Li Bin, it's time to attract investment

It turned out that Li Bin still had such an identity.

At the recent NIO Intelligent Manufacturing Open Day, Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of NIO, appeared, and he talked about the cooperation between NIO and Hefei City, revealing a detail: Li Bin, the founder of NIO, has another identity

Senior Investment Promotion Commissioner of Hefei City.

In recent years, with the help of NIO, 40 or 50 companies have landed in Hefei, which can be called the "best investment specialist". At the scene, Qin Lihong joked: "Li Bin's salary in the Hefei municipal government is even higher than that in Weilai." ”

Seeing that Li Bin was busy attracting investment, it is estimated that many investment institutions feel the same way. Since the beginning of this year, many investment institutions have taken up the task of attracting investment from local governments, and investors seem to have become non-staff personnel for investment promotion.

Li Bin did to attract investment

Brought in the fellow king to pass on the blessings

A native of Anqing, Anhui, the story of Li Bin and Hefei will start from 2020.

At that time, the market value of NIO, which had just landed on the US stock market for more than a year, was bleak, and almost all investors lost a lot, and Li Bin was once called "the worst person in 2019". Then the new crown epidemic broke out in early 2020, NIO continued to lose money, and Li Bin fell into the most difficult situation since starting his business.

Regarding this past, Li Bin once revealed in a CCTV interview that in fact, before cooperating with Hefei, he had negotiated cooperation in 18 cities, and in the end, only Hefei reached out. The cooperation between the two parties has been very rapid, with NIO and Hefei in January 2020 beginning formal contact, signing a framework agreement on February 25, followed by an equity investment agreement on April 29.

According to the investment agreement, NIO China has received a strategic investment of 7 billion yuan from Hefei state-owned assets and will set up its headquarters in Hefei. It was this investment that brought NIO back to life, and then the situation reversed, and the stock price soared several times, and Hefei was called "the most bullish venture capital city".

"Hefei supported us when we needed it most. NIO is like a 'patient' to be helped by Hefei, and at that critical moment, we, the 'patient', only need to 'get an injection' to get better immediately, and Hefei has done the same. Li Bin, who is originally from Anhui, sighed in public more than once.

Talking about the process of investing in Weilai, Li Hongzhuo, chairman of Hefei Construction Investment Holding (Group) Co., Ltd., once revealed in a CCTV program that Hefei was carrying out four fronts at the same time: first, a professional team was organized to conduct all-round research and judgment on Weilai's technology, supply chain and market; Second, pay close attention to the country's policy orientation and provide some support for decision-making; Third, a professional organization was commissioned to conduct comprehensive due diligence on the enterprise through legal and financial affairs; Fourth, the specific investor conducts detailed, thorough and rigorous business negotiations with NIO.

NIO, which has survived the crisis, also began to give back, and signed a "Deepening Cooperation Agreement" with Hefei in February 2021, planning to jointly build the Xinqiao Intelligent Electric Vehicle Industrial Park. In Li Bin's view, for an enterprise and industry, the best support is to build a complete industrial cluster, because industrial clusters will bring talent gathering, industrial chain, supply chain and market gathering.

Subsequently, Li Bin also began to frequently call for Hefei in public, "I see everyone now, I have to tell him, 'You come to Hefei quickly', I am Hefei's volunteer investment consultant." ”

Among them, the story of Li Bin connecting BYD and Hefei is well talked. A report by People's Daily Online mentioned that after the completion of NIO's Anhui production base in 2020, at an automotive industry conference, Wang Chuanfu, the founder of BYD, who is also a native of Anhui, grabbed Li Bin and asked: "How are you in Anhui?" ”

Li Bin introduced Hefei's business environment to Wang Chuanfu, and briefly said a few data around the company's efficiency improvement and operation improvement, and Wang Chuanfu knew it in his heart. In August 2021, BYD officially broke ground on its park in Hefei. From signing the contract to starting construction, it took only 42 days. Just 10 months later, the first vehicle of BYD's Hefei project rolled off the assembly line.

According to the "Investment Promotion Internal Reference", since the introduction of new energy vehicle business in Hefei, Anhui's new energy vehicle sales account for 12% of the country, with a number of vehicle enterprises such as JAC, Weilai, Volkswagen Anhui, BYD, Changan, Ankai, etc., and more than 500 industrial chain enterprises.

To date, NIO, which has recovered its vitality, has set a record high of 55,432 quarterly deliveries in the third quarter of this year. The 49-year-old Li Bin has also changed from a volunteer investment consultant to a senior investment promotion commissioner in Hefei, achieving a good story of government-enterprise cooperation.

VCs have also become non-staff personnel for investment promotion

"Anqing Daily" has reported on the Hefei investment promotion team, mentioning that the Hefei Investment Promotion Bureau has a group of hundreds of project investment personnel, according to the integrated circuit, software artificial intelligence and other 18 key industry classification, each person is responsible for the study of specific industries, more than 200 days a year in the country to find a variety of worthy of investment projects.

This scene is familiar with the state of investors.

Thinking of the ridicule of my VC friends around me, this year I seem to have become a non-staff member of the government's investment promotion.

When state-owned LPs have become the main force, there have been some new changes in the venture capital ecosystem. Even though many government guidance funds have loosened the requirements for reinvestment, they pay more attention to the ability of the GP industry to land. It is no exaggeration to say that as long as the RMB fund is raised, the guidance fund cannot be bypassed, and if the guidance fund is taken, it is necessary to meet the biggest demand of the other party to return to investment, or attract investment.

Some IR friends joked that they saw that the institutions around them were preparing to set up a chief round-trip investment officer, that is, a chief round-trip investment officer (CRO), to supervise the return and investment promotion tasks. Some investment institutions are divided into a group to attract investment, which is internally called the "Ministry of Government Resources".

"Recently, we have set up a new position to be responsible for investment promotion and return to investment." Joyce talks about the latest change within the organization.

She works in the post-investment department of a well-known dual-currency fund in China, and when she met last year, she was still preparing for the first RMB fund of the fundraising institution. "How much capacity can the project have? How much employment and tax revenue can it drive? After visiting a circle of RMB LPs, Joyce kept receiving these questions.

A few months ago, a well-known venture capital institution in South China opened a new position to recruit senior managers of industry empowerment, and the job requirements are very clear: to help investment institutions invest in the industry landing, to help government LPs attract investment, and to complete the requirements for fund return investment and industry landing. The job requirement is to have more than 5 years of experience in government investment promotion and industrial landing.

Quietly, investment promotion has gradually become a top priority for investment institutions. From investment institutions to portfolio companies, everyone invariably appears in the wave of investment promotion.

Investment promotion, the hottest scene this year

All these are just a microcosm of the current efforts to attract investment across the country.

An interesting detail is that when local government investment promotion personnel start the business travel mode, make promotions, visit enterprises, discuss cooperation, and take the initiative to attack, the Greater Bay Area has become a collective check-in place, and even brought fire to the Shenzhen offices in various places.

The "fund investment" model has swept away, which has allowed us to see that industrial funds are blooming everywhere across the country.

I remember that in April this year, Shanghai also set up a series of industrial investment funds with a total scale of 100 billion yuan, focusing on the three leading industries of integrated circuits, biomedicine, and artificial intelligence, as well as the four new track industries of intelligent terminals, green and low-carbon, digital economy, and metaverse. It is clearly mentioned that it will be mainly used to serve the implementation of investment promotion projects and smooth industrial investment and financing channels.

Chongqing is also impressive. In May this year, the Chongqing Industrial Investment Fund of Funds was established, with a total scale of 200 billion yuan, which was implemented in two phases, with the first phase subscribed and contributed 80 billion yuan; Subsequently, in October, the Western (Chongqing) Science City Industrial Development Fund was released, with a total scale of 30 billion yuan and an initial phase of 10 billion yuan, which clearly pointed out that the government allocation ratio of up to 90% of the industrial investment fund and 50% of the science and technology innovation fund was given to ease the fund-raising pressure of investment institutions.

Coincidentally, in July this year, Changsha China Merchants Fund was officially registered and established, with a fund scale of 10 billion yuan. The main goal of the fund is to invest in projects that have a significant impact on Changsha's industrial development and the construction of district and county parks, and strive to attract more high-quality enterprises to settle in Changsha.

In addition, Guangdong, Anhui, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, and Hubei have also launched super fund groups focusing on emerging industries. Bidding farewell to the past "spread the net" investment, more and more local government guidance funds have begun to attach great importance to the leverage role of "fund investment", and play the guiding role of financial funds in a more active way.

This was followed by the phenomenon of hot investment. Under the reinvestment mechanism, the government guidance fund has become the most powerful hub for investment promotion, and investment institutions and invested companies have unexpectedly become one of the protagonists in this investment promotion tide.

At the end of the day, it's a battle for new industries.

Experience shows that an industrial cluster can attract enterprises from the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, all links of the supply chain and related parties of the innovation chain to settle in and agglomerate, thus forming an industrial cluster effect. This strong industrial cluster effect can bring huge economic contributions, and even subvert the local industrial layout, nourishing a "trillion city".

Without industry, it is difficult to say that there is a future. This is not only a major reshuffle of the city, but also a historical opportunity for the city to "change its life". Of course, no one wants to be an outcast.