Huawei, which was once regarded as a key learning object by Li Xiang, may now have to put down its body and learn from its ideals.
Huawei, which holds the titles of "the fastest monthly sales of more than 10,000 units" and "the fastest delivery of 100,000 vehicles", is increasingly unable to sell cars. Last year, it once caught up with the ideal in monthly sales, and in 2023, sales have plummeted, and it is difficult to return to the threshold of monthly sales exceeding 10,000.
In July, new energy vehicle companies once again ushered in the moment of the announcement of monthly sales report cards, the ideal monthly delivery exceeded 30,000 for the first time, and 32,575 vehicles were sold in June, but the other side of the question has not yet released June sales.
However, a data that can be referred to is that Cialis sold 5,668 vehicles in June, a year-on-year decrease of 25.99%. According to the past data, the final delivery of the transcript is generally consistent with Cialis.
From January to May this year, only 21,873 vehicles were delivered. This also means that if you sell hard for half a year, you may not be able to work for one month.
Yu Chengdong is not unaware of the crisis that cars are becoming more and more difficult to sell. According to Cialis insiders, "(March) Huawei changed the AITO question to HUAWEI question, in fact, it is also a lot of sales pressure, and the whole situation has changed some times this year." It (Huawei) sales can't go up, and it can't be negotiated when it goes out. ”
However, Yu Chengdong's planning to borrow the Huawei brand to further bind the world to boost sales was stopped by Ren Zhengfei with a paper. After the Huawei logo can no longer be used in car brands, Yu Chengdong has some new moves.
The mobile phone store sales strategy pioneered by Huawei is ushering in a new round of adjustment, and Qianjie has begun to further learn from new forces such as ideals.
Recently, Huawei's smart car business is rumored to be building independent car sales stores different from the current mobile phone stores, for the sale of Huawei smart car ecological alliance models, including the AITO series currently on sale, as well as Chery, JAC and BAIC and other follow-up models that are planning cooperation with Huawei.
The two sales and service systems of Huawei and Cialis, which were originally independent of each other, have also begun to try to integrate. Previously, many car owners have complained about the after-sales service level of Cialis, believing that it does not match the high-end car brand image that Huawei wants to create.
In order to solve the above problems, Cialis and Huawei recently jointly issued an announcement to establish the "AITO Joint Working Group on Boundary Sales". Huawei responded that the establishment of the working group has nothing to do with the right of both parties to speak, and the move is aimed at improving customer experience.
In August last year, Qianjie ushered in the brand's glorious moment, its M7 defeated the ideal ONE in one fell swoop, and won the high-end extended-range SUV, which also had the controversial remarks of Li Xiang's "the release and operation of the M7 directly crippled the ideal ONE" and "he was once worried that he couldn't sleep".
But the more real reason is that the ideal at that time was in the replacement node of the new and old models. With the ideal L9/L8 successively launched and delivered. Just one month later, the ideal monthly sales returned to 10,000 units and once again exceeded the threshold.
Attack and defense are easy, and now it is Huawei's turn and Yu Chengdong can't sleep.
A
Treating competitors as his teachers is one of the ways Ren manages Huawei. This set of principles was transferred by Yu Chengdong to Huawei's automotive business.
At the beginning of the birth of the M7 model, it was questioned by the outside world about the "pixel-level imitation ideal ONE", the two models are also focused on extended-range SUVs, the same positioning of three rows of six-seat large space, and the price range is highly overlapping - ideal ONE is priced at 349,800 yuan, and the M7 is priced at 31.98-379,800 yuan, which is 30,000 yuan higher and lower than the former.
Yu Chengdong even shouted at the product launch to thank Li Xiang for his "efforts and contributions in exploring the extended range model".
Under the pressure of the questioning world, the ideal, which was not in a good situation at that time, began to learn Huawei with great fanfare.
After dealing with Huawei, Li Xiang said that he "quickly learned from Huawei internally, from product development, sales and service, supply and manufacturing, to organizational management."
Especially in terms of organization, Li Auto has comprehensively learned from Huawei and upgraded itself to a matrix organization. Li Xiang asked the management team to buy no less than ten public books from Huawei. By learning Huawei, according to Li Xiang's words, "I can fight positional warfare and say goodbye to guerrilla warfare once and for all." ”
Li Xiang
The IPD (Integrated Product Development) process has become a key focus for Huawei. According to Li Xiang, he regards process change as a first-hand project to promote, "I take the number one position of each business line to solve this problem, rather than we find a group of experts in this area and let them do it themselves." ”
This is almost a copy of Ren Zhengfei's internal IPD promotion at Huawei. From the beginning, Ren Zhengfei strongly supported the reform of IPD business, and repeatedly stressed the importance of IPD to Huawei, "IPD is related to the future survival and development of the company... As far as IPD is concerned, if you learn to understand, you will go to work, and if you do not understand, you will be removed, we are this principle, otherwise we cannot rectify it. ”
After introducing IPD into Li Auto, Li Xiang further established SPDT (Model and Intelligent Product Development Group), which is responsible for the commercial success of each model, and set up PDT (Product Development Group) for each car, which runs through the whole process of a car from definition to sales.
However, the implementation of IPD by car companies has not been smooth sailing. Some insiders told Alphabet that IPD was learned by Huawei from IBM, and the theory of technology companies used in the automotive industry should be combined with the laws of car manufacturing, and the team also needs to adjust, run-in, and adapt according to their actual situation.
According to insiders close to Li Auto, the "cannibalism" between the new model Li L8 and the old model Li ONE last year played a decisive role not by founder Li Xiang, but by the IPD (Integrated Product Development) team. In essence, this is not the result of Li Xiang's personal decision, or a problem with business management.
B
However, the new energy vehicle market is changing, and the outbreak of the M7 is like a flash in the pan. Entering 2023, under the continuous surge in ideal monthly sales, the world has been muted one after another.
One of the main reasons why the market cannot be sold comes from the impact of the price reduction wave opened by Tesla. In early January, Musk made the largest price cut in Tesla's history, with the price of the Model 3 base model falling to 229,900 yuan and the Model Y base model to 259,900 yuan.
According to car fans, Tesla sales said that the strongest SUV competitor in the same class of Model Y is only the ideal L8, "basically compared to the potential owner of L8, except for the financial problem can also be dealt with, everything else can not be stopped." ”
According to Li Peng, a sales person in a Beijing store, last year, the standard version of the M5 EV was 288,600 yuan, and the internal benchmark model was Model Y, but after the latter price was reduced, the price was already nearly 30,000 yuan cheaper than the M5 EV. A prospective owner who had been in frequent contact to book a test drive of the M5 EV waited until the show car arrived at the store and learned that the other party had ordered the Model Y when he called the other party to confirm the test drive time.
BAO car studio Bao Jiaxiang told the alphabet list that in addition to the price factor, the shortcomings of the original design level also make some prospective car owners hesitate, such as the front face of the boundary and Porsche have many similarities.
According to Liu Ming, an analyst in the new energy industry, a large part of the average monthly performance of last year came from Huawei's brand endorsement, but "to measure whether a product is competitive, it depends on whether its sales can be sustained for about 10 months." ”
After the feelings, it is still the product power that ultimately determines whether the model can continue to sell well. In the case of the M7, as soon as it was released last year, some people questioned its suspected low-end model Dongfeng Fengguang iX7 with a shell of more than 100,000 yuan. What's worse, the M7 was exposed to some safety design flaws in the later stage of the China Insurance Research Institute test, and could not pass the 25% small offset collision.
Qianjie M7 Source: AITO Qianjie Auto official website
More intuitive and real sales data also once again proves that the product is king. In August last year after the release of the M7, the monthly sales of ideal ONE plummeted from more than 10,000 vehicles to more than 4,000 vehicles, which became the core evidence that Li Xiang's ideal was disabled by Huawei.
But the real situation is that at that time, Li Xiang announced in advance that the ideal ONE would be discontinued and the new model ideal L8 would be released. It is not so much that Huawei has embezzled the ideal sales share, but that the ideal L8 "backstabs" the ideal ONE. After experiencing a trough of 4,571 monthly sales in August last year, only one month later, the ideal monthly sales climbed again to 10,123 units, and has remained in the 10,000-vehicle club camp since then.
In Bao Jiaxiang's view, in terms of building trust between new energy brands and car owners, it is also a bad move. After Tesla cut prices in early January, Li Xiang quickly made it clear that he would not follow Tesla to reduce prices, and believed that medium and large SUVs should be set at the current price to be reasonable.
In contrast, Qianjie became the first domestic car brand to follow up since Tesla's price cut. While winning some orders by reducing prices, Qianjie also paid the price of the owner's reduced trust in the brand.
C
In addition to Yu Chengdong's leadership to boost sales, expanding the scale is also a problem that Li Xiang needs to worry about all the time.
Even if it is as powerful as Tesla, Musk still regards scale as his core competitiveness. In December when participating in a Twitter space discussion organized by many special fans and Tesla long fund managers, Musk even aggressively said that during the recession, Tesla will gradually reduce its profit margin, and does not rule out the possibility of turning from positive to negative in order to ensure the achievement of the annual sales target of 20 million vehicles in 2030.
At a recent automotive industry forum, Yu Chengdong also talked about the importance of scale, believing that in the future automotive industry knockout competition, there will be a situation where small and medium-sized enterprises will be merged. "(In the future) the annual output of leading car companies will not reach 5 million or even 10 million vehicles, and it will be difficult for enterprises to gain a foothold."
Li Xiang set a new three-year plan for Ideal, that is, from 2023 to 2025, the ideal product matrix will be expanded to one super flagship model, five extended-range electric models and five pure electric models, and "achieve the first sales volume of all luxury brands in the Chinese market (that is, the first sales of all passenger cars above 200,000 yuan), and the delivery volume will reach 1.6 million units per year." ”
On the way to the pursuit of expansion, Yu Chengdong, like Li Xiang, has set their sights on the mid-to-high-end market of more than 200,000 yuan, and both want to replace BBA. After the launch of the M5 in February last year, Yu Chengdong said, "Give Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi 300,000 to 500,000 cars space, and we will completely drive out BBA within the price range of 500,000." ”
Li Auto has already decided to add pure electric models to the product matrix from 2024 - their first pure electric model is a full-size MPV, named MEGA. Li Xiang claimed that "MEGA will become the number one sales of all passenger cars with more than 500,000 units, regardless of energy form and body form." ”
But now, Yu Chengdong and Li Xiang have ushered in new challenges. Yu Chengdong's originally proposed road of brand empowerment was unexpectedly stopped by a document from Ren Zhengfei. Without the blessing of Huawei's halo, asking whether the world can really establish the image of a high-end brand, from the current sales data, it is inevitable to worry.
With the ideal of great success in range extender, there are also many uncertainties about whether the successful experience can be replicated on pure electric models.
According to an estimate given by Credit Suisse Research, about 100 new energy vehicles will be launched in China in 2023, more than 30 more than last year, but the demand is not optimistic. Morgan Stanley mentioned in the report that in 2022, due to the impact of the subsidy policy, demand has been overdrawn to a certain extent. "China's current penetration rate of pure electric vehicles has exceeded 20%, and it is difficult to see a similar growth rate next year."
In a new energy vehicle market with slowing growth, how to seek a breakthrough rising point for their respective brands is becoming a common test for Yu Chengdong and Li Xiang.