ZEEKR is listed, and Li Shufu is still difficult to become "Henry Ford"

Titanium Media APP

2024-05-16 19:37Posted on the official account of Beijing Titanium Media APP

Text | Gulfstream Economic Review

Geely, Ford, China, the United States, a hundred years of entanglement.

In 1924, Sun Yat-sen wrote a letter to Henry Ford, inviting Ford to invest in China. At that time, the latter was already a leader in the U.S. auto market, and sent back a letter of rejection: "Mr. Ford has no plans to visit China in the near future." ”

100 years later, 14 years have passed since Geely, a Chinese self-owned brand, acquired Ford's Volvo, and its sub-brand Zeekr has also been listed in the United States, and its share price is more than twice that of Ford. Geely, it seems that there is a trend of "the new king should be established".

Even so, the "Gulfstream Economic Review" believes that Li Shufu is still difficult to become China's "Henry Ford".

01 Catfish slimming

One reason is that times have changed.

On May 10, Eastern time, ZEEKR officially traded on the New York Stock Exchange, with an opening price of $26 (about 187.84 yuan), and once rose 40% in intraday trading, and the scene was a sea of joy.

Catfish Tesla, which is also in the United States, has lost nearly 1/4 of its stock price in the past six months, and is constantly laying off employees and slimming down. Some time ago, Tesla announced that it would lay off more than 10% of its global workforce. According to people familiar with the matter, Tesla China's layoff rate is about 20%, and some departments are as high as 50%.

The hardest hit area of layoffs is the sales department. Quite simply, Tesla's cars are not easy to sell. In the first quarter of this year, Tesla's global cumulative deliveries were 387,000 vehicles, down 8.5% year-on-year. This is the first year-on-year decline in Tesla's single-quarter deliveries in the past four years, and it is also the worst performance in the past five quarters.

Because even Tesla is struggling in the Chinese market:

The price war comes and goes: you have 10,000, I have 20,000, and I can drop 30,000 tomorrow;

Players continue to squeeze onto the table: Xiaomi brings its own traffic, Huawei is "far ahead", and Chery also shouts "You're welcome!" ”

Products continue to be enriched: coupes, SUVs, and MPVs all have pure electric versions, and consumers can experience the driving feeling of millions of fuel vehicles for hundreds of thousands......

This has also indirectly led to the fact that consumers used to think that Tesla could not climb high, and now they ignore it.

The catfish slows down, and the sardines die faster. Therefore, Tesla's slimming does not mean that domestic new energy vehicle companies are full, but entering the life-and-death competition.

Extreme Krypton, can't stay out of it.

02 Only fast is not broken

The second reason is that the process of electrification of ZEEKR is too slow.

The world's martial arts, only fast is not broken. The power battery giant has already seized the opportunity.

During the period of high subsidies for new energy vehicles, battery energy density is the main technical threshold for receiving subsidies. CATL relies on ternary batteries to occupy the mainstream of passenger cars and has become the "King of Ning".         

After the subsidy declined, the cost advantage of lithium iron phosphate batteries was highlighted. BYD improved its technology, released lithium iron phosphate blade batteries, and conducted acupuncture tests, which filled up the visual effect and captured a large number of consumers, so as to seize CATL's market share. "Dizi" turned into "Daddy".

In 2023, CATL will rank first in the global installed capacity of power batteries, followed by LGES, Panasonic, China Innovation Airlines, Samsung SDI, SK on, Guoxuan Hi-Tech, EVE Lithium Energy and Funeng Technology. The top 10 companies have a total installed capacity of 662.72GWh, accounting for 93.7% of the total installed capacity.

Unfortunately, there is no Geely and Zeekrypton in the above list.

In the past two years, car companies have generally participated in the 800V competition, and ZEEKR has finally caught up. At the end of last year, ZEEKR released the world's first mass-produced 800V lithium iron phosphate ultra-fast rechargeable battery - Golden Brick Battery, which can be charged for 15 minutes and increase the range by 500 kilometers. Since then, ZEEKR has achieved the full-stack capability of three-electric 800V - battery, motor and electronic control.

800V is nothing new, though. In 2015, BYD used this technology on the Tang DM and Qin EV, four years earlier than the Porsche Taycan.   

According to this situation, it will be difficult for ZEEKR to tear open the mouth of the power battery, unless it can develop disruptive technology.

The players who end late are not less chances, but may not have them, just like the previous chairman of GAC sighed:

"We seem to be working for CATL."

03 The era of intelligence

The third reason is that ZEEKR is also lagging behind in intelligence.

Two years earlier, ZEEKR was delayed by the Mobileye system.

In 2007, Mobileye provided lane departure warning systems for models such as the BMW 5 Series, which was acquired by Intel in 2017, and has also cooperated with Tesla, Li Li, NIO and other car companies.

As a result, within a few years, the Mobileye system was abandoned by the above-mentioned car companies. The reason is that it only occupies the largest market share in the field of low-cost assisted driving systems, and does not have an advantage in large computing power intelligent driving chips and systems, and only provides overall solutions to car companies, and cannot allow car companies to modify algorithms or participate in development, so it is complained that it is a "black box".

So much so that in response to a similar scenario, the chairman of SAIC Motor threw out a "soul theory": SAIC does not want to be reduced to a shell, and wants to take the soul (of key technologies such as autonomous driving) into its own hands.

Therefore, various car companies jumped ship in time and began to purchase NVIDIA chips while developing their own products, in order to gain the greatest autonomy. As early as 2016, Tesla broke up with Mobileye, and only then did it have the current FSD; The 2021 Ideal ONE has also been replaced with Horizon Journey 3.         

As a result, ZEEKR, which was established in 2021, is still talking to Mobileye. So much so that the media that criticize the relative restraint have to say that ZEEKR 001 has "excellent styling design and excellent driving texture", but "there is still a lot of room for improvement in the intelligent sector." ”

This year, ZEEKR finally turned to self-development, but it was too late.

The recently released ZEEKR 007 is equipped with NVIDIA's intelligent driving chip, which uses the self-developed vast intelligent driving system, which is said to cover all scenarios of intelligent parking, high-speed and urban intelligent driving. The problem is that autonomous driving is very difficult, and it is not as simple as stacking chips and materials.

At present, in the field of intelligent driving, the most advanced level is Tesla FSD. It not only runs through the closed loop of technology and business, but also continuously iterates and upgrades through data feeding, and finally realizes autonomous driving.

This part of the data first includes daily autonomous driving data. The industry believes that 8 billion miles of driving tests are needed to ensure that unmanned driving is safer than people. This required 100 vehicles to drive 24 hours a day for 400 years.

The second includes rare scene data, which is also the most valuable, and usually the driver will not encounter it in his or her lifetime.   

Tesla adopts a "crowdsourcing model" to collect data on both aspects. With millions of annual sales, it's not hard to get it. But this is undoubtedly a fantasy for other car companies.

Huawei and Xpeng are leading the way in domestic autonomous driving technology, but both have a big gap with Tesla. In this regard, Huawei has formed alliances with a number of car companies to concentrate on big things. Industry insiders even believe that it is difficult for car companies to parry Tesla on their own. Huawei has the technology and has joined forces with a number of car companies to "fight a battle".

According to this, the probability of success is slim when Extreme Krypton fights alone.

04 Born proud

Even so, Extreme Krypton is still Li Shufu's heart, and he was born with a golden key:

Strategically, ZEEKR is Geely's big plan. In 2021, Li Shufu launched the "Two Blue Geely Action Plans", and the second plan is ZEEKR - "focusing on pure electric smart cars." Establish a new pure electric vehicle company and compete head-on in the smart pure electric vehicle market. ”

Organizationally, ZEEKR is a fully established independent automobile brand from manufacturing, R&D to sales and service. Geely's other car brands are essentially sales companies.

According to the prospectus, ZEEKR's business is divided into three major sectors - automobile sales, battery components (Ningbo Weirui) and technical services (CEVT). In 2021, Geely transferred 51% of the equity of Ningbo Weirui and the entire equity of CEVT to ZEEKR, injecting two technical forces into ZEEKR's fight in the new energy vehicle market.   

Ningbo Weirui's main products are battery PACK bags and electric drive assemblies, and it has the ability to manufacture battery cells, and the BRICS battery comes from it.

CEVT is more bull, the full name is China Euro Vehicle Technology AB, that is, the Central European Automotive Technology Center, headquartered in Sweden, founded in 2013, to provide product development support for Geely's "all" car brands, its team is also global, gathering elites from more than 30 countries, the star product is the SEA vast architecture - the world's first pure electric architecture, but also the vehicle architecture that makes Zeekr 001 famous.

It can be seen that Li Shufu has a preference for extreme krypton.

In terms of personnel, Li Shufu chose An Conghui as the CEO of ZEEKR. An Conghui is a heavyweight veteran of Geely, one of the four gentlemen of Geely, and the first generation of Geely's product manager, and Emgrand is his masterpiece.

The above factors, coupled with the fact that Xiaomi and Huawei have not yet built cars in the past two years, the time and place are favorable, and Zeekrypton is a big seller.

Then it is easy to understand why ZEEKR has set a number of "bests" in its listing:

Approximately the largest IPO in the last three years;   

The fastest IPO in history of new energy vehicle companies;

Compared with other new energy vehicle companies incubated by traditional car companies, it is the most successful "second generation car"

……

05 Technology closed loop

But ZEEKR is just a son of Li Shufu in the high-end pure electric vehicle market.     

In 2017, Geely won the first place in sales of local car companies in China, and then proposed to "benchmark Volkswagen" for the first time:

In terms of brand, Volvo benchmarks against Audi; Lynk & Co benchmarks against the Volkswagen brand; Geely's parent brand is benchmarked against Skoda, which has a slightly lower positioning.

In terms of global layout, Geely Group has frequently made moves, acquiring 49.9% of the shares of Malaysia's Proton Motors, acquiring the British sports car brand Lotus, and buying 9.69% of the shares of Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, becoming its largest shareholder......

When it comes to the new energy battlefield, ZEEKR focuses on high-end pure electric vehicles; Lynk & Co has pure electric and hybrid, focusing on the range of 200,000 yuan; Geely's parent brand focuses on the market below 200,000. At the same time, Lotus unveiled an all-electric sports car, and Geely and Daimler have also established a joint venture in China to produce smart brand electric vehicles.

In order to embrace the second half of intelligence, Li Shufu also seized the acquisition of Meizu and established ECARX, an automotive operating system and chip company. Therefore, some people say that Li Shufu is "an investment maniac who has been delayed by car manufacturing".   

But that's just the surface. As Volvo CEO Hanken Samuelson said: "He (Li Shufu) has bigger ambitions".

In 2018, Li Shufu said in Wu Xiaobo's channel "Ten Years and Twenty People" program that it is not difficult to spend money to build a few good-looking cars, but the difficulty lies in forming a complete set of rigorous technical closed loops. The original words are probably as follows:

The automotive industry is large-scale, you want consistency, reliability, durability, scale, economy, sustainability...... The difficulty is that the application of many supporting technologies, the formation of infrastructure, and the formation of technical capabilities, including chips, operating systems, and the entire network system, all need to form a very rigorous cooperation and a very rigorous closed-loop capability...... Neither does Tesla, it's engaged, and that's its ultimate goal......

The implication is that Tesla is doing it, and Geely is doing it. This kind of accumulation of step-by-step technology and ability, and the formation of the final technical closed-loop ability, may be what Li Shufu often talks about, "keeping the right is surprising".

Therefore, although the external competition is anxious, Geely's internal line is clear. In the future of ZEEKR, challenges and opportunities coexist.

As Li Shufu said: "I don't want to stop dreaming, dreams are the foundation of all business." ”

It's just that back to reality, like Henry Ford, popularizing automobiles and changing the way the automobile industry produces may be possible in the future, but not now......   

Resources:

Caixin Weekly: "Ning Wang" Seeks the Limit Caixin Weekly: Auto Car Decisive Battle in the City 36kr: ZEEKR IPO: Electric by Geely, Intelligence by Itself Caixin Weekly: Geely Falls Behind and Catches Up    

View original image 26K

•