Produced by丨Tiger Sniff Automobile Group
Author丨Li Mingyang
Header image source丨NIO
On May 9, NIO held a ceremony to roll off the assembly line of its 500,000th vehicle at its Hefei plant. From the first delivery to the 500,000th unit, it took them six years. In a media interview after the offline ceremony, Li Bin, the founder of NIO, sighed: It is not easy to go through ups and downs, ups and downs.
Image source: NIO
Of course, 500,000 units off the assembly line is only a milestone, and new car-making forces that have reached this standard have been and will be there in the future. And the main reason why Li Bin is so deeply emotional: NIO has taken a different path from other new car brands.
Most of the time, they spent their time exploring unknown business boundaries in no man's land: building Nio Power battery swap stations, building NIO App user communities, building Nio Phone mobile phones, and turning the Nio Day conference into the Spring Festival Gala......
A series of innovations have indeed promoted the development of the entire electric vehicle industry, but behind the innovation and exploration comes huge pressure, huge costs, and huge risks.
"Unreliable, will only burn money, go bankrupt at any time, and the worst person in 2020 ......" These statements around Li Bin and Weilai are common in the media.
Image source: NIO
After welcoming 500,000 vehicles off the assembly line this time, Li Bin and President Qin Lihong believe that they have gradually found a sense of rhythm and established a moat for NIO. Where is the moat embodied, the author summarizes the speeches of Li Bin and Qin Lihong into three points:
1. Mental positioning of high-end brands
2. Sales capacity + flexible production capacity
3. Systematic service capabilities
Li Bin believes that high-end brands are not a separate concept, but more like a feeling, and the core revolves around technology, products, services, and communities. But there are two other things that are very important: to have an original spirit and to have a full experience.
As I mentioned earlier, NIO's series of explorations have put the company under tremendous pressure and risk. But on the other hand, these explorations have really made them pioneers in the industry.
No matter how much other electric brands enter the market later, no matter how much they publicize themselves: they want to be user-oriented enterprises, play user operation/community, and build a charging and energy replenishment system, it is actually difficult to escape from NIO's narrative mode. Li Bin said on the spot that there are always people who criticize Weilai's ability, but in fact, if you ask the auto headhunter, you will know how high the package price of other friends is to poach people from Weilai.
Image source: NIO
Regarding NIO's moat, Qin Lihong also added one point: that is, their sales ability and flexible production capacity. In NIO's model family spectrum, ET7 and ET9 focus on business, ES6 and ES8 can be used by families, and ET5(t) focuses on young sports.
Not only sales, NIO has so many models, and each model is open to a series of options such as interior and exterior decoration color matching, various configurations, etc., and the order-based production method determines that the number of orders per month is dynamically changing. All of the above has a considerable test for the production line.
How to make the production utilization rate relatively stable, and the production capacity can keep up with the sales and orders at the same time, Weilai has suffered losses, but after building 500,000 cars, Qin Lihong believes that their flexible production capacity has been greatly improved.
The third moat, Qin Lihong, believes that it is NIO's systematic ability. This systematic capability is summarized by the author into two points: more mature sales channels + more charging and swapping service sites.
The most direct beneficiary of the latter two points is not only NIO, but also their second brand Ledao.
Qin Lihong mentioned such a set of data: from the delivery of the first ES8, two years later, they built 200 battery swap stations like a hill. And now in the first year of Ledao's launch, there are 1,000 battery swap stations waiting to be used.
To seize the high-end market, NIO hopes to dare to be the first in the world. But to challenge the mainstream mass market, Li Bin said that they want to dare to be the queen of the world.
Image source: NIO
His strategy and methodology are: in the early stage, through the high-end market, in the technology accumulation, talent accumulation, infrastructure construction, enterprise organization ability to lay the foundation, and then at the right time, with the preemptive model, and then participate in the very cruel mass market competition, will have a better chance of winning.
The author is deeply touched by this strategy. Because around 2018, the new cars are full of flowers and competing to open, Wei Xiaoli has just begun to deliver, and Weimar, Byton, and Gaohe are still eager to try.
However, an investor friend was the first not to be optimistic about Weimar, and the core logic was that Weimar's first car hit the price range of 10~200,000 yuan, and the mainstream mass market with the most fierce competition. Fighting for cost performance, cost sharing, and bargaining power for procurement, a new car can never do large-scale car companies such as SAIC, Geely, and BYD. Now, the collapse of Weimar has indeed confirmed this.
Positioning the high-end first, and then seizing the mainstream market downward, must be much more successful than first low-end and then desperately playing the brand up, which is the riveting effect of the brand.
In order to truly understand mainstream mass users and family users, Li Bin invited Ai Tiecheng, who has a Disney background, to serve as the president of Ledao. Li Bin's logic is: Disney is good at creating happiness for family users, and it also understands family best. Although it is cross-border, the underlying logic is the same.
Ai Tiecheng, President of Ledao, image source: NIO
When talking about whether Ledao and Weilai will fight internally and grab market share from each other, Li Bin admitted very frankly: It is impossible to say that there is no impact at all. But he believes that Lexus and Audi can't compete with Mercedes-Benz and BMW, not because of the parent group Toyota and Volkswagen. Ledao and Weilai, the mutual influence of the two brands, he is confident that he can control it well.
Li Bin said jokingly: The reason why Ledao is called this name comes from the joy of the family and the way of running the family. He and his team know that the vast majority of Chinese users do not actually have a fixed parking space, and there are still troubles in charging, and they are more concerned about energy consumption, which is the pain point that the Ledao brand wants to solve.
As for how to interpret "family happiness and family care", Li Bin finally buried an easter egg, depending on how many surprises the press conference on May 15 can bring to everyone.
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