The three-legged situation of the new forces of ideal, Weilai and Xiaopeng Automobile is being broken by Nezha Automobile.
Throughout 2021, the sales volume of Nezha Automobile totaled 69,674 units, an increase of 361.7% over 2020, ranking first in the mainstream car-making new power brands. Relying on soaring sales, Nezha Automobile successfully attracted the attention of various capitals, and after the ensuing financing, the news of its impact on the listing of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange also spread in the industry...
On the one hand, it is unstoppable, while on the other hand, Nezha Automobile is still in the stage of high losses. According to the performance of Nezha Automobile revealed in the announcement of 360 Group, a shareholder of United Automobile, Nezha Automobile achieved revenue of 1.297 billion yuan and a net loss of 1.321 billion yuan in 2020; In the first half of 2021, it achieved revenue of 1.632 billion yuan and a net loss of 693 million yuan.
Nezha's car "foot on the hot wheel", there are still many weak ribs on the body. As a dark horse that quickly counterattacked among the new car-making forces, will its future road still soar "with divine help"?
01. Nezha car's dark horse counterattack
Nezha Automobile's parent company, Hezhong New Energy Automobile Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "United Automobile"), was founded in 2014, and although it is the same year as the company behind Weilai and Xiaopeng, its reputation is far less than them.
For a long time, cost performance is a major "creed" upheld by Nezha Automobile, as its co-founder Daniel Zhang said: Nezha Automobile does not do toys for the rich, only cars that the people can afford. It is precisely because of this that Nezha Automobile can complete the counterattack on sales from the encirclement and suppression of the "Wei Xiaoli" iron triangle and walk out of a successful path of "rural encirclement of the city".
The "countryside" here refers to both the sinking market and the B-end market of Nezha's innovative efforts.
Open the official website of Nezha Automobile, several models mainly promoted by its home page have shown strong competitiveness in price, the official guidance price after the "150,000-level intelligent life cabin" Nezha U pro subsidy is from 105,800 yuan, and the official guidance price after the "70,000-level intelligent technology warehouse" Nezha V subsidy is only 74,900 yuan.
Open the official website of ideal car again, and the national unified retail price of ideal ONE is 349800 yuan. In a rough comparison, the price of an ideal ONE can buy three Nezha U Pro, and Nezha U Pro is already one of the more expensive models.
Nezha is to other new energy vehicle brands, just as Xiaomi is to Apple. When "Wei Xiaoli" and Tesla have piled up a price band of more than 300,000, Nezha has entered the unusually cold new energy sinking market, especially the pure electric SUV market below 100,000, and has become a well-deserved king.
According to the official announcement of Nezha Automobile, the number of new car deliveries in March reached 12,026 units, an increase of 270% over March last year. In addition, the cumulative delivery volume of Nezha Automobile in the first quarter of this year reached 30,152 units, an increase of 305% compared with 7,443 units in the first quarter of last year.
The sinking market is indeed a big fat meat that cannot be missed. According to the "2021 China Sinking Market Car Purchase Behavior Insight Report" released by Ai Media Consulting, the sinking market has become a new growth point in China's auto market, and the scale of China's auto industry sinking market in 2020 is about 2,000.28 billion yuan.
Analyzing the sales data of various price points in the automotive industry can also prove the size of the sinking market.
According to the data released by the Association of Passenger Vehicles, 21.09 million passenger cars were sold in the narrow sense in 2019, of which models under 150,000 accounted for 60.4%. Models with 150,000 to 300,000 accounted for 29.8%, while models over 300,000 accounted for only 9.8%. In 2020, luxury brand models sold only 3.236 million units in China, accounting for only 16.2% of total sales.
In the sinking market, Nezha needs to face few opponents, but with a high cost performance to attract a large number of consumers, from mass production began to accumulate sales of more than 60,000 units, in the second half of 2021 is to begin to accelerate, so far has reached the monthly sales of more than 10,000 results, the annual sales of 69674 vehicles, ranking fourth.
The above is the counterattack of Nezha Automobile in the C-end market.
In the early days, the purchase of official vehicles was the main strategy of Nezha Automobile and its parent company, United Automobile. In 2020, Nezha Automobile began to lay out the online ride-hailing market. Away from the C-end market, Nezha successfully avoided head-on competition with "Wei Xiaoli" and quietly completed the dark horse counterattack.
In 2021, Nezha released customized models for the official car market and the online car market. For example, Nezha U launched a super online booking version, making adjustments in terms of comfort and entertainment of rear passengers. In May 2021, Nezha U Pro added four new customized models, and the three-electric system enjoys a longer warranty of 500,000 kilometers for five years, specifically for the official car market.
02. The sinking market is easy to attack
The road to branding is difficult to follow
In a sense, value for money is like a double-edged sword. It has created the sales volume of Nezha Automobile today, and has also caused a high loss of Nezha Automobile.
In 2020, Nezha Automobile's revenue was less than 1.3 billion yuan, but the net loss exceeded 1.3 billion; In the first half of 2021, its revenue exceeded 1.6 billion, and the loss in the same period was also close to 700 million. Burning money is undoubtedly the key word that Nezha Automobile is facing at this stage, and it is also a problem that the entire new energy automobile industry needs to face for a long time in the future. R & D, production requires a lot of funds, and Nezha Automobile's choice of 100,000 yuan price band in the market, the profit margin is not large, it is difficult to cover its huge losses.
In contrast, the bicycle revenue of Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal when they reached the threshold of 100,000 units was 377,000 yuan (cumulative as of Q1 2021), 229,600 yuan (cumulative as of Q3 of 2021) and 337,400 yuan (cumulative as of Q3 of 2021), respectively, which was 3.9 times, 2.4 times and 3.5 times that of Nezha, respectively.
Another disadvantage brought by the cost performance for Nezha Automobile is that its branding and high-end road are difficult to go. Because once the low-end brand positioning is formed, it is difficult to change, and Xiaomi is a lesson for the future.
In fact, Nezha has not given up the mid-to-high-end market of new energy vehicles. Last year, Nezha's first digital car, the Nezha S, was unveiled at the World Internet Conference.
According to the official introduction, the acceleration time of Nezha S 100 kilometers is 3.9s, providing two power types: extended range and pure electricity. Among them, the range extender range is 1100 kilometers, and the pure electric version has a mileage of 800 kilometers, and in some scenarios, L4 level intelligent driving can be realized. This level of performance has almost doubled compared with Nezha's previous models, and even surpassed some models of Weilai and Xiaopeng.
It is reported that Nezha S will be listed at the end of this year, although the official price has not yet been announced, but from the perspective of configuration and performance, this may be a charge launched by Nezha Automobile on the high-end market.
In addition to price, brands also influence consumers' car purchase decisions. According to the report released by the research institute J.D. Power, consumers are gradually shifting from direct focusing on models to focusing on brands first and then determining models, and have locked in the intention to buy brands at the beginning of purchase.
Under the attack of "Wei Xiaoli" and Tesla, people want to buy new energy vehicles, and the first brand that comes to mind will not be Nezha Car. When people talk about the brand of Nezha Automobile, the first thing that comes to mind may be the marketing overturning incident in August last year.
At that time, the star Wu Yifan was on the cusp of public opinion, and a screenshot of the WeChat chat message of "[Nezha] Brand Center Management Group" flowed out of the network. A person named "Peng Gang" spoke in the group: "Do you want to give Wu Yifan a chance, the official xuan asked him to be a spokesman, telling everyone that they still have to give him a chance, and the bad guys also need a chance, do you think?"
After the matter was exposed, it quickly fermented and became a well-known case of bottomless marketing brand on the Internet, nailing Nezha Automobile to the pillar of shame, making its brand image in the minds of consumers cause irreparable losses.
03. Face "Wei Xiaoli"
Where is Nezha's competitiveness?
Looking at the domestic new energy vehicle market, Weilai's customer service and power exchange model, Xiaopeng's assisted driving "black technology", the ideal range extender electric vehicle route, and the three head new force car companies have their own distinctive characteristics. In contrast, the Nezha car, which focuses on cost performance, has not yet formed its own moat.
Car companies focusing on the low-end market have a common problem, that is, whether it is the appearance, interior, performance, or degree of intelligence, the product does not have its own core competitiveness, let alone the formation of differentiated characteristics. Shen Hui, founder of WM Motor, said: Less than 100,000 can only be called electric vehicles, not intelligent electric vehicles.
In the second half of last year, Nezha Automobile carried out intensive financing.
In October last year, Nezha announced the completion of a D1 round of financing of 4 billion yuan, with 360 Group leading the investment of 2 billion yuan; In December, Nezha also disclosed the D++ round of financing in which CATL, 360, BAIC Production and Investment participated, with a financing amount of about 2 billion yuan.
Recently, "Late Post" reported that Hezhong Automobile, a company owned by the Nezha Automobile brand, has recently completed a new round of financing of more than 2 billion yuan, and the main investment institutions include CRRC Fund under CRRC Group and Shenzhen Venture Capital with state-owned background in Shenzhen.
Financing for Nezha Automobile not only brings financial support, but also technology and experience empowerment. According to the announcement of 360 Group, the company's strategic investment in Nezha Automobile intends to take intelligent networked vehicle security as the cornerstone to empower Nezha Automobile with its accumulation and experience in the fields of network security, intelligent hardware security, and vehicle networking security, and will rely on the follow-up in-depth strategic cooperation between the two sides to further study the safety of intelligent networked vehicles, so as to better provide intelligent networked vehicle safety services for car companies and industry chain partners in the whole industry.
With the blessing of 360, the competitiveness of Nezha Automobile is expected to be improved. Since August last year, Nezha Automobile has also cooperated with Huawei, Horizon, SenseTime, etc., which, as a key partner of major OEMs, can also bring certain advantages to Nezha.
However, from the current stage, cooperation with other companies is ultimately a shoe itch, and the only way to bring substantial breakthroughs is independent research and development. It is understood that in the process of self-developing NGP high-level assisted driving, Xiaopeng Automobile invested 5.382 billion yuan in research and development expenses in the period from 2018 to the first quarter of 2021 alone.
At present, the battery cost of smart cars remains high, and in the future, the user's demand for intelligent technology is still rising, and even the cost of high-level automatic assisted driving will increase.
Going around, the problem of research and development eventually returned to the problem of funds, even if the pace of financing has been so compact, Nezha still cannot relax in the matter of listing. Before realizing true intelligence, Nezha still has a long way to go.