Harvesting the 9th listed company, Li Shufu went from "car madman" to "listed maniac"

凤凰WEEKLY

2024-05-11 18:18 Published on the official account of Beijing Phoenix WEEKLY

Harvesting the 9th listed company, Li Shufu went from "car madman" to "listed maniac"

When Lei Jun and Zhou Hongyi continued to rush to the top of traffic because of cars, Li Shufu, a "car madman", quietly took over a listed company.

With the successful landing of ZEEKR on the New York Stock Exchange on May 10, Li Shufu, who has passed the age of sixtieth, has also changed the number of listed companies under his name from 8 to 9.

In this listing, ZEEKR issued a total of 21 million American depositary shares, priced at $21 per share, which was the highest end of the issue price of $18-21 in the previous prospectus.

After listing, the market value of ZEEKR also reached about $5.2 billion, making it the largest Chinese company to IPO in the United States since October 2021.

As of the close of the U.S. stock market on May 10, Zeekr closed at $28.26 per share, and its market value rose to $6.898 billion (about 50 billion yuan), becoming the new darling of Li Shufu's "listing map".

In recent years, Li Shufu has rarely released sharp words at the marketing level, and the image of a "madman" seems to have converged a lot.

However, this does not prevent Li Shufu from continuing to be good at dancing in the capital market.

Before ZEEKR went public, Geely had quietly set foot in many industries, including satellites, power batteries, flying cars, and power semiconductors.

Judging from the listing map, some people have already called Li Shufu "China's closest entrepreneur to Musk".

Maniac's "Car Empire"

ZEEKR is Li Shufu's "son-in-law" in the new energy vehicle track.

According to the "IPO Unicorn" report, after the IPO of Zeekr, Li Shufu will own nearly 75% of the shares.

At present, the "sister-in-law" ZEEKR has become the fourth Chinese new energy vehicle company listed on the US stock market after Wei Xiaoli, and it only took 3 years to "walk" into the door of the US stock market, which also makes ZEEKR the fastest IPO new energy vehicle company in history.

ZEEKR was officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the United States Photo/Geely Holding Group's official WeChat

ZEEKR is Li Shufu's 9th listed company, but it is not the end of Li Shufu's capital chess game.

Recently, Cao Cao Travel submitted a prospectus, if Cao Cao Travel can successfully land on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it means that the number of listed companies under Li Shufu will reach 10.

Back in 2005, Geely Automobile was successfully listed in Hong Kong, allowing Li Shufu, who was not confused in his 40s, to have the first listed company.

In the following 10 years, Li Shufu led Geely Automobile through major changes such as sales growth, strategic transformation, and brand internationalization, and entered the Fortune Global 500 for the first time in 2012.

Or the fundamentals are becoming more and more stable, since before entering the automotive industry, Li Shufu has regarded the car as an ideal, and accelerated the construction of his own "automobile empire" through acquisitions, shares, incubation and other ways, and promoted unlisted companies to enter the capital market, and the results have been quite good.

Up to now, in addition to ZEEKR and Geely, Li Shufu's listed companies include Qianjiang Motorcycle, Hanma Technology, Lifan Co., Ltd., Lotus, Polestar Auto, ECARX Technology, and Volvo Cars.

Among them, except for Qianjiang Motorcycle, Lifan and Hanma Technology, which were already listed companies before they were "bought" by Li Shufu, other companies were successfully listed, all of which were inseparable from Li Shufu.

"Listing master" and "car maniac" have gradually become the most evaluated by the outside world for Li Shufu.

Li Shufu, chairman of Geely Holding Group

With more than 20 years of car-making career, Li Shufu's business territory is large enough, and it has also earned him the title of "madman". Friends in the market, from foreign brands, to joint venture brands, to new Internet car manufacturers, have almost all been "scolded" by him.

The well-known wild saying, "What's so great about a car, isn't it just four wheels, two sofas and an iron shell", it came from Li Shufu's mouth.

But when the car was first built, the outside world ridiculed Li Shufu more, and even ridiculed, "Geely building a car is tantamount to jumping off a building." For these, Li Shufu responded angrily, "Then give us a chance to jump off the building!" ”

Since then, Li Shufu's "arrogance" has become more and more obvious.

Not only did it set Geely the goal of "allowing Chinese to buy a car with a year's income", but when looking at the foreign cars running on domestic roads in the early days of reform and opening up, he shouted "I am not against joint ventures, but I always believe that 'Norwegian forests' do not belong to China, and China cannot do without its own automobile industry." ”

As a result, Li Shufu staged a "snake swallowing an elephant", successfully won the Volvo car company, and acquired Proton, Lotus, and Daimler...... It has become the largest shareholder of Volvo Car and the largest shareholder of Daimler AG. It has also made Geely ranked among the world's top 500 companies for 7 consecutive years.

The listing has not yet "landed", and the calm predators are still worried

When reviewing his many entrepreneurial experiences, Li Shufu once summarized it as, "The formation of economic competitiveness lies in sorting out resources from a complex and disorderly state in an orderly, large-scale and clear strategy, which represents a level." ”

Li Shufu, who does not lose his standard, has indeed created many events that can be called business miracles. Among them, the most sensational is Li Shufu's persistence for 8 years, and finally succeeded in the "Geely merger and acquisition of Volvo car" incident.

"Geely's purchase of a Volvo car has been my dream for many years."

In 2002, when Li Shufu's Geely was still a car company that had just obtained the "birth permit" for cars, the idea of acquiring Volvo cars had already arisen in his mind.

Finding the right time starts at that time.

But Li Shufu at that time was not seen by the owner of the Volvo car at that time, the American Ford Motor Company, and was even regarded as an idiot's dream. After all, Geely is still a car company that has not received a penny of sales revenue.

It was not until eight years later, on August 2, 2010, that Geely spent US$1.8 billion to acquire 100% of the shares of Volvo Car before finally completing the asset delivery.

In 2010, Geely Holding and Ford Motor signed a final equity acquisition agreement for Volvo Car Company Photo/Geely Automobile's official WeChat

"We applied to Ford in 2007 and they ignored it." After the completion of the acquisition, Li Shufu revealed in an interview with the media that some people even felt that they were cheating money, and Volvo car employees even broke out a strike against Ford around 2010.

In fact, even though the acquisition was completed, Li Shufu did not get rid of people's ridicule, doubts and criticism of Geely's acquisition of Volvo cars.

The source of all kinds of suspicions is nothing more than that Volvo sedan at that time had a history of 80 years and was a world-renowned luxury car brand; Geely, on the other hand, is just a Chinese private enterprise with a history of just over 20 years. As for sales, Volvo's annual sales at that time were nearly 10 times that of Geely.

The acquisition of Volvo cars is not only Li Shufu's dream, but also Geely's inevitable choice under market competition.

Three years later, Volvo cars have emerged from the scepticism and global sales have grown. This is Li Shufu's answer to those who have questioned this decision.

From Volvo cars to Daimler, Aston Martin, etc., self-owned brands plus overseas acquisition brands, from ordinary passenger cars, to luxury sports cars, to pickups, motorcycles, and travel services, this makes Li Shufu much more relaxed than many bigwigs in the same industry.

So much so that this year, Wei Jianjun of Great Wall Motors claimed that he wanted to be a "high-quality Internet celebrity", and when BYD Wang Chuanfu squeezed the subway to see Xiaomi cars at the Beijing Auto Show, Li Shufu always hid behind the scenes and rarely spoke.

Li Shufu, who has a clear strategy, is also involved in different industries including satellites, flying cars, and power semiconductors while making efforts to build an automobile empire.

Recently, Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360 Group, "live broadcast test drive of flying cars, but could not take off because Xiaopeng Huitian did not complete the take-off procedures" triggered a new round of discussion among netizens about flying cars.

Flying cars are also a project that Li Shufu has been "playing" for a long time. In 2017, Li Shufu wholly acquired Terrafugia, an American flying car company, and jointly invested with Daimler in Volocopter, a low-altitude mobility company that operates point-to-point in the city.

In the same year that he acquired the Volvo car, Li Shufu publicly mentioned his "cosmology" for the first time. In 2018, the company "Time and Space Daoyu", which was invested by Geely and named by Li Shufu himself, was established.

Today, the company's Taizhou Star Zhilian Satellite Factory has an annual production capacity of 500 satellites.

It's just that satellites and flying cars, one is quite far away from consumers, and the other has not really landed.

Moreover, Li Shufu also needs to solve the dilemma that his other listed car companies are far from "going ashore".

Seven years ago, Lotus, a luxury car brand bought by Li Shufu, experienced the peak of its listing at the beginning of 2024, and as of the close of the U.S. stock market on May 10, the market value of Lotus was only $5 billion, a decrease of 46% from $9.2 billion on the day of listing.

Polestar (Chinese: Polestar), which was launched a year and a half earlier by Lotus, has a similar fate. As of the close of the U.S. stock market on May 10, Polestar's market capitalization was only $2.7 billion, down nearly 90% from $26.6 billion at the beginning of the listing.

Extreme Krypton solves worries?

With the evolution of the industry, Li Shufu's focus on the automotive field is no longer as simple as four wheels and a sofa.

Li Shufu has already updated the theory of "four wheels", and once proposed that "in the future, there will be fewer and fewer cylinders, but the participation of the motor will be higher and higher, and eventually the engine will disappear completely." ”

In 2015, Geely officially announced the "Blue Geely Action" plan, proposing that "new energy vehicles account for 90% of sales by 2020".

However, in the first five years after the implementation of the plan, Geely's NEV sales fell short of expectations, and by 2021, Geely's NEV sales accounted for only 6.2%, which was even lower than the 8.3% in 2019. Even the annual sales of the group as a whole are declining year after year.

ZEEKR is regarded as a company with high hopes after the first five years of Geely's new energy plan was hastily concluded. When ZEEKR was founded, Li Shufu was the chairman, and An Conghui, president of Geely Holding Group, served as the CEO.

ZEEKR is indeed much more competitive than Li Shufu's other "children".

According to the prospectus, ZEEKR, which was established in 2021, has launched a number of models including ZEEKR 001, ZEEKR 001FR, ZEEKR 007, ZEEKR 009, ZEEKR X and so on. As of December 31, 2023, ZEEKR has delivered a total of 197,000 new vehicles. Among them, 119,000 units will be delivered in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 65%.

ZEEKR Automobile Photo/Geely Holding Group official website

ZEEKR's "stride meteor" helped Geely Group complete its annual sales target of 1.65 million units in 2023 after a lapse of 5 years, and finally achieved annual sales of 1.686 million units, a slight increase of 2% year-on-year. At the same time, Geely's NEV sales exceeded 480,000 units, accounting for 28.7% of the company's total sales.

The upward growth in 2023 will make ZEEKR's sales target in 2024 reach 230,000 units, that is, double the sales volume on the basis of last year. The latest sales data shows that in April 2024, ZEEKR delivered 16,000 new cars, a year-on-year increase of 99%. From January to April, nearly 50,000 units were delivered, a year-on-year increase of 111%.

But at present, even if ZEEKR has completed the listing, if it wants to achieve the above sales target, the road ahead is not easy.

First of all, today's capital market is completely different from when "Wei Xiaoli" was listed.

Taking NIO as an example, as the first new EV manufacturer to go public, NIO's share price can be said to have experienced a rollercoaster fluctuation. On the first day of listing, NIO opened at $6.26 per share, with a total market capitalization of $6.4 billion.

Subsequently, NIO, like the new energy vehicle industry at that time, experienced rapid development.

In mid-2020, NIO's stock price soared, reaching $66.99 per share in early 2021. However, with the intensification of market competition and the increase of players, the bubble of the new energy vehicle industry has gradually been squeezed.

As of the close of the U.S. stock market on May 10, NIO's stock price closed at $5.33 per share, with a total market capitalization of $10.49 billion.

The bubble no longer exists, and only sales are the key to success.

However, under the impact of increasingly fierce competition in car manufacturing, high-end has become the choice of more and more car companies.

Whether it is AVATAR, VOYANT, and Zhiji, which are the representatives of the sub-brands of traditional car companies, or NIO and Xiaopeng, which were initially positioned as high-end, or the Qzhijie and Xiangjie launched by Internet car companies, they are all strong opponents faced by ZEEKR. In particular, the addition of Xiaomi cars will set off a "new war" for the high-end of new energy vehicles in 2024.

Grabbing the market among the crowds, even for Zeekrypton, which has the endorsement of Geely, is not an easy task.

What's more, the pressure faced by ZEEKR is not only from its peers, but also from the "self-transfusion" ability that has not yet been realized.

According to the data, from 2021 to 2023, ZEEKR's operating losses will continue to grow, with 4.3 billion yuan, 7.152 billion yuan, and 8.178 billion yuan (about 1.152 billion US dollars), respectively, and the net loss will also be as high as 4.514 billion yuan, 7.655 billion yuan, and 8.264 billion yuan. It's still "selling one and losing one".

Previously, Lin Jinwen, vice president of ZEEKR Intelligent Technology, said in an interview with the media that the addition of Xiaomi cars will accelerate the industry knockout competition and help companies such as ZEEKR and Tesla "clean up the battlefield".

Indeed, the joining of the strong can accelerate the process of survival of the fittest in an industry. But shopping malls have always been like battlefields, and no one can predict who the car companies that have been swept away will be.

In this way, whether it is the 9th or 10th listed company, it may not be the end of Li Shufu.

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