Wen | Wang Xuanxuan, a reporter for China Entrepreneur
Edited | Ma Jiying
Head photo | Shi Xiaobing
Wang Fengying's role has changed.
Wang Fengying has long been regarded as the "second in command" of Great Wall Motors and the only female president of China's automotive industry for decades. In the more than 30 years that she has partnered with Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall Motor, Great Wall Motors has grown from a weak local car company to one of the benchmarks of China's automotive industry.
Two months ago, Wang Fengying formally applied to resign as an executive director, vice chairman and member of the Strategy and Sustainability Committee of Great Wall Motors, retaining only the position of president of Great Wall Motors. This makes her seem a little more relaxed and has more time and energy to explore the career space outside of Great Wall Motors.
In an interview with China Entrepreneur in an office building in Beijing's South Fourth Ring Road, Ms. Wang is an entrepreneur whose company is preparing for its official debut.
At this time, Great Wall Motors is also making various layouts for the next 30 years. For example, in terms of management teams, Great Wall Motors has put more young people in core positions. After resigning from the board of directors, Wang Fengying hopes to provide more external perspectives for the next development of Great Wall Motors through the new platform he founded, and avoid "drilling into the hutong" due to internal thinking.
Ms. Wei said she gave a lot of "time and attitude support" to her new career. But for a while, Wang Fengying still felt that her energy was very involved, "one will think about the car, the other will think about the Internet, resulting in high blood pressure." Fortunately, now she has better adapted to these two identities, unloading the burden on her shoulders and dominating her free time.
She also needs to return to Baoding every month to attend major conferences of Great Wall Motors, but more often than not, she can stay in Beijing and "keep herself with a heart of eternal innovation."
Photo: Shi Xiaobing
Leave no regrets
At Great Wall Motors, Wang Fengying said that she mainly did two things, one is strategic innovation, the most important of which is category innovation, and the other is the marketing of the Great Wall, which is always in the front line.
In the case that the automotive industry is generally affected by the supply chain, Great Wall Motors is one of the few car companies that "increases revenue and increases profits". In 2021, Great Wall Motor's operating income was 136.4 billion yuan, an increase of 32.04% year-on-year, and net profit was 6.73 billion yuan, an increase of 25.41% year-on-year. Wang Fengying attributed it to the category innovation of Great Wall Motors, and the explosive models represented by haval H6 can reduce costs and have premium space. So for many years, Great Wall Motors has been exploring new categories.
The birth of the new category will be accompanied by many controversies, and Wang Fengying said that once he thinks clearly, he must firmly promote it and leave no regrets.
The Tank 300, which was launched at the end of 2020, caused more than a year of discussion inside the Great Wall. In the words of Wang Fengying, this is a "contrary" decision - off-road vehicles are no longer in the attention of most car companies, why should the Great Wall do it?
In her opinion, there have also been fierce debates inside Great Wall Motors. From the perspective of engineers, some people think that the current development direction is urban SUVs, which is almost the consensus of car companies. From the user's point of view, some people think that young people will like the category of off-road vehicles with personality: because it has both strong off-road functions, comfortable and intelligent, it is a combination of future trends and current trends.
Later sales proved the market space of "hardcore smart off-road". In 2021, the tank brand sold 85,000 vehicles, and Great Wall also separated it from the high-end brand WEY, and launched the Tank 500 in line with the trend, with more than 40,000 pre-sale orders a week.
Great Wall Motor's electric vehicle brand Euler has undergone similar discussions. The planning department plans to launch a women's car, and the R&D department wonders why it is only sold to women?
Wang Fengying remains a staunch supporter. In 2021, the Euler brand sold 135,000 vehicles, an increase of 140% year-on-year, and also undertook the heavy responsibility of the Great Wall to leverage the pure electricity market.
Wang Fengying told Chinese Entrepreneur that she and Wei Jianjun did a test, and the result was two extremes - Wang Fengying is a right-brain thinking, doing strategy and marketing, first of all, to see the direction of three years, ten years later, and then push back, in a few steps. Wei Jianjun is a left brain thinking, a scientist thinking, meticulous, each step to think of special details and clarity, will be steadfast. But Wang Fengying believes that in the early stage of building a business model, if you always want to take the first step, it is difficult to push forward.
It is this complementarity that makes Great Wall Motors continue to move forward and correct deviations in time when problems arise.
Wang Fengying recalled that one of the most difficult and important decisions over the years was not to make a car. More than a decade ago, Great Wall Motors had already established a position in the field of pickup trucks and SUVs, and Wang Fengying persuaded Wei Jianjun to try his hand in the more mainstream car market. But after smashing 10 billion yuan and launching five or six cars, it was applauded. Finally, after the diagnosis of the strategy company, the company decided to stop the car business and focus on SUVs.
"It's the same now, focusing on a part of the resources and penetrating a category." Wang Fengying said that the focus and category do not conflict, "no car company has laid out so many categories, and each category is on a new road." This paves the way for the next 5 years and 30 years for Great Wall Motors. ”
However, in the case of increasing brands, resources are scattered, and how to maintain the advantages of each brand has become a new challenge. At present, Great Wall Motors has formed five major vehicle brands of Haval, WEY, Euler, Great Wall Pickup truck and tank, and is incubating a new brand salon. But every brand has its own challenges.
The pressure on Great Wall Motors is not small. In June 2021, Wei Jianjun proposed that by 2025, Great Wall Motors should achieve global annual sales of 4 million vehicles, of which 80% will be new energy vehicles. In 2021, Great Wall Motor's total sales volume will be 1.28 million units, of which the cumulative sales of new energy models will be about 137,000 units. This means that Great Wall Motor's sales will increase by 3 times in 4 years, and the sales of new energy vehicles will increase by 24 times.
Source: Visual China
Jump out of the Great Wall
In 2020, on the 30th anniversary of the company's establishment, Great Wall Motors released a micro-film of Wei Jianjun's 30 years of experience in building cars. "What will happen to Great Wall Motors in the future?" Wei Jianjun asked himself in the film: "In my opinion, my life hangs in the balance!" ”
But facing the next 30 years, Great Wall Motors is not unprepared. Cultivating a new generation of management teams is one of the actions.
In 2020, Great Wall Motors began to implement the rotating president system, and the first rotating president Meng Xiangjun was born in 1979, which is considered to be the embodiment of Great Wall Motors' use of young executives. In addition, Great Wall Motors has also made many innovations in the organizational mechanism in the past three years, including the implementation of the system of one brand is one company and one combat group, and activating each brand. Focus on cultivating young people, so that more young people have the opportunity to be seen and reused through job rotation. At the same time, the launch of equity incentives, 2020 and 2021 two years of equity incentive plans have been granted to more than 10,000 employees, covering 50% of the core employees.
Wang Fengying, who is 3 years away from the statutory retirement age, regards the Great Wall as a "home", but for her, home is not a place for retirement. She hopes to "jump out of the Great Wall" and contribute another kind of power.
In 1991, at the age of 21, Wang Fengying joined Great Wall Motors. At that time, Wei Jianjun was only 26 years old. In 1996, Great Wall Motors developed the first generation of pickup truck Great Wall Deere, pickup truck marketing became Wang Fengying's "battle of fame", two years later Great Wall won the pickup truck sales championship for the first time. Since then, the Great Wall has become a banner for Chinese car companies with brands such as Haval.
Wang Fengying has also become the "Iron Lady" in the automotive industry.
When the automotive industry is facing change, industrial digitalization has become an important issue. For example, the user operation platform of Great Wall Motors, based on the sales volume of Great Wall Motors, has more than one million daily active users. In Wang Fengying's view, the platform must be built with "pure Internet thinking", in addition to recruiting people from the Internet industry and cultivating young people internally, they must "truly step into the Internet circle" to have a cross-industry and global vision to provide more value for Great Wall Motors.
She co-founded "Beagle" with Zhang Yun, a long-time friend and global CEO of Rees Strategic Positioning Consulting, and cooperated with industry experts to launch innovative cases and other related content, which was output in the form of videos and courses. She hopes to become a marketing expert and serve more small and medium-sized enterprises. She set herself a 10-year goal, that is, to build the world's largest category king incubator", if there are nearly 10,000 companies that can achieve category innovation with the help of "Beagle", "this value is far greater than the value of being a company.".
When I met Wei Jianjun recently, Wang Fengying not only discussed the problem of Great Wall Motors with him, but also told him a lot of innovative stories to see what experiences could be used by Great Wall Motors. Wang Fengying also shares innovative cases at internal conferences from time to time, one of which is about selling socks. There is a company's socks can be sold alone, linked to the car, can it break the symmetry rule, each seat according to different needs, make different forms, launch different functions?
Innovation is what Wang Fengying cares about the most, and she herself is adapting to the new work model. In a large company such as Great Wall Motors, which has nearly 80,000 people, is responsible for strategy, as long as a direction is pointed out, someone will immediately follow and implement it, and the ideas spoken during the meeting never need to be said a second time. And the Beagle, she is faced with a new team, and she sometimes needs to express her ideas over and over again to ensure that her ideas are understood and recognized as much as possible.
Many years ago, as a female executive, Wang Fengying labeled herself as "ambitious and stable". Now Wang Fengying has more ambitions. She hopes that in a few years, her label will have "entrepreneurial mentors" instead of just "president of Great Wall Motors."