In March, the sales volume was released, and BYD sold a total of 302459 vehicles, returning with glory.
After experiencing the off-season of the Spring Festival, BYD, which lost its sales crown, set off a wave of price cuts, which directly made the sales in March unbeatable, far ahead.
Other new energy vehicle companies, although their sales are not as good as BYD's, have also ushered in significant growth with this wave of price cuts.
According to incomplete statistics from Mysteel, as of April 2, among the 12 new energy vehicle companies that announced sales volume, 11 car companies achieved positive growth from a year-on-year perspective. GAC Aion ranked first with an increase of 344.43%, and Cialis ranked second with an increase of 255.81%.
On the other hand, take the big brother Toyota as an example.
Judging from the cumulative sales in the first quarter announced by Toyota on April 3, the total sales in the first quarter were 206907, although the sales in March were not directly announced, but minus the sales in January and February, it is not difficult for us to calculate that Toyota's sales in March were only 60,449 units.
For a while, the topic of declining fuel vehicles was once again hotly discussed.
I can't help but wonder why BYD dares to challenge the century-old fuel vehicles in just over 20 years since it made the car?
Those who know BYD know that BYD made batteries before making cars, and it has also achieved the top three in the world, which makes BYD have a unique advantage on the track of new energy.
Wang Chuanfu is a technical background, and he developed batteries before going to sea to do business.
He dismantled each process of battery manufacturing, and never used machines where manual labor could be used, and a set of imported equipment cost more than 200,000 US dollars, which was depreciated for 5 years, with an average monthly usage cost of more than 20,000 yuan, which was enough to pay wages to more than a dozen workers at that time.
In this way, Wang Chuanfu solved the problem of entrepreneurship with the tactics of crowds, and only spent more than 1 million yuan to run a production line with a daily production capacity of 4,000 nickel-chromium batteries, and the price is very advantageous.
Although the quality of the product is not as unified as mechanized production, but the price is cheap, and to catch up with the Asian financial crisis in 1997, major enterprises are reducing expenses, and the cheaper BYD has also ushered in explosive growth.
In just three years, BYD has become the leader in the nickel-chromium battery industry, with annual sales of 150 million pieces, seizing 40% of the global nickel-cadmium battery market share.
This kind of thinking of not playing cards according to routines is not only used in the battery industry, but also used by Wang Chuanfu in the automotive industry.
In 2003, BYD's growth in the battery industry at that time had reached the ceiling, and BYD had a lot of funds after listing.
But at that time, Wang Chuanfu's idea was regarded by the outside world as a suicidal crossover.
Not only because the automobile industry has been a hundred years old and the industry is thriving, but also because Wang Chuanfu actually doesn't understand cars.
But Wang Chuanfu does not think so, he sees the new energy market under the pressure of environmental protection in the future, and also sees that BYD has an absolute advantage in battery manufacturing.
Although Wang Chuanfu has been under tremendous pressure both internally and externally, and even BYD's stock price fell by 20% at one point, it still did not shake his determination to enter the new energy vehicle market.
In the end, against all odds, Wang Chuanfu led BYD to officially start the road of car manufacturing.
Even if Wang Chuanfu is full of confidence in the future of new energy vehicles, he did not blindly develop new energy vehicles as soon as he came up, but steadily and steadily step by step.
He first acquired Qinchuan Automobile in 2003 and obtained the valuable production rights of the 7-digit car. At that time, it was very difficult to obtain the production rights of the prefix 7, and state-owned car companies like Chery had to be affiliated with other car companies to sell.
After that, Wang Chuanfu began to organize the production of fuel vehicles, and first let his automobile supply chain run.
At that time, most of the domestic car companies produced cars, purchasing parts separately and then assembling them.
But BYD is different, it adopts a rare integration of the industrial chain, to put it bluntly, it can produce its own will never use others, and it also follows the tactics of the crowd of people who started with batteries, replacing high mechanical costs with labor.
It is precisely because of this operating concept that BYD's first real market-oriented car, the F3, has attracted widespread attention as soon as it was launched.
Although the appearance is somewhat similar to Toyota's Corolla, it has a super high cost performance, and the price is only more than 70,000 yuan, which is 60,000 yuan cheaper than Toyota's Corolla.
The success of F3 also made BYD's road to car manufacturing officially set sail.
After that, BYD developed new energy electric vehicles while producing fuel vehicles, and was the third car company to take the lead in mastering dual-mode hybrid technology in addition to GM and Toyota.
In recent years, with the country's strong support for the research and development of new energy vehicles and the improvement of supporting facilities, BYD has risen rapidly like a rocket.
From less than 430,000 units in 2020, it has soared to nearly 1.87 million units in 2022, and will exceed 3 million units in 2023, and its revenue has also increased by 100 times.
For a time, BYD has become a leader in the field of new energy vehicles, with unlimited scenery.
In 2022, Wang Chuanfu publicly said that BYD has absolute pricing power between 10-200,000 yuan, and if it doesn't reduce prices, it just doesn't want other car companies to be too uncomfortable.
At that time, this sound a little crazy, and many people ridiculed BYD for drifting a little, but now it seems that this sentence is really not a joke that Wang Chuanfu said casually.
At the beginning of 2024, BYD used to play the pioneer Qin puls has already come to a price reduction in 2023, playing the slogan of "the same price of oil and electricity", and this year it will be directly reduced to 79,800 yuan, pulling the price of new energy vehicles to less than 80,000 yuan for the first time.
BYD played "oil is lower than electricity", and also improved the configuration while reducing the price, and took the lead in showing its own big killer move.
It is said that the first player wins. While BYD is slashing prices, other car companies can only be forced to enter the war whether they want to or not.
For a time, the slogans of "electricity is lower than oil" and "oil is stronger than electricity" are endless, and prices have dropped again and again.
It seems that this wave of price war is a counterattack made by BYD in January when its sales were overtaken by fuel vehicles, but it is more of a bright sword that BYD has been planning for a long time.
Whether it is the integration from R&D to the integration of the industrial chain, or the layout of the entire brand products, BYD has already completed its own strategic deployment.
It can be said that from the moment BYD decided to build a car, Wang Chuanfu has been paving the way for today's new energy market.
First of all, there is a high degree of integration of the industrial chain. From body molds to wire screws, as long as you can make your own, you will never buy someone else's. It is precisely because of Wang Chuanfu's strategic vision that BYD has a super high price space from the beginning.
For example, in the era of F3 models, if domestic car companies wanted to build a self-designed car, the import fee of the mold alone needed to spend 80% of the cost.
Wang Chuanfu, who has always been well versed in cost control, directly acquired Beijing Jichi, a mold company spun off from Beijing Jeep, and the molds developed by them only cost less than one-tenth of the cost.
There are many operations like this in the process of BYD's car building, so that today's BYD, in addition to tires and glass, the rest can be built by itself.
Although the integrated supply chain has a super high price advantage, there is also an obvious problem, that is, self-production, there is no competitive pressure from the market, and the competitiveness and quality of products are gradually declining.
Wang Chuanfu was also aware of this internal problem, and immediately ordered all business divisions to be opened to the outside world, participate in the market competition environment, and compare the products produced by himself with the market products to ensure that they are of good quality and low price.
Therefore, BYD now produces auto parts that can not only be used for its own cars, but also sold to other car brands, which can not only share the cost in terms of output, but also make its own cars have an absolute price advantage.
In addition, in the layout of brand products, BYD has also completed its own matrix.
After experiencing the multi-model melee in the development stage, mutual internal friction and blind expansion, BYD has already sorted out its own distribution network and product series.
At present, BYD has a total of two major car series, one is the Dynasty series and the other is the Ocean series, which are sold by the red network and the blue network respectively.
The models also basically cover all the mainstream family car categories, from sedans to SUV models, with prices ranging from 70,000 to 300,000 yuan.
It can be said that as long as you want to buy a car, no matter what type and price, BYD has a model available.
With such ultra-high cost control and full category coverage, even if BYD continues to reduce prices again, it is still possible, and it will also have profit margins, which can be regarded as truly mastering the pricing power of the market.
Compared with the ranking of car sales in March last year, there are 6 pure electric vehicles, 2 plug-in hybrids, and 2 gasoline vehicles in the top 10 models.
The oil truck has fallen out of the top five, and the "three mothers on the road", who have always dominated the list, only one Xuanyi remains, and it is still ranked ninth, and it fell below everyone's glasses at that time.
In March this year, Honda announced that its sales in the Chinese market in March were 60,441, a year-on-year decline of 50.8%, which was five times less than the 302459 units announced by BYD.
This can't help but make people ask, is it really not good to use fuel vehicles?
Not necessarily.
Although new energy vehicles have been making great progress in the past two years, fuel vehicles still have an unshakable position in the minds of the market and consumers, and it is not easy to completely replace fuel vehicles.
BYD's sales staff said frankly that among the customers received, many consumers are buying cars to run online car-hailing, and real home customers will be more willing to choose a high-end version of the new energy car, but at the same time, the price has also gone up.
In fact, this is the concept that fuel vehicles control the market for a long time and leave it to consumers, and this concept is difficult to change easily.
According to third-party data, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in the A-class car market in 2023 is only 22.5%, and the penetration rate in the price range of 8~150,000 yuan is only 17.2%.
Even if BYD's sales in 2023 beat the "three big mothers on the road" and become the sales champion, the inertia of fuel vehicles in the minds of consumers has not really been changed.
Although at the beginning of 2024, BYD took the lead in showing its sword and pulled fuel vehicles into the price war, it does not mean that new energy vehicles can sit back and relax.
In January 2024, Zhu Huarong, chairman of Changan Automobile, said at the Changan Global Partner Conference that foreign-funded enterprises have just not made a move, they are waiting and seeing, looking for a suitable time to enter.
Since the beginning of the year, many multinational companies have also announced delays or even canceled the development of electric cars.
Apple announced that it would stop building cars, and Mercedes-Benz also announced that it would abandon its plan to switch from oil to electricity in 2030 and continue to develop fuel vehicles. Manufacturers such as Ford are also reevaluating their electric vehicle programs, and countries such as Europe have also delayed the timing of the gasoline-to-electricity switch.
Is it really impossible for them to give up on new energy vehicles? It should be unlikely, but now they can't get involved with Chinese car companies at all, and the way they can enter the market is very simple, that is, mergers and acquisitions.
Since the announcement of the suspension of production of Gaohe Automobile, Li Xiang, chairman and CEO of Li Auto, has posted on Weibo, calling on the state to establish a system of mergers and acquisitions.
After the first wave of new energy vehicle price reductions in 2024, many car companies will inevitably announce their closure or be acquired due to poor management or lack of market competitiveness, and this may also be the opportunity for many foreign-funded companies to enter the market.
If they are acquired at an ultra-low price, and then use strong funds and resources to integrate the market, it is really hard to say who the future new energy vehicle giants will be.
With the strong support of the state, new energy vehicles can be described as the darling of capital in recent years.
All car companies that can be named have a huge capital chain, even if some car companies lose money year after year, they are still not short of money to continue their lives.
However, among the new energy vehicle companies, only BYD has achieved a standout, not only with low prices and high sales, but also with profits.
In an interview, Wang Chuanfu once broke the key to BYD's success:
"There has to be a transition from plug-in hybrids to pure electric vehicles to pure electric vehicles. ”
BYD's success is precisely to seize the middle of the transition, and the market demand for plug-in hybrid vehicles can stand out among many car companies and become the leader in the field of new energy vehicles.
For consumers, the first car purchased for the family can be fueled and electric, which can be refueled and charged, usually save money, long-distance travel and emergencies are not limited by charging, and it has become the first choice in their minds.
Last month, Wang Chuanfu bluntly said at BYD's financial report investor communication meeting that BYD sold 3 million vehicles last year, with a cumulative revenue of more than 600 billion yuan, and this year's sales hit 3.6 million vehicles.
As for the confrontation between joint venture vehicles and fuel vehicles, Wang Chuanfu is still very confident that the rapid rise of new energy vehicles will inevitably encroach on the joint venture car market.
"In the next three years, it will be a knockout competition for new energy vehicles, without scale and sales, everything else is empty talk!", Wang Chuanfu is still always pragmatic.
If it were you, would you choose a new energy vehicle or a fuel vehicle?
-END-
Resources:
City boundary: Fuel vehicles are going crazy by BYD
Smart car: Why can BYD's price drop again and again?
Uninterrupted power to the north: It turns out that back then, what Wang Chuanfu said was true
Daydream Lab: From "Mad God" to God, BYD's legendary counterattack
Two shaking clouds: After the suspension of tram construction, foreign cars really admit defeat? The merger and acquisition of Chinese car companies is the last hope for a turnaround
Gaze Chronicle: Europe and the United States are afraid, what is the truth of BYD's price reduction frenzy? "Electricity is lower than oil" makes countries think deeply
Author: Pick Zero
Editor: Willow Leaf chatter