Core Tips:
1 The price war of new energy vehicles is forcing traditional fuel car companies into a corner. BYD Qin shouted the slogan of "electricity is lower than oil", rolling up a bloody wind, and some traditional fuel vehicle salespeople said that the intended customers in their stores have been robbed of 30% by BYD Qin.
2 The decline in sales has made traditional car 4S stores fight a battle to defend. Not only will the shortcomings of BYD Qin be introduced in terms of words, but dealers would rather pay for their own car discounts to try to retain customers. A large number of 4S stores have also broadened their customer acquisition channels through webcasts, but with little effect.
3 new energy vehicles have gradually become the main battlefield of car companies competition, the living space of traditional fuel vehicles continues to shrink, 4S store sales have become the most stressful people, many sales consultants choose to leave or even change careers, some people run Didi, and even sell lottery tickets.
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In an automobile city where dealers are gathered in Guangdong, dozens of automobile 4S shops and showrooms stand on both sides of the avenue. It was late at night, and 24-year-old Jiang Sheng put down his hot mobile phone, turned off the light, and pushed the door out. After a day of work, his back was stiff and sore, and he just wanted to stretch his muscles and bones, and when he looked up, he saw the brightly lit BYD store opposite. He was in a bit of a complicated mood, so late, there were customers looking at the car in the store.
The picture comes from the Internet
On February 19th, BYD Qin PLUS Glory Edition was officially launched, shouting the slogan of "electricity is lower than oil", and the official guide price was as low as 79,800, which quickly sounded the siren of the automobile price war, not only dominating the list of new energy vehicles in the first quarter, but also directly moving the cake of joint venture fuel car companies.
Dongfeng Nissan Sylphy bore the brunt. Jiang Sheng is a telephone salesman at a Dongfeng Nissan 4S store, and his feelings are the most obvious, in the past month, the flow of people and the actual transaction volume in the store have declined a lot.
"If we want to impulse, we need to desperately poach customers. In order to snatch customers from BYD, he made more than 100 calls a day, and the advantages of Chen Xuanyi compared with new energy vehicles seemed to be in vain.
The tide of price reductions for new energy vehicles is coming from all directions, following the price reduction of BYD Qin, Beijing Hyundai, Nezha Automobile and many other car companies have also officially announced price cuts. At the end of March, "Thor's Hammer" was involved in the field of new energy vehicles, and the long-standing Xiaomi car was officially put on sale, making the car price war unsettled and rising again and again. Weilai, Xiaopeng, Chery and other car companies can't sit still, and have launched car purchase subsidies, among which the 2024 Xpeng G9 will start at 243,900 yuan after the subsidy, which is close to the 215,900 yuan of Xiaomi Automobile.
In the face of the encirclement and interception of new energy vehicles, the joint venture fuel vehicles that survived in the cracks were once again forced into a corner.
01 BYD snatched three percent of customers
"Hello, may I ask you the Sylphy classics that you have seen in our store before, do you still think about it now?"
Jiang Sheng is responsible for telephone appointments and return visits to customers every day, asking about the intention of buying a car, and persuading customers to place orders as soon as possible.
This customer, who came to the store in mid-February to see the car, stopped in front of the Sylphy Classic for a long time, and had a strong intention to buy the car. However, a week later, the voice on the other end of the phone poured a basin of cold water on Jiang Sheng: "I have already bought BYD Qin." ”
The air suddenly quieted down, and in embarrassment, Jiang Sheng didn't forget to say "congratulations", and then hung up the phone helplessly.
Due to its high economy and high comfort, the Sylphy Classic has always been the best-selling model of Dongfeng Nissan below 120,000 yuan, and in the past four years, it has been the annual sales champion of fuel vehicles in the Chinese market. When the customer looked at the car, the price of the Sylphy car was more than 80,000 yuan, which was slightly higher than the budget of the other party.
However, at the stage when customers were still waiting, BYD Qin suddenly entered the price range of 70,000 yuan, and the price reduction far exceeded market expectations. This directly made the wait-and-see customers make a decision: the two cars with the same price, BYD Qin has a smart car machine, a fashionable appearance, and a simple and technological interior, which is more attractive to young people.
In fact, the market for joint venture fuel vehicles is relatively stable, and the buying group also has a very clear portrait. Jiang Sheng told Phoenix.com's "Eye of the Storm" that in addition to middle-aged people who trust traditional fuel vehicles more, a very important group of his customers is college graduates who have just graduated, or young people who have just entered the workplace: they just have some savings in hand and need to buy a car to travel.
And it is this part of the population that lost 30% in the two weeks after BYD's price cut. Jiang Sheng called every customer back as usual, but he always got similar answers.
According to Autohome data, in February this year, BYD Qin PLUS sold 27,851 units, ranking first, and Nissan Sylphy sold 19,878 units, ranking second, compared with 30,384 units in January, a decrease of 34.6%.
According to the latest data, BYD sold more than 300,000 new energy vehicles in March, a year-on-year increase of 46%. The cumulative sales in the first three months of this year were 626,200 units, a year-on-year increase of 13%.
Wei Jiangming, who has been engaged in car sales for nearly ten years, works in a FAW-Volkswagen 4S store in Hefei, and is responsible for contacting customers who have left capital on online media, inviting them to the store, and receiving natural customers in the exhibition hall.
FAW-Volkswagen's Bora and other models are very affordable, and this part of the customer group also overlaps with BYD Qin. Although it is not obvious that the source of customers has been robbed, Wei Jiangming feels that the price reduction of new energy has given customers a psychological expectation, believing that under the price war, fuel vehicles will also follow the price reduction in the near future. This makes a large number of customers more inclined to stay on the sidelines.
Compared with Hefei, the Shenzhen automobile 4S store where Wei Jiangming worked before seems to be more obviously affected by new energy vehicles. Colleagues in Shenzhen told him that in the past, several branches combined could sell more than 400 vehicles in March, but this year they can only reach more than 100 vehicles. Shenzhen's youthful urban nature has given new energy vehicles more room for development.
Even luxury models had a bad start to the year. Wang Li, who works in a Mercedes-Benz 4S store, told Phoenix.com's "Eye of the Storm" that although Mercedes-Benz will be more recognized than other car brands, this year's sales are also about 10-20% lower than last year. In the past, in addition to some elites, Mercedes-Benz sales also relied on some corporate procurement. However, when people's spending power declines and business management difficulties, the purchase of automobiles has also been affected.
In this case, Xiaomi Auto was born, driving new car-making forces such as Weilai and Xiaopeng to join the price reduction frenzy. This has brought unprecedented pressure to traditional fuel vehicle dealers, who are already in decline.
However, the hot sales wave of Xiaomi cars seems to be limited to the Internet, and Wang Li has not yet clearly felt its market share grabbing. The tsunami is surging, and in addition to new energy competitors such as Tesla, which piece of beach will it shoot at traditional fuel vehicles, 4S stores are still looking up and seeing.
02 Fuel car dealers fought a battle to defend themselves and sold their cars at a loss
The decline in sales has made traditional automobile 4S stores quickly enter a state of readiness.
In order to improve the efficiency of telephone customer acquisition, the sales director personally supervised the work of the Dongfeng Nissan 4S store where Jiang Sheng worked, gathered seven telemarketers into a small office and stared at them on the phone. Every salesman seems to have a knife hanging over his head, and he does not dare to slack off.
The daily morning meeting was even more solemn, almost turning into a mobilization meeting and discussion meeting to deal with the crisis, and the superintendent would constantly emphasize that "in difficult times, everyone will work together hand in hand to tide over difficulties". Every salesperson has to review how to retain customers and how to grab customers from BYD.
The fierce battle between peers is gradually heating up. When Jiang Sheng visits customers, he will focus on the shortcomings of the BYD Qin, and correspondingly, emphasize the proven reliability of the Nissan Sylphy over the past decade. "Don't look at the cheap price of BYD cars, as the saying goes, it is easy to buy a car and difficult to maintain a car, and it is not clear whether the battery of new energy vehicles can withstand the test of ten years. ”
As long as the other party hesitated a little, he continued to persuade: "For the same car bought for 100,000 yuan, when the second-hand car is sold after seven or eight years, compared with pure electric cars and plug-in hybrid cars, the residual value rate of pure oil vehicles is still higher." ”
In addition to these words, the company has also developed a set of countermeasures. For customers with high intentions to buy a car, they will try to make a car purchase plan according to the wishes of the other party, and they would rather lose a little in terms of price. Dealers pay their own money to make special prices, and try to retain customers.
Traditional 4S stores adopt a wholesale sales model, where dealers pay a deposit to wholesale cars from auto OEMs and then sell them to consumers at retail prices. When the inventory of the 4S store is relatively high, it means that the backlog of vehicles in the inventory is higher than the sales volume of automobiles, and the dealer will find a way to release the funds at this time and give profits to some models.
In late March, Jiang Sheng's 4S store still needed to sell 12 cars to complete the sales task assigned by the car factory. Otherwise, it will be difficult for the company to get the rebate from the car factory, and even the money will be deducted. Jiang Sheng told Phoenix.com "Eye of the Storm" that this is a defensive battle, if it is lost, not only the wholesale price of the car factory to the dealer may not be preferential in the future, but the car quota may also be reduced, so even if there are customers to buy a car in the future, the dealer will not have the car to sell.
"At that time, we can only go to other Nissan 4S stores to transfer cars, which is much more expensive than the wholesale of manufacturers, and we will lose money. He said.
Jiang Sheng told Phoenix.com "Eye of the Storm" that in this case, dealers can only sell cars at a loss, and normally speaking, Sylphy Classic will sell for more than 90,000 yuan after counting the car price, purchase tax, insurance, etc. But after the dealer subsidy, it was sold to 7-80,000. This is completely selling at a loss, so after completing the sales task and getting the manufacturer's rebate, the price must be adjusted back.
When it is difficult to support sales of natural customers in automobile cities, 4S stores and online capital retention customers, in order to attract more customers, more and more dealers have begun to acquire customers through live broadcasts.
Jiang Sheng's company was an early tester of Douyin live broadcast, but the number of people in the live broadcast room has only been more than 70 for many years, and all of them are company employees. Since the actual price of the car involves trade secrets, the live broadcast can only roughly introduce "we sell very low here", and it is impossible to say how low it is, so the sales effect of the live broadcast is not obvious. More often than not, the live broadcast is just to tell the outside world: the store is open.
Jiang Sheng told Phoenix.com's "Eye of the Storm" that the Douyin platform can also increase exposure by spending money to buy traffic, so that more people can see the live content. But in fact, the live broadcast content of almost all 4S stores is the same: the function of introducing the car, the approximate price range, and the homogeneity is very serious. The company doesn't spend too many resources to buy traffic.
"Spending thousands of dollars a day is unbearable for the company, and it doesn't have much effect. He said.
Wang Li's Mercedes-Benz 4S store has also tried to sell cars live broadcast, but he told Phoenix.com's "Eye of the Storm" that more often, live broadcast plays the role of online publicity and customer acquisition, so that customers will come to the store after watching it, offsetting the problem of insufficient data sources for some vertical media websites, which is just a substitute for business.
In the past, the live broadcast room of this Mercedes-Benz 4S store was only a functional explanation by sales staff, but this year, the store began to recruit professional anchors to explain the goods, hoping to use a better image, more passionate language and professional words to drive customers to place orders.
"Live streaming will increase the cost, but this must be done, if you don't do it, this part will be gone, and you can only lose. He said.
Screenshot of Douyin live broadcast
03 Stressful sales flee one after another
The bloody battle in the automotive field spread rapidly after being ignited by BYD. In fact, in recent years, the share of new energy vehicles has been rising, and it has gradually become the main battlefield.
Traditional fuel vehicles are generally like a big enemy. AT THE END OF LAST YEAR, FAW-VOLKSWAGEN LAUNCHED THE ID.7 VIZZION, A NEW ENERGY MODEL, IN ORDER TO SEIZE THE PURE ELECTRIC CAR MARKET, AND ALSO SUPPORTED THE TILT POLICY. Wei Jiangming told Phoenix.com "Eye of the Storm" that in order to increase the sales of new energy vehicles, the car factory has changed the original wholesale sales model of fuel vehicles to an agency system in the distribution model, which does not require dealers to pay a deposit in advance, but to sell a car to earn a commission. At that time, all the staff in the 4S store had to vigorously sell Volkswagen new energy vehicles, and the profits were higher than fuel vehicles, Wei Jiangming remembered that when selling a fuel car, his commission was about 1,000 yuan, and the commission for selling ID.7 was 3,000 yuan.
However, the price of this new energy vehicle is more than 200,000, and at this price, there are more new energy models with higher configurations for people to choose from. After Volkswagen's new energy vehicles once achieved an average monthly sales of more than 10,000 units, the good times did not last, and sales quickly went downhill, and only a few thousand units were sold per month.
Dongfeng Nissan is also actively seeking to save itself after its sales have suffered setbacks. In the face of the decline, the company decided to reduce its production capacity in China. As early as April last year, Dongfeng Company said that it would invest 50 billion yuan in the development of new energy in the next three years. This year, Dongfeng's main brand of independent passenger cars will also achieve 100% electrification of new models.
"In the past, joint venture cars could account for more than half of the cars on the street, and I felt that whoever bought the tram would be a leek! Who would have thought that in just a few years, the worst loss would be the joint venture car. "There are joint venture fuel vehicle sales consultants complaining on the Internet.
According to the sales consultant's analysis, due to the saturation and sluggishness of the market, car companies began to roll up prices. Manufacturers want sales, dealers want profits, and consumers want cheap. "In order to compare prices, dealers do not hesitate to give rebates to discounts, and the result is that everyone has no money. ”
The living space of traditional fuel vehicles is shrinking, and the sales of 4S stores on the front line have become the most stressed.
The sales tasks assigned by the automobile OEMs to the dealers will be strictly assigned to each sales consultant. Jiang Sheng's 4S store, for telesalesmen, requires each person to invite about 60 batches of customers per month in the peak season and about 30 batches of customers per person in the off-season. If you don't meet the target, you will face a fine of 500-2,000 yuan. In March, Jiang Sheng only completed half of the target. This means that he ended up with less than 5,000 yuan in salary.
Wang Li told Phoenix.com "Eye of the Storm" that Mercedes-Benz dealers have been reducing costs and increasing efficiency, reducing costs from the details of operation and manpower, such as compressing security and cleaning service fees, and striving for the best price in the same city.
Under the recession of the entire industry and the continuous pressure of performance, many sales consultants choose to leave or even change careers. In the sales of Phoenix.com's "Eye of the Storm", some people ran Didi, or sold lottery tickets, completely letting go of the previous industry accumulation.
Wei Jiangming left the Shenzhen 4S store in this way. He originally intended to buy a house and settle in Guangdong, but starting in 2022, the company stopped issuing sales incentives, and Shenzhen's car sales became more and more sluggish, and his income declined, which made Wei Jiangming have the idea of leaving. Shortly after leaving the company in January last year, the Shenzhen dealer began delaying payroll payments.
The company seems to be running into problems with its funds. Many other employees have also chosen to leave. Among Wei Jiangming's colleagues, some of them worked as financial consultants, and although they did not open a single order for a year, they received a much higher basic salary than that of a car sales consultant.
Wei Jiangming returned to his hometown in Anhui and wanted to open his own auto trade store. But this is not so easy, he learned about it, and found that opening an auto trade store can only get a car from a 4S store, and a car can only earn a difference of one or two thousand, but it has to invest hundreds of thousands. In the case of 4S stores are operating poorly, this is obviously not the ideal way to go.
Last fall, Wei Jiangming found a 4S store in Hefei and returned to the car sales industry. He didn't expect that in Hefei, which has a population of just over 10 million, car sales are also very high, and he has to work overtime until eight or nine o'clock in the evening every day.
In January this year, a number of 4S stores under Guangdong Yongao Investment Group Co., Ltd. reported the closure of the news. Even the 27-year-old dealer group is facing such a predicament, which is embarrassing.
According to data from the China Automobile Dealers Association, only 37.4% of auto dealers will complete their annual sales targets in 2023, and as many as 23.2% of dealers will have less than 70% of their tasks completed. According to the data of the Passenger Association, 40% of dealers in China will close down in 2022, and more than half of the auto 4S stores are currently in a loss-making state, with an average of about 11 4S stores closed every day.
In the 4S store that is still insisting, the car salesman complained on the Internet: It has been closed since the New Year, and it has been working from 9 to 9 for more than a month. Most people are busiest on weekends when they start to relax and have customers coming to their stores. However, even so, many of them have not opened a single order for the whole of March.
(At the request of the interviewee, the names of the people in this article have been changed.) ）