Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall Motors
In 2024, Great Wall Motor's transformation begins with live broadcasting.
On March 26, Wei Jianjun, the 60-year-old chairman of Great Wall Motors, updated his long-registered personal Weibo for the first time and began to share his daily work. On April 15, Wei Jianjun started the live broadcast for the first time to personally test Great Wall Motor's full-scene NOA (pilot assisted driving technology). On April 18, Wei Jianjun appeared on the Douyin platform and interacted with Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi Auto.
Then, on May 10, Great Wall Motor held the 2024 general meeting of shareholders at its headquarters in Baoding, where not only did Great Wall Motor's senior executives attend, but also changed the usual closed-door meeting and conducted online synchronous live broadcast through multiple channels.
Great Wall Motor's senior management team attended the 2024 General Meeting of Shareholders
Objectively speaking, Wei Jianjun has always insisted on "excessive R&D investment", and Great Wall Motors has also mastered a lot of hard-core technologies, but in the new energy era, it is not good to do technology with a dull head. Great Wall Motors and Wei Jianjun themselves also had to follow the marketing methodology of the new car-making forces and try to change the image of the past through live broadcasts.
Wei Jianjun said frankly at the shareholders' meeting, "For a long time, [I] was relatively rare even in the media. But this is an Internet era, and it is necessary to have an Internet mindset. "I'm setting an example, I must be better than them (the employees), I have an advantage because I'm the boss."
In the 120-minute exchange, whether it was a self-ridicule against a serious image, or a "microphone" to talk about the shortcomings of pure electric off-road, Wei Jianjun was personally conveying to the outside world the changes that will occur in Great Wall Motors. He said that Great Wall is a very simple company, and everything can be said except what cannot be said in the regulations of listed companies.
"Continuous losses are difficult to support the development of enterprises"
In addition to the change of marketing channels that Great Wall Motors is trying to change, there is also a background: Great Wall Motors has just delivered the best quarterly financial report in history.
On April 25, Great Wall Motor disclosed its first quarter report for 2024. According to the data, the revenue was 42.86 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 47.6%; net profit was 3.228 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 1752.55%; 275,300 new cars were sold, a year-on-year increase of 25.11%.
Of course, one of the main reasons for the sharp increase in Great Wall Motor's net profit in the first quarter was that last year's base was too low. Wei Jianjun once said frankly that the squat in 2022 is for a better jump in 2023. However, Great Wall Motors did not "jump" as expected in 2023. In the first quarter of 2023, Great Wall Motor's net profit will only be 174 million yuan.
However, Great Wall Motor said that the results in the first quarter of this year were mainly due to the growth of sales scale, the optimization of sales structure and the increase in revenue per vehicle.
In fact, the reason why Great Wall Motor's first-quarter financial report has attracted attention from the outside world is, on the one hand, from the growth of Great Wall Motors itself, and on the other hand, from the horizontal comparison of car companies that have recently handed over their report cards for the first quarter of 2024.
After combing through the titanium media app, it was found that BYD, Great Wall Motor, and Cialis achieved double growth in revenue and net profit. However, nearly seventy percent of car companies declined in profits in the first quarter, such as Changan Automobile, Guangzhou Automobile Group, SAIC Group, BAIC Blue Valley, Zotye Automobile, Haima Automobile, etc., all of which declined to varying degrees.
At the shareholders' meeting, Wei Jianjun also judged that the competition intensity of the automotive industry will not decrease in the three years from 2024 to 2026.
So, in the context of intensifying competition, how can Great Wall Motors survive? Wei Jianjun said that the automobile industry generally suffered large losses, and the Great Wall Motors not only had to face the difficulties, but also to "do something and not do something", for products with particularly serious losses, it will moderately reduce sales, give full play to its own long board, and vigorously promote it if it does not lose money or has a slight loss or a relatively high profit.
This may not sound like "long-termism", but in Wei Jianjun's view, long-termism is not simply the opposite of a price war. He explained that long-termism itself is about companies creating social value. If they are all in a state of loss, they will not be able to hold on in the long run. Therefore, it is necessary to have its own hematopoietic ability, establish long-termism, and look at the problem from a more long-term perspective.
"The current problem of Great Wall is that it is not very good at selling cars"
At present, Great Wall Motors has five sub-brands: Haval, Tank, WEY, Great Wall Cannon and Ora. Since Great Wall Motors started with SUVs and pickup trucks represented by Haval, and gradually opened up the market to form large-scale industry segments, Haval and pickup trucks are also the main sales force of Great Wall Motors.
According to the production and sales report released by Great Wall Motor, the sales volume of the Haval brand in March was 54,055 units, a year-on-year increase of 13.99%, and the sales volume from January to March was 157889 units, a year-on-year increase of 25.53%. Great Wall pickup truck sales in March were 17,569 units, and sales from January to March were 43,495 units.
For the ORA brand, which focuses on the female market and has relatively weak profitability, Wei Jianjun said that although the ORA brand is niche and small, it has few losses.
WEY, as a brand launched by Great Wall Motors after Wei Jianjun's surname to hit the high-end market, has always been valued by Wei Jianjun himself, but due to the lack of clarity in brand positioning, the sales of this brand focusing on the high-end market were once sluggish.
Wei Jianjun also said at the scene that the product strength of WEY brand has not been bad, especially last year, relying on hybrid and intelligent resources, WEY brand is currently at the first-class level of competitiveness in the same level of market.
According to the data released by Great Wall Motors, WEY sales in the first quarter of this year were 9,608 units, although the absolute number is not high, but fortunately, it increased by 182.34% year-on-year, which is the fastest growth rate among Great Wall Motor's brands.
However, Wei Jianjun also bluntly analyzed that the current problem of the Great Wall is that it is not very good at selling cars, and the dealers of the Great Wall in the past also lack the experience of dealing with more high-end consumer users.
In response to the service and other problems faced by brands such as WEY in the terminal, Great Wall Motors has established the "Great Wall Zhixuan" direct store brand internally to test the direct sales model. As of May Day this year, Great Wall Zhixuan has laid out 33 stores in 19 cities, and Wei Jianjun himself "reads the war report every day." During the May Day holiday, Wei Jianjun also spent more than 6 hours driving from Baoding to Zhengzhou Zhenghongcheng direct store to visit.
According to reports, the new Blue Mountain will be launched in batches in the third quarter of this year, and the facelift of Gaoshan will also be put into the market in the fourth quarter.
Regarding the tank brand, Wei Jianjun also added that the off-road vehicle pursues slowness in the traditional sense and the needs and functions of the scene. Slow has better control, the slowest pure off-road vehicle in the world can do 2.7 km / h, and there is a huge torque output in the slow process, which is a function that pure electric vehicles cannot achieve. The electric motor is slow and there is no torque, and the electric vehicle that the user sees can climb uphill, but the tires are slipping and scratching up, not really climbing up, Hi4-T pursues low-speed torque, and it is a new energy vehicle technology that adapts to off-road scenarios.
Wei Jianjun also called for the off-road category to be divided into three categories: "high-intensity pure off-road, pan-off-road, and urban four-wheel drive". In his opinion, the "square box" only represents the styling trend, but it does not simply represent the off-road vehicle.
In addition to cars, Great Wall Motors is also building motorcycles. Wei Jianjun said: "To tell the truth, (for motorcycles) do have feelings, but they will also try their best to achieve both feelings and money. ”
At the previous 2024 Beijing Auto Show, Great Wall Motor's booth debuted an 8-cylinder engine motorcycle powertrain SOUO H8. It is reported that this 8-cylinder engine motorcycle will soon be unveiled at the Beijing International Motorcycle Exhibition.
"The layout value of overseas markets is greater than the short-term business value"
At a time when the domestic new energy vehicle market has been extremely involuted, many car companies will focus their strategies on going overseas in 2024, and the Great Wall is no exception.
In fact, Great Wall Motors started to go overseas relatively early. In Wei Jianjun's view, going to sea is also the longboard of the Great Wall.
He said at the shareholders' meeting, "new energy is China's strategy, not the strategy of other countries, in fact, Australia, Thailand, Brazil and other countries have recently retreated in new energy policies." ”
It is precisely because most overseas markets are far less resolute than China's attitude towards the development of new energy, in his view, the current Great Wall covers pickups, SUVs, HEVs in the overseas market still has advantages, the Great Wall's testing standards are also enough to cope with the test of countries around the world, the future into more overseas markets, the Great Wall only needs to do simple adaptive development to enter.
As for whether the competition of car companies will affect the profits of Great Wall Motors in overseas markets, Shi Qingke, vice president and head of overseas business of Great Wall Motors, said that competition must inevitably exist and there is no way to avoid it. However, improving the base and market share of overseas market segments is the principle of Great Wall in strengthening overseas construction.
As for how to guarantee profits? He further explained that the first step is to focus on the strategy of ONE GWM. In addition to the introduction of new models in major markets such as Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, we are also actively studying policies and product strategies in Europe, North America, Japan, and South Korea. The third is to insist on the layout value greater than the short-term business value in the process of overseas operation.
According to the financial report, in the first quarter of 2024, Great Wall Motor's overseas sales increased by 78.51% year-on-year to 92,800 units, accounting for 33.7% of its total sales in the first quarter.
In overseas markets, Great Wall Motor will challenge its sales target of 500,000 units this year. Among them, the Haval brand will challenge 300,000 units, 60,000 pickup trucks, 50,000~60,000 tanks, and the WEY brand and ORA brand will be promoted in key overseas markets. According to the plan, Great Wall Motor expects its annual sales in overseas markets to exceed one million units by 2030.
In the era of fuel vehicles, Great Wall Motors once became the leader of its own brands with its large-scale single product strategy, but in recent years, it has encountered the dilemma of market promotion in the face of electrification and intelligence, and the outside world has mixed reviews of Great Wall Motors. Nowadays, the "second half" of smart electric vehicles is unpredictable, and Great Wall Motors is also trying to change, such as refocusing, frequently adjusting new management, and continuing to make efforts in overseas strategy......
It is naturally a good thing for Laqi and the marketing thinking of Internet companies to let the outside world see the transformation of Great Wall Motors. But whether Wei Jianjun can take this opportunity to "recast" the Great Wall is still the sales figures that are put on the table month by month.
This year, Great Wall Motor has set a target of 1.9 million units, which means that it will sell an average of 158,000 units per month. However, at present, from January to April this year, Great Wall Motor's cumulative sales were 370129, with an average monthly sales of less than 100,000 units. In the next eight months, it will not be easy to achieve the full-year sales target.
(This article was first published on Titanium Media App, author | Han Jingxian, editor - Zhang Min)