Produced 丨Tiger Sniff Car Group
Author 丨 thoughtful
Editor丨Zhang Bowen
By now, the meaning of the word "involution" has been generalized to an incomprehensible degree. From the fierce market competition to the Wenshan meeting sea in the 996 factory, one "volume" seems to be enough to summarize it all.
Specific to the Chinese auto market, "volume" has become the main theme. From model configuration to price concessions, as well as various rights and interests for gift owners, car companies are giving benefits to users like races. Among them, NIO has reached a new height with its service "volume", which is unique among the new forces of car manufacturing and even its own brands.
As the first player among the new forces of car manufacturing, NIO's user operation and car service have become a well-deserved benchmark in the industry after more than 6 years of development. In the minds of the public, it is no longer the impression of "curiosity" at the beginning. On Monday, NIO co-founder and president Qin Lihong and NIO Vice President Shen Fei shared in Beijing what they did to bring NIO's services out of the sky.
Left: Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of NIO; Right: Shen Fei, Vice President of NIO
And how they felt in the face of January's dismal car market and Tesla's price cuts.
Service: Roll to Skyrim?
From January 13 to February 5, NIO offered unlimited free battery swaps to car owners at its national highway swap stations. In 35 days, NIO provided more than 372,000 free power swaps. Among them, on the busiest G15 Shenhai Expressway, more than 50,000 NIO owners received free wool replacement. The busiest substation, the Shenhai Expressway Dahuai Service Area (located in Guangdong Province), provided 2,982 power exchange services in 35 days, an average of 85.2 times per day.
In addition to the high-speed exchange station, the supercharging pile and destination charging pile built by NIO also brushed a lot of presence. As a charging system built by NIO and open to all car owners, NIO Power has built a total of 13,600 charging piles in the charging network. During this 35-day period, the system provided a total of 901,900 services, of which 76% served non-NIO brands.
At the event site, Qin Lihong also posted the order statistics of various brands of charging piles. In addition to "congratulations" to friends on selling well this year, he also raised his soul torture:
Let's take a look! Who the hell, in the whole of China, there is not a single public charging pile!
In addition to replenishment, NIO's traditional performing arts - user services and offline activities also rolled out of the sky during the Spring Festival. In terms of user services, NIO provided a total of 199768 services including chauffeur parking, door-to-door pick-up and delivery, one-key power-up, one-key maintenance, car wash, roadside assistance, and driving services during the Spring Festival, of which the last driving service provided 4,919 times.
The reason why the driving service is taken out separately is because this service is not a standard product, but "independently developed" by various regional companies of NIO according to their own manpower conditions, "talent reserves" and other conditions. For example, some NIO service specialists were barbers before joining the company. So they offered to provide door-to-door haircut services for the owners and children during the general closing hours of the Spring Festival barbershop. And this kind of service can also be paid with NIO points (in NIO Mall, 10 points is equivalent to about 1 yuan).
What is even more "frustrating" is that @wangxiaoyu, the author of our tiger sniff car, broke the news with the author that NIO Hainan regional company is also in Haikou to and from the Leizhou Peninsula Ro-Ro terminal to provide users with queuing services. After the user places an order, the NIO service specialist will drive the service car to queue up instead of the user. And the owner only needs to wait until it is almost time to board the ship and change the position of the service specialist's car.
The most coke thing is that there are actually gifts to take
However, this kind of service Qin Lihong did not introduce it. He posted a photo of a NIO service car crossing the sea on the ferry to Nanri Island in Putian, Fujian Province, to rescue a car owner who encountered a flat tire on a self-driving trip. The president of "Revenge" also recalled the interesting story of NIO using a fuel scooter to pull a NIO Power mobile charging vehicle to Xinjiang in 2018 to ensure the owner's self-driving trip, and shouted to the people who mocked NIO back then:
"Despite the laughter, our 'scooter' this time is much more than that time."
Of course, Continental Ferries are considered buses to some extent. Buying a ferry ticket for a car is much cheaper than renting a scooter
In addition to various services, NIO also cooperated with "The Wandering Earth 2" during the Spring Festival and organized 186 viewing activities. Among them, at an event in Shanghai, the film's protagonist Wu Jing and director Guo Fan also arrived at the scene. Of course, in addition to watching movies, NIO centers in various places also organize activities for users to make dumplings. And, the NIO Car Friends Association in Beijing once again made door-to-door condolences to the staff on duty at the exchange station.
In terms of user service and operation, NIO has deservedly become a benchmark for learning among various car companies across the country and has been imitated by everyone. However, as the earliest starter and the most criticized enterprise, NIO has formed the most comprehensive software and hardware, online and offline service system in this regard. At the same time, it has also gained the widest recognition and social awareness of car owners. In this regard, NIO is worth learning, but I believe that it is difficult for latecomers to catch up.
In fact, it takes a lot of effort to tie up.
But in addition to the good things, this company is also not a small problem. In particular, in the face of the "black opening" of the auto market in January this year and the 46.2% decline in sales compared with December 2022, NIO posed a serious challenge.
The car market is dark, how to roll through Tesla?
In January, all new energy vehicle companies had a hard time. According to statistics from the Passenger Vehicle Market Information Joint Council, wholesale sales of new energy passenger vehicles in January reached 389,000 units, down 7.3% y/y and 48.2% m/m. The slowdown in new energy sales that emerged in December continues. Retail sales of new energy passenger vehicles in January reached 332,000 units, down 6.3% y/y and 48.3% m/m.
And when it comes to NIO, the situation is even worse. NIO delivered a total of 8,506 new vehicles in January, which is not only close to the bottom of the previous month, but also down 11.9% compared with the same period last year.
However, there are objective reasons for this. After all, this year's Spring Festival is a holiday from January 21, while last year's Chinese New Year's Eve was January 31. Qin Lihong admits that almost 10 days of the entire month were in a "void" state. During this period, few users ordered the car, and most of the cars could not be delivered when they arrived at the store. In fact, the performance of various Chinese new energy vehicle manufacturers, including BYD, Lili and Qianjie, was worse than in December last year. From January to March every year, it is also the off-season of the Chinese car market.
Of course, these companies in dilemma do not include Tesla.
According to the China Passenger Association, Tesla sold 66,051 units in China in January 2023, an increase of 18% month-on-month. Of these, 26,843 units were sold in Japan and 39,208 units were exported. Compared with the same period last year, the increase was 10.37.
Of course, the sales of new energy vehicles are the result, and the orders made a few weeks or even 1 month ago are the reasons for the results. The reason why Tesla's sales did not increase in January is that it announced a big price reduction for the two domestic models of Model 3 and Y in early January. Among them, the highest decrease was as high as 48,000 yuan.
For the "bloodletting therapy" of the industry leader, some domestic car companies chose to follow up helplessly, including Qianjie and Xiaopeng. Among them, the former has a maximum decrease of 30,000 yuan, and the latter has a maximum of 50,000 yuan. NIO was exposed by social media that some long-term exhibition vehicles can get a superimposed discount of more than 100,000 yuan.
However, Qin Lihong also refuted this statement. He said that the preferential price calculated by some media is the highest value after superimposing various discounts. For example, he said, the media also included the 20,000 yuan local car purchase subsidy in Shanghai's Jiading District, "this conclusion is not rigorous." But he also acknowledges that today's older ES8, ES6 and EC6 models need to be cleared as soon as possible to make room for the upcoming new ones.
In addition, Qin Lihong also reiterated that NIO will not choose to exchange price for volume, but maintain a stable price to maintain the image of high-end brands, "or do a good job in product services and brands."
In this regard, NIO's approach is to adjust the terminal channel, the first is to expand the proportion of "cow houses" in terminal stores. At present, NIO has two types of stores in the terminal, one is the NIO House called "NIO Center". It is often located in the core business districts of first-tier cities and prefecture-level cities and has a large area, including coffee bars, parent-child areas, user gatherings and shared office functions in addition to selling cars, which can be described as a large and complete flagship store.
The largest of them is the first NIO House in Beijing Oriental Plaza, covering an area of more than 3,400 square meters; The other is NIO Space, which only provides functions such as vehicle display, sales and test drives, with an average area of about 400 square meters, of which the smallest is only 70 square meters, "only the next car".
Qin Lihong said that they will focus on building the NIO Center to bring the overall experience of the NIO brand, especially the lifestyle it advocates, to more users as much as possible. And these "small and well-equipped" shops, the median area will be controlled at about 600 square meters. "In the future, we will only build NIO space in areas that do not have a NIO center at all." For example, he said, in the future, the center of NIO will expand from provincial capitals to prefecture-level cities and even county-level cities, "including cities such as Baotou, Ordos and Ulanqab."
NIO's new generation ES6, from the appearance and ES8 is already difficult to see the difference
To put it bluntly, NIO still has to serve with Tesla Roll. Because the latter can be priced at the cost with the world's highest gross profit per bike, if you follow Tesla, you will most likely fall into the trap of "who learns and who dies". In this way, the fighting methods and strategies proposed by Comrade Mao Zedong against the anti-Japanese base areas behind enemy lines are still valid in China's automobile industry. Here it is:
You hit yours, I hit mine.
Of course, these well-known eight words are preceded by another eight words: "first hit the weak, then hit the strong." Isn't this Nio already announced last year that it will surpass Lexus in sales in 2023.
If it goes public, it has to be delivered, and NIO can't afford to drag it out
Of course, according to NIO's narrative logic, it is certainly right to build more NIO House in order to establish user awareness of NIO's "high-end brand" in the minds of more people. But everyone should also be aware of a problem: a larger area, richer functions and a larger staff system of a single store are bound to bring higher operating and management costs to the enterprise. This is obviously another challenge for NIO, which aims to achieve break-even in 2024.
For this company, the more burning problem is poor production capacity and product lead time. Simply put, the time from the release of NIO models to delivery is too long.
As NIO's first two sedan products, ET7 and ET5 caused a sensation and received a large number of orders at the beginning of their launch. However, one of the two cars took more than a year to deliver, and the other had a delivery period of nearly 9 months. What's more, in 2022, when the two cars are on the market, the prevention and control policies have greatly affected the stability of the supply chain. After starting delivery, the ET7 and ET5 lines often fail to reach production. Due to the lockdown, quality engineers at Shanghai-based NIO were unable to go to the Hefei plant in person for production and debugging. This directly led to problems with the quality of ET7 and ET5 products and triggered a recall.
In fact, NIO's production capacity climbing problem exists in the mother's womb. The author communicated with Qin Lihong on this issue when NIO just released the original ES8 in 2018. He admits that the disadvantage of the order-based production and direct sales model is that NIO cannot deliver new cars to users when the popularity is at its highest. This is a huge waste for the friendly public opinion environment at the beginning of the product launch.
But the problem is that the ideal car solves this challenge very well. On the original product Ideal ONE, it will take nearly 1 year from release to delivery. On the ideal L7, which was launched on February 8, the time from placing an order to picking up the car was controlled to a minimum of 2 months. Such handy, on-call production capacity is largely the basic condition to ensure that each car can become a hit.
Today, the ET5 pick-up cycle has finally been shortened to about three weeks
However, the second-generation ES8 released by NIO at the end of last year will not be delivered until June this year at the latest, which is the same as the original ES8 released in 2017. This makes people question what substantial progress NIO's production and supply chain management has made in recent years.
In this regard, Qin Lihong also elaborated on the reasons why NIO did this. Because NIO Day is set at the end of the year or the beginning of the year, the timing of the release is relatively fixed, and the timing of the product cannot be adjusted accordingly. Next, they release products more intensively and take the product from release to delivery as short as possible.
"We will have one or two more models from launch to delivery before the EC7 and ES8 are delivered." Qin Lihong said.
Indeed, NIO needed a shorter and faster pace of product delivery. Otherwise, even if NIO House is driven all over the country, users can't pay the car when they place an order, and it will be in vain.
Written at the end:
As a person who has been observing NIO for more than 6 years, the author has felt deeply since NIO Day in 2022 that NIO is starting to get bored.
Yes, from matryoshka products to various strategies that follow the established plan. NIO has lost its initial freshness many times and has become normal and stable.
Intuitively, there is a lack of surprises.
But with an industry or market, from creation to development, "boredom" is the inevitable result. Today, when the penetration rate of new energy vehicles has steadily exceeded 25% per month, what we are witnessing is actually more of an industry's "from 10-100" process. And in it, waves and challenges begin to be hidden below the surface of the sea. The effects of undercurrents take longer to be detected.
Thinking about it this way, NIO, which has no surprises, is also worth continuing to pay attention to.