize production efficiency.
At the same time, to ensure the sales of high-end products, on the channel side, Xiaopeng needs to adjust the action is also very large, and even involves the proportion of physical stores in the city, according to the financial report performance will show that by the end of 2021, Xiaopeng has opened a total of 357 physical stores in 129 cities, including 209 directly operated stores and 148 authorized stores. At the same time, in 2021, Xiaopeng's strategic layout channels will sink and pay attention to sales in non-first-tier cities. In terms of results, Xiaopeng physical stores in non-first-tier cities account for nearly 80% of all physical stores, most of which will be realized in the second half of 2021. Such a layout is obviously contrary to the company's route of focusing on high-end, high-margin products in 2022, and how to adjust the channel has become a problem in front of Xiaopeng Motors.
Low gross profit margin seems to be Xiaopeng's curse, has been trying to get rid of, but whenever the real action, but there are many problems, products, supply chain, channels, and operational efficiency and other contradictions, are slowing down Xiaopeng's pace forward. How to flash around in it and get the best results is the most important problem for Xiaopeng Automobile in 2022.
02 Unknown intelligence
As the most obvious label of Xiaopeng, the intelligent development has always been the strongest muscle link in the performance meeting of Xiaopeng Automobile.
But this time I have to say that from the hard data, it is a bit disappointing. First of all, R & D expenses, Xiaopeng Motors 2021 financial report shows that its R & D expenditure of 4.114 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 138.4%. According to the financial report, it was mainly due to the increase in salaries due to the increase in R&D personnel and the increase in expenses for developing new models.
Since its establishment, Xiaopeng plans to rely on burning money to establish a technological leading advantage and gradually build a moat. But compared with the new forces of car manufacturing, everyone's expenditure on research and development has almost been unable to open a significant gap, Xiaopeng only ranked second, higher than the ideal but lower than Weilai, in view of the ideal in the sale of only one model, so in the research and development of investment, it can be said that the new forces are basically flat.
On the other hand, the pixel-level imitation of each other and saturation research and development between major manufacturers will further shorten the gap between them. For example, in the case of Xiaopeng's proud automatic driving, the LiDAR solution of Xiaopeng P5 was previously a thriving mass production car, but after March 28 this year, Weilai ET7 was listed, and the uniqueness of Xiaopeng P5 almost ceased to exist. At the same time, at the performance meeting, Weilai said that the number of ET7 orders has exceeded 15,000, while the Xiaopeng P5 has only sold 7865 so far, and a large number of deliveries will quickly close the gap between the two sides.
On the other hand, from the perspective of supply chain disassembly, taking the most important chip in the decision-making layer of autonomous driving as an example, the new forces almost all choose NVIDIA as the supplier, and they cannot open the gap in hardware. Of course, the accumulation of Xiaopeng in the visual perception algorithm can not be ignored, He Xiaopeng revealed at the 2021 financial report performance meeting that the research and development of the core function city NGP of Xiaopeng Automobile XPILOT3.5 is progressing smoothly, and after obtaining the approval of the relevant competent authorities, it is planned to launch the urban NGP in the first batch of cities at the end of the second quarter of 2022.
Urban NGP as a high-level automatic driving, to some extent, relying on this technology, Xiaopeng will open up the distance with other manufacturers in the field of automatic driving, at the same time, in the same technology with Xiaopeng route, and the algorithm is more advanced Tesla, has not yet realized this technology. If Xiaopeng can really apply this technology in advance, it can almost be sure that it is at the forefront of the industry in the field of automatic driving.
But it is worth vigilance that Xiaopeng Motors' expression here is exaggerated. At this stage, Xiaopeng's urban NGP is still tested internally by R & D personnel, and no real user-related data is revealed. Xiaopeng's urban NGP function can only be applied to the Xiaopeng P5 equipped with 2 lidars, that is to say, Xiaopeng makes up for the lack of technology research and development with design redundancy. But the compatibility of the two technologies, as well as the real driving experience, is somewhat unknown. In contrast, even the FSD beta tested by the industry's leading Tesla is not perfect, and small accidents are frequent. At the same time, objectively speaking, China's traffic environment is more complex, and there are more areas of cooperation with local governments, whether Xiaopeng can achieve, as he said, the technical height, everything still needs to be questioned.
In the face of the comparison between Tesla FSD and his own urban NGP, He Xiaopeng still showed self-confidence: "Regarding the competition with friends, friends are launching FSD overseas, but China has not yet launched, when seeing third-party analysis and sharing, Xiaopeng is very confident that the city-level NGP effect pushed out within this year will be quite better than the effect of Tesla FSD." ”
But if He Xiaopeng thinks about it again, those troubles in the supply chain do not know whether the good mood will be disturbed.