Sleeping in the car can also be healthy?
A video circulated on the Internet a few days ago showed a speech by Huang Hongsheng, the founder of Skyworth Automobile, during the Beijing Auto Show. Huang Hongsheng stood in front of a Skyworth car and said: In the past ten years, he has gone to the car every day to take a nap, and without taking any medicine, his high blood pressure has returned to a normal level from more than 180 before, respiratory tract infections and habitual diarrhea have been cured, immunity has also improved, and he has not had a fever in so many years.
For a while, the news that "the founder of Skyworth Automobile said that Chuangwei Automobile can cure diseases and prolong life" spread. On May 11, Skyworth Auto publicly responded that the online information was taken out of context and maliciously patchwork, which was seriously misleading to the public, inconsistent with the health technology that the company has always advocated, and inconsistent with Huang Hongsheng's public sharing content.
Huang Hongsheng, who was previously known by the public, single-handedly created the "color TV king" of Skyworth Group. As Huang Hongsheng's words became more and more amazing, Skyworth Motors and himself were once again pushed into the spotlight. The outside world was surprised to find that in this era when traffic is king, the car circle is also "learning from Lei Jun's good example", but Huang Hongsheng, a veteran who has been in business for more than 30 years, has the most "open" in traffic marketing. In October last year, he released a video to "spray" Xu Jiayin, the founder of Evergrande, and this year on major short video platforms, Huang Hongsheng served as a business mentor and became an "Internet celebrity" for selling courses.
But Huang Hongsheng is "quite old" after all. In the marketing field of new energy vehicles, can there be another Lei Jun?
01. "Build a car for the health of 80 million entrepreneurs"
"In the past 13 years, I have been making electric vehicles, and I have adjusted my sub-health."
When Huang Hongsheng spoke in the Skyworth Automobile Exhibition Area of the Beijing Auto Show, there was a big screen behind him, on which a paragraph of "My Health Insights" was written. Huang Hongsheng said that "60% of the manufacturing group that started in the 80s of the last century has left this world", but he has been fortunate to eliminate the above diseases. Therefore, Huang Hongsheng's perception is to "sleep deeply". After Skyworth Auto breaks in the morning, all kinds of busy meetings and activities in the afternoon and evening can be handled freely.
"Building cars for the health of 80 million entrepreneurs" is the brand portrait sketched by Huang Hongsheng for Skyworth Automobile. And this is not the first time that he has publicly linked the car he built to the concept of health.
As early as the 2023 Skyworth Spring Technology Ecology Conference, Huang Hongsheng said: "Chuangwei Automobile, the life span will be extended by 30 years, so that every car owner can enjoy a 100-year-old life." At that time, he said that since he drove Skyworth electric cars, "my high blood pressure, diabetes and other problems have been cured."
In this official response, Skyworth Auto emphasized that Skyworth Auto has created the "Health 3.0 System", which supports technologies such as active health monitoring and active sleep promotion, which has the effect of real-time assessment of vital signs and improvement of sleep quality; The company's promotion of health technology only stops there, and there is no expression of disease treatment and life extension. Huang Hongsheng started from his personal experience and explained the positive effect of Skyworth Automobile, especially on his personal health, but he never said that the experience was "universal".
In the view of Zhang Xiang, an automotive analyst and visiting professor at the Yellow River Institute of Science and Technology, the concept of health is nothing more than a marketing technique for car companies, but Huang Hongsheng's propaganda still seems to be a "local method". "Whether the car can cure diseases cannot be said by mouth, but also by the verification and data of medical institutions. Even if there are patients, people will not want to buy a car to treat them. ”
Skyworth Auto's first model, the EV6, was released in 2021. At this year's Beijing Auto Show, the company officially released the Skyworth EV6 II supercharging model. Skyworth Auto said on its official website that Skyworth EV6 is equipped with "active sleep promotion technology", which can "improve sub-health status". SKYWORTH EV6 II. can also be equipped with optional functions such as "somatosensory music sleeping pad" and "smart sleep pillow".
▲ (Screenshot of the description of Skyworth EV6 on the official website of Skyworth Automobile)
Today, smart seats and health monitoring configurations have almost become the standard configuration of various car companies, and car owners are no strangers to them. However, when other car companies are happy with the concepts of battery swapping and autonomous driving, this has become the biggest selling point of Skyworth Automobile's uniqueness.
After all, Skyworth Automobile and Huang Hongsheng both need a reason to let consumers pay attention to themselves.
Huang Hongsheng, 68 years old this year, is a little unfamiliar in the eyes of many young people. And in the mid-90s of the last century, in the color TV price war, his name was resounding all over the industry. Skyworth, which has emerged victoriously from this campaign, ranked among the top three in the industry and was officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2000.
Huang Hongsheng was sentenced by a Hong Kong court in 2006 on suspicion of embezzlement of company property and financial fraud, and left Skyworth. Three years later, Huang Hongsheng returned to the capital market, sold 100 million shares of Skyworth shares, cashed out about 900 million yuan, and established Chuangyuan Tiandi Investment Company.
Huang Hongsheng, who could not return to Skyworth's management, started the second entrepreneurial road, aiming at new energy vehicles. In 2011, he increased the capital of Nanjing Jinlong, which had a loss of up to 40 million yuan at that time, through Chuangyuan Tiandi, and became the actual controller. In the second year, Nanjing Jinlong successfully obtained the new energy vehicle production qualification, and its business covers new energy buses, logistics vehicles, special vehicles, etc.
At that time, Huang Hongsheng entered the new energy market, and Huang Hongsheng can be said to be ahead of the times. Nanjing Jinlong also took advantage of the subsidy policy at that time and turned the crisis into safety. By 2014, its pure electric bus sales were 1,890, ranking second in the country; In 2016, the sales volume was 7,111 vehicles, and the revenue reached 5 billion yuan. Until 2020, the sales volume of Nanjing Jinlong pure electric buses still ranked third in the country.
In 2016, Chuangyuan Tiandi changed its name to Kaiwo New Energy Automobile Co., Ltd., and the brand name of Nanjing Jinlong was also changed to "Kaiwo", and obtained the production qualification of new energy passenger vehicles in the following year.
Kaiwo Group's passenger car subsidiary in 2019 borrowed the Chinese translation of the company's English name "skywell" and named Tianmei Automobile. In September 2020, the new model TiMi ET5 was launched, but the number of vehicles on the market for the whole year was only 467.
Perhaps in Huang Hongsheng's view, the main problem with the poor sales of Tianmei, which has turned around from commercial vehicles, lies in the brand. As a result, in April 2021, Kaiwo Group spent 28 million yuan to obtain the trademark transfer of Skyworth on the delivery vehicle, and Tianmei Automobile officially changed its name to "Skyworth Automobile", and its first model, Skyworth ET5, was also released at the same time.
However, from the perspective of capital, Skyworth Automobile cannot be called the transformation of Skyworth Group. It is the carrier of Kaiwo Group's new passenger car business after the reorganization of Nanjing Jinlong. Fundamentally speaking, Huang Hongsheng borrowed the brand of Skyworth and loaded the bottle of "old wine" of Tianmei Automobile.
Since the transformation of commercial vehicles, both TiMi ET5 and Skyworth ET5 are technically lackluster. They start at about 150,000 yuan for entry-level models, and they don't even have a reversing camera and radar, not to mention the already hot assisted driving features. At that time, some bloggers in the car circle questioned the sincerity of Skyworth Automobile: "If you change your name, will this model become more worth buying?" ”
Subsequently, Skyworth ET5 was discontinued, and Skyworth Automobile released two new products at the 2022 Global Strategic Partner Conference: pure electric SUV Skyworth EV6 and its hybrid version Skyworth HT-i, with price ranges of 156,800-289,800 yuan and 129,800-259,800 yuan respectively, focusing on the mid-to-high-end market. When the two models were released, Huang Hongsheng also set a goal: to deliver 30,000 units in 2022 and achieve a sales impact of 4.5 billion yuan.
However, the two new models are basically "the same", and the improvement in design and technology is still limited. The competition of new energy pure electric vehicles has become a red ocean, and if Skyworth Automobile wants to stand out from the encirclement, it must also give users a reason to buy it.
This is difficult for Huang Hongsheng, who has been on the battlefield for a long time. He has been prepared for a long time: at the beginning of the transformation of passenger cars, Kaiwo Group's products have emphasized their "health" attributes.
In the early marketing of Tianmei Automobile, the naming of several models of Tianmei ET5 is "Mingxin Health Edition", "Pure Heart Smart Edition" and "Zhijian Integrated Edition", which includes the main driver's seat with a health mode, which can provide functions such as on-board air purification system adjustment, and the main focus is to "provide users with a comfortable and comfortable in-car rest environment".
Later, although the Skyworth EV6 changed its naming, the concept of health has gone to a higher level: it is positioned as a "healthy intelligent pure electric SUV", equipped with KN95 filtration system, constant temperature air conditioning and sleep seats and other health "killer features", and can also be used to monitor the driver's blood pressure, heart rate and other life and health indicators in the form of photos.
In Zhang Xiang's view, this is also the last resort choice of Skyworth Automobile. "The homogenization of Skyworth automotive products is more serious, lacking bright spots, and the main focus is on cost performance." He believes that when car companies have launched selling points, "Skyworth can only use the concept of 'health' for marketing, hoping to attract the attention of consumers." ”
Huang Hongsheng appeared to say, starting from personal feelings, the target users are young and middle-aged entrepreneurs, because the biggest challenge they face is often not money, but health, and Skyworth Auto has created a "healthy third space, a 100-year-old life".
But Huang Hongsheng, who has high blood pressure and diabetes, is already old.
Zhang Xiang believes that Huang Hongsheng's publicity does not match the needs of Skyworth Automobile's target group. "Of course, the comfortable interior space is good for health, but young entrepreneurs in big cities don't have the habit of taking a nap, and they often carry a cup of coffee at noon. Even if there is, there is no need to rest in the car. ”
Not only that, Skyworth Automobile, which focuses on "health", has also been questioned by the outside world in terms of safety. Last year, CAIC announced the C-NCAP crash test results of Skyworth EV6 (520 Intelligent Edition). In the C-NCAP test, the weight of occupant protection, pedestrian protection, and active safety of the vehicle is 60%, 15%, and 25% respectively, while the score rate weights of the Skyworth EV6 520 intelligent version model are 23.07%, 9.22%, and 7.57% respectively.
In this regard, Skyworth Automobile publicly responded that Skyworth EV6 was developed and manufactured in strict accordance with the 2018 regulations, but in this crash test, it encountered the test standards that adopted the 2021 regulations, and the Skyworth EV6, which was not manufactured in accordance with the 2021 regulations, became the first batch of models to be sampled.
In the end, Skyworth's sales figures were not satisfactory. According to the data, in 2022, Skyworth Automobile's annual sales will be 21,900 units, and in 2023, this number will drop to 18,600 units.
However, Huang Hongsheng was not discouraged.
Skyworth Motors has lowered expectations. Wu Longba, the company's president and co-founder, said in an interview in May that Skyworth Automobile's sales target for the whole year of 2024 is 50,000 units, and domestic and overseas sales account for "five to five". Huang Hongsheng emphasized that in the future, the company will invest another 30 billion yuan to make Skyworth Automobile enter the top 10 among global car companies.
02. Ten years of Skyworth consultants, Huang Hongsheng's 100 billion revenue dream
Shouldering the heavy responsibility of building a car, Huang Hongsheng refused to accept the old age. After all, the burden on his shoulders does not stop there.
Why did Huang Hongsheng end up building a car? Judging from his previous decades of entrepreneurial experience, he is not a person who likes to spend lavishly. You must know that when he founded Skyworth Group, Huang Hongsheng was famous for "slamming the door", even after Skyworth went public, his story was also circulated on the rivers and lakes: when Skyworth employees went on a business trip with him, because they wanted to save money, they could only squeeze 4 people into a room together.
A person close to Mr. Huang before also said that Mr. Huang was "not a presumptuous person." In his opinion, Huang Hongsheng is not afraid of tossing, but prudence is his consistent style, and he is also careful in spending money.
Keenly grasping policy trends, chasing the wind and market favorites, Huang Hongsheng's business experience accounted for a large component. The former "color TV king" ended up building a car, which is also not unrelated.
Around 2009, when Huang Hongsheng entered the bureau to build cars, it was at a time when the country vigorously advocated and piloted new energy vehicles and promoted the "10 cities and 1,000 vehicles" project. Huang Hongsheng later admitted that he was sensitive to the feeling at the time that this would be an opportunity for the future. After being taken over by Skyworth Tiandi, as the market turned to new energy, Nanjing Jinlong did come out of the trough.
In 2015, the production and sales of new energy commercial vehicles declined year-on-year, and a large number of commercial vehicle companies turned to the passenger car market.
At that time, Skyworth Group also stood at the crossroads of finding the second growth curve.
Huang Hongsheng did not return to Skyworth's management, but he has been paying attention to it. In August 2012, Huang Hongsheng served as a consultant of Skyworth Group, which lasted until August 2022. In the year when the contract expired, his son Lin Jin took over the position of chairman of the board of directors and chairman of the executive committee of Skyworth Group from the hands of professional managers.
During this period, with the rise of domestic Internet TV brands, the capacity of the domestic home appliance market gradually became saturated, and Skyworth's traditional TV business revenue began to decline since 2017. In 2022, in the palm print of Lin Jin, in Skyworth's core business, the revenue of TV business is only 18.233 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 22.33%, and a decrease of 33% from 2017.
After Huang Hongsheng became a consultant, he proposed that Skyworth should achieve 100 billion revenue in 2020, but this goal was not achieved at that time and was delayed to 2024.
Ten years of consultants, 100 billion big test. Skyworth also started from the TV category to open up the industrial chain and ecosystem. But Huang Hongsheng has been thinking for many years, and the key answer to break the situation still has to fall in the field of new energy: photovoltaic and automobile.
The photovoltaic business has become a new driving force for growth in Skyworth. In 2023, Skyworth Group's revenue will be 69.031 billion yuan, and its net profit will exceed 1 billion yuan. Among them, the revenue of new energy business, which is dominated by distributed photovoltaics, was 23.396 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 95.9%.
Under the personal leadership of Huang Hongsheng, Skyworth Automobile has successfully entered the ranks of new car-making forces. From the very beginning, it has taken a different path: it has directly inherited the car-making qualifications, industrial capital chain and industrial base formed by Nanjing Jinlong and Kaiwo Group for many years, and has also allowed Skyworth to directly have more than ten years of experience in car manufacturing.
In the eyes of industry insiders, Huang Hongsheng's car manufacturing can enhance the value of Skyworth's brand; And not tied to the group, it can also allow both parties to avoid risks. After all, building a car is a money-burning job, and in the matter of spending money, Huang Hongsheng is still cautious. In 2022, he said that the new forces will spend one or two hundred billion at every turn, which is not the right way. In his view, automobiles are like his old business, the home appliance industry, which can make small profits, but cannot always lose money, and the essence of manufacturing is cost control.
Since the investment is limited, Huang Hongsheng, who has been "chasing the wind", has inevitably gone off the rails in the marketing of Skyworth Motors and learned the traffic gameplay of the Internet.
Skyworth transitioned from home appliances to smart homes, and at the same time engaged in new energy vehicles, Huang Hongsheng also mentioned a few years ago that he wanted to learn from Xiaomi and be the entrance to the family Internet of Things. In the car circle, "learning Lei Jun" has also become a consensus. However, Huang Hongsheng started earlier and entered the game deeper than other bigwigs in terms of playing traffic.
03, "Internet celebrity" Huang Hongsheng's traffic anxiety
The way rims are marketed is changing.
Since Xiaomi entered the game, Lei Jun has been dominating the hot search headlines of major platforms. In the past April, the "top leaders" of new energy vehicle companies, including Wei Jianjun, chairman of Great Wall Motor, Yin Tongyue, chairman of Chery, and Xia Yiping, CEO of Jiyue, went live one after another, from the press conference to the performance test and vehicle delivery, and personally opened the "volume" traffic. Yin Tongyue said bluntly in the live broadcast room: "This (live broadcast) is to use new Internet thinking to learn from Yu Chengdong and Lei Jun." ”
Even Jia Yueting, the founder of Faraday Future (FF), who has been in the United States for a long time, also released a video on May 7 saying that he would consider starting the commercialization of personal IP to make money to build cars.
For a while, the personal IPs of the bigwigs also ushered in a huge test. After all, not everyone can have the same traffic attraction and influence on the Internet as Lei Jun. Huang Hongsheng's non-rigorous "health" remarks unexpectedly reaped the circle-breaking effect.
But in fact, Huang Hongsheng has already worked hard to create a personal IP.
As early as 2022, Huang Hongsheng established Skyworth Automobile Business School, looking for well-known business people to stand on the platform and attract people to listen to the lectures, with a tuition fee of 288,000 yuan, and the top version of Skyworth new energy vehicles will be sent when you sign up. According to Southern Weekly, students can get a commission for recommending friends to Skyworth Automotive Business School, and those who pass the interview can become spokespersons, and if they can influence 10 friends to become students, they can become Huang Hongsheng's "personal disciples".
Although this did not boost the sales of Skyworth Automobile, Huang Hongsheng's traffic anxiety can be seen.
Not long ago, some users were surprised to find that Huang Hongsheng had begun to "sell classes".
On multiple platforms such as Douyin, WeChat video account, Xiaohongshu, and Station B, you can see the personal perception content shared in the name of Huang Hongsheng, and the business courses taught by him are on the shelves, with a price of 365 yuan. The theme of the course he sold is "From Scratch to Tens of Billions of Revenues", with a total of 17 videos, including "From Money First to Finding the Fun of Entrepreneurship" and "Starting from 0-1 from Scratch, How to Find the Way to Make Money", etc., starting from his own entrepreneurial experience, he tells entrepreneurs about the way of doing business.
▲ (Huang Hongsheng's course products in a store on the short video platform)
On platforms such as Douyin and Channels, you can search for countless accounts with the keyword "Huang Hongsheng", and in their associated products, Huang Hongsheng's course is included. Some of them have sold more than 4,000 copies of the course on their accounts. Most of the stores on the shelves of these merchandise courses are franchised stores under Customer Acquisition Brand Management Culture Co., Ltd.
Customer acquisition culture belongs to Boshang Group, as an IP incubator, it has launched a number of business mentors, the most well-known of which is Zhang Qi, who will be a smash hit in 2022 - the "success master" in the corporate training industry, claiming to have gained more than 10 million fans on the whole network one month after his debut, with the highest single video playback of more than 65 million, the first live broadcast received 1 million views, and he was also invited to Dong Mingzhu's live broadcast room.
Among these accounts, there are also short videos of Huang Hongsheng sharing his life and entrepreneurial insights. He will analyze the business thinking of entrepreneurial bosses, talk about the importance of "research early to make money", and analyze how traditional businesses can be transformed. At the end of the video, he will recommend everyone to take his video lessons.
Huang Hongsheng once explained in a video why he did it. He believes that a new wave of enterprise development in China is coming, and countless young entrepreneurs still feel lost and lack confidence, so he hopes to pass on his own experience and lessons to help everyone avoid detours.
Huang Hongsheng, who is now nearly seventy years old, seems to be an "Internet celebrity" business mentor. But industry insiders are not without concerns.
"If you want to take the Internet celebrity route, Huang Hongsheng's personal influence is still not high enough, and it is not comparable to Lei Jun, Li Bin and other founders. He wants to copy the network marketing model of other new forces, but he does not have the relevant conditions, and the effect does not seem to be good at present. "In the long run, this road will not work." Although Huang Hongsheng's class has attracted fans, it is difficult for them to convert into users of Skyworth Automobile.
If Skyworth Auto wants to go further, what it can rely on is never a variety of marketing.
Author | Yang Jie
Edit | Sun Chunfang
Operations | Liu Shan