Relying on the "cost-effective" route, Leapmotor has successively launched four products, S01, T03, C11 and C01, and successfully stood out from the fiercely competitive new energy market.
Looking back at 2022, Leapmotor delivered a total of 111168 units throughout the year, a year-on-year increase of 154%, such data is still good in the "new force" echelon. However, as the fourth listed new car company, Zerorun failed to take advantage of the IPO to raise sales to another new height.
After the Spring Festival, major car companies released sales reports for January 2023, of which Zerorun sold a total of 1,139 vehicles in January, down 85.9% year-on-year and 86.59% month-on-month, ranking last in the sales list of new automakers in that month. In response to the decline, car companies have given a unified explanation: "Spring Festival factors".
Affected by the Spring Festival holiday, the decline in deliveries is understandable, but is the Spring Festival really the "culprit" that affects the decline in sales?
According to the "Complaint Content of the Auto Complaint Network", in January this year alone, there were 6 cases of complaint and rights protection against Zerorun C01. Among the problems include power "power battery", "steering system", "body and chassis", etc. The fault problem is more scattered, and there is no common problem, and some of them involve pre-sales and after-sales service problems... I will not list them all here, and if you are interested, you can search by yourself.
Car owner complaints: inducing lock orders, false publicity?
It is worth noting that among the six complaints and rights protection cases related to Leap C01, the latest complaint is titled: "Leap C01 sales induce customers to lock up the car without refund of deposit and falsely advertise the chassis suspension material, seriously defrauding consumers".
In communication with the owner Mr. Sun, I learned that the owner, Mr. Sun, said that after the price of the Zerorun C01 was announced at the end of September last year, he ordered the vehicle and paid a deposit of 5,000 yuan, and then the vehicle order was locked. Mr. Sun said that the configuration could not be changed or unsubscribed after the sale was not informed of the lock order, and at the same time urged the lock order and said that he could pick up the car first.
At the same time, the owner Mr. Sun said: one month after the order, the sales notice that the vehicle has arrived at the store and can be picked up, but the car has not actually started at all; At the same time, the relevant warranty of the vehicle, the purchase subsidy, etc. did not match the publicity information, and then the request for refund of the deposit and compensation was submitted to the company, but they were all rejected.
After the feedback from the store sales, the other party said: At the beginning, Mr. Sun was only told to order the vehicle, and did not let the customer carry out the lock order operation, and Mr. Sun's appeal was also feedback to the manufacturer, and the relevant regulations stipulated that the lock order could not be returned, so he rejected Mr. Sun's request.
At the same time, Xiaobian also contacted the official customer service of Zerorun, the official customer service said: the vehicle ordering is operated by the customer himself, and there will be a prompt pop-up window for the transition from the order to the lock order status, and there is no way to cancel the order after confirming the order, and there is no way to cancel the order.
At present, the case of the car owner, Mr. Sun, is still being further communicated.
It is undeniable that the transaction mode similar to the order can indeed "lock" some customers, and sometimes it will backfire and cause the loss of customers, which shows that there is still room for improvement in the manufacturer's attention to the demands of car owners.
Under the shackles of "cost performance", how to achieve "turning losses into profits"
The loss of new car-making forces is relatively common, and Leap Auto has not escaped this fate.
In the blink of an eye, it has entered 2023, the competition in the new energy vehicle market is becoming more and more fierce, and the market share that once relied on the "cost-effective" route to expand its market share has gradually become the "shackles" that affect its upward development. It is true that the price-performance strategy has led to a significant increase in sales, but Leapmotor has also fallen into the red, and the loss is expanding year by year.
According to financial report data, last year's Q3 zero run revenue was 4.288 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 398.5%, but a net loss of 1.34 billion yuan, compared with a net loss of 719 million yuan in the same period last year. The cumulative loss in the past three years has exceeded 4.8 billion yuan, in other words, Zerorun is in a state of "selling one at a loss".
On the occasion of its seventh anniversary, Zerorun put forward a new slogan - "to be a user's foundry", and at the same time ushered in the "first battle of price reduction" at the beginning of 2023. As we can see, for the price war set off by Tesla, many new force brands have successively announced price reductions, the purpose is to "exchange price for volume".
At present, Leap Auto has fallen into a "dilemma": on the one hand, Leap Auto focuses on the "cost-effective" strategy, but as more new energy vehicle companies have successively reduced prices, Leap's cost-effective ratio may no longer be so prominent; On the other hand, Leap Auto is in the dilemma of losses, and if it follows the trend to reduce prices or "self-defeating", the loss will continue to expand.
In the face of sales constraints and financial losses, Zerorun has opened the layout of expanding from pure electric products to range extension products. Based on the advantages of the cost side, the trend launched the Zerorun C11 extended version as a sales booster, and the pre-sale price of the new car is: 15.98-200,000 yuan, but it is easy to smoothly achieve a headwind turnover.
If the price is aside, consumers will consider more factors when buying new energy vehicles, such as brand, service system, etc., and no longer just pay for early adopters, which is not a test for Leap Auto.
In addition, Leapmotor has been transmitting its self-research capabilities to the outside world. According to the prospectus information, its R&D investment from 2019 to 2021 was 358 million yuan, 289 million yuan and 740 million yuan, respectively, with a total of less than 1.4 billion yuan.
For some comparisons in the echelon of new forces, in fact, Zerorun's investment in research and development is not too high. At the same time, can the continuous loss for many years support the continuation of Zerorun's "global self-research"?
Electric EVs: Facts speak louder than words
Zhu Jiangming once said after the listing of Zerorun, "The main reason for choosing to go public is that we don't care about the current time period, this is a long-distance run, and there is still a long way to go." We are more concerned about doing a good job of ourselves, doing a good job in products, doing a good job in service, practicing internal strength, and the most concerned is the company's increment, and getting a lot of share as soon as possible in the process of replacing fuel vehicles with electric vehicles. ”
In the fierce competition, the competition in the new energy market entered the second half. In the process of upward development of the brand of new forces, it is inseparable from the only way to "do a good job in products and services", and the new forces still have to go a long way, and the challenge of Leap Motor may have just begun.