Weilai crisis, will Li Bin fall three times in the same place?

Wen 丨 Wu Dalang

Produced by 丨 Niu Dao CaiJing (niudaocaijing)

2021 is regarded as the first year of China's electric vehicle outbreak, and this year Li Bin and his Weilai also wrote a wonderful chapter.

NIO delivered 10,628 vehicles in September, an increase of 125.7% year-on-year, achieving six consecutive quarters of positive growth. This allowed Weilai to end the embarrassing situation of being overtaken by Ideal and Xiaopeng and return to the throne of the new forces of car building.

Good thing into a pair, that month Weilai's ternary iron lithium standard battery pack (75kWh) was officially released, immediately configured to the whole vehicle, compared to the old model, the charging speed was directly increased by 40%; Weilai's supporting facilities layout was also rapidly expanded, and nearly 100 new power stations were added in September, completing the goal ahead of schedule.

However, it is the "bellwether" of this new energy vehicle, and since its inception, there has been no shortage of questions about the "concept of speculation" and "circle of money", and once faced the test of life and death.

In 2014, Li Bin founded Weilai, and he comprehensively expanded his business and compressed the growth time with a "big opening and big cooperation" style of playing, spending 23 billion yuan at the same time, but also buried the hidden danger of the broken capital chain.

In 2017, Li Bin withstood the pressure of all parties and successfully achieved the first batch of mass production of WEIO ES8.

A year later, NIO rang the bell on the New York Stock Exchange in the United States. The market has high hopes for Weilai, although at that time there were already discordant voices such as "short mileage and long charging time".

However, the storm came without warning, and Li Bin's water came backwards.

In 2019, as agreed, all the events within and outside the situation detonated together: the Sino-US relations that fell into the ice cellar externally, the competition of the new energy track, the change of face of the capital market, the internal is the poor management of personnel, and the straw that crushed Li Bin is the Weilai battery burning accident.

From April to June 2019, a fire accident broke out in WEILAI ES8 every month, directly triggering a recall notice from the State Administration for Market Regulation. When the news came, all parties were sensational, first of all, the stock market, Weilai's stock price fell below $4 like a cliff, less than 1/3 of the listed price; then there was a personnel change, seeing that the wealth in hand had shrunk sharply, including the CFO, The middle and high-level weilai had left; and most investors also ruthlessly emptied The weilai stock.

Cash flow is suddenly tight, and Li Bin, who has tens of billions of capital, even has to spend this darkest moment by selling production equipment.

For him, the accident was undoubtedly a resounding slap in the face, but it also made him sober, he realized that capital is like a tidal wave, it comes and goes quickly, and technology and management are the foundation of the enterprise.

The first thing Li Bin did when he woke up was to make personnel adjustments to improve operational efficiency; on the other hand, Li Bin was also adjusting his channel construction ideas - the efforts to jointly build NIO Space with partners have increased significantly, and as of December 2019, the number of NIO spaces has reached 48.

The improvement of the research and development direction is the top priority - in the past, Weilai can be described as a full bloom, covering the three-electric system, body lightweight, automatic driving, etc., after experiencing the black swan event of battery combustion, Weilai reduced the degree of independent research and development and turned to joint cooperation. In November 2019, NIO announced a partnership with Intel-owned Mobileye to use the latter's technology for the autonomous driving market.

This series of initiatives has yielded remarkable results. On December 30, 2019, Weilai's third quarterly report was released, the loss was lower than expected, and the company's stock price rose all the way on the day, rising more than 53.72%, closing at $3.72, with a market value of $3.909 billion.

The outside world may feel that Li Bin is like a divine help, and a one-time operation saved Weilai from the hands of Yan Wang, but in Li Bin's eyes, it is not that he saved Weilai, but that the user saved Weilai.

Li Bin said in an interview: "At that time, I thought that I should go back to the user, and I found that the user really had a lot of social pressure to buy our car. Some users' Fa Xiao broke off relations with him, just because he bought Weilai. Why? The things that everyone at the bottom believes are different. After meeting the users, I really feel that we really don't think this is a big deal. ”

"At the worst time, our finance department, the supply chain team, when there were less than 1,000 units, we were finished, so I said that it was really the user who saved Weilai."

If the story ends here, it should be a fairy tale of Weilai and the owner of the car, but unfortunately the story will continue, li Bin and his Weilai are destined to have a second disaster.

Just when everyone thought that Weilai had long been out of trouble, on August 14 this year, Lin Wenqin, the founder of Meiyihao Brand Management Company, 31 years old, died in an accident after driving the WEIO ES8 and activating the automatic driving function (NOP pilot system).

This is the second WEILAI car accident in half a month. At the end of July, a NIO EC6 caught fire after hitting a stone pier on the highway in Pudong, Shanghai, and the driver failed to escape the unfortunate death in time.

People can't help but think of the battery burning accident 2 years ago - Weilai once again stood on the cusp of public opinion.

And Weilai's relationship with the owner of the car has also changed from a fairy tale to a joke in the former Soviet Union:

Brezhnev Brezhnev saw a man on the road carrying a watermelon home. He stopped the car, beckoned the man, and asked him to sell him the watermelon.

"All right, Comrade Brezhnev." The man said, "Choose one." ”

"But there's only one watermelon."

"That's when we chose you."

This time, there are far fewer car owners who support Weilai.

On August 18, 500 car owners jointly issued a statement, saying that When Weilai promoted the NOP pilot system, it did not mislead the drivers, and also told the media not to fool around, which was summed up in one sentence: We believe in Weilai.

However, another 7,000 Weilai drivers could not stand it, and created a topic of #Anti-Car Owners Joint Statement on the Weilai APP to fight back: Why do you 500 people represent me?

They believe that this is a "pseudo-statement" led by Weilai officials, and the 500 people are like watermelons in Soviet jokes, and there is only one option to speak for Weilai.

The owner's doubts are not unreasonable, Lin Wenqin as a victim of WEILAI's "automatic driving" technical defects, the sales link of Weilai has not fulfilled the responsibility of informing the risk.

"An important reason why we can't blindly believe in automatic driving is that L2-level assisted driving vision plus millimeter radar (technology used by Weilai) has limited recognition ability to static objects." A technical developer said. The truck that Lin Wenqin rear-ended was in a "static state" of construction work at that time.

People think that Weilai has always been in the name of "free hands" in sales promotion, almost without mentioning the technical defects of automatic driving, and the owner does not have the professional ability to read the 100,000-word instruction manual.

Even Li Bin himself packed tickets to the public: "Mass-produced ES8 can liberate drivers 50% of their time, and the safety of cars more than 50% of the time is not worse than that of your own driving."

In fact, Li Bin has always responded to the outside world's concerns about research and development capabilities with an ambiguous attitude.

When asked about the progress of production and testing of solid-state batteries on a conference call, Li Bin replied with only one sentence: "All are still relatively smooth, according to our plan in progress." As for the field of autonomous driving and the field of chips, there are no more answers.

And in the development of new energy vehicles, in fact, there are still many challenges to face, in addition to the research and development end, the speed of infrastructure construction is also a major problem for Weilai.

Of course, from the perspective of Weilai's ternary iron lithium standard battery pack launched in September and the acceleration of the construction of the replacement power station, these problems are being solved by this company one by one.

At the same time, NIO's market performance quickly adjusted back after the august accident fluctuations, setting a monthly delivery record with a delivery result of 10,628 vehicles.

It seems that in people's eyes, the inspirational story of Weilai's resurrection two years ago has been very complete, Li Bin has transformed from the "most miserable person" in 2019 to today's appearance, this bowl of successful entrepreneur's chicken soup is very delicious, and I don't want to see the damage to Weilai's image.

If we always mention the problem of automatic driving that Weilai has not been able to solve, it is a provocation, and it will not extinguish the public's high buying sentiment. After all, now the big name of "Weilai" is thunderous, and under the high growth of 6 consecutive quarters, in addition to the victims who can't make a sound, who else is qualified to challenge this new car-making force?

It is estimated that only Li Bin understands in his heart: the next time he encounters a crisis, will the people still give Weilai the opportunity to "nirvana rebirth"!