Chairman of Changan: The name of the joint venture with Huawei is tentative, and the smart car model is risky
(Text/Zhang Jiadong Editor/Zhang Guangkai)
On January 16, the 2024 Changan Automobile Global Partner Conference was officially held.
Zhu Huarong, chairman of Changan Automobile
Zhu Huarong, Chairman of Changan Automobile, took the lead in reviewing and interpreting the operation in 2023 and the strategic cooperation reached with NIO, Huawei, Ganfeng Lithium and other companies since November 2023, as well as Changan Automobile's strategic planning for 2024 and the future.
One of the most eye-catching is that Zhu Huarong talked about the details and concept of the cooperation between Changan Automobile and Huawei for the first time.
Zhu Huarong mentioned that Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, led a team to communicate with Changan Automobile in August last year, and both sides hoped to help the rise of China's intelligent automobile industry through cooperation, so it took only 3 months from the proposal of cooperation intention to the final signing of the investment cooperation memorandum.
For the new joint venture, Zhu Huarong said that the new company is tentatively named "Newcool", and will be mainly engaged in the research and development, design, production, sales and service of automotive intelligent systems and component solutions in the future, and its business scope includes seven major fields, including automotive intelligent driving solutions, automotive intelligent cockpit, intelligent vehicle digital platform, intelligent vehicle cloud, AR-HUD and intelligent car lights.
At present, the two parties are working on the details of the transaction, including the establishment of a new company. At the same time, Zhu Huarong also pointed out that the new company will be a public open platform serving the whole industry.
This means that the final strategic cooperation between the two parties may be open to the whole industry, and the new joint venture may also change its role as a technology supplier.
If the joint venture will indeed carry out business according to Zhu Huarong's description in the future, then Huawei's voice in the vehicle technology industry chain will undoubtedly change compared with the current strength.
In recent years, there have been many cases of joint ventures between car companies and technical service providers in the face of the advance layout of intelligent transformation. Meizu and Polestar's Meizu and Geely and Baidu's cooperation are typical representatives.
However, without exception, in these cooperations, the vehicle business still dominates the market, while the technology provider is more of a supplier of intelligent characteristics.
From this point of view, Zhu Huarong's statement on the new joint venture can also be regarded as Changan Automobile's most direct attitude towards Huawei's technology empowerment.
Although the current hot sales of models such as Wenjie and Zhijie have provided a strong voice for Huawei's automotive business, in terms of financial performance, the car BU has always been Huawei's only loss-making business unit, which has also become the fundamental reason for Huawei's car BU to become independent and cooperate with car companies.
In other words, for Huawei's automotive business, it is imperative to expand the circle of friends and form a large-scale intelligent technology as soon as possible to amortize costs, while Changan Automobile is to prevent "losing its soul" on the premise of improving intelligence.
In fact, in the era of intelligence, Changan Automobile is not the first time to face the problem of the soul of the car.
At this conference, Zhu Huarong also mentioned his views on Huawei's automotive business model: as the only vehicle partner of Huawei's HI model, AVATR and the entire Changan Automobile will continue to choose the HI model.
He believes that there are three reasons for choosing the HI model instead of the smart car model: first, under the strategic layout of Changan Automobile, the car must be its own brand, and the HI model can allow Changan Automobile to maintain the brand label; second, the HI model is more in line with the national industrial policy and business laws; and the third is that the definition of product liability under the smart car model may harm the fundamental interests of users.
"In the HI mode, Changan and AVATR will be responsible for any problems with the product, which will not only meet the requirements of the national industrial policy, but also meet the needs of users. Zhu Huarong added.
Based on the above three reasons, as well as the excellent situation of the development of overseas markets, Zhu Huarong also made it clear that based on several problems of international competition, Changan Automobile will also expand cooperation with other advantageous resources in the industry, fully integrate and compete fairly in the international market.
Zhu Huarong particularly emphasized that car companies should have a bottom line in their marketing skills when releasing products. Changan Automobile is happy to be a car company leading the healthy development of the industry, and he appealed, "Changan's partners should have basic values and the spirit of social responsibility, and do not mislead consumers." The value of the brand is ultimately reflected in the most real value embodiment for users, rather than being built on the premise of "touting". ”
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