Li Auto: Really out of the mud pit?

Electric

2024-05-11 14:04Posted on the official account of Shanghai Electric Pai

The ideal of being eaten back by the traffic finally completed the first step of healing during the Beijing Auto Show.

On May 7, the long-awaited weekly sales list of Li Auto reappeared: in the 18th week of 2024 (4.29-5.5), Li Auto's weekly sales volume was 5,300 units, and the Ideal L6 has more than 41,000 cumulative orders.

Ideal L6, which Wang Xing jokingly called "the most likely model that is most purchased by Ideal's own employees", finally led Ideal out of the public opinion turmoil, and seems to be the biggest promoter of Ideal Auto's bottoming out.

Therefore, we might as well review the market and public opinion of Li Auto in the past year, like a roller coaster, and then take a look at the next road for Li Auto.

Li Auto's weekly sales data is released from April 2023. At that time, Li Auto fixed to release the sales data of the previous week every Tuesday, which was a "first" in the automotive industry.

Sales data is a rare research material for major consulting and research institutions, but to a certain extent, it belongs to the "gray industry", after all, the amount of risk belongs to the proprietary data of independent departments, and there is a risk of violating the law by buying and selling.

"We have been complained and reported by many peers, so we will not be able to release the real risk data for the time being last week (May 8 ~ May 14, 2023), which is very regrettable. I see that some peers can't stand the fact that some people have begun to falsify the data on the amount of insurance (every car company will buy it), and took the initiative to release the real data on the amount of insurance in the first week to quickly correct the deviation", Li Xiang, chairman and CEO of Li Auto, took the initiative to speak out.

Even if it has been temporarily out of the limelight for a while, in the second half of 2023, Li Auto will once again release a weekly sales data list.

Different from before, Li Auto changed the name of the list from the previous "China's new power brand insurance volume" to "China's new power brand sales", and at the same time, the previously announced single-digit sales data was also changed to a statistical data in units of 10,000 units, which was retained to two decimal places.

It is understood that the list data before and after the "update" of Li Auto comes from the retail data of China Automotive Data Terminal.

The period when the weekly list was "born" was probably the most glorious time for Li Auto. China's more than 300,000 SUVs, more than 200,000 new energy sales champions, large SUV & medium and large SUV sales champions, new power luxury brands fastest delivery records, etc., have all been won by Li Auto.

At that time, Li Auto was in the limelight for a while, and created a milestone in the growth and development of the new power brand with the trend of extending the range. Accompanied by Li Xiang's "indiscriminate bombardment" on Weibo, many people called Li Xiang the "king of Weibo" in the new era.

In contrast, NIO is still experiencing the pain of insufficient sales capacity, Xpeng Motors continues to be in turmoil in its organizational structure, and Wenjie is in the alternating period of new and old models.

God wants it to perish. It must be driven crazy first. Li Auto's "good luck" seems to have come to an abrupt end at MEGA.

Before the MEGA was listed, Li Xiang set up a lot of flags, shouting the slogan of "selling high-end pure electric cars into explosive products", and said that the current number of 5,000 yuan small orders for the ideal MEGA has far exceeded the performance of the ideal L9 in 2022.

After MEGA was listed, the voices of decline came and went, and a PS picture hit the seven inches of MEGA, and the product power and price could not match, spending 100,000 more than L9, which became the most prominent complaining point.

The noise of the market has also contributed to the loneliness of sales: according to media statistics, the 72-hour order is only more than 3,000 vehicles, and even the orders with the new L series have fallen to about 4,000 vehicles, which is a huge contrast.

Since then, Li Auto has been like a deflated balloon, losing its previous momentum and falling directly from the top of the mountain to the bottom.

Li Xiang is in such a situation, so that Li Xiang's reflection comes very quickly.

Li Xiang admitted that in the process of rapid growth, Li Auto misjudged the market rhythm, especially in the promotion of Li MEGA, mistook the commercial verification period as a period of rapid development, which led to the distraction of the sales team and affected the service and sales of the main model L series.

At the same time, Li Xiang said that he would adjust the pace, return to the business strategy from 0 to 1, and focus on the core user group and the high-end pure electric market.

Li Xiang also proposed that Li Auto needs to reduce excessive attention to sales and return to the path of healthy growth, focusing on user value and operating efficiency. He reminded the team to avoid letting desire override value, and to adhere to three codes of conduct: user value first, consensus through co-creation, seeking truth from facts, and correcting mistakes.

After a month of precipitation and adjustment, Li Auto has an initial trend of bottoming out during the Beijing Auto Show.

There are two key characteristics to judge that a company has bottomed out: one is that the market performance has rebounded significantly, and the other is that the external public opinion environment has improved significantly.

In terms of market performance, Li Auto has stabilized at the performance of 20,000+ units per month, and has accepted the fact that the world has caught up with itself. In addition, Li Auto also provided a good reason for the resumption of the weekly sales ranking: for the sake of consistency in external communication, we decided to resume the release of the sales list.

In terms of external public opinion, on the one hand, because of MEGA's public opinion, the expectations of the industry have been lowered, and on the other hand, there are lessons from the past, and Li Auto has deliberately shrunk the marketing front internally, so that the release of the ideal L6 has not caused big public opinion, but it has also achieved a certain user reputation by virtue of mature communication methods.

At this Beijing Auto Show, Li Xiang became more relaxed than his previous serious and manic image, explained the ideal L6 in detail for Lei Jun, and also reviewed the time when the ideal MEGA encountered a public opinion crisis, and the help of the Xiaomi car team to the ideal car.

In addition, he also went to the NIO booth and had a long-lost interaction with Li Bin.

Li Xiang said, "High-end pure electric vehicles are too difficult to sell, and it is difficult to push without an energy supplement network." Li Bin agreed, "Now you know how difficult it is for NIO to sell so much."

High-end pure electric vehicles are not easy to sell, which is not only one of the reasons for the frustration of the ideal MEGA, but also the next problem faced by the new forces, and even the problems faced by global car companies such as BBA.

The success of the M9 is inseparable from the blessing of hybrid power, and it is inseparable from the super appeal of the Huawei brand.

It may only be possible to compete with Xiaomi cars, as of now, SU7 is set to exceed 110,000 units, which is a good example, but the price range of more than 300,000 yuan, the appeal of Xiaomi cars still has to be a question mark.

Aside from the external environmental impact of high-end pure electric vehicles, the lack of a perfect energy replenishment system leads to the overly forward-looking design of the Ideal MEGA, which is also one of the reasons for Li Auto's further shift to the high-end pure electric market.

According to media reports, the exterior design of the Ideal pure electric series models will continue the appearance characteristics of the MEGA, and the fastback design will cover MPV and SUV models.

Judging cautiously, even if Li Auto has a bottoming out trend now, there are still great uncertainties about the market outlook.

On January 1, Li Xiang announced his 2024 target on Weibo: Li Auto's annual sales target is 800,000 units, more than double the total sales in 2023.

After the adjustment, the target fell back to 56 to 600,000 units, but even so, to accomplish this, Li Auto needs to reach an average monthly sales of 47,000 units in 2024.

Up to now, the average monthly sales of Li Auto have stabilized at about 25,000 units, and Li Auto has a long way to go in the next three quarters.

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