Can Zhou Hang save Cao Cao from traveling?

The author | Bai Qian

Edit | Tsukimi

After Gong Xin took over as Liu Jinliang, Cao Cao traveled again to use airborne executives.

On April 7, 2022, Zhou Hang, the founder of Yidao Car, was appointed as the chairman of Cao Cao Chuxing. As of now, Cao Cao Travel has not disclosed Zhou Hang's responsibility, only indicating that the company's business development is good, and the company will have new business progress in the future. At the same time, CEO Gong Xin will still preside over daily operations.

This is the same as Gong Xin's airborne landing last year. With the resignation of founder Liu Jinliang as chairman, Cao Cao Travel's daily operations were officially taken over by Gong Xin, to which Cao Cao Travel responded that the adjustment will improve the company's approval and management efficiency and respond to market changes in a more flexible way.

The "market changes" in Cao Cao's mouth are mainly derived from the tug-of-war with Didi. On July 4 last year, the Didi APP was removed from the Cyberspace Administration of China for illegal collection and use of personal information, which sounded the second round of whistles for the second echelon of players in the travel team to divide the Didi cake.

Correspondingly, Cao Cao's business model is changing from heavy to light.

In the era of Liu Jinliang, Cao Cao's special car was renamed Cao Cao Travel, and the hitchhiking business was launched nationwide, aiming to accelerate the cutting of the cake left by Didi.

From Liu Jinliang, Gong Xin to Zhou Hang, Cao Cao Chuxing has continuously weakened the Geely label, and the two airborne executives are the general manager of the former Didi Chauffeur Business Unit and the founder of Yizhi Car. Behind it is undoubtedly the anxiety of Cao Cao Travel accelerating its competition for market share.

01 Management was shaken again

For Zhou Hang, the deepest impression of the outside world is the founder of the easy-to-use car who publicly broke with Jia Yueting. In a statement that drew a line with LeEco, Zhou Hang angrily accused LeEco of misappropriating 1.3 billion yuan of funds, which in turn caused a cash crisis for easy-to-use cars.

Putting aside the anger of the LeTV system, Zhou Hang gave people more of a steady impression, and in the face of the money-burning subsidy war, Zhou Hang held an opposing attitude: "Burning in product technology and experience is reasonable, burning in the price war is naïve, and it is very simple to pull drivers away with interests, but the long-term business model is not established." ”

According to China Entrepreneur Magazine, Zhou Hang insisted on calling the boom in the online ride-hailing market under the subsidy policy a bubble: "If you don't issue coupons, users won't come." "And once the tide of red envelope subsidies recedes, naked swimmers will show their figures."

This cautious strategy makes easy to travel quickly be overtaken by Didi and Kuaidi, of which the payment entrance plays a decisive role, Didi and Kuaidi respectively due to access to Tencent and Alibaba's mobile payment and stand firm, while Easy to use the car instead of the decline in order volume, for this time, Zhou Hang described as "a sense of collapse and collapse".

For Cao Cao, this coincides with his own cautious expansion strategy. Zhou Hang once used the Apple mobile phone as a metaphor for the travel market: "When the first generation of Apple came out, there were many doubts, but now it is so successful, the reason is to make the proposition to the extreme." In the interface news report, the CEO of Cao Cao Travel expressed a similar countervailing view: "Subsidies will not bring explosive growth to the market, we choose to deepen cultivation in existing cities." ”

However, from the specific rhythm of personnel changes, the management shock of Cao Cao Travel is often related to the market crisis.

For example, when Gong Xin parachuted into Cao Cao Chuxing as CEO, Cao Cao Chuxing was facing the crisis of market share and user volume being surpassed by T3 Travel, and Cao Cao Chuxing urgently needed to seize the market opportunity period left by the removal of Didi APP.

At the time of Zhou Hang's landing, Cao Cao's situation was more delicate.

The first is that Cao Cao's travel has reached the crossroads of the change of light and heavy mode.

At the beginning of designing Cao Cao's travel business model, Liu Jinliang chose the capital-heavy self-operation model that maximizes the interests of car companies, and the advantage of this path is that it is conducive to accumulating road test data for Geely Automobile with the help of the volume of travel business, providing support for research and development, and providing mass production and market share capabilities for Geely's new energy products.

From February 2019, when Cao Cao Chauffeur was renamed Cao Cao Travel, the platform began to exert efforts in business sectors such as hitchhiking and same-city delivery, and encouraged drivers to "join with cars" and rely on the light capital model to seize market share. This part deviates from the original intention of Geely Automobile's layout of the travel business, and the strategic positioning of Cao Cao Travel needs to be reorganized.

In addition, in the face of Didi's competition, CaoCao's attraction to Didi drivers has always been limited.

Some Didi drivers said that the dispatch weight system of the online ride-hailing platform encourages drivers to cultivate a single platform, and suppresses cross-platform order acceptance behavior, and "leaving" drivers will face penalties for receiving orders. In addition, due to the compliance problems of platform drivers, Cao Cao Travel was interviewed by five departments in September last year, demanding that non-compliant drivers be immediately dismissed.

According to data provided by Gong Xin, Cao Cao Travel has seen an explosive increase in orders since May last year, of which the number of orders received in July was more than double that in April. In the context of not fighting a subsidy war, it is difficult for Cao Cao Chuxing to poach drivers from the Didi system, and behind it also shows the transformation contradiction of Cao Cao Travel, in the face of the market share given up by Didi, Cao Cao needs to increase the capacity to seize the opportunity.

The above dilemma can be summarized as that the old growth logic has encountered bottlenecks, and in the eyes of Cao Cao Travel, Zhou Hang, the elder of online ride-hailing, may become the pioneer of a new situation.

02 Custom car + substation solution?

During this year's two sessions, Li Shufu, founder of Geely Automobile, brought the "Suggestions on Increasing the Construction of Electric Vehicle Replacement System", suggesting accelerating the construction of power station replacement facilities and related standards, as well as promoting the standardization of battery packs to achieve the interchange of battery packs between different car companies, power stations and users.

For Cao Cao Chuxing, this is the key to overtaking Didi in the field of capacity competition.

After Didi was subjected to supervision in July last year, CaoCao Chuxing held a multi-day discussion on whether to expand, and the meeting concluded that it adhered to operational norms, tried its best to expand the market, and mainly carried out deep ploughing in existing cities. In the view of CEO Gong Xin, the growth space of cao cao travel's registered users is not large, and the investment subsidy war will increase the cost of customer acquisition.

This means that the expansion of Cao Cao Travel will focus on the driver side. Gong Xin said that only if a single city's online ride-hailing platform has more than 20% share, there are barriers to competition. More market share requires greater capacity density, and a large number of users on social media have said that Cao Cao Travel's waiting time is longer, in other words, Cao Cao Travel also needs to expand the driver team.

In this regard, Cao Cao Travel's strategy is to upgrade customized models, that is, rely on the advantages of Geely Group's car manufacturing costs, on the one hand, to provide drivers with more cost-effective new energy models; on the other hand, to improve the service cost performance to customers.

Among them, the power exchange mode is a key step for Cao Cao Travel to strengthen operational efficiency. Power exchange is to abandon the idea of improving the endurance of large-capacity batteries of electric vehicles, and replace the battery for vehicles instead of gas station mode.

Since March last year, Cao Cao Chuxing has launched the first power exchange model Maple Leaf 80V, and by February 23 this year, the second generation of power exchange model Maple Leaf 60S was launched, and provides half-hour fast charging mode and one-minute power exchange mode. According to the official announcement, by 2025, Geely will launch more than 5 intelligent power replacement models, and cover 100 core cities with 5,000 replacement power stations, providing 3 minutes of unmanned power exchange services.

According to this plan, Cao Cao Travel, which is backed by Geely Group, will provide customized models with higher operational efficiency and lower operating costs, and reduce production costs by improving the interior structure, so as to achieve a win-win situation in which the power exchange model seizes market share and the travel platform grabs the driver's share.

But behind the ideal, the market risk of the power exchange model is not small.

Guo Lili, an analyst at Tianfeng Securities, believes that there are risks in the power exchange model in terms of model popularization and battery standard unification. Looking at the power battery market, there are many battery standards for various companies, and the market lacks a unified standard, even in the same brand, the battery replacement speed of the front and rear models is also extremely fast.

Taking the Tesla Model3 standard endurance rear-wheel drive version as an example, its 2019, 2020, 2020 remodeling and 2021 models use Panasonic, LG and Ningde era batteries respectively, and the types also include ternary lithium and lithium iron phosphate.

In addition, the construction cost of substations is higher. Taking the substation invested and built by Weilai as an example, its early cost per seat is about 3 million yuan, and for car companies, the large-scale coverage of the substation means high investment risk.

For Geely Automobile, Cao Cao Travel, which faces the driver side, will support the power exchange model with the scale effect of transportation capacity, but in the C-end market, complex consumer demand makes the prospect of the power exchange model still unclear. For Cao Cao Travel, the task of selling models on its back will be aggravated, how to improve the cost of operation? How to switch from financing blood transfusions to blood transfusions for the parent company will be the questions that Zhou Hang will answer in the future.