Why does WEILAI want to build mobile phones for car owners?

In order to defend against the apple car that has not yet been launched, Weilai chose to build a mobile phone. Mobile phone companies build cars, car companies make mobile phones, the essence is the future product form is more and more similar to the special way to return

Wen | Caijing reporter Li Haoyin and Wang Jingyi

Editor| Wang Jingyi

The rumor market of Weilai Automobile's mobile phone has been rumored for more than a month. On March 31, Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of WEILAI, personally went down to confirm it.

A set of chat records exposed by the automotive media "Electric Planet News" shows that Li Bin believes that Weilai's mobile phone is not essentially offensive, but defensive, because the mobile phone is now the most important device for Weilai users to connect to the car.

"Think about 2025, the Apple car came out, 60% of our users are even higher to use Apple, we have no defense at all, today is not a little prepared to do it." Li Bin felt that if Weilai did not build a mobile phone, "it would be equivalent to the key to the home in the hands of his opponent." What's more, now Huawei, Xiaomi, and so on, "some of the mobile phone manufacturers have to engage in cars."

Weilai stressed to the "Finance" reporter that the mobile phone business is still in the early stage of market research, and is also thinking deeply about the value of users. From the perspective of user experience, we will bring users a better experience to explore more.

After answering the question of why car companies want to build mobile phones, more questions emerged: Can car companies build mobile phones? Built, did anyone buy it?

Build a "best mobile phone for car-machine interconnection experience" for car owners

As early as February this year, Weilai was exposed to cross-border mobile phones, and it is said that it has initially established a mobile phone business department, and more personnel recruitment is also continuing.

Weilai did not respond positively to its entry into the mobile phone industry until March 31, when Li Bin came forward to confirm it.

For example, Li Bin, more and more people began to use mobile phones to open the door, but due to the different openness of mobile phone manufacturers, not every user can enjoy this convenient function, such as weilai's second-generation models are equipped with UWB standard, but Apple does not open the interface, "making us very passive."

UWB refers to hyper-bandwidth technology and is one of the necessary conditions for the current implementation of digital keys. Apple has not fully opened the data interface to car companies, so Apple's mobile phone cannot be used as an electronic key to unlock Niolai's vehicles - according to Niolai's internal statistics, more than 50% of car owners use iPhones.

Li Bin believes that Weilai mobile phone is based on user interests and experience, to see what needs have not been met, not only mobile phones, to study and "car-centric intelligent terminal equipment", including wearable, mobile devices, but excluding tablets, computers, TVs, which have little to do with cars.

What is the boundary of NIO's new business exploration? Qin Lihong, founder and president of WEILAI Automobile, once revealed the underlying logic of WEILAI to the Reporter of Finance: the strategy is divided into four major sectors, including cars, full-life cycle services, digital experience, and lifestyles beyond cars. The new business should be related to the main direction of the strategy, if on this line, the probability will be done, and then just consider the time mode and cost pricing; if not, the probability will not be done.

"I think flying cars are very cool, will we make flying cars?" It seems that it is not in the direction of reasonable expansion, and the current high probability is not to engage. We think and invest very carefully, we don't do something completely unrelated, and the scope of our investment is within the gross profit range. Qin Lihong added. Weilai's 2021 financial report shows that the gross profit margin of the automobile business is 20.1%.

One question is that it is not difficult to build a mobile phone, but it is not difficult for the owner to use the Weilai mobile phone.

Li Bin said: "So first of all, we must see whether 40% of Android users are willing to turn." Please rest assured, the starting point for us to consider making mobile phones is very simple, that is, to give our car owners a mobile phone with the best experience of car-machine interconnection. ”

Weilai said that the mobile phone project is still in the research stage, "Is Weilai's mobile phone (really) valuable to users? We're still thinking about this. ”

Car companies frequently cross-border mobile phones

The car companies that want to build mobile phones are not Weilai.

As early as half a year ago, the "Caijing" reporter had exclusively disclosed that Li Shufu, the founder and chairman of Geely Automobile, intended to set up a team to enter the mobile phone business and establish the company Xingji Era; and then reconfirmed that meizu was contacting meizu to discuss and negotiate.

In September last year, Xingji Times, founded by Li Shufu, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone and announced its entry into the field of mobile phones. According to media reports, the total investment of the project exceeded 10 billion yuan, and it is planned to launch mobile phone products in 2023, which may be produced or manufactured by Foxconn.

At that time, an insider told the "Finance" reporter that Li Shufu was not the only car company that wanted to make a mobile phone. The logic behind it is also very clear: on the one hand, car manufacturing and mobile phone manufacturing are integrated supply chains, making mobile phones more profitable; on the other hand, mobile phones are close to the attributes of users, allowing car companies to connect directly to users in real time, and the two are deeply bound.

The mobile phone that does not leave the body allows users to never go offline and connect directly to enterprises and consumers; more importantly, the basic thing is that the mobile phone has become the best identity identifier, which may be used as a "secret key" for interaction with all intelligent terminals. This account system, as well as a variety of smarter value-added services around the travel space scenario, is exactly where ambitious companies are most interested.

"What's important about a phone? Is it call quality, battery life, or computing power? If you take any of the dot-like examples of hardware, it is estimated that apple will not be counted, but Apple has changed the industry. Apple relies on features that go beyond mobile phones as communication tools. Qin Lihong said.

In Qin Lihong's view, the personal handheld mobile terminal is a product that deeply defines everyone's lifestyle, self-awareness and self-value positioning. From this point of view, industrial design is very important, brand image is very important, the ecosystem of established application software is very important, even if the offline store decoration standards that cannot be beaten with mobile phones are also very important, it is a decathlon competition, and it is necessary to build system competitiveness around the user's full experience.

It can be seen that car companies do mobile phones, in fact, not only defense, to deal with the counterattack of Apple and Millet cross-border car manufacturing; in the final analysis, it is still a situation in which mobile phones and cars are becoming more and more similar in the future product form, and the two factions of forces are in the same way.

With the continuous improvement of the level of intelligence, the accelerated transformation of the car's identity, the attributes of the "car" are gradually reduced, and the attributes of experience, interaction, and technology are gradually enhanced, and the future car will be more like a robot.

Zhu Dawei, chief designer of Wilson Intelligent Network Application Center, told Caijing that the future of smart cars with L5 level automatic driving may evolve into mobile living spaces, and the content will change with passengers, location, and travel purposes, and people may live here for more time than home and company.

The path of car companies to make mobile phones

From the study of Li Shufu's mobile phone that has now surfaced, it may be possible to see the path of cross-border mobile phone manufacturing by car companies:

First, the company is set up by the business leader to operate independently. This can not only enable the mobile phone business to develop independently and freely, and prepare for the independent listing of future financing; it can also use the relationship of the boss to make the mobile phone business and the automobile business run in the same business logic and empower each other.

Xu Haidong, deputy chief engineer of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, told Caijing that this is based on realistic considerations. With the help of mobile phones, you can face users directly, improve the human-vehicle interaction experience, and at the same time, promote the company's digital transformation, and transform itself from a car company into a technology company.

Second, establish their own core values and rely on external forces. Rather than simply establishing a mobile phone company from scratch, car companies should pay more attention to the big and the small: focus on product design, how to organically combine with the automobile ecology, and create products that meet their own commercial value and can meet consumers. After all, car companies that are good at operating the supply chain can't make a mobile phone, and it is rare to do a good job of a mobile phone.

"It's not as hard to make a phone." Tao Xujun, director of the communication and ICT business consulting department of Nomura Comprehensive Research (Shanghai) Consulting Co., Ltd., told Caijing that the mobile phone design and processing industry are very mature, and the automotive electronics and mobile phone industry has a large number of overlapping connections, and it is not difficult to enter the market. The difficulty is to do a good job in the supply chain and make a difference in the market with serious homogeneous competition.

For the cruelty of the mobile phone industry, WEIlai has psychological expectations.

"In the highly market-oriented industry, one is a winner-take-all industry, mobile phones are such an industry, competition to the later stage of the global only few brands left, even the top five can not guarantee profitability." One category is a hundred flowers blooming, cars belong to this, the biggest competitor is themselves, others are good does not mean that you will be less, which is also one of the starting points of Weilai's entrepreneurship. Qin Lihong said.

Third, open up mobile phones and car machine talents, two-way empowerment. When Caijing reporters interviewed Ford China's intelligent networking and digital experience team in Shanghai, they found that Ford placed great emphasis on user research, and they hoped to use the deep integration of software and hardware to meet user needs according to scenarios. To this end, a large number of talents in its team come from user research, industrial design, software and hardware development and other positions.

Robin Li, chairman and CEO of Baidu, believes that the future of the car is high-level automatic driving; the car and the car, the car and the road to achieve signal coordination; the car can recognize the occupant requirements and take the initiative to provide services. This naturally makes the car it defines and the development route of others is naturally different, and the focus of research has become to build a smart chassis, study steer-by-wire, and prepare to "abandon" the steering wheel from the beginning. "Car robots are not the same as cars that everyone imagines, in fact, it will be more like a robot, which will also be the direction of car evolution in the future." Robin Li said.

This means that the establishment of a mobile phone company helps car companies to make a cut from this, observe how the mobile phone is iterative at high speed, and how to combine soft and hard. Not only can you learn experience, but also help to make talent reserves for your own car machine and even the digitalization of follow-up car companies.

As Li Bin said, Weilai made mobile phones "always have a beginning." ”