Written | Cold Zelin
Edit the | Wang Pan
Thanks to the sharp increase in sales last year, Great Wall Motor's total revenue in 2021 was 136.405 billion yuan, an increase of 32.04% year-on-year, and the net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 6.726 billion yuan, an increase of 25.43% year-on-year. Both revenue and profit achieved substantial growth.
However, after the Turnaround, Great Wall Motors broke negative news one after another, first two of Euler's main models were forced to stop production due to raw material price increases; and then affected by the double impact of the Spring Festival and Bosch ESP supply shortage, Great Wall sold only 70,792 new cars in February, down 20.5% year-on-year.
It is worth noting that in the February production and sales data announcement, the Great Wall changed its previous style and began to publish another data. "From January to February, the proportion of Great Wall Motor's sales of models of more than 150,000 yuan increased to 15.5%, the proportion of intelligent models increased to 88.1%, and the proportion of lemon, tank and coffee intelligent three major technology brand models accounted for 75.1%."
Unlike BYD, in the process of new energy transformation, the Great Wall put intelligence in the first place.
Following the special Wei Xiaoli, the Great Wall has also recently launched its own pilot assistant driving NOH, becoming one of the fastest OEMs in traditional car companies. Different from the pure electric models of the new forces, the Great Wall NOH was first installed on the fuel vehicle WEY Mocha model.
According to the official data and the test drive in Garage 42, NOH has a performance that is not inferior to the new forces.
The supplier who provides NOH pilot assistance for the Great Wall, Formerly known as the Great Wall Advanced Technology Research and Development Department, was independent at the end of 2019. The family did not speak two words, and the Great Wall also "spoiled" to announce that in 2022, the autopilot system equipped with the end of the zhixing will cover dozens of passenger models.
Relying on the huge annual shipments of the Great Wall, Zhixing wrote a sexy story "more than one million installed in three years".
Capital is also very convinced, making it successfully complete two rounds of financing last year, with a valuation of more than $1 billion. Honeycomb Energy, a power battery company that was also born out of the Great Wall in 2018, opened listing counseling at the beginning of this year after completing nearly 20 billion yuan of financing.
If the first half of domestic new energy is electrified, then the second half must be intelligent competition. Can the great wall of reverse order make the new forces feel uneasy again, as BYD did?
Electricity before wisdom or wisdom before electricity?
Great Wall and BYD, as domestic independent brands that started at the end of the last century, have chosen different paths of change in the current wave of new energy.
On the surface, it is not too much to say that BYD is the most radical traditional car company in the transformation, in fact, this is also inseparable from Wang Chuanfu's bold words released since the day he acquired Qinchuan Automobile, "Xi'an Qinchuan can be used as an entry point for the electric vehicle market." ”
While the rest of the domestic traditional car companies in the transformation of new energy is much slower, Euler can be seen as the first step in the transformation of the Great Wall new energy, founded in 2018, so Euler is also the first independent new energy vehicle brand in China's mainstream car companies.
Euler sold 39,000 vehicles in 2019, 56,000 units in 2020, and in 2021, through feminine marketing, sales increased significantly to 135,000 units, and this figure is almost The new energy sales of Great Wall Motors in 2021 (137,000 units).
Seemingly comparable to Wei Xiaoli, in fact, the Euler brand has not really brought much improvement to the Great Wall, and the low gross profit of mini cars has not improved with the increase in the price of upstream raw materials, but the restriction of low threshold, with the increase of competitors, will further exert pressure on the main engine factory.
On the other hand, as a male-dominated market, the growth space of female brands is still slightly lower, which also erases the possibility of further expansion of the price range. Unless like mini or smart, there is a big brother support of bmw and Mercedes-Benz two luxury brands behind it.
In addition, the Great Wall currently does not have a new energy model to hand, Haval is all fuel vehicles and oil-electric hybrid (plug-in hybrid is considered a new energy), Wei brand Machiduo/ latte DHT-PHEV respectively compared with the oil-electric hybrid version of the price increased by 2-10 million yuan, relative to BYD hybrid premium is higher.
Some insiders pointed out to Photon Planet that this is due to the cost reduction brought about by the simpler structure of BYD DM-i. As far as electrification is concerned, the Great Wall is still taking a slow step.
However, in terms of automatic driving, BYD is half a beat slower. The current BYD Han DM model is equipped with a total of 4 surround view cameras and 1 high-perception camera, and the Tesla Model 3 is equipped with 8 cameras. HanEV's DiPilot intelligent driver assistance system adopts a three-millimeter-wave radar + monocular camera solution.
In the No. 42 Garage Assisted Driving Review, the BYD Han EV, as the flagship sedan, ranked at the bottom of the rankings with its DiPilot Assisted Driving System.
From publicity to actual configuration, BYD has not taken intelligence as the focus, in fact, this is ALSO BYD's current strategy. Because there is no advantage in the fuel vehicle market, sales have been under Geely and the Great Wall for many years, and only in the early days of the new energy market, relying on low-priced running volume to occupy the market, can we raise enough capital flow to support BYD's next action.
On the contrary, the basic market of the Great Wall is still solid, according to the data of the Federation of Automobile Associations, in 2021, Geely's retail sales of 1.213 million units, down 2.8% year-on-year, the Great Wall 949,000 units, up 13.4% year-on-year, ANDD 724,000 units, up 73.5% year-on-year.
In the short term, the basic disk of fuel vehicles will not be seriously injured with the rise of new energy sales, the Great Wall relies on the support of many years of experience in the fuel vehicle market, and is not eager to sell new energy vehicles through low prices and overdraft brand image, but has taken a road more similar to that of new forces, and increased the price and brand image through the level of intelligence.
For example, the recently listed latte DHT-PHEV, the price has come to 300,000 yuan, competing with the ideal ONE. At the same time, the NOH assisted driving system developed by Mimo Zhixing will unlock the city pilot assistance function in the middle of this year, and the full-scenario NOH and HSD (HAOMO Self-Driving) will also be launched in the second half of the year and next year.
At present, only Xiaopeng has clearly stated that it will pilot the auxiliary driving function in the upper-tier cities this year.
To a certain extent, the progress of the Great Wall in the degree of intelligence has caught up with some new forces, but the speed of its electrification still makes people feel "walking on one foot". Electricity before wisdom is the main direction of the transformation of traditional car companies at present, and can the Great Wall of wisdom and electricity be able to find another way?
Collaboration and incubation
Due to years of development, traditional car companies are often bloated in organization and decision-making processes compared to start-up companies. The comfort zone formed by the fuel vehicle market is also easy to make some employees slack and lack of momentum, so the introduction of fresh blood and open systems is particularly important, and cooperation and incubation have also become the keywords of the transformation of traditional car companies.
Great Wall mainly incubated three companies, namely Hive Energy, Xiandou Intelligence and Millima Zhixing.
Like BYD, Great Wall also has its own three-electric technology, and the motor electronic control comes from Hive Yichuang, and also purchases United Electronics. Batteries have hive energy and are still in the ramp-up stage.
In 2021, the penetration rate of new energy continues to rise, the demand for power batteries is also increasing, according to SNE Research data, with a growth rate of 416.67% and 3.1GWh installed capacity, honeycomb energy squeezed into the top ten of the global power battery installed capacity.
Compared with the identity of BYD battery birth, the hive was only 3 years old, before it was only a project group within the Great Wall, it was promoted to a business unit in 2016, and it was officially independent and began to face the market in 2018. And the rapid growth must be inseparable from the support of the Great Wall behind it.
95% of the installed capacity of Hive Energy is supported by Great Wall Motors, and 5% is equipped with zero-run, Nezha and other models. Similarly, BYD, in 2021, bydir battery production and sales ratio also reached 94%.
Although neither BYD's Fordy battery nor the Great Wall's hive energy has completed the "weaning". However, at present, the expectations of OEMs to strengthen the right to speak in the supply chain are becoming stronger, and the position of "Ning Wang" is not stable, and many car companies are looking for a second supplier, such as Xiaopeng and GAC last year, which introduced Zhongxin Airlines, and BMW signed a contract with Ewell Lithium Energy.
That is to say, second-tier battery manufacturers in the new energy market still have a certain window period.
Therefore, at the battery day at the end of 2021, Hive Energy also shouted out the slogan of increasing the global capacity planning target to 600GWh in 2025.
Compared with the production capacity planning of each family in the same period, it may be intuitive to understand the expansion of the hive.
Cataline Era plans to have a production capacity of 800GWh, and the rest of the enterprises ranked above Hive Energy, such as AVIC Lithium Battery and Guoxuan Hi-Tech, have planned production capacities of 500 and 300GWh respectively. Bydir, which sold 600,000 new energy vehicles last year, has a planned production capacity of only 450GWh of Fudi batteries.
In addition to the power battery, the Great Wall also incubated the Xiandou Intelligence of the smart cockpit and the Zhixing of the automatic driving in 2019. The composition of the two companies is very similar, partly from the automotive industry and one from the Internet.
The mission of Xiandou Intelligent is very obvious, as a springboard between the Great Wall and the outside world. It was established in March and reached cooperation with Tencent and Great Wall in July.
According to a Tencent executive, in the process of integration of Xiandou, they combined the concept and method of the Internet with some of the original knowledge of the automobile factory. In this transformation process, the left side can connect to the Great Wall, and the right side can connect to the Internet.
Another company focused on autonomous driving, Zhixing, has also grown into a unicorn under the protection of the Great Wall.
Due to the back of the Great Wall, the end of the auxiliary driving data accumulation is not worried, although lagging behind Tesla, Xiaopeng, but it is mounted on the Great Wall's fuel models and hybrid models, the shipment volume is still considerable. As of March 2022, the number of assisted driving ranges has exceeded 6 million kilometers, and it is estimated that the total number of passenger cars equipped with the HPilot system will exceed 1 million units in two years.
At the same time, based on this, Millima can also go out of the way with other autonomous driving companies and adopt progressive autonomous driving research and development. On the one hand, it can quickly enhance the competitiveness of Great Wall models, and on the other hand, it can also alleviate the revenue dilemma of autonomous driving companies.
According to Zhang Kai, chairman of The Wisdom Bank, at the press conference, the revenue of milliper in 2021 will also reach hundreds of millions of yuan, which is the fastest growing autonomous driving company in China.
The hand of the Great Wall
BYD's car machine and auxiliary driving function have been complained about by many car owners, but it has not hindered its position as the hegemon of domestic new energy. Among them, DM-i and blade batteries have played a big role, and they are also two important hands at this stage.
In February this year, BYD's Song series won the SUV sales championship with sales of 24,532 units, surpassing the enduring Great Wall Haval H6. Not only BYD, but also car companies such as Ideal, Weilai, and Tesla often appear on the list of competitors with fuel vehicles.
When we took the Great Wall apart, it seems that several of its subsidiaries have performed well, but when they are gathered on the Great Wall model, they do not come up with memorable products.
Although the order of the Great Wall Tank 500 exceeded 30,000 within a few months of its release, and the tank 300 was sold out of stock, with the continuous tightening of the new energy policy, the future of large-displacement models is not optimistic.
The popularity of the tank did not bring help to the transformation of the Great Wall's new energy, on the contrary, after the independent operation of the tank, Wei Pai could not enjoy the heat and returned to mediocrity.
At present, Weipai continues to undertake the mission of the fuel vehicle era and leads the Great Wall to hit the high-end, but the brand's overall sales in January were only 5,098 vehicles. Even with the blessing of intelligent cockpit and auxiliary driving, can Wei brand DHT-PHEV beat the by-one BYD DM-i?
On the contrary, after BYD gained a large amount of market share, it turned around and began to make up lessons in intelligence, and reached cooperation with Baidu and NVIDIA this month. BYD, which has acquired self-driving capabilities, may continue last year's rapid growth.
In terms of pure electricity, Euler is currently facing the problem of rising raw materials and stopping production, and at the same time, can Euler continue to be favored by consumers after core change and price increase?
On the other hand, the high-end pure electric brand of the Great Wall at last year's Guangzhou Auto Show was also officially unveiled, and the unique appearance of the mecha dragon seems to want to reproduce the popularity of the tank, but the exaggerated intelligent configuration and limited sales always make people feel that the gimmick means more.
In fact, when we disassembled the hands of the Great Wall one by one, we found that there were many Great Wall cards, but we did not make a potential product and brand in the new energy market.
Regardless of the Euler who earns points, Weipai and Sharon have an iron heart to hit the high end, and from a normal point of view, there is no model that goes in volume and conforms to Volkswagen, such as the Haval H6 in the fuel era. When people mention the Great Wall, they still think of SUVs and pickup trucks, which are difficult to connect with new energy.
The Great Wall's ability to create explosive products is very strong, but it seems to be limited to the fuel vehicle market.