Source of this article: Times Finance Author: Song Ran
"To simplify the movement of people and things, to make life more convenient and interesting" is the corporate mission of Nine Company at the beginning of its establishment, after more than ten years of development, this mission has become a reality.
In October 2020, No.9 was officially listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and on the day of the bell ringing, No.9 did not adopt the form of gongs generally sounded by the founders, partners, executives or employees of the company, but handed over the ceremony to the robot to complete the stage, which was the first A-share robot to sound the gong and go public.
Behind the robot ringing the bell is a public appearance of Nine's intelligent mobility capabilities, and it is also conveying Nine's scientific and technological ideals of changing the world with technology. Since its listing, from turning losses into profits in 2020 and achieving 10 billion revenue in 2023, Nine has been listed for 3 years, and has continued to stir up the global innovative short transportation and service robot market pattern with its performance.
In the first quarter of this year, the company's performance grew again, achieving a single-quarter revenue of 2.562 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 54.18%, and a net profit attributable to the parent company of 136 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 675.34%.
The brand micro-film "Memory Journey" created with brand spokesperson Yi Yang Qianxi is also continuing to deepen the spiritual resonance with the majority of young users, and continue to help performance growth from the brand dimension. The data shows that since the micro movie was launched on April 19, the cumulative number of views on the whole network has exceeded 170 million times in less than 4 days, and it has been on the Weibo movie influence list TOP1 and TOP2 for 3 consecutive days, and among the iQiyi moviegoers, young users aged 19-24 account for nearly 44%.
Looking back at the eve of the listing, the two founders of the company, Gao Lufeng and Wang Ye, who are now the chairman and CEO respectively, wrote an internal letter to all employees - no celebration, immediately fight, what is true is true.
The two engineering students have branded the company Nine.
Technology brings a sense of security
If you have experienced the products of Nine, you will be impressed by the full sense of technology and security, and when you have an in-depth understanding of Nine, you can deeply understand why this company can quickly achieve industry leadership every time it enters a category, which is the most intuitive display of the global R&D and production base of Nine Company located in Changzhou, Jiangsu.
There are three factories here, namely the No. 9 Short Traffic and Robot Factory, the No. 9 Electric Factory, and the Segway All-Terrain Vehicle Factory, which produces intelligent electric two-wheelers, electric scooters, electric balance vehicles, intelligent lawn mower robots, all-terrain vehicles and other products, which can support the demand for millions of smart products in more than 100 countries and regions around the world every year.
The three factories have adopted the industry's advanced intelligent production lines and digital management of the whole process, which effectively ensures product quality while improving production and assembly efficiency.
Among them, the short transportation and robot factory currently has an annual production capacity of more than 1 million units, and the entire production area has 11 double-speed chain vehicle production lines. The factory is already a leading intelligent manufacturing workshop in the industry, and the factory transfers ERP/MES and other systems and data to the cloud platform through the construction of the cloud platform, and comprehensively optimizes the whole-process business management mechanism.
The intelligent electric two-wheeler factory covers an area of 220,000 square meters, and the current phase A and B phase plants have been put into production, and the C phase plant is under construction, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2024, when the overall annual production capacity can reach 3.5 million ~ 4 million units. The plant adopts the industry's leading intelligent production management technology, and introduces a more intelligent vehicle manufacturing whole-process monitoring system MES system based on the Internet of Things system in the final assembly process.
Compared with the traditional production mode, the MES system can code and trace the source of each key component, realize the digitization of one machine and one file, and the intelligent management of the whole life cycle of the product end-to-end, and each part of each vehicle has an independent electronic file, which can not only ensure product quality, but also ensure that each part can be correctly assembled. At this factory, an electric two-wheeler rolls off the assembly line every 36 seconds on average, but each vehicle has to go through an average of 105 processes before it can be delivered to the customer after passing the final road test.
It's not enough. The company has also set up a No. 9 science and technology testing center for the reliability of key components and vehicles of electric two-wheeled vehicles in the initial research and development stage, and the products can enter the formal mass production stage only after passing the test. The testing center has also obtained the CNAS license, so that it has the national standard testing qualification.
It can be said that compared with the traditional production mode in the industry, the No. 9 factory innovatively introduces an intelligent full life cycle management model from parts procurement, to vehicle assembly, compliance testing, offline delivery and other processes, which greatly improves the reliability of production and manufacturing, and also ensures the quality and reliability of each electric two-wheeled vehicle to the greatest extent.
A technological revolution
The digital intelligence and high standards of the factory are only the epitome of Nine's advocacy of technology and quality, and behind this is Nine's continuous iteration of technical capabilities, and even a technological self-revolution.
In the first quarter of this year alone, the company's R&D expenses reached 164 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 29.08%, and in the whole of 2023, the R&D expenses of No. 9 Company accounted for 6% to 616 million yuan, and the proportion of R&D personnel reached nearly 40% to 1,434 people, and the number of intellectual property rights obtained worldwide has further increased to 4,696, including electric two-wheeled vehicle intelligent systems, mapping and positioning systems based on visual Tag coding, and brand new RTK and visual assistance combined positioning system and many other internationally leading or equivalent core technologies.
With such a spirit of research and development, the company has achieved a number of major research and development achievements and applied them to products. In 2021, Nine took the lead in the industry to launch the borderless Navimow intelligent lawn mower robot, based on the self-developed "Exact Fusion Locating System", which can realize more advanced planning mowing without buried wires, completely subverting the traditional mowing mode that uses manpower or still needs to be buried, and the cost of mowing is greatly reduced compared with the traditional mowing mode.
In 2022, Navimow Smart Lawn Mower became the world's first borderless lawn mower brand to land on a large scale, and by 2023, it has become the world's first buried lawn mower brand with 30,000+ user activations.
Gao Lufeng, founder and chairman of Nine, said: "We have spent a lot of time and done very solid research and development work. "That's why we have the results of today's smart lawn mowers.
And the continuous upgrading of technological innovation is also really promoting industrial upgrading. In 2012, the electric self-balancing car began to be concerned by the market, at that time, the global self-balancing car was in the hands of Segway, but the product price of up to 80,000 yuan made Segway only a luxury in the hands of a few people.
Since then, through technology and manufacturing process innovation, the nine company has made the electric balance car more compact and portable, and at the same time, it has played a product price of 1999 yuan, so that the electric balance car has changed from a rich toy to a mass consumer electronic product, driving the birth of an industry;
What makes the market even more amazing is that in the category of electric two-wheeled vehicles, the main vehicle intelligence of the nine true intelligence, has completely changed the disorderly development status of the industry in the price competition, and promoted the mainland electric two-wheeled vehicles into the real sense of intelligence, high-end era, Nine in leading the development of the industry, but also in this red sea market to pull out a new blue ocean track.
According to the data, since the first year of the launch of the No. 9 Electric in 2020, the company has set an industry sales record of more than 100,000 units, in 2021, the product sales will reach 420,000 units, a year-on-year increase of nearly 300%, and in 2023, it will achieve sales of 1.46 million units, a miracle of 10 times growth in four years. In the first quarter of 2024, sales will reach 416,900 units, and cumulative shipments have reached 3 million units.
"Nine's methodology is that if you choose an industrial category, you must quickly become the first in this industrial category", for the selection of tracks, in Gao Lufeng's view, "First of all, Nine should think about whether there is an opportunity to innovate the industry through innovative methods, and secondly, Nine should ask yourself whether you can be the first?" Gao Lufeng said that at this time, we always find that there will be some technological innovation that can drive the industry from functional to intelligent machine leap opportunities, and in this process, Nine has been able to develop from edge innovation to the center, and finally achieve industry leadership, from electric balance vehicles to electric scooters, and then to today's intelligent electric two-wheeled vehicles, intelligent lawn mowing robots, etc., are the same, in promoting the industry from the red ocean into the new blue ocean, Nine company is also based on the global market, forming a unique competitive advantage.
At present, the advantageous businesses such as electric scooters and electric balance vehicles of Nine Company are still at the head of the industry, and the cultivation business of electric two-wheeled vehicles, lawn mower robots, and all-terrain vehicles has also ushered in a larger-scale performance realization, superimposed on the global market layout, and has become a powerful weapon for Nine Company to hedge against the performance fluctuation cycle.
Looking back at the development of Nine Company for more than ten years, it has always focused on improving the product series in the field of innovative short transportation and robotics, and like most technology companies such as Apple and Tesla, it has also set off a technological revolution in the industry and leveraged new incremental space while achieving its own development with the persistence of technology. Therefore, it is difficult for you to look at the future of Nine from a certain category or industry space, on the contrary, as long as it is the field that Nine has entered, even if it is already a red ocean, it will always bring a new blue ocean space.