Watson | author
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At the end of 2016, Great Wall Motors released the "WEY" brand positioning luxury SUVs, Chinese name is also known as Wei Brand, which is named after the surname "Wei" of Wei Jianjun, the founder of Great Wall Motors. At the press conference, Wei Jianjun once vowed, "The WEY brand has bet on my surname, and can only succeed and not fail." Contrary to expectations, the performance of the "WEY" brand is not ideal.
Great Wall Motor's latest March sales data shows that Weipai's sales in March were only 4,755 vehicles, and its performance continued to be sluggish. Previously, sales in January and February were only 5,098 and 4,432 units, respectively.
Compared with competitors in the same industry, BYD's flagship models Han and Tang have achieved sales of 10,000+ respectively, and the Qin and Song families, which are mainly cost-effective, have achieved sales of 20,000+; the price range is higher than that of new power car manufacturers such as "Wei Xiaoli" of the WEY brand, and the sales volume is 2-3 times that of the Wei brand; even the Geely Lynk & Co brand, which was initially directly benchmarked with the WEY brand, has reached 221,000 units in 2021.
As a brand that the Great Wall has been building and has been established for 5 years, why is the performance of the WEY brand so dismal?
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Readers familiar with the automotive industry will understand that the WEY brand actually experienced a good period of time at the beginning of the listing in 2017. At that time, the WEY brand launched two SUV models, VV7 and VV5, named after the "VV + digital", and in less than half a year, the monthly sales of the above two models both exceeded 10,000, and the ANNUAL SALES of the WEY brand reached 86,000 units in 2017. In August 2018, the WEY VV6 was officially launched, and the WEY family product camp was further enriched, and sales in 2018 further jumped to 139,000 units.
However, the highlight moment of the WEY brand did not last long. In 2019, annual sales of the WEY brand fell by 28.28% year-on-year to 100,000 units; in 2020, WEY sales fell 21.53% year-on-year to 78,500 units, and sales of all its models declined.
The decline in WEY brand sales is mainly due to external and internal factors.
In terms of external factors, the initial victory of the WEY brand in the field of independent high-end brands has caused competitors to follow suit, and for a time, brands such as Geely Lynk & Co and Chery Xingtu have been established, resulting in intensified competition in the independent high-end market and diverting the sales volume of the WEY brand.
In terms of internal factors, the core is the lack of product strength of the WEY brand itself. First of all, as an independent brand, the WEY brand has significantly fewer models, from VV7 to VV5 to VV6, and even the appearance of new energy P8 models is basically the same, and even the interior is similar. Secondly, VV7, VV5 and other models have been criticized by consumers because of high fuel consumption and abnormal transmission noise due to powertrains, which has seriously affected the market reputation of the WEY brand. The data shows that the VV7 of the 2017 model has 329 complaints on the car quality network, of which 109 are about the engine.
In essence, the high opening and low of the WEY brand lies in the fact that its own product strength cannot reach its luxury brand positioning, and even cannot make a strict distinction with the Haval brand, and WEY has also been jokingly called "high-priced version of Haval" by some netizens. In addition, with the decline in sales, the WEY brand has also lost the high-end in terms of price, and its 2021 VV5 price has dropped to 125,800, and the brand's upward strategy has also encountered obstacles.
What is more fatal is that the WEY brand has also been shaken in its strategy with poor progress. The most typical is the independence of the tank series products from the WEY brand, which makes the WEY brand lose a chance to redeem.
In December 2020, Weipai launched the hardcore off-road SUV tank 300, which was quite popular after the listing, and won a good result of 6018 vehicles in the first month, and once led to a rebound in WEY brand sales. In addition to the increase in sales, the tank series products are in line with the high-end tough image at the beginning of the WEY brand listing, which is also conducive to enhancing the overall competitiveness of the WEY brand.
However, in April 2021, Great Wall Motors was relatively short-sighted to independent the tank series into a new sub-brand, which greatly weakened the product strength of the WEY brand, resulting in the WEY brand's annual sales of only 52,194 units in 2021, continuing to fall sharply by 28.1% year-on-year, accounting for less than 5% of Great Wall Motors' overall sales, and ranking first among the four major passenger car brands of Great Wall Motors (Haval, Euler, Tank, WEY).
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The poor progress of the business began to make Great Wall Motors completely negate the early strategy of the WEY brand, and it successively discontinued all the models of the "VV+ Digital" series, but replaced them with three new models named after coffee: Mocha, Macchiato and Latte.
Among them, weY Mocha, which is positioned as a medium-sized SUV, was officially launched on May 21, 2021, and is the first model built by Great Wall Motor based on the "Coffee Intelligence" platform, and the current official price is 192,800-22.88 million yuan.
On September 29 of the same year, WEY Macchiato DHT, which is positioned as a compact SUV, was officially announced, with a current price of 155,800-16.98 million yuan, which is also the first model of Great Wall Motors equipped with intelligent hybrid DHT technology.
Lemon hybrid DHT technology is a new set of oil-electric hybrid system that Great Wall Motor has high hopes for, which can cooperate with each other through efficient hybrid engine and motor interconnection, so that the vehicle can achieve a high-performance balance. In addition, the lemon hybrid DHT has two power architectures, including HEV (oil-electric hybrid) and PHEV (plug-in hybrid).
The WEY Latte DHT, which is also positioned as a compact SUV, was officially launched on December 17, 2021, positioning a compact SUV, with a total of three models: the middle cup, the big cup and the super cup, and the current price is 169,800 yuan, 179,800 yuan and 189,800 yuan, respectively.
WEY Mocha DHT-PHEV was officially released at the Guangzhou Auto Show on November 17, 2021 and officially launched in March this year, with a total of two models with prices of 295,000 yuan and 315,000 yuan respectively.
It is worth noting that except for the earliest release of weY Mocha, which is a fuel vehicle, the rest of the models use lemon hybrid DHT technology. Behind this is a major strategic adjustment of the WEY brand, that is, from a traditional fuel vehicle brand to a new energy vehicle brand with intelligent hybrid technology, which will no longer launch traditional fuel vehicle models in the future.
At the same time, the WEY brand positioning has also been updated from "China Luxury SUV" to "a new generation of smart cars". This shift in positioning basically overturns wey's brand accumulation in previous years, which means that the WEY brand needs to be re-branded shortly after its establishment, which is a huge consumption for WEY. In addition, the new strategic design of the WEY brand is also too idealistic, and there are some major weaknesses.
First of all, in the past, WEY as a luxury brand positioning and the appearance of the tough design style, attracted the favor of some male users, and now the WEY brand models from the naming to the appearance of the design are more feminine, but also no longer highlight the luxury brand positioning, which makes its brand image become more blurred, in any user group is not flattering.
Secondly, the prices of Weipai's three "coffee" models are very similar, and they are all compact and medium-sized SUVs, and there is a large product game and price game between them.
Finally, and most importantly, the WEY brand's models using lemon hybrid technology are significantly higher priced than the same level of fuel vehicles, which makes it unable to win users who intend to be pure electric models, nor can it replace fuel vehicles. The core of the success of BYD, another company that has achieved great success due to the hybrid technology DM-i, is to make the models using DM-i technology achieve the same level of fuel vehicle price, and achieve a good replacement for traditional fuel vehicles.
In addition, although BYD has achieved great success in the field of hybrid technology, it is mainly due to its special historical origin and genes in the field of new energy vehicles, which does not mean that other companies can make hybrid models into a brand alone. In the future, if the WEY brand only focuses on hybrid models that are still difficult to call the mainstream technical route of the industry, it will be difficult to support huge sales.
It is the above several weaknesses that make the repositioning of the WEY brand unable to open the situation. At present, there are only a few thousand units sold every month, which is not only far from its grand strategic goal, but even whether it can support the survival of the WEY brand in the future is unknown.
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From the good situation when it was first listed, to the current pain of a good situation, the future is uncertain. Great Wall Motor's strategic swing on the "WEY" brand requires deep reflection from the management team with Wei Jianjun as the core.
What is most needed to build a high-end brand is strategic determination, and Great Wall Motors has a big problem in strategic determination. Let's imagine that if we do not change the brand positioning, but continue to focus on the brand positioning of luxury SUVs for deep cultivation; if we do not cancel the "VV + digital" series, but apply lemon hybrid technology to the series for product iteration; if we do not strip the tank series to establish a new sub-brand, but let the tank series become the star model that helps the WEY brand upwards, then the WEY brand is likely to have become the most successful high-end brand among China's own car brands.
The series of mistakes and decisions of Great Wall Motors not only made the WEY brand miss the strategic opportunity and return to the pre-liberation overnight, but also made the tank brand face great uncertainty risks in the future. Although the current tank brand has a good sales performance, it will face the core problem of a smaller hardcore off-road market in the long run, and with the layout of other manufacturers such as BYD in the hardcore off-road SUV market, the competition in this field will also be white-hot. If the WEY brand and the tank series could initially maintain the brand synergy, it may be much safer than it is now.
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