Produced by Flower Finance Observation
Editor丨Duozi
On March 19, 2024, Xpeng Motors announced its 2023 financial results. According to the data, Xpeng Motors delivered 60,158 electric vehicles in the fourth quarter, with revenue of 13.05 billion yuan, a big improvement over 2022, but Xpeng seems to be in a situation of "selling more and losing money".
According to the financial report, Xpeng Motors' gross profit margin for the whole year of 2023 will be negative, with a loss of 10.37 billion yuan.
As soon as this financial report came out, the Hong Kong stock of Xpeng Motors fell on March 21, falling by more than 7% at one point. According to 144 documents filed by Xpeng Motors with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Taobao China Holdings Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Alibaba, plans to sell 33 million ADS (American Depositary Receipts) of Xpeng Motors, with a total value of about US$314 million.
At the same time, Hu Xiao, managing director of Alibaba Group's strategic investment department, who previously served as a non-executive director of Xpeng Motors, has also submitted his resignation to the board of directors of Xpeng Motors, effective March 19.
There is no doubt about the importance of R&D in the new energy track, Xpeng has worked hard in this regard, and the R&D investment in 2023 will increase significantly compared with previous years, but perhaps due to market competition and other reasons, the price of Xpeng Motors' new products has not increased significantly compared with previous years, but has remained in the same range.
According to the current price reduction trend of the new energy industry, the price increase is obviously a headwind, so it should be a difficult option for Xpeng to increase profits by increasing the price of new cars. At the same time, the competition in the new energy market, which has become a red sea, is still intensifying, which is reflected in the financial report, that is, the increase in marketing expenses, which also poses a greater challenge to Xiaopeng's profitability.
Both Ideal and NIO, both of which are three small strong, have positive gross profit margins. The ideal is as high as 22.2% - not to mention that the gross profit margin of 22.2% is not good, which is really high in the new energy industry - in comparison, Xpeng Motors looks gloomy.
And this reduction is not the first time that Ali has reduced its holdings of Xiaopeng. Back in December 2023, Alibaba sold 25 million ADSs from Xpeng for a total of about $391 million. Regarding the reduction, the relevant person in charge of Alibaba Group said, "According to our own capital management goals, we sold part of our shares in Xpeng, and the shareholding was reduced from 10.2% to 7.5%. "
He Xiaopeng, Chairman and CEO of Xpeng Motors, expressed his gratitude to Alibaba Group for its support to Xpeng Motors and looked forward to continuing to maintain in-depth cooperation in the AI technology innovation ecosystem.
Xpeng Motors' market sales performance in 2023 is also unsatisfactory, the established sales target is 200,000 units, and the actual sales volume is 141,600 units, although it has increased by 17.3% compared with last year, but it has been squeezed out of the top three in the 2023 new power rankings.
What's even more worrying is that according to the latest car sales rankings, the market sales of Xpeng Motors in February this year were only 4,545 units, while its January sales were 8,250 units, and the market sales declined significantly, and according to Xpeng's forecast, the delivery volume in the first quarter of this year was 21,000 to 22,500 units, and the total revenue in the first quarter was about 5.8 billion yuan to 6.2 billion yuan, that is, the delivery of new cars of Xpeng Motors in March must be close to 10,000 units to achieve expectations.
(Article source: Flower Finance Observation)
*This article is based on publicly available information and is for information purposes only and does not constitute any investment advice