Hengyuan Technology Group Co-founder, CEO
Mr. Wang Zuguang is 65 years old this year, and his unhurried attitude and soft words make him look more like a scholar, and it is difficult to believe that the entrepreneurial veteran really travels between the United States and China every month, with an average of one jet lag in two weeks.
Wang Zuguang's first well-known titles were "Father of PHS" and "Founder of China's First NASDAQ Listed Company", and four of the companies he participated in have already gone public. Past success did not stop him, in 2014 Wang Zuguang cross-border new energy vehicle manufacturing field, and then became the co-founder and CEO of Hengyuan Electric Vehicle Group, in 2016 Hengyuan launched the intelligent car manufacturing platform "Rongta Intelligent Manufacturing", it is expected that Hengyuan Electric Vehicle Group can be listed in the first half of 2020.
Although it is very low-key in the current Chinese social media, Wang Zuguang's life is enough to be described as "legendary". He was born in Shanghai into a family of scholars, his maternal grandfather Yu Huairen was the operator of the famous "Huairen Accounting Firm" in Shanghai, and his grandfather Wang Gongxi was a legendary patriot. In 1979, as one of the first batch of students to study in the United States in New China, Wang Zuguang enrolled in the University of Illinois, obtained a double master's degree in computer and electrical engineering with honors, and became the first student in the school to obtain a bachelor's and master's degree in two and a half years. His graduate supervisor is also a legend of academia with nine PhDs across multiple fields: Herbert A. Simon (Chinese Sima He), the first Nobel Prize winner in artificial intelligence.
After graduation, Mr. Wang Zuguang was hired by Racal-Milgo as a system engineer in the United Kingdom, responsible for the development of network management systems, and then entered bell lab, which was the most famous in the communications industry at that time, as a senior researcher, and his research topics were mainly network systems and network management. It can be said that more than 40 years ago, Wang Zuguang became one of the first American students to contact artificial intelligence.
In 1989, Wang Zuguang decided to return to China to start a business, and became the first batch of returnees. After that, we are more familiar with the story: in 1991, he co-founded UTStarcom with Lu Hongliang and Xue Manzi, making "PHS" the first mobile phone for many Chinese. In March 2000, UTStarcom became one of the first companies in China to be listed on the NASDAQ.
From left to right: Lu Hongliang, Xue Manzi and Wang Zuguang
Wang Zuguang said: "In fact, I have a hobby, I like to start a business. For me, life is the most important process, and the waste process is the biggest waste. I retired once when I was 40 and later found out that I was born to work. ”
In 2006, Wang Zuguang was first exposed to the domestic automobile manufacturing industry chain, which brought him a lot of thinking. In 2014, the 60-year-old Wang Zuguang did a new energy vehicle entrepreneurial project, which was later Hengyuan Electric Vehicle Group. To date, Hengyuan's electric vehicle components and systems have been sold and used in more than 20 countries, the largest market of which is Germany. Hengyuan Electric Vehicle Group has 12 plants around the world, including the United States, Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Russia, and the Japanese Fukushima plant is under construction.
If you have the opportunity to be a change-maker of history, don't just be a follower
Wang Zuguang talked about the development history of new energy vehicles in China and the United States. The U.S. electric vehicle manufacturing industry started around 2000, when the U.S. government also invested more than $20 billion in high subsidies, and about 20-30 companies were born during this time, and all of them went bankrupt, without exception. After the massive bankruptcy, only two promising businesses were acquired, one was Tesla, founded by Martin Eberhard, which was bought by Musk in 2012. Another Fisker, once considered Tesla's most powerful competitor, has received little news after being acquired by Wanxiang Group.
The trajectory of new energy vehicles in Europe is also similar to this model, and almost all of the more than 30 startups that emerged at that time went bankrupt. This is actually an opportunity for Hengyuan, in 2014, Wang Zuguang from Yang Xiangyang, Xue Manzi and other old friends temporarily turnover to 8 million euros, the acquisition of a French electric logistics vehicle company SITL-Brandt Motors, and then successively bought two other European electric vehicle companies as technical reserves and start-ups. This story of "raising 8 million euros overnight" has also become a good story in the car-making industry that year.
China's new energy vehicles started about a decade later than Europe and the United States, and a large number of new companies began to emerge in 2014, with a number of about two or three hundred. Thanks to government subsidies, huge amounts of capital have been attracted to the market. Although developed countries have more than ten years of technology accumulation, China, as a latecomer country, can directly use these technologies and industry experience, but the commercial system, market system, supporting services and other detailed and localized parts, or have to start from scratch.
Wang Zuguang believes that there are only three elements to do a good job in starting a business: one is to build on strengths and avoid weaknesses, the other is differentiation, and the third is that the model and genes are not as good as ensuring profitability and healthy cash flow first. Speaking of this, Mr. Wang Zuguang said proudly: "We are the world's earliest profitable new energy vehicle startup, and our cash flow and profits are very good. ”
In terms of promoting strengths and avoiding weaknesses, Hengyuan is doing the production of technology platforms and automobile kits, not doing vehicle assembly, and the main market is no longer domestic but overseas. At present, Hengyuan's kits and systems have been sold to more than 20 countries around the world, the largest of which is Germany. After the domestically produced kits are shipped to Germany and assembled into a whole vehicle, they are SOLD in Germany and shipped to different factories in France, the United States, Japan and other factories. In China, the kit can be sold to brands such as Dongfeng and Sinotruk. This is also why the names of Hengyuan electric vehicles or Rongta Zhizuo are not common in the consumer market.
Hengyuan's differentiation is mainly for the commercial vehicle market, that is, passenger and logistics vehicles, and now the mainstream electric vehicles on the market are passenger cars. Electric commercial vehicles are precisely the market that all large international automobile companies and domestic companies ignore at present, and Hengyuan is also the only company in China that is developing cars for positive use, which is also rare in the world.
People who pay attention to industrial technology know that around 2015, many new concepts in the Internet and technology circles suddenly exploded and became well known to the public, such as blockchain, industrial Internet, Internet of Things, new energy vehicles and so on. Also in 2015, after Wang Zuguang tried how deep the water of automobile manufacturing was, he did not fear it from then on, but initially established the car-making platform model of Rongta Intelligent Manufacturing. Professor Zeng Ming, chief strategy officer of Alibaba Group, also personally invested in this platform and gave great help in strategic planning.
Wang Zuguang believes that whether a company stands in the forefront of the times is not the most important, the most important thing is to follow the trend and differentiate competition. In this era, we have experienced wave after wave of booms, from solar photovoltaics to bioengineering, from artificial intelligence to chip research and development, but there are very few startups that can really come out of the wind and become a mature enterprise. As the saying goes: We have to learn from the water, not to compete, but to fight endlessly. The outlet is not important, the hotspot is not important, and the traffic and Internet genes are not important. What really matters is what strengths you have and how you can play to them.
Many people believe that the commercialization of New Energy Vehicles in China is now in trouble, one is because a large number of enterprises have not really achieved the scale of mass production that can be introduced to the market, and the other is because they have encountered the competition of new energy vehicles from traditional vehicle companies and the competition of overseas brands.
Wang Zuguang still takes Tesla as an example: Tesla only takes 10 months from the shanghai factory to the production of the first batch of orders, which cannot be done by domestic startups or world-class vehicle manufacturers. And Tesla can now not only achieve mass production, but also huge capital endorsement, which domestic electric vehicle companies can not do. On the other hand, the domestic SAIC, GAC, Geely, Great Wall these veteran automobile manufacturers, they enter the new energy vehicle market, can achieve low prices and high quality products in a short period of time, the output is not small, users do not have to worry about after-sales service and brand reputation.
Therefore, unless the startup has a huge technical or platform advantage, it will fall into extremely cruel competition and repeat the mistakes of its predecessors in Europe and the United States. This is also why the domestic "new car-making forces" need to examine themselves and adjust their strategies in a timely manner. As the academic community generally adheres to the "do not reinvent the wheel" principle, choosing to develop on the basis of mature technology and combining domestic production capacity to build a car is a strategy for overtaking in curves.
"Many people emphasize Internet thinking and technology genes, in fact, the biggest problem is not the differentiation of thinking or mode, but the differentiation of products and services." Even if you use Internet thinking to make a car, its functions and experience are not decisively different from what traditional manufacturers produce, which is equivalent to you losing. ”
Competition is "horse racing", but change requires the wisdom of transcendence
Many people are not optimistic about the current new energy vehicle market, but Wang Zuguang has the opposite attitude. "I think the potential of the new energy vehicle market is still very good, and the market share is still growing rapidly." The recent decline in sales is mainly due to the withdrawal of state subsidies and local policy changes, but the future sales of new energy vehicles will certainly exceed 50% of the overall market, because new energy is the future trend. ”
From another point of view, Wang Zuguang also admitted that the main growth of new energy vehicles in the future may not come from the startups of "new car-making forces", but the rapid rise of new energy research and development of traditional large car companies, and hybrid vehicles are also put on the market in large quantities, and the supply chain scale, market share, product cost performance and brand effect they have are difficult for startups to reach.
Whether China's "new car-making forces" can survive in the future is a big question, and to say that car-making is an extremely difficult thing is to underestimate its difficulty. Xu Jiayin invested 20 billion yuan to build a car, Gree and Dyson have considered building a car, but now there is no follow-up news.
As mentioned earlier, the strengths of many startups are technology development, Internet applications, and platform management, which are also the weaknesses of traditional vehicle manufacturers. But startups' weaknesses are just as obvious: manufacturing, marketing, after-sales service.
If capital, research and development, production and sales are regarded as horse racing, the competition between startups and traditional manufacturing may have to learn the strategy of Tianji, can not use their own weaknesses and other strengths to fight hard, you must know how to give up and give up appropriately, in order to win in the field you are best at. Wang Zuguang himself also realized that he should start from the direction of resource integration that he was best at after losing nearly 23 million US dollars of personal investment as a "tuition fee".
However, perhaps what the current new energy vehicle startups have to do is to surpass the wisdom of Tian Ji, and perhaps in the era of rapid development of intelligent manufacturing and the change of the time-space relationship of the manufacturing industry, we are not winning or losing from the core strategy, but to achieve mutual benefit and win-win results, learn from each other's strengths and complement each other.
Because history has repeatedly told us that even if you have cutting-edge technology, new industries, and outstanding advantages, you can't be arrogant, don't always shout to replace others across borders, but to unite others across borders.
According to Wang Zuguang's idea, we should break the vertical structure of the traditional automobile industry and change the model from the positioning, design, research and development, supply chain, assembly, sales to after-sales service of automotive products. What Rongta Intelligent Manufacturing Platform is doing now is to pull this structure from vertical to horizontal, from exclusive competition to differentiated win-win.
On the platform of Rongta Intelligent Manufacturing, Hengyuan's own team is conducting research and development, and there are also technologies provided by partners. Based on this, the supply chain, manufacturers, sales and services of intelligent car manufacturing are separated. Manufacturers on the Rongta intelligent manufacturing platform do not need to do research and development and processing, nor do they need to do supply chain and testing, they only need to do their IP. Hengyuan's 12 factories around the world will increase to 20 in the future. Wang Zuguang's optimistic vision for the future is to make the market and after-sales service into a platform service, which can maximize R&D and production efficiency, and quickly spread the market in any part of the world.
"In fact, the investment of our entire company is only 1 billion yuan, which is not enough for a car manufacturer to even have a production line." But integrating existing resources to maximize our strengths is what makes us different. ”
Regarding the farther future and greater differentiation, Wang Zuguang believes that the scientific and technological competition between China and the United States will be a competition for basic education. At present, China's education focuses on guiding outstanding students to applied science and financial and accounting-related fields, ignoring the basic education of theoretical sciences and humanities. At present, China is moving very fast on the road of technology research and development, but in terms of long-term development, mathematics, physics, chemistry, philosophy, history and politics are the forces that enhance the overall development level of a country.
"Why japanese academics have won a lot of Nobel Prizes, because their basic education is doing better, and they are not relying on the driving force of business." Japan has learned this from its past experience competing with the United States. ”
Keep curious and exploring, constantly thinking and observing, on the road of entrepreneurship, I believe that Mr. Wang Zuguang will go farther and farther until he reaches the era of true artificial intelligence. At that time, what kind of cross-border projects will this old gentleman who refuses to stop create or invest in?