Text/Editor丨Qingtian Imperial History
●—<前言>—●
In 2023, some car companies have said goodbye forever and fallen into their own graves. Even if it is a joint venture brand camp, with state-owned enterprise resources and foreign technical strength, it cannot escape the fierce competition in the market.
Do you know how many car companies fail in China a year? The most unlucky car company in 2023 was once a winner in life, raising tens of billions of yuan to attract various capital tycoons into the game, and exporting to more than ten countries. However, he single-handedly ran out of food in this year, burned hundreds of billions of dollars, and became the biggest laughing stock.
What hastened their demise?
●—<拜腾>—●
In this bottomless pit of red sea competition, Byton has been favored by well-known enterprises and institutions such as FAW Group, and has been only one step away from mass production in the past three years, and now it was officially liquidated by the court on June 14. A generation of new car-making forces is coming to an end, but Byton's tragic situation is somewhat "made".
At the beginning, he had a high starting point and a strong background, and he had carried out 4 rounds of financing, and he would not worry about money at all in the past few years. As the founder, Bi Fukang was also the "father of BMW i8", and the reason why he founded Byton was because he worked at BMW for more than 20 years, saw with his own eyes that BMW made a lot of money in the Chinese market, saw the unlimited potential contained in the Chinese automobile market, and decided to build cars himself.
Therefore, he also poached his colleagues in BMW, Dai Lei, who has served as an executive in Dongfeng Infiniti and BMW Brilliance, and Fu Qiang, the former CEO of Volvo China Sales Company, and also received tens of billions of investment from business giants such as Tencent, FAW, CATL and Foxconn. Because of the high starting point, at the beginning of its business, Byton was known as the "Four Little Dragons" of new car-making forces with Weilai and Xiaopeng.
Compared with NIO, most of the founders are cross-border investors in the Internet industry, and the BYTON team has a very solid foundation in terms of business capabilities, so it has been very optimistic about capital from the beginning of its birth. In the following two years, Byton built a ceiling-level factory in Nanjing, with a total investment of 11 billion yuan covering an area of 1,200 acres, designed and built according to Industry 4.0 standards, equipped with about 400 robots, such a luxurious lineup in the words of employees is "a local tyrant" and "spending money like a waterfall".
It didn't take long for Byton to be entangled in lawsuits due to lack of money and arrears, and even became the focus of public opinion for "burning 8.4 billion yuan to build a production car". Less than three years after its establishment, Foxconn, which had intended to take over Byton, also announced that it had given up, and the root cause was actually the chaos and excessive spending within Byton, which not only put the high-end image on the publicity, but also on its daily operations.
It is understood that the staff outfits of a store in Shanghai are tailor-made and imported from Germany, and the staff business cards in China are also made of high-end materials, and the price of a box has reached thousands of yuan. What's even more exaggerated is that in 2018, Byton's 300-person office in North America spent more than $7 million on snack purchases alone. In a short period of time since its establishment, BYTON had less than 1,000 employees, but at its peak, it had 29 vice presidents, and the salary was even more prohibitive.
"We are serious about building cars", but what was left for Byton in three years was the fate of bankruptcy, and this ending seemed to be doomed.
●—<威马>—●
Weimar, as the first brother of the former new car-making force, his ending was something that everyone did not expect. Many people don't know that compared with car companies such as Xiaopeng, Weilai and Ideal, WM's biggest advantage is to make cars independently. He lives up to his name and has publicly stated that his car factory produces hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year. However, it is this amazing output that is the envy of other car companies that has become a heavy burden on WM Motor.
According to WM Motor's sales data in 2021, WM Motor's cumulative sales in two years are only 36,000 units, while its production capacity has reached a terrifying 200,000 units, resulting in a serious waste of resources and huge resource consumption, which greatly increases operating costs. Since 2022, it has been revealed that 4S stores in many places are closed and empty, and in 2023, Weimar's serious financial crisis forced it to lie in the "ICU".
As the leader of Weimar, Shen Hui is a veteran of the automotive industry, served as the vice president of Geely Automobile, chairman of Volvo China, and caused a sensation in the entire Chinese industry that year is "Geely's acquisition of Volvo", Shen Hui is one of the deep participants, with such a background, Weimar has accumulated financing of more than 35 billion. It is said that in 2021, the reward payment expenditure granted to the management in just one year will reach 2.7 billion, and the news of "Weimar founder's annual salary of 1.2 billion" once appeared on the hot search, shocking the Chinese people.
After experiencing the reshuffle of new forces in 2022, WM will not even be able to face Tesla's price war in 2023, and it is the sales problem that will eventually lead to WM's defeat.
●—<游侠>—●
In July 2015, the first batch of new forces Wei Xiaoli had just sprouted, and an electric concept car called "Ranger X" had been officially released. At that time, in a hall in Taikoo Li, Beijing, there was a crowd of enthusiastic people holding up their mobile phones to take pictures, all wondering what kind of car a car company with the name of "China's Tesla" had built?
Sure enough, CEO Huang Xiuyuan has officially announced, which immediately caused a sensation in the entire automobile circle, "Isn't this a Tesla with a different shell?" In fact, the appearance of this car is almost completely similar to Tesla, and the data is also very close to each other, and the data released by Mr. Huang is only an indicator of their "expectations". But what people never expected was that the supply chain behind Ranger can be described as very strong.
According to the data, Ranger's products use imported battery cells in the core three electric and intelligent driving, the self-developed high-performance battery pack and the 350kw high-power power motor jointly developed by Taiwan Tomita. A series of Tier 1 suppliers deal with Ranger in a way that was never predicted. In addition to Ranger Motors, which has done a lot of work in the supply chain, most of their colleagues are even from Audi, Jaguar, Land Rover, and BMW.
It can be seen that the Ranger's gigafactory, which reflects the highest level of Chinese industry, has as many as 680 robots, and has introduced the automated deep learning system used by Audi and BMW. In 2018, Ranger became the largest investment project in Huzhou in recent years, so it was strongly supported by the government.
Everything is so beautiful, but it is not as we expected, the Ranger's car building is still just a PPT. A netizen even ridiculed: "At the beginning of the establishment of Ranger Automobile, the biggest expense should be to buy a Tesla modelS and ask a sheet metal master to build a shell by hand." Maybe the Ranger didn't plan to build a car seriously from the beginning.
●—<爱驰>—●
From the beginning of its establishment, Aiways has adhered to internationalization and intelligence, and the founder Fu Qiang also has a "luxury" resume. He has not only held important positions in FAW-Volkswagen and SAIC-Volkswagen Skoda, but also has a wealth of work experience in Beijing Mercedes-Benz and Volvo. In an interview, he once said amazingly: "It doesn't cost so much money to build a car, and shouting every day to raise one or two tens of billions of yuan is a sign of lack of self-confidence!" At that time, Li Bingang of Weilai said, "Don't build a car without one or two hundred billion yuan."
As a result, when NIO, Ideal, Xiaopeng and other car companies broke through the 20,000 mark in 2020, Aiways was still hovering over 1,000 vehicles. According to public reports, Aiways had planned to list on the U.S. stock market through a reverse backdoor, but this plan unsurprisingly failed. After that, it boldly laid out the global market, and has also exported to more than a dozen overseas markets such as France and Germany.
But is it really necessary for a brand new car brand to lay out such a big shop from the beginning? Doing so will inevitably distract energy, waste a lot of ineffective capital investment, and even do not do a good job in the market around you, how can there be a miracle in the overseas market? Not surprisingly, in May this year, some media found that Aiways' imposing four-story office building in Shanghai had been emptied, and employees could not only work from home, but also stopped paying salaries, social security and provident funds.
●—<恒驰>—●
After the Evergrande explosion, Xu Jiayin tried to use new energy vehicles to change his fate, so he established Hengchi to find new profit growth points. However, in just four years, 110 billion was burned, and the cumulative sales volume was 1,389 vehicles. At present, Hengchi has completed a total of 6 new cars from 1 to 6, of which Hengchi 5 has more than 50,000 blind orders before it is really listed, which is really breathtaking. There are only a handful of achievements in the market, but the story is well known.
In fact, many models of Hengchi are like PPT models, even if the publicity is in place, what you see on the road in the later stage is almost "out of print models". No one wants the new car they buy to be out of print in the future, so it is a miracle that Hengchi's performance can survive for so long in the domestic market with serious involution. Other car-making companies are at least really making cars, but Evergrande's "Great Leap Forward" car-making story is full of absurdity and magic, but it is just a game to cover up financial problems and cash out money!
In 2023, the state has canceled subsidies for new energy vehicles, and for new energy vehicle companies, whether they can survive by the market can only depend on their own fate. However, those car companies that have gone bankrupt have lost the most money from consumers and investors, and their own people and money have already retreated from it.