Sentence | Moda
"I just learned yesterday that there is so much attention to bowing. A 90-degree bow is swearing and rude to people. 15 degrees is a greeting, 30 degrees is welcome, and 60 degrees is extremely thankful. So, I'm going to give you a 60-degree bow today."
At 9:40 a.m. on May 10, Nezha Automobile's first L series model was officially delivered. At the event, CEO Daniel Zhang opened the door for each owner while explaining the reason why the promised 90-degree deep bow was changed to 60 degrees.
Daniel Zhang's actions are said to have been learned from Lei Jun, the founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group. But it is easy for a discerning person to see that he is "adding drama" to himself again - because Lei Jun personally opened the door for the first batch of owners of Xiaomi Su7 and took a photo with each owner cordially, but he did not bow so deeply.
From posting a reflection to accepting criticism from 360 founder Zhou Hongyi, to shouting to learn and imitate Lei Jun, Nezha Automobile CEO Daniel Zhang is trying all kinds of ways to attract attention this year.
Daniel Zhang was really anxious. Because Nezha Automobile is encountering unprecedented growth bottlenecks.
In the first quarter of this year, Nezha Automobile sold only 24,400 vehicles, a year-on-year decrease of 6.9%, and further back, the annual delivery volume of Nezha Automobile in 2023 will be 127,500 units, a year-on-year decrease of 16%, and only half of the sales target of 250,000 units has been completed. It is the only car company with negative growth among the new car-making forces.
At the same time, since the news of the listing in 2020, Nezha Automobile has been fruitless in its listing so far, and it has also become the only car company that has not yet been listed by the new car-making forces.
Interestingly, at the beginning of this year, when the Gaohe Automobile Building was about to collapse, netizens who joined in the excitement launched a vote on "the next collapsed new energy vehicle brand", and Nezha Automobile had the highest number of votes.
On the surface, the reason for Nezha's poor sales in the past year is that it is overly dependent on low-end models and hindered in impacting the high-end, but the deeper reason is Nezha's lack of marketing system, product architecture and strategic planning.
The new energy vehicle market in 2024 will still start with "hell" difficulty, and Nezha Automobile's capital is becoming less and less.
1, the white knight "mud sea fluttering"
Whether it is posting a video saying that he has been with him for nine years to sell the Maybach S600, or becoming the most popular "car model" during the Beijing Auto Show, as the second largest shareholder of Nezha Automobile, Zhou Hongyi of 360 Company is regarded as Nezha's "red savior". But many people ignore that CEO Daniel Zhang is the original "white knight".
Hezhong New Energy Automobile Co., Ltd., the operating entity of Nezha Automobile, was established as early as 2014 by Fang Yunzhou, one of the earliest members of Chery's "Clean Energy Vehicle Special Group".
However, although Fang Yunzhou understands how to build cars, he does not know how to sell cars, so he found Daniel Zhang, who achieved the myth of annual sales of 100,000 units in BAIC New Energy after his former colleagues at Chery, and since then Fang Yunzhou has paid attention to the research and development of automobiles internally, and Daniel Zhang has paid attention to the sales of automobiles externally.
Fang Yunzhou, who knew nothing about the market and brands, found Daniel Zhang, and the story of the two "old car people" teaming up officially began in 2018. The latter single-handedly dominated the naming of Nezha Automobile and subsequent branding and marketing efforts.
The popularity of the national comic "Nezha's Demon Boy Descends" in 2019 made Fang Yunzhou and Daniel Zhang's "Nezha" out of the circle again. Subsequently, in terms of external publicity, Nezha also replaced the company's slogan with the out-of-the-circle line of Nezha's movie, "My life is up to me".
Facts have proved that the white knight's decision-making also laid the groundwork for Nezha to be criticized by consumers.
The marketing history of Nezha Automobile is almost a Daniel Zhang overturning history: from the earliest public relations person in charge trying to invite the bad artist Wu Yifan to endorse, to the press conference to advertise himself as the pioneer of the same price of oil and electricity and ridiculing his peers, and then to the live broadcast room because of the problem of sitting posture to scold netizens for licking dogs...... This white knight constantly let himself go in marketing, and before Nezha Automobile really made trouble, he first made a fuss.
Looking back on 2023, Nezha Automobile not only failed to complete the annual delivery target set earlier, but also was the only player among the top 5 new car-making forces to "reverse the car" in sales.
On the second day of the new year, when the new car manufacturers celebrated the harvest of the past year, Daniel Zhang "reviewed online" on Weibo: "Thank you for your concern, you have seen your kind criticism." Subsequently, a personnel appointment document for Nezha Automobile's marketing team circulated on the Internet.
Nezha Automobile has to put a question mark over whether it has learned from the pain. But behind the failure to do a good job in marketing for so long, Daniel Zhang will not market in the first place. It can even be said that Daniel Zhang has achieved almost nothing in marketing in the past five years.
One example is that each of the new car makers is highly labeled. For example, Li Auto is the first choice for daddy cars, Xpeng focuses on intelligent driving, and NIO highlights services. However, when it comes to Nezha automobiles, few consumers say clearly what its positioning is.
In other words, when the marketing of new forces has advanced to version 2.0, Daniel Zhang's marketing thinking is still in the beta version. Combined with all kinds of marketing that corrupts the popularity of passers-by, black and red are not red, and naturally they can't "add" Nezha's car sales.
2, the ripening "magic boy"
Some people compare the relationship between Fang Yunzhou and Daniel Zhang to "Su Hua and Cheng Yixiao" in the new energy industry. One is in charge of strategy from 0 to 1, and one is in charge of tactics from 1 to 10.
Although Daniel Zhang's marketing has a big problem, at most it is only not done well from 1 to 10, and the real problem actually appears from 0 to 1. More precisely, it is out of Fang Yunzhou, that is, in the formulation of the strategy from 0 to 1.
In 2014, Tesla entered China. Subsequently, car companies such as Weilai and Xiaopeng, which were later called "new forces", were established one after another, and Hezhong New Energy, the predecessor of Nezha Automobile, was also among them.
However, unlike the Internet entrepreneurship background of Wei Xiaoli's three founders, because Fang Yunzhou went to Tsinghua University for further study, he was the deputy director of the Energy Conservation and New Energy Vehicle Center of Tsinghua University at that time, and was famous for being "a new force in the creation of new cars led by Tsinghua University's R&D personnel".
Fang Yunzhou's initial plan was to become a supplier of new energy vehicles, but later with the entry of Tsinghua resources, new energy policies and market outlets, it turned into a vehicle manufacturer.
From 2014 to 2017, finding money and engaging in product research and development were the main tasks of the Fang Yunzhou team. At that time, in addition to obtaining the new energy vehicle license and production qualification "double permit", the company had almost no sense of existence until the advent of the first model, Nezha N01.
Generally, it takes four to five years from the construction of the factory to the final delivery, and Nezha only took less than three years. More importantly, the "product power" of Nezha that was born is not good enough. Don't dare to sell to ordinary consumers. Most of them are sold to the B-end market. To B accounts for about 50% of the total sales. From the release of the new car to the end of the year, only 1,000 units of the N01 were sold.
Nezha's start was lonely, which may also make Fang Yunzhou realize that it is not easy to build and sell cars, so he immediately formulated two cards for Nezha, one is Chery and the other is BAIC - Chery, that is, from the lowest place, in the sinking market to spread sales; BAIC brand occupies the highland of corporate sales.
This style of play proved to be effective at the time.
From the second half of 2018 to 2019, Nezha completed the development of Nezha You and Nezha V. The subsidized prices of these two cars are between 129,800 and 201,800 and 70,900 and 123,800 respectively, and the data shows that the sales performance of the Nezha you and V models did not disappoint Daniel Zhang.
In January 2022, Nezha Automobile announced that the 100,000th production car rolled off the assembly line, and it took only 42 months for Nezha Automobile to go from the first to the 100,000th unit.
But small profits and quick sales are at most a ticket to the next round of competition, and it can't change the fact that they are losing money and making money.
According to the data, in 2021, Nezha Automobile will deliver 69,674 vehicles, with a total revenue of 5.735 billion yuan and a net loss of 2.908 billion yuan. This also means that Nezha sells cars with an average price of about 80,000 yuan, and loses 40,000 yuan for every car sold.
Nezha's past success was a short-lived victory in which two old paths came together. But the aftermath of the two cards is also very obvious -
After Chery used low-cost cars to sink the market, the road to high water testing has frequently failed, and even the IPO has been dragged down so far, becoming one of the very few companies among the old independent car companies that have not yet been listed;
Although BAIC's corporate market strategy is full of momentum, while helping it avoid the C-end market fight, it also makes it give up this battleground, and now BAIC is still in an embarrassing situation of serious lack of stamina.
From this perspective, Nezha's sales champion position in 2022 - at that time, the new energy car manufacturing market was experiencing a serious shortage of cores, and the supply chain crisis caused by the chip shortage interrupted the development rhythm of "Wei Xiaoli" and other leading car manufacturers, giving all low-end car manufacturers a short-lived opportunity. The lower the end, the less affected by the chip shortage, the greater the opportunity.
This also explains why a low-end brand that is not very conspicuous among many new power companies will be able to counterattack in 2022, defeat "Wei Xiaoli" with higher traffic, and sit on the throne of "sales crown" of new forces. And in 2023, Nezha's sales will begin to decline unstoppably.
3. Riding a "Weima" is sad to cross the river
In April this year, Daniel Zhang launched a poll survey with users on the topic of "whether Nezha Auto needs to be renamed" to solicit public opinions. In this poll, which had at least 13,000 participants, as many as 32% of users preferred to change the brand name to "Hezhong", which shows the resistance of the C-end market to the car name Nezha.
But in fact, even if Nezha Automobile changes its name, it may not be able to save the next decline.
At present, the competition in the new energy vehicle industry is extremely fierce. On February 19, BYD offered the "King Bomb" at the beginning of the year, which has to some extent determined the tone of the price involution in 2024, in order to seize the market, many car companies and many models have followed up, collectively reduced to less than 100,000 yuan.
And Nezha Automobile is also actively following up and embracing the market with price reductions. On February 19, BYD launched the 79,800 yuan Qin PLUS Glory Edition, and Nezha Automobile immediately followed up with a price reduction, Nezha X cut the price by 22,000 yuan, the price dropped to 99,800 yuan, and the starting price also dropped to less than 100,000 yuan. In addition, the price of Nezha AYA is reduced by 8,000 yuan, and the price of Nezha S is reduced by 5,000 yuan.
After all, the price war in 2024 will continue to fall will be the general trend, and Nezha Automobile, which does not have much room for decline, will face the biggest problem: following the price reduction will only compress profits, and the cost performance advantage of not reducing the price itself will be gone.
Nezha also realized that the trick of "cost performance" is difficult to "eat all over the world", trying to impact the mid-to-high-end market, after 2022, Daniel Zhang led Nezha Automobile on the road to brand improvement, hoping to gradually dilute the low-end brand image. Later, the Nezha U, Nezha S, and Nezha GT launched by it were positioned in the price range of more than 100,000 yuan, more than 150,000 yuan, and 200,000 yuan respectively.
The fact that cannot be ignored is that under the low-end strategy of Nezha Automobile in the early stage, its product strength has not been fully verified by the market, because the competitive advantage is more focused on the price side, and some of Nezha's early orders are in the online car-hailing market.
Nowadays, under this strategy, whether the technology is leading enough, whether the research and development can keep up, whether the quality control, marketing, channels, services, etc. are hard enough, and whether the brand can be precipitated, etc., are all the next torture questions that Nezha faces.
A bad news is that the second half of new energy vehicles is intelligent has been the consensus of the industry. And intelligence needs more funds for long-term support, Nezha relies on low-end and subsidies to enter the game, it is difficult to achieve profitability through scale advantages, and there is no way to bet on smart cars, leaving Nezha to stay in the tram era There is not much time.
Previously, Nezha's batteries were provided by CATL and SVOLT, motors were provided by Bosch, BMS battery management systems were provided by Infineon, intelligent cockpits were from Desay SV, and autonomous driving chips were selected from the journey series of domestic enterprises Horizon. In addition, Nezha announced the launch of research on intelligent driving functions in 2021, which started slowly.
It can be said that in the first two years of Nezha, almost all of the three-electric technologies were "patched together". And this just blocked Nezha's upward breakthrough.
Perhaps because of the pain caused by the weak technical strength, after the completion of the crossover round of financing with a total of 7 billion yuan in August last year, Nezha Automobile began to increase investment in technology research and development, and released a number of new technologies and products of "Haozhi Strategy 2025", covering five major sectors: supercomputing platform, skateboard chassis, electric drive system, range extender, and thermal management system.
But investors clearly can't wait.
According to the 2022 financial report released by 360 Company, the investor of Nezha Automobile, in 2022, Nezha Automobile's revenue will be 13.329 billion yuan, and its net loss will reach 6.919 billion yuan. In three years, Nezha Automobile has accumulated losses of 11.148 billion yuan.
In 2023, Nezha's sales and brand will both soar and fail, not only will he have a hard time, but also continue to drag down the performance of shareholders 360. In 2022, 360 will lose about 2.2 billion yuan, of which the investment income loss of Nezha will be 894 million yuan, which will be obviously dragged down.
This can also explain why, in the past six months, Zhou Hongyi has been "angry" at a series of problems in the marketing system of Nezha Automobile, while hoping that Daniel Zhang can learn more from Lei Jun and Xiaomi.
What's even more terrifying is that Nezha's next style of play is very similar to the development path of Weimar, which chose to develop overseas markets and go public when its market share was not fully competitive. But as a result, the listing failed, and Weimar, which moved to overseas markets, only ended up dismal, and the founder donated money and ran away, ending up with chicken feathers.
Lei Jun said in an exclusive interview with CCTV Finance, "Smart electric vehicles are the same as consumer electronics and the software industry, it is a winner-takes-all, we feel that if we don't do the top five in global sales, we may not survive, so we invested $10 billion to build a car from the beginning." ”
Will Nezha become the next Weima? This answer seems to be getting better and easier to answer.