Sales fell by more than 40%, and GAC Aion also had "labor pains"?

Rim visibility

2024-05-24 19:16Posted in Chongqing automotive creators

Image source: Du Ge

Photographed at the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2023

GAC Aion, which is attacking overseas markets, is facing the embarrassment of losing its domestic "base camp".

According to GAC Aion, on May 23, the GAC Aion brand launch conference was held in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, announcing its official entry into the Nepalese market. Two days earlier, Aion appeared at the 2024 Malaysia Motor Show, and its model AION Y Plus was officially launched in Malaysia. Earlier, Aion successively entered Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore and other markets.

However, behind the prosperity of the overseas market, GAC Aion seems to have died down in the domestic market. Guangzhou Automobile Group (601238. SH) production and sales express report shows that from January to April this year, the sales volume of GAC Aion New Energy Automobile Co., Ltd. was 70,200 units, a year-on-year decrease of 41.16%. This decline is much higher than that of the joint ventures GAC Honda and GAC Toyota.

And according to the production and sales report, since the fourth quarter of last year, GAC Aion has had a trend of slowing down sales. In May ~ August last year, its monthly sales have been hovering at the level of 45,000 units, and even directly exceeded 50,000 units in September. However, it began to fall back in October, and suddenly fell to 11,000 and 10,000 units in January and February this year.

In addition, in terms of IPO, GAC Aion also failed to make a move. As early as October 2022, after announcing the completion of Series A financing, there has been IPO-related news, but so far it has not been possible.

GAC Aion, which has already touched the sales ceiling, what else can it rely on to impress consumers and investors?

1

Sales plummeted●

GAC Aion should be regarded as the fastest among the new brands created by traditional old car companies, which has only been established for a few years and has a gratifying development speed.

According to the data, GAC Aion is the brand of the former GAC New Energy, born on July 28, 2017, and is the strategic core carrier of GAC Group to develop intelligent networked new energy vehicles. On November 20, 2020, GAC Group announced that it will operate "GAC Aion" independently and build a high-end smart electric vehicle brand in an all-round way.

Because it is backed by GAC Group and fully benefits from the wave of "great changes in automobiles unseen in a century", GAC Aion has been running since the beginning. Data shows that since the launch of the first model in 2019, its sales have grown at an average annual compound growth rate of more than 120%.

From 2019 to 2021, GAC Aion achieved annual sales of 42,000 units, 59,500 units and 120,200 units, respectively, and the cumulative sales volume in 2022 reached 271,200 units, a year-on-year increase of 126%, setting the fastest growth rate in the history and significantly exceeding the original sales target set that year.

Last year, GAC Aion continued to sprint forward, and finally achieved cumulative sales of 480,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 77.02%, ranking firmly in the top camp. In the retail sales ranking of new energy manufacturers last year, GAC Aion ranked third only after BYD and Tesla, with a share of 6.3%.

However, behind these beautiful figures, GAC Aion is not without hidden concerns. "Rim Visibility" noted that GAC Group's production and sales express report showed that in September last year, GAC Aion's sales data reached a peak of 51,600 units, a year-on-year increase of 71.89%. However, the growth rate has slowed since October, and monthly sales in the fourth quarter were more than 40,000 units.

This year, GAC Aion's performance is even more surprising. From January to April, the sales volume was 11,000 units, 10,000 units, 27,900 units and 21,400 units, respectively, which is not comparable with the monthly sales of 40,000 or 50,000 units last year. Especially in February, March and April, its sales also fell by 66.74%, 30.4% and 47.94% year-on-year respectively, ultimately resulting in a 41.16% decline in overall sales in the first four months of this year.

According to the latest ranking of the passenger association, from January to April this year, GAC Aion not only ranked eighth in the retail sales of new energy manufacturers, but also the only two in the list that showed a year-on-year decline.

GAC Aion originally planned to achieve the goal of "500,000 units for the whole year and 600,000 units for the whole year" in 2023, but in the end, the actual sales volume was 480,000 units, which failed to complete the volume guarantee results. According to public reports, its sales target for this year is 800,000 units, and there are also media reports that Gu Huinan, general manager of GAC Aion, gave the goal in an interview: "Strive to be able to guarantee 700,000 units this year." ”

But whether it is 800,000 or 700,000 units, it is not so easy for GAC Aion, which is walking in the downward channel, to achieve.

2

The online car-hailing label is difficult to tear●

The decline of GAC Aion has a certain relationship with the changes in the market in which it is located. From the sales structure, it can be seen that GAC Aion's achievements largely depend on the AION S and AION Y, two high-volume models of online car-hailing, but due to the current surplus of online car-hailing power, it is difficult to provide much incremental market.

When it comes to GAC Aion, many people label it as "electric car", "cheap and low-end", "online car-hailing brand" and so on. Similar to the playing style of BAIC New Energy and Nezha Automobile, at the beginning, GAC Aion chose to focus on the B-end market in order to quickly increase the volume.

"Rim Visibility" argues that this strategy was not problematic at the time. After all, although there have been many new forces swarming in that meeting, the number of deliveries is not much, and consumers' acceptance and recognition of new energy vehicles are not high.

Facts have also proved that the B-end can indeed increase sales quickly. With competitive prices, GAC Aion's sales volume has achieved a qualitative leap from 2019 to 2021. Among them, the AION S was responsible for sales, which once supported most of GAC Aion's sales. Even last year, the monthly sales of the AION S from February to September have been more than 20,000 units.

However, the sales of this car are mainly driven by taxi companies. According to the statistics of CITIC Securities, from 2020 to the first half of 2021, the sales volume of the AION S leasing market accounted for about 60%~70%.

In 2021, the AION Y, priced at around 100,000 yuan, was launched, and its sales also grew rapidly, with monthly sales gradually reaching 27,000 units in the second half of last year. But the problem is similar, it seems to be more popular in the B-end market than in the C-end market.

In July last year, the new energy market interpretation report released by the third-party research and consulting agency Jielan Road mentioned that 41% of GAC Aion's sales in that month were owned by individuals. According to this calculation, nearly sixty percent of the sales are going to the B-end market.

If there is a long-term dependence on the online car-hailing market, then there are certain risks: on the one hand, it is easy to collapse the product positioning, which is not conducive to the later volume; On the other hand, it will also face the crisis of market changes. Last year, Chongqing, Shanghai, Changsha, Jinan and other cities successively issued risk warnings for the online car-hailing industry, and even some cities have suspended the acceptance of online car-hailing transportation permits.

This market change did affect GAC Aion's sales. According to the data of the car emperor, in October last year, the sales of AION S fell from 21,500 in September to 11,700 units, and in April this year it was 11,900 units, failing to rebound, and the sales of AION Y in April this year were 11,500 units, compared with 27,100 units in October last year.

Of course, it's not all about online car-hailing, and now the white-hot "price war" in the automotive industry has also made GAC Aion lose its advantage. Take BYD as a comparison, in February this year, BYD announced that its Qin PLUS Glory Edition and Destroyer 05 Glory Edition were listed, with a starting price of 79,800 yuan. With this move, GAC Aion seems to be difficult to compete for the market by relying on cost performance.

3

The listing process is slow●

What makes GAC Aion's management anxious is probably not only these, one is that although its scale has reached a certain level, it is precisely because of the beautiful price that it has not been able to make much money.

Taking last year as an example, GAC Group's net profit attributable to the parent was 4.429 billion yuan, of which the investment income from GAC Honda, GAC Toyota and other joint ventures was 8.349 billion yuan. It can be deduced from this that the loss of GAC Group's independent sector is about 3.92 billion yuan, and the same will be true in 2022 and 2021. This makes us wonder whether GAC Aion is a "burden" on the road to the group's profitability.

The other is that GAC Aion, which relies on the volume of the B-end, seems to be firmly bound to online car-hailing, resulting in a lot of difficulties in the future when impacting the high-end.

As early as 2020, GAC Aion released the AION V priced at 172,600-239,600 yuan, but the monthly sales hovered at the level of 1,000-2,000 units for a long time, and even if the price was reduced later, sales still did not improve, and the latest sales in April this year were only 1,666 units.

In order to meet the high-end market, GAC Aion officially released its high-end brand - Haobo at the end of 2022, and unveiled the first mass-produced model Haobo GT, with an initial price of 219,900-339,900 yuan. Subsequently, two models, Haobo SSR and Haobo HT, were also released, of which Haobo SSR is a supercar priced at the million-level level.

Judging from the actual results, Haobo's sales are bleak. According to the data of Chedi, in the year ending April this year, the cumulative sales of Haobo's three cars were only 12,000 units.

Low-end sales have slowed down, high-end sales have not been able to rush, and profitability has been tested, which has made GAC Aion's originally bright IPO uncertain.

You must know that in October 2022, GAC Aion attracted attention due to the A round of financing, and at the stage when the financing of the new energy industry entered the "cooling-off period", it overraised about 18.3 billion yuan in a single round of financing against the trend, and the post-investment valuation exceeded 100 billion yuan. At that time, the voices of GAC Aion that it would sprint to "the first share of new energy vehicles on the Science and Technology Innovation Board" came and went.

Later, at the Guangzhou Auto Show at the end of 2022, Gu Huinan revealed that GAC Aion is reporting the relevant materials of the initial public offering application to the securities regulator, and intends to sprint to the first share of the new energy vehicle science and technology innovation board, which is expected to be listed by the end of 2023 or early 2024.

Then, at the Shanghai Auto Show in April last year, Feng Xingya, general manager of GAC Group, mentioned the IPO again, saying that GAC Aion strives to achieve IPO within the year; In July, Gu Huinan said that Aion's IPO is going as planned, and it will not be until 2024 at the earliest.

Time flashed to 2024, and at the beginning of the year, there were rumors in the market that GAC Aion would go public in Hong Kong and plan to raise $1 billion. After the news came out, many industry insiders believed that GAC Aion, which was valued at more than 100 billion yuan at the time of the A round of financing, was somewhat "aggrieved".

But even though there is a steady stream of IPO news, there is never a single accurate number. In today's new energy vehicle market involution, GAC Aion is slowing down, can it wait for the ideal time to market and a satisfactory valuation?

Author | Lee Lee

来源 | 车圈能见度（CarVisibility）

View original image 104K

•