It is difficult to deny that the new energy market is quietly changing, and independent brands are rapidly rising in various market segments. For example, in the field of pure electricity, the driving out of another Niolai ET7, the 200,000th car belonging to NIO, officially rolled off the production line, and from the off-line of the first mass production car from 2018 to the present, it took less than 4 years, of which the second 100,000 vehicles went off the production line in only one year. Many people applaud weilai to refresh the speed of the industry, but in our view, although the efficiency of Weilai is high, it is not fast enough.
Weilai used less than half of Tesla's time
When it comes to the mass production speed of Weilai, Tesla is indispensable to be compared, after all, Tesla's "first 100,000 vehicles" took 12 years, which is much slower than Weilai. However, it is difficult to say whether Weilai can still have this efficiency if it is not standing on the wind outlet. After all, in the first quarter of 2022, Tesla's global delivery volume was nearly 210,000 units, of which the domestic market accounted for about 180,000 units. For Weilai, which is "200,000 units in 4 years", there is still a big gap.
What are the advantages of NIO?
In fact, the reason behind Weilai's ability to obtain such results is not difficult to explore, in addition to the factors of the predecessors planting trees and the cooling of the people, in fact, the domestic support for new energy electric vehicles in the policy, as well as the rising cost of fuel vehicles are stimulating the demand for new energy vehicles. In the early days, when Tesla entered China, battery technology, infrastructure, etc. were not mature, and now good mobile Internet infrastructure has become a booster for new car-making forces such as Weilai.
In addition to external factors, when it comes to Weilai itself, first of all, Weilai abandons the strategy of exchanging price for volume, positioning itself as a high-end intelligent electric vehicle, in the new energy vehicle market, the brand aura is not as strong as that of fuel vehicles, which is also the reason why Weilai can stand up.
Secondly, the product matrix is very rich, there are currently ES6, ES8, EC6, ET7 four cars on sale, in the third quarter of this year, the other two new cars based on the second-generation technology platform NT2 BUILT NEW CAR ET5, ES7 will also be delivered. According to official data, as of April 18, NIO has built a total of 900 substations in the Chinese market, and there are various ways to open WEILAI to replenish energy.
What is the bottleneck of WEILAI?
As one of the three major new car-making forces, Weilai's monthly sales since the new period of time are not particularly eye-catching. Sales in the first four months of this year have fallen out of the top 3, and WEILAI's sales in April were 5074 units, down 49.18% month-on-month.
As a result of this situation, we all know that there are environmental factors, such as the interference of the epidemic and the rise in raw material prices. Nio announced on April 9 that it would suspend vehicle production and slowly resume production five days later. On the whole, Weilai does not lack orders, but lacks production capacity, specifically, it is the lack of control of the supply chain, and weilai's ability to control the supply chain is likely to be far inferior to that of friendly businessmen, and now Weilai does not have its own factory.
It is not known whether the new cars to be added can solve the growth rate problem of Weilai, after all, the domestic luxury car market with limited capacity in the high-end market has declined for 10 consecutive months. The higher the price of the car, it is similar to being at the top of the pyramid, that is, it has digested its own potential customers, and if it wants to break through, it must sink the product. Perhaps Weilai should be to create a model of about 200,000 yuan, so that it is more grounded and takes the route of Tesla.
Write at the end
In the face of the small luxury car market and the failure of vehicle sales to go up, Weilai, how many bottlenecks behind the "4 years and 200,000" have not yet been broken, and may also know it. And in addition to the sales can not keep up, Weilai's annual revenue in 2021 is less than one-third of Tesla's single-quarter revenue, which also means that Weilai, which has not even turned positive gross profit margin, still has a long way to go.