Another car company officially announced that it had joined, and Huawei had really become the "Alliance of the Frustrated" in the car circle?
At the end of last week, VOYAH and Huawei's official Weibo posts each posted a Weibo: See you on Monday! The two Weibo posts stirred up a thousand waves, which can be said to have whetted the appetite of the outside world.
On January 22, the suspense was revealed, and the two sides announced that they would cooperate on a number of models, and the focus of the cooperation was on "intelligence": through the innovation and exploration of cooperative models in multiple fields, the large-scale commercialization of intelligent technology will be accelerated.
In the past few years, VOYAH has been on the edge in terms of sales and brand, and the Cialis behind the Wenjie brand is also unknown, so some netizens ridiculed Huawei for forming an "alliance of the frustrated".
Intelligence is Huawei's strength and weakness, and the cooperation between the two parties seems to be a matter of course. But in fact, at this point in time, the complementary advantages of products may not be enough to describe the market pattern faced by Huawei and Dongfeng.
Why does VOYAH need Huawei?
The most direct reason for why VOYAH needs Huawei is that the two parties have been listed in the cooperation announcement - intelligence. But at the market level, it's not all.
As a high-end brand under Dongfeng Motor, VOYAH has been tepid for a long time in the past, and it can even be said to be sluggish, with sales of only 19,400 units in 2022 and less than 2,000 units per month.
In 2023, VOYAH CEO Lu Fang set a target of 50,000 units per year, but until the first half of 2023, its total sales volume will only be 13,400 units, with an average monthly sales of only 2,232 units. There is a big gap with NIO and Ideal at the same price.
Until August this year, the new VOYAH FREE was launched, and the starting price dropped by 66,700 yuan compared with the old model, from 300,000 yuan to 266,900 yuan.
Subsequently, the new VOYAH Chasing Light and VOYAH Dreamer were launched one after another, and they also continued the strategy of big price reductions. The price of the new VOYAH Chasing Light starts at 266,900 yuan, which is 119,000 yuan lower than the old model, and the starting price of the new VOYAH Dreamer is 100,000 yuan lower than the old model.
Even in 2023, when the price war is in full swing, the price reduction of the three VOYAH models can be called "unprecedented" - not only the price reduction is large, but also there are many models, and the price of the three models is more than 60,000 yuan.
The market also voted for VOYAH's price cut. Starting in September last year, VOYAH's monthly sales finally exceeded the 5,000 mark, and sales continued to grow in the following months until December sales exceeded 10,000. As a result, VOYAH will sell 50,000 units in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 160%.
However, the hidden concern of exchanging price for volume is that it is difficult to provide long-term sales support and brand premium for VOYAH with large price cuts. On the other hand, even if the VOYAH model is already very cost-effective at the same price, its intelligence level is still not high compared with the new power model, especially compared with the ideal car with a very high price and positioning overlap, the intelligence is obviously insufficient.
The same is true for Dongfeng Motor, the company behind VOYANT.
In 2023, Dongfeng Motor Group's cumulative sales will be 2,088,200 units, a year-on-year decrease of 15.27%. Among them, the cumulative annual sales of passenger cars were 1,744,800, a year-on-year decrease of 19%. It was one of the car companies with the largest decline in sales among domestic brands last year.
In March last year, the first round of price war for fuel vehicles was started by Dongfeng Citroen, and the discount of 60,000 yuan at that time once made many people from other provinces go to Hubei to buy cars.
Similarly, the lack of intelligence is also a weak link of Dongfeng Motor. So, Huawei came into the picture.
From the perspective of Dongfeng Motor Group, if the cooperation between VOYAH and Huawei can be carried out perfectly, it is equivalent to a sample for the group, and if the effect is good, it is not excluded that Dongfeng Motor will join Huawei's "circle of friends" in more depth.
Previously, Yu Chengdong, Huawei's executive director, CEO of the terminal BG, and CEO of the intelligent vehicle solution BU, publicly stated that the new car-making forces represented by brands such as NIO and Li have their own pursuits, and will not choose to cooperate with Huawei for the sake of market value and control. He said, "Who will choose us? Of course, those traditional car companies will not choose us if they are afraid of losing their souls. ”
In the context of a sharp decline in sales, Dongfeng Motor may only be able to temporarily forget the trouble of "losing the soul", after all, if the market is lost, it is not only the "soul" that is lost.
Huawei joins vertically and horizontally, knocking Chang'an
In the second half of last year, with the release of the new M7, Zhijie S7, and Wenjie M9 one after another, Huawei was promoted to the top of the car circle, and Huawei's "circle of friends" is also expanding.
On November 25 last year, Huawei and Changan Automobile signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to establish a new company focusing on the R&D, production, sales, and service of intelligent driving systems and incremental components for intelligent connected vehicles, and to open up its equity to the outside world.
On January 16, Huawei registered a new company, Shenzhen Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., and there are market sources that the company is the new company, in addition to Changan, Cialis, JAC and Chery, Dongfeng, FAW and other companies are expected to invest in the new company.
However, although it seems that Huawei's "circle of friends" is growing, there are also cracks.
According to Jiemian News, on January 17, Zhu Huarong, chairman of Changan Automobile, publicly stated at the Changan Automobile 2024 Global Partner Conference that Huawei's smart car model (Hongmeng Zhixing) will eventually harm the interests of users, and criticized suppliers for only focusing on their own profits will lead to the long-term development of the industry.
Zhu Huarong said that under the strategic layout of Changan Automobile, it is necessary to make its own brand to make a car, and the HI model can allow Changan Automobile to maintain its brand label, which is also more in line with the national industrial policy and business rules. However, the smart car model has a confused definition of product liability, which will ultimately harm the interests of users.
The directiveness of these words could not be more obvious. At present, AVATAR, a subsidiary of Changan, is the only car brand that adopts Huawei's HI model, but its marketing and core technology are moving closer to Huawei. As a brand established by Chang'an, CATL, and Huawei, AVATR is dominated by Chang'an in terms of equity, but its brand power is obviously biased towards Huawei.
But Chang'an is not Cialis and Dongfeng. In 2023, Changan Automobile's sales will reach 2,553,100 units, a year-on-year increase of 8.82%, of which the sales of its own brands will be 2,097,800 units, an increase of 11.91% year-on-year, accounting for more than eighty percent of the total sales. In the passenger car market, Changan is second only to BYD and ranks second in sales of its own brand passenger cars.
For Chang'an, it is obviously irrational to completely hand over the "soul" to Huawei under such a "good situation". Therefore, the public statements of Chang'an executives can also be seen that they still have a considerable right to speak in Huawei's "circle of friends", which is completely different from Cialis completely ceding its "soul" to Huawei.
In this case, if another powerful partner joins the "circle of friends", it can weaken Chang'an's right to speak to a certain extent, or knock on the intention of "restless" from the side, that is, tell other collaborators - you don't cooperate, and some people cooperate.
This is the "vertical and horizontal" of the automobile market.
Although Dongfeng Motor has not been satisfactory in the past two years, it is still a state-owned enterprise with a million-level automobile production capacity, and it is still a rare high-quality partner for Huawei.
Huawei's "circle of friends" is easy to enter, but it is not easy to win
VOYAH and Huawei have not made it clear whether the cooperation between the two parties will be in HI mode or HarmonyOS Zhixing mode (smart car), but industry insiders generally speculate that the HI mode will be the mainstay, similar to the technical support provided by Huawei to AVATAR.
What is certain is that for both Huawei and VOYAH, this is a win-win situation for each side of the world. But for other car companies in Huawei's "circle of friends", I am afraid that it will soon face a new problem that netizens ridicule from time to time - if everyone has the blessing of Huawei technology, is it equivalent to nothing?
In other words, when car companies have Huawei technology, everyone's competition has returned to the original point, how can we make differentiation and win competing products?
For example, Zhijie S7 and AVATR 12 are both pure electric C-class sedans in which Huawei is deeply involved, and there are many overlaps in price and product selling points, for example, they both focus on Huawei ADS 2.0 high-end intelligent driving, but the "Chinese content" of Zhijie S7 is much higher than that of AVATR 12.
As a result, those users who are attracted to Huawei will inevitably be diverted between the two.
And these are just two models, if there are more models blessed by Huawei in the future to join the battle? Huawei will naturally not lose, after all, whoever sells is selling, but can car companies agree?
The price range of the VOYAH FREE coincides with that of the M7 and is an extended range model, while the price range of the VOYAH FREE also coincides with that of the S7. Perhaps in the short term, the technology and brand power brought by Huawei can help VOYAH to a certain extent, but in the long run, whether VOYAH needs Huawei may have to put a question mark.