Recently, Liu Yongzhuo, president of Hengchi Automobile, announced that the pre-sale of Hengchi 5 will be fully launched and will be mass-produced on June 22 this year, and said that Hengchi 5's work is progressing smoothly and has entered the ministry of industry and information technology's new car announcement, and its first batch of sales centers and experience centers will be opened in 15 key cities in the near future.
Hengchi Automobile officially also released information on recruiting agents in 18 cities, including three sales characteristics: the implementation of order-based sales, asset-light operation; the exhibition hall is small and fine, located in the automobile business circle; unified pricing, to ensure profits. Its sales center has an exhibition hall area of 200-300 square meters and will be recruited in 18 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
This can be described as the most promising progress of Evergrande Automobile. Evergrande, which started with "real estate", has been seeking transformation to get rid of the predicament, and this piece of fragrant food in the field of new energy vehicles has also become Evergrande's first choice.
In January 2019, Evergrande joined the global electric vehicle company NEVS, carne and the Dutch e-Traction company. It marks that Evergrande officially entered the automobile market and obtained the qualification of car manufacturing.
By the 2021 Shanghai Auto Show, Hengchi Automobile released 9 new cars in one go. Such a huge press conference attracted many media and consumers to watch. But unfortunately, even if the leadership of Hengchi is no matter how crazy the advocacy is, the staff will never allow the audience to enter the exhibition hall experience, and even not allow photos.
Later, everyone learned that the exhibition cars of Hengchi's 9 new cars at the Shanghai Auto Show at that time were not real cars, but an empty shell model. This exhibition is just a "PPT" of "thunder and rain".
Until January this year, Evergrande will be able to achieve mass production of models from the earliest 9 models to Hengchi 5. Causing the public to strongly question, such a huge gap, where is Evergrande's road to car building?
At the same time, the turnaround is also quietly happening, on January 12, Hengchi issued a notice in its official Weibo, announcing that the first mass-produced model of the Hengchi brand, the Hengchi 5, was rolled off the production line at the Tianjin plant, 12 days earlier than originally planned.
During this year's "May Day" period, Hengchi has held static experience meetings of Hengchi 5 in Guangzhou and Tianjin Experience Centers, which is also the first offline appearance to the public after Hengchi 5 mass production vehicles roll off the production line.
From Volkswagen questioning Evergrande's "PPT" type of car manufacturing, to Hengchi's offline and offline experience, and then to the opening of the agent franchise model now. In the eyes of the outside world, "Evergrande Car" and Hengchi Automobile seem to have begun to enter the right track.
However, compared with the brand direct operation model of the current new car-making forces "Wei Xiaoli", Hengchi Automobile still chooses the sales method of traditional dealer agents. The advantage is that Hengchi Automobile does not need to independently form a sales team and throw all the pressure to dealers, which reduces capital investment and further saves operating costs for Evergrande at this stage. On the contrary, Hengchi has lost the absolute control of the direct operation model over the selling price. But this is also purely an impatient move of Evergrande, which is deeply in financial crisis.
According to the 2021 Hong Kong stock Evergrande Automobile released the first half of the financial report data, the first half of the year revenue of 6.92 billion yuan, an increase of 53.4% year-on-year, Evergrande Automobile has not yet mass production loss of 4.79 billion yuan, and according to evergrande automobile's own performance data, the first half of 2021 accumulated loss of 18.83 billion yuan, the loss is in the trend of continuous expansion.
Judging from this announcement of Hengchi on dealer qualifications and venue requirements, the registered capital of the dealer registration company is not less than 5 million yuan; the exhibition hall area is 200-300 square meters, the display area is greater than 150 square meters, and the positioning is small and exquisite car experience store. It seems that the requirements are very high, but the industry seems to have reduced the franchise fee and qualification a lot compared with other traditional car brands, "Although Hengchi requires the registered capital to reach 5 million yuan, it does not require the actual payment of 5 million yuan, which is a lower threshold for joining." ”
As Liu Bin, the domestic regional sales manager of the Mercedes-Benz brand, said in an interview with the media, "The 'auto business circle' in Hengchi's requirements for building a store is an area like an automobile city on the outskirts of the city, not a shopping city business circle with new forces such as Weilai and Xiaopeng." In the automobile city, the general 4S store will start from 2000 square meters, compared with Hengchi's 200-300 square meters sales center is too small. ”
Of course, the industry generally believes that Evergrande Automobile is likely to further reduce the threshold for agents to authorize franchises and shorten the process of joining, so as to attract more agents to join and achieve an acceleration in the layout of sales channels.