After the end of the "Battle of Baowan" in 2017, Wang Shi officially stepped down as the chairman of Vanke, and in the following years, Wang Shi occasionally appeared in the public eye, but he has rarely been involved in commercial activities, either participating in charity, or carrying out sports such as mountain climbing and rowing.
Image source: Wang Shi's personal Weibo
But just when everyone thought that the real estate tycoon had officially retired, Wang Shi, who had been away from the business world for 5 years, came out of the mountains again. Just a few days ago, Shenshi Acquisition Enterprises Limited (hereinafter referred to as Shenshi Acquisition) submitted a prospectus on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the promoters of which Wang Shi and AIIB Fund Management Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as AIIB) attempted to list through SPAC.
According to related reports, Shenshi acquisition will focus on two major investment lines in the future, including green technology and environmental protection consumer goods and services, of which the green technology investment direction includes electric vehicles.
Suddenly, the news that Wang Shi wanted to build a car spread in the industry.
In recent years, new car manufacturers have been the focus of attention in the industry, such as Weilai, Xiaopeng, Ideal and other new car manufacturers have become representative enterprises in the domestic new energy vehicle market, in just a few years, the market value has exceeded most of the traditional automobile groups.
Looking at a number of new car manufacturers, there are projects created by individuals or teams from traditional car companies, but more founders of new car companies are from other industries. For example, the above-mentioned "Wei Xiaoli", the founders have an Internet enterprise background, of course, like Wang Shi, there are not a few real estate company backgrounds, such as Baoneng's car-making project and more "legendary" Evergrande Automobile, etc., the parent company is a real estate developer.
Automobiles are capital-intensive industries, and the demand for funds for an automobile project can be said to be astronomical, and many new car manufacturers who now look quite successful have lamented that car manufacturing is burning money. From this point of view, real estate developers with deep pockets do have the innate advantage of cross-border car building. But the reality is that the previous cross-border car-making projects of real estate enterprises are basically chicken feathers at present, and it can even be said that from the beginning, the cross-border car-making of housing enterprises has not been optimistic by most people, and has always been accompanied by the criticism of "disguised land enclosure". Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the National Passenger Car Market Information Joint Association, once said that the essence of some real estate companies in building cars is to show off, in a vain attempt to capture land through low-cost methods, but in the end they failed to really build cars, and the loss to themselves was also very large.
Then the question is, in the current context, does Wang Shi really want to cross the border to build a car?
Image source: Wang Shi's personal Weibo
Judging from the main body of Wang Shi's re-establishment, the possibility of building a car should be small. The goal of the deep stone acquisition is to be listed through the SPAC table, and as a "shell" company, the two major business lines currently revealed are basically investment-oriented.
What Wang Shi is going to do this time may be a capital bureau.
The information disclosed in the prospectus of The Deep Stone acquisition shows that there are many real estate and capital in the company's list of directors, but many of the big guys have very little experience in the automotive industry. If Li Bin, Li Xiang and other cross-borderers can at least carry the banner of intelligence, then for the team that Wang Shi has saved up this time, it is a thorough car-making "layman" (Shenshi acquired another co-sponsor, Asia Investment, and participated in the D round financing of an automobile-related company in 2021, but this company called Xinkangzhong is only an automotive aftermarket service platform and does not involve automobile manufacturing).
When he left the chairman of Vanke in 2017, Wang Shi publicly said that he would do a completely different thing from real estate, and there were also media reports before Wang Shi visited the news of new energy vehicle companies. Coupled with the current super-high heat of the new energy automobile industry, it is not unimaginable that Wang Shi will extend the tentacles of investment to the field of new energy vehicles in the future.
But I have to say that it is still too difficult to "build a car" in person.
Although in the past one or two years, including Baidu, Xiaomi, Maverick, Light Orange Times, etc., there will still be cross-industry car-making projects one after another, but there are more cases of failure. Dong Mingzhu, Jia Yueting, Xu Jiayin, Li Ka-shing, etc., these business leaders whose financial strength and appeal are not worse than Wang Shi's, have all confirmed with personal experience that there is a huge gap between dreams and reality in the matter of "building cars".
In fact, in the current overall environment (the market value of new energy vehicle companies has generally soared, core supporting enterprises such as batteries have exploded in full swing, chips, intelligent driving and other related enterprises are also "growing barbarically"), to take away a piece of the new energy vehicle market, it is not necessary to dabble in the car-making link, do a good job in the capital bureau, and also be able to earn a lot of money. What's more, Wang Shi, who was born in 1951, is 71 years old this year, and the cross-border car manufacturing that needs to be tossed around may be more suitable for "young people" like Li Bin.