Li Bin played the "anti-fate card"

Author | Chai Xuchen

Edit | Zhou Zhiyu

NIO, which has not waited for a long time to explode in terms of scale, has handed over the hope of a turnaround to a new brand.

On May 15, Li Bin, chairman of NIO, specially chose to launch NIO's sub-brand - Ledao Automobile on the International Day of Families, and the first SUV model "Ledao L60" was unveiled at the same time.

Qin Lihong, president of Weilai, quipped that Ledao is a mature "rich second generation" who inherited the resources accumulated by Weilai in the past ten years of car manufacturing as soon as he was born. If it can increase the amount as desired, it will also become a "disobedient card" in Li Bin's hand, and take Weilai out of the predicament for many years. Li Bin is also very optimistic that Ledao will no longer sell cars at a loss, and he will be able to "support his family" when he is born.

However, the capital market does not seem to buy Li Bin's new story. After the Ledao brand press conference, NIO's U.S. stock price fell, falling 9% in the past three trading days, and its market value evaporated by more than $1 billion.

Can the arrival of Ledao reverse the old problem of low efficiency for NIO, and can it gain a foothold in the 200,000 yuan market that rolls up the sky? Ledao, who has just become familiar with the market, has a lot of important things to prove.

"Rich Second Generation"

Under a relaxed and cheerful atmosphere, Li Bin's "second child" appeared happily, and this was the first time he built a 200,000-yuan car.

As the president of Ledao Automobile, it was Ai Tiecheng who Li Bin invited from Disney, and he lived up to expectations, proving that Lei Jun and Li Xiang are not the only ones who understand the needs and "can live" in the family car market.

The benchmarking with Model Y has become the main line throughout the L60 explanation. In terms of energy consumption, space, and configuration, Ai Tiecheng jokingly used "Erlang leg freedom", "freedom of wandering" and "luggage freedom" to show the strength of L60 to subvert Model Y.

The core is energy replenishment, and Ledao can use more than 1,000 battery swap stations and 20,000 charging piles when it is delivered. Ai Tiecheng Versailles called its replenishment capacity "the second in the industry". And the first, naturally, is the parent brand NIO.

In terms of price, the pre-sale price of 219,900 yuan is 30,000 yuan cheaper than Model Y, and the reservation fee deduction of 6,000 yuan for 2,000 yuan is just the same as the starting price of Xiaomi SU7.

With the technology and resources shared and "decentralized" by NIO, Ledao tried to strongly disrupt the 200,000 yuan market. It is nearly 100,000 yuan cheaper than the parent brand, and it has been shouldering the mission of pursuing sales since it was born.

Ai Tiecheng pointed out that the family users in Ledao's price segment cover a wide range, targeting 90% of the group. Judging from its benchmark models, the Model Y has a peak monthly sales of nearly 70,000 units in China, and the Ideal L6 has won more than 41,000 units in less than a month.

This also makes the internal sales forecast very optimistic. According to channel sources, Ledao's delivery target is 70,000 units this year and 250,000 units next year. Ai Tiecheng said in the interview ring that the number of bookings after the press conference "far exceeded expectations".

Compared with the internal optimism, including institutions and the industry, they are still cautious about the future of Ledao.

Some institutional investors revealed to Wall Street that the Ledao project has been in preparation for more than three years, but the brand launch conference is only a pre-sale, and the new car will be launched and delivered in September, which seems to have seen the shadow of inefficiency. NIO has suffered similar losses in this regard, and the popularity of the ET5 when it was launched three years ago was "delayed" by delivery, and the heat was lost, and finally failed to complete the expected sales.

In addition, the price band of 200,000-300,000 targeted by Ledao is the most bloody Red Sea market for new energy vehicles. According to the data, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in this market segment is as high as 56%, much higher than the overall industry of 43.7%. Competing models in the same class include BYD Song L, Zhiji LS6, Wenjie M5, and Xpeng G6.

On this track, where there are tigers in front and hungry wolves in the back, Ledao has not yet convinced the market that it can break out of this red sea.

Some industry insiders pointed out that Ledao has largely reused Weilai's system, but the key to determining whether its sales can be released as desired lies in whether independent channels can be quickly rolled out. In addition, the BaaS and intelligent driving subscription models that NIO is good at will also take time to change their cognition and consumption habits for the mainstream consumer groups in the price band in which Ledao is located.

Therefore, even with NIO's past accumulation of capabilities in energy supplement, service and manufacturing, Ledao still needs to transform this series of capabilities according to its own needs. At least for now, there are some doubts in the market.

New Breakthrough

Looking back, Li Bin has been eyeing the high-end market of more than 400,000 since he decided to build a car, but the growth of this part of the market is too slow, and the scale ceiling is significant.

When asked why he started with the high-end market, Li Bin replied that it was because of the slow transformation of high-end brands such as BBA, which gave NIO an opportunity. Over the past decade, Li Bin has invested heavily in a huge ecological chess game, emphasizing services, technology and energy infrastructure.

Since 2016, Li Bin has continued to invest more than 43 billion yuan in research and development, but the scale of sales is not enough to dilute the massive investment, and last year's net loss of 20.72 billion yuan for NIO set a new record.

Being placed on top of the high-end tonality, NIO is in a dilemma in terms of brand positioning and sales. Even in the face of fierce price wars, Li Bin could not accept the launch of reduced models and rapid price adjustments, so he could only use the BaaS model to adjust and release discounts to consumers. However, the complicated calculation costs such as battery replacement subsidies and discounts have "dissuaded" some consumers, and the "implicit" NIO has not been able to wait for the outbreak of scale.

In the first four months of this year, NIO delivered 45,700 new cars, with a total sales volume of less than half of Wenjie and Ideal, and was overtaken by ZEEKR and Deep Blue.

In such a difficult trough, Li Bin's face is often full of optimism and positivity, and the big move behind his back is the sub-brand. In the interview, he revealed that Ledao was not born hastily, but as early as 2014 and 2015, when NIO was established, it had set a multi-brand strategy internally.

Perhaps Weilai's "hard resistance" has also left room for Ledao to show. With the help of NIO's systematic "asset-light" development, it can be profitable from birth, and then use rapid and large-scale sales to make up for the loss gap of the previous long-termism.

"At present, the pre-sale price announced by Ledao still has a good gross profit, and I will not sell one or lose one." Li Bin told Wall Street that he had invested a lot in R&D on new brands in the past few years, and now it was time to monetize, "It won't be long before I have to contribute income to my family."

According to a source source, based on the empowerment of the NIO NT3.0 platform, the cost of Ledao L60 (BOM) is about 140,000 yuan. As early as the performance meeting at the beginning of the year, Li Bin pointed out that the cost of the car will be about 10% lower than that of the Model Y.

For Li Bin, if Ledao sells big and becomes a "cash cow" with systematic ability to realize, NIO's business model will run through. upward, it is the NIO brand to further enter the high-end and luxury markets; Downward is the scale of brand development including Ledao and "Firefly" (codename).

Last year, NIO unveiled its flagship ET9 priced at 800,000 yuan. Li Bin told Wall Street that starting from the ET9 and the new ET7 executive version, NIO has been very resolute in starting to move in the direction of the commercial car market, and BBA's success comes from this. This is also the window paper that Chinese brands can't pass through, and the NIO brand has a chance to pierce it.

Next year, the third brand "Firefly" will enter the 100,000 yuan level market. At that time, the three brands will work together, from high to low, from sales to profits, and the brands will perform their duties. NIO also hopes to take advantage of this to return to the top of the list of new forces.

Li Bin has even greater ambitions. He wants to subvert the entire fuel and hybrid market and win the all-out battle of pure electric vehicles.

In the interview, he reflected that there are still many consumers in the market who do not choose pure electric vehicles, and in the final analysis, it is inconvenient to charge and change batteries, "60 or 70% of urban households in China cannot install charging piles." At the same time as the preparation of the two sub-brands, Li Bin has cooperated with 6 car company groups to swap batteries, and the laying of battery swap stations will also be rolled out by car companies, and the moat of NIO is rapidly extending.

If Li Bin's strategy can be successfully rolled out, from battery swap infrastructure, to the replication and extension of technology and services among his brands. This is a complete set of systematic capabilities that top players such as Zeekr and Ideal do not have. Li Bin's long-term horizontal R&D layout of casting a wide net will also converge and turn into a combat force with a stronger sense of vertical depth.

It can be said that Ledao at this moment will become a key node for NIO to enter the positive cycle, depicting a blueprint for NIO, a "big family", to become the public in the new energy era first.

Ledao wants to find a way out for Li Bin and Weilai.

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