I want to surpass Tesla, but I can't win Wuling Hongguang.
01
Three years to surpass Tesla
"Our smart electric vehicles offer advanced technology and premium performance that surpasses their price point, delivering superior driving performance and immersive interactions, as well as superior interior space and configuration."
The above is a very impressive paragraph in the latest listing prospectus submitted by Zero-Run Automobile.
The current new energy vehicle industry, and the previous smart phone, Internet industry is simply a teacher to teach the student, do not blow the cowhide out of the sky, are embarrassed to say that they are in the industry.
In last year's capital market, the hottest concept was new energy, thanks to the marketing wizard Musk, who revitalized the entire new energy car market. As long as any enterprise catches up with the three words "new energy", it will immediately become the target of investors' attention.
Although we all know that this is the trend of the times, it is estimated that no one can accurately predict what the automotive industry will develop in the next few years.
However, the heads of many car companies continue to release harsh words and put forward various grand goals.
Xiaopeng, Weilai, ideal three new car-making forces bragging is still forgivable, good villains after mass production, the annual delivery volume is close to 100,000 mark, which is a new turning point for the entire domestic new energy car industry.
However, as a new energy first-line brand can not squeeze into the zero run, they dare to put the exit number:
"Surpass Tesla in three years".
It's always going to be off-putting.
Among its strategic goals, Zero Pao said it aims to launch eight brand new models by the end of 2025, with a sales target of 800,000 units. However, in 2021, they will sell only 43,000 vehicles for the whole year. This means that after 3 years, sales will increase by nearly 20 times!
This can't help but remind people of the originator of "bragging marketing" - Luo Yonghao.
Zero-run cars are always labeled by the outside world as "millet" in the field of new energy vehicles; but from their operation, they are more like the "hammer" in new energy vehicles.
Maybe it will eventually become the Gree mobile phone of the year.
At the beginning of 2015, Dong Mingzhu participated in the TV program announcing that he might make a mobile phone, and said:
"Do the phone minutes, definitely super millet."
Later, he was interviewed by the media and said:
"If I make a mobile phone for 3 years, I don't have to change it", "I hope to make the best high-end mobile phone in the world".
At the shareholders' meeting held in June of that year, Dong Mingzhu once again said:
"Gree mobile phone has begun to order internally, the price will be 1600 yuan, the future believe that selling 50 million units is not a problem."
The cowhide blew through the sky, and as a result, a few years later, Gree mobile phones became an industry joke.
02
Zero run listing
Also relying on big talk, putting satellites, in exchange for popularity of zero-run cars, its listing is not a sudden behavior, last year's ZERO-run car CEO Zhu Jiangming revealed:
Zero-run cars are considering an IPO in Hong Kong next year.
This progress is undoubtedly very fast, because zhu Jiangming revealed the news around October, and then submitted materials in January this year, and now the official news is out, that is to say, when Zhu Jiangming revealed the news to the outside world, the internal preparations were already being made.
Zero-run car is also a new energy vehicle manufacturer, founded in 2017, two or three years later than the establishment of the three new forces of new energy car manufacturing, these years the volume is indeed much smaller than several new forces, and now it is only a second-tier new energy vehicle brand in China.
However, the company's shareholders are very luxurious, the largest shareholder is Dahua shares, and then there are Guosen Securities, Sequoia China, CICC Capital and so on.
Dahua shares, A-share listed companies, and itself is the second oldest in the global security industry.
Guosen Securities, Sequoia China, CICC Capital, these big guys do not need to introduce too much, the top domestic investment institutions.
With the blessing of a large number of big guys, the performance growth of zero running in recent years is very fast, but the shortcomings are also obvious - to this day it has not been profitable.
On the evening of March 17 this year, ZeroCar submitted a listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and the co-sponsors were CICC, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and CCB International. Once successful, Zero Run is likely to become the fourth new car-making force to be listed in Hong Kong after "Wei Xiaoli".
According to the listing application submitted by Zero Run, in the three years from 2019 to 2021, Zero Run has been in a state of loss, and the company's adjusted net losses were 810 million yuan, 935 million yuan and 2.629 billion yuan, respectively; a total loss of 4.374 billion yuan.
There are still 2 years to go before Tesla, and zero running is still hovering in the second echelon of new forces in China. Losses are also getting bigger.
Even with such a huge loss, zero run does not seem to be short of money at all.
From the perspective of financing, zero run from January 2018 to August 2121 C2 round, a total of 7 rounds of financing zero run raised a total of 11.866 billion yuan.
11.8 billion yuan was raised, the loss was only 4.3 billion, and there were still billions left to squander.
Although the funds raised exceeded 10 billion, the research and development of zero run was not much.
The most important thing for new car manufacturers should be R& D investment. After all, unlike traditional car companies, they have a strong scientific and technological foundation and process accumulation.
Like BYD, it has strong enough competitiveness in terms of technical reserves, production capacity, product matrix, brand, or autonomy. What needs to be done now is how to transform the advantages into productivity and market value, and instead take a back seat in research and development.
However, as one of the new forces, Zero Run, raising tens of billions of yuan, only about 10% is used to invest in research and development.
According to the prospectus, from 2019 to 2021, the R&D expenditure of zero-run is 358 million yuan, 289 million yuan and 740 million yuan respectively, and the total R&D investment in the three years is 1.387 billion yuan.
In contrast, in the first three quarters of 2021, Xiaopeng, Weilai and Ideal invested 2.663 billion yuan, 2.073 billion yuan and 2.057 billion yuan respectively.
In other words, the cumulative cost of research and development in the three years of zero running is only equivalent to Xiaopeng's 4.5 months of research and development investment.
Of course, zero running to do this, personal guess is still because of the environmental problems of the new energy car industry, for many new car companies, research and development may not be so important.
The whole world is busy building cars. Even Xiaomi, Huawei, Apple, which make mobile phones, also promise to mass-produce within a few years, and Xu Jiayin, who wants to "double employment", also proposed to "work hard for three months to achieve Hengchi 5 mass production".
It is enough to see that the technical threshold of new energy vehicles is already very low. There is no shackles of the three major parts of traditional cars (engine, gearbox, chassis), as long as new energy finds a reliable supplier in batteries, motors, and electronic controls, any company dares to say that it can build cars, and even the assembly work can be outsourced to other manufacturers.
Start your own brand, put a brand, and you can do it. Live off a copy of the Internet thinking, here I have to say that the entrepreneurial logic of the Internet is really a great invention of the times, the beginning of a PPT, the rest all rely on editing.
However, the cars created by such new energy vehicle companies are basically the same, and the places where the hollow mind is hollowed out are in appearance, and the core three major parts are almost the same.
That is to say, regardless of whether the logo is good or not, most of the new energy vehicles on the market that do not have sufficient self-development ability will not have much difference in driving experience.
03
"Put satellite" brand plan
Zhu Jiangming, the founder of Zero Run Auto, has been known for his "mouth cannon" before. With the aforementioned sentence: surpass Tesla in three years. Zero-run Cars and Zhu Jiangming successfully exited the circle at the press conference in July 2021.
From the perspective of the time, this sentence was analogous to Yuan Chonghuan's "five years of Pingliao", which was intended to refer to it as "temporary comfort".
To borrow a sentence from Yijian Finance: If the mouth cannon is also a cannon, the zero-run car can blow away Tesla.
However, bragging about marketing is a tactic. At least this kind of operation has made the little-known zero-run car gain popularity.
The wine aroma is afraid of the deep alley, not to mention that this pot of wine is not very fragrant, but also to take the initiative to attack, win the eyeballs, and strive for traffic.
In fact, under the operation of Boss Zhu, the sales volume of Zero Run has achieved amazing growth in 2021.
In 2021, the total delivery of zero-run vehicles was 43,000 vehicles, a substantial increase of 443% over more than 8,000 vehicles in 2020, ranking sixth among the new car-making forces, the top five being Xiaopeng, Ideal, Weilai, Nezha and Weima.
With the rapid increase in deliveries last year, offline stores also expanded rapidly last year. At the end of 2020, there were 95 stores in Zero Run, tripling to 291 at the end of last year.
From 2019 to 2021, its revenue was 117 million yuan, 631 million yuan and 3.132 billion yuan, respectively. From this data, it can be clearly seen that the first two years were basically small fights, and it was not until 2021 that the income was raised.
Last year was undoubtedly the most eye-catching year for zero running, and Boss Zhu's "bragging marketing" was still effective. If you put aside the loss situation, zero running is indeed on the channel of rapid growth; but it is far from the goals he mentioned: "surpass Tesla in three years", "8 new cars in 4 years", "achieve sales of 800,000 in 2025" and so on.
Luo Yonghao has to be mentioned here.
Many people feel that bragging is very vain, it is better to make products steadily. Some people also say that if Luo Yonghao had made products steadily, he would have become a long time ago.
This sounds true, but it reverses the logical relationship. Bragging and making products are actually two different things. If there was no Luo Yonghao's bragging marketing, the hammer might have gone out of business a long time ago; the hammer technology did not do it, it was not good in other aspects other than marketing, and it had little to do with bragging.
From a marketing point of view, bragging marketing is definitely useful, and Zhu Jiangming's strategy is definitely correct.
However, bragging marketing has a big limitation, that is, only rely on bragging, the actual product span, is absolutely impossible to last.
Some "perceived value" is not very strong industries, such as health care products, early education, interest classes, etc., the products of these industries are relatively virtual, good or bad consumers in a short period of time is difficult to perceive, even after use, the effect is difficult to judge, all rely on the merchant "blowing".
But the new car industry is too real, all kinds of comparisons, all kinds of evaluations, all kinds of indicator data, ugly daughter-in-law sooner or later to see the in-laws, is not bragging, the market will give a fair judgment, stretch a long line to see will eventually be reflected in sales.
But if it is a zero-run listing, the performance in the stock market is not easy to say.
The stock market itself has speculative attributes, buying is a message, buying is expected, even if the reality is pulled across, can not squeeze into the ranks of a line of car manufacturing, it is still possible that the stock price will usher in a wave of rise.
For example, Tesla, in the relatively high period of Tesla's stock price last year, the price-earnings ratio was as high as 781 times, which was much higher than Toyota's 12.9 times, General Motors' 33 times and BMW's 12.5 times.
However, traditional car manufacturers have sold several times more than Tesla. For example, BMW in the same quarter, BMW delivered 675,700 vehicles, almost five times the Tesla 139,300 vehicles.
As a result, Tesla's valuation is more than 60 times that of BMW, which is outrageously high.
This is because Tesla and other new energy vehicle companies are solving the new market demand rather than replacing the demand. New demand is the new demand of users stimulated by the company through product and process innovation.
For Volkswagen, Tesla not only solves the need for travel, but also brings a new way of life. Low-carbon travel is likely to become mainstream in the future.
The size of the new market created by the new demand cannot be estimated according to the existing market size, so the potential is huge.
In fact, the zero-run listing is more like a signal, and the listing tide of the second echelon of the new forces of car manufacturing is only afraid to come.