Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Tesla, my buddies and myself.

A few months ago, Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen immediately posted a message: "the technological development curve includes not only the Internet and smartphones, but also electric cars, the first of which was produced in the 19th century." after that, gasoline cars dominated the world for more than a hundred years. " Some people in the comment area said that there was a laboratory fire that destroyed the trams of Ford and Edison, and then history took a turn, and electric cars were completely replaced by fuel cars.

However, the transformation of history will not be so arbitrary, in the process of actual development, urban road development, oil supply changes, policy promotion and other factors, the use of electricity or oil, and there are several ups and downs in the middle.

For example, during the oil crisis in the 1970s, GM, Ford and other manufacturers developed electric vehicles; more than a decade later, the economic crisis broke out, and in order to deal with the impact of imported cars such as Toyota and Honda, the US government launched a zero-emission vehicle program. But whether the early GM EV-1 or Toyota's RAV4 EV restricted leasing or open sales, electric car manufacturers have always struggled to make a profit.

In the impression of many people, it was not until the appearance of Tesla, who was loaded with lithium batteries, that it could be called a true streetcar revolution. But before that, lead-acid batteries made the first electric car more than a decade earlier than gasoline cars, and by the end of the 19th century, electric cars and fuel cars were even neck and neck. Therefore, from the perspective of the car itself, battery capacity and high cost are the most important problems that limit the development of electric vehicles.

In 2010, Tesla was listed on NASDAQ, raising US $226 million.

In the following week, Tesla's share price soared 40%, with a market capitalization of as much as $10 billion at one point, surpassing established car companies Fiat and Mitsubishi. Setting the clock back to 2014, when Musk posted the famous "All Our Patent Are Belong To You" on Tesla's website, he said, "yesterday, there was a patent wall in the lobby of our headquarters, but now the situation has changed. in order to promote the development of electric car technology, we have torn down this wall."

A month later, Letv Motor was founded, and then Weilai, Xiaopeng, and ideals emerged one after another as new forces. At the beginning of its establishment, Li Bin said that Xilai would become one of the world's top five smart electric vehicle companies by 2030, while Li Xiang threatened in his internal letter that his goal was to achieve the first domestic market share by 2025 and become one of the top three in the world. Compared with the top two, he Xiaopeng is more direct and almost matches Tesla in product strategy orientation.

According to an earlier report released by the China Electric vehicle Association of 100 people, cars will reproduce the smart evolution path of mobile phones in the future. according to the law of the development of the industry, for example, before mobile phones are fully intelligent, Nokia has survived for nearly 50 years. But once Apple appeared, it took almost five years to subvert and disintegrate the old pattern.

The implication is that this kind of logical change at the bottom brought about by technological upgrading will set off extremely tragic disputes in the industrial chain.

So in the two years from 2020 to 2021, the secrets of new energy vehicles are getting fewer and fewer, not only Wei Xiaoli, but also on the track where all kinds of new and old players gather, from product performance and intelligent configuration to all kinds of scenes created by car companies, around the car is an all-round fight. Faced with the question of falling behind, Weimar founder Shen Hui responded at that time that "New Energy is a long-term track, just like playing football. Now we haven't finished playing in the first 15 minutes of the first half, and we don't know who wins or loses."

In September last year, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in China exceeded 30%, and the overall growth rate of the market declined, while car companies were still setting quite radical targets. Now, they are once again standing on a new starting line, while the penetration of new energy vehicles is increasing, there are also more players, such as retreat, price increases, price cuts, low consumption, and organizational unrest, which have made the industry, which is already in dire straits, press the acceleration button.

Why is it a smart car? On this issue, he Xiaopeng once admitted that since experiencing Tesla's electric car, his intuition told him that the car is going to produce new changes. "everyone is quite hit by smartphones, and they all think that the incident between Apple and Nokia will happen again in the automotive industry."

Prior to that, when Tesla went public in 2010, BMW began to develop pure electric vehicles, and a domestic promotion plan for new energy vehicles was also released. Some analysts believe that in the short term, it will be very difficult for Chinese automakers to catch up with foreign countries in internal combustion engine technology. With the continuous improvement of battery, motor and controller technology, people with a slight commercial sense know that if they want to rise, they have to rely on the bend of new energy vehicles.

In 2017, he Xiaopeng parachuted to Xiaopeng as chairman and replanned the G3 Beta version of the company's first production car; at the same time, ES8, the company's first car, was unveiled at the Shanghai auto show. Li Bin stood on the stage, from the body to the machine, incorporating all the market confidence in the seven-seat pure electric SUV into his own language and body expression.

According to the law of car-building in the industry, a car that has been introduced needs to be completely updated, and it will take at least five years from research and development, experiment to listing. The Xilai car has been useful from scratch for three years; one year after he Xiaopeng joined, the G3 of the Standard Tesla Model 3 also entered the market smoothly, with a subsidized price of 13.58-165800 yuan, which is also the best-selling model of Xiaopeng.

New power players grab the results faster, but the sound of the tide falls to both sides.

In Xiaopeng's shareholder list, in addition to Ali and IDG, Xiaomi, Chunhua Capital, Foxconn and other players are also included. Behind Weilai are investment giants such as JD.com, Temasek and Sequoia. Ideal investors include Wang Xing's Dragon Ball, byte Jump, Source Code and other players. New energy cars are a hot track, and all kinds of capital want to get a piece of the pie.

But there are a lot of people who remain skeptical.

Although the Internet is popular, cars, as commodities, cannot easily change their special technical attributes. Countries have strict regulations on the R & D and production of engines, transmissions, front and rear axles and frames. For example, ES8 is made in Jianghuai cars, but JAC itself is still struggling in both pure electric and medium-and high-end car markets.

In fact, Wei Xiaoli started out as a contract manufacturer, and they found Jianghuai, Haima and Lifan respectively. None of the three are mainstream car companies and have no value for brand endorsement. However, the cycle of Weilai and Xiaopeng to come up with a whole car is much shorter than ideal. From the construction of a branch factory in Changzhou in 2016 to the acquisition of Lifan two years later, the ideal first model, the ideal ONE, will not be officially mass-produced until the end of 2018.

According to Soochow Securities, in terms of chips, Wei Xiaoli uses Nvidia solutions; millimeter wave radar, braking and other components of sensors are mainly Bosch products; batteries cooperate with Ningde era, using Qualcomm chips in the cockpit. In the process of the birth of a whole vehicle, Wei Xiaoli plays the role of design, research and development, purchasing key components, and then finding a factory to assemble and produce.

If you look at it from a profit-making point of view, car-building is actually a very thin profit-sharing industry, compared with BYD with a full set of vehicle manufacturing industry chain, Wei Xiaoli's stacking car-building model, the degree of autonomy of spare parts is low, and the cost is not dominant; on the other hand, since they are contract manufacturers, it means that they do not have an absolute say in the downstream supply chain.

Wei Lai paid Jianghuai fee statistics Tu Yuan Guoxin Certificate "according to Matrix Partners China partner Wan Haoji, I felt that Xiaopeng had made a" open smartphone ". This sentence also revealed the helplessness at that time: the basic manufacturing level was unreliable, so that immature functions such as mobile KTV and remote control were used as marketing gimmicks, and even gave birth to he Xiaopeng's joke that" automobile operation is the core and manufacturing is not important. "

At the same time, since Model 3 announced mass production, it has also been mired in a "capacity crisis". At that time, Tesla even spent $100m a week to push capacity climbing. GM's former CEO even asserted that Tesla was about to close down, and the latter lost $700m just after the first quarter.

Although Tesla later survived the difficult problem of mass production by relying on abundant funds. But other players still can not escape the shadow of lack of capital, even the Rivian, which is highly expected by Amazon, can only use cheaper production to achieve scale; traditional automakers such as Volkswagen also take 3-5 years to barely keep pace with Tesla in the cost and profit of electric cars, not to mention the newcomers who started later.

The day after the release of the G3, he Xiaopeng admitted in a group interview that the company could not meet large-scale delivery now.

Similarly, throughout 2019, after ES8 spontaneous combustion, battery recall, stock price collapse, massive layoffs, and huge losses of tens of billions in four years, the full-year net loss of Xilai soared to 11.3 billion yuan. Although sales hit an all-time high in the fourth quarter, the gross profit margin was still negative-8.9%, and the cash balance was halved month-on-month, leaving only about 1 billion. Unable to raise money, Li Bin became the "worst entrepreneur of the year" that year.

The relatively stable ideal costs 650 million yuan to buy the equity of Lifan Motor, but it is burdened by the remaining debt problems and is listed as the executor several times in succession. The main "growth program" is not valued by the industry, and the performance promotion has not been able to stir up many storms. Coupled with the raising of the subsidy threshold, the already unrich family background is even more difficult.

02. Without a single part, we will not be able to produce what these new car-building forces face. In fact, it is a very long-term problem.

When "later Auto" asked about the storm, Li Bin used the word "perfect" to describe it. "everything that was expected and unexpected happened, and nothing happened," he said. Competition in the external industry, changes in the capital market, internal batteries, ES8's early capacity problems, and so on, are indeed exposed at the same time.

However, after the capital chain crisis in 2019, it was followed by the impact of the epidemic on the supply chain, insufficient upstream expansion, lack of core in the global automobile industry chain, and the capacity problem was difficult to alleviate; the cost of lithium carbonate raw materials rose, and some media revealed that the average cost of a car should be increased by 30,000 to 40,000 RMB. If reflected in the price level, it must be increased by 40,000 to 50,000 to reach the gross profit level of the same period last year.

But the problem is that although domestic consumers have mixed feelings about price cuts, they are even more reluctant to accept price increases.

Li Bin said that one part of a car cannot be produced without one part.

In the interconnected automobile industry, as mentioned earlier, most assembly companies rely on stacking materials, and the degree of freedom is very low. They only master the design and production of core accessories such as engines and gearboxes, and at most add the final process of car assembly. But black box solutions like chassis, even if full of high-end hardware, may not necessarily produce a good car that matches the luxury configuration list.

Tesla independently developed intelligent driving and cockpit software and hardware, which achieved the rapid iteration of the whole vehicle OTA, and the self-developed autopilot chips were also mass-produced and landed on the ground, with computing power reaching 144TOPS, nearly five times that of Nvidia Xavier, which also allowed Tesla to lead the industry again in technology and cost control.

Later, a new car technology executive said, "Tesla has run out, everyone can copy homework."

In 2020, Weilai came back from the dead, and its share price soared from approaching the delisting red line to about $28, making it the second largest car company in China after BYD. Wei Xiaoli followed Tesla's example and launched independent research and development of cockpit and intelligent driving one after another. Among them, Xiaopeng was the first to set up a Chinese and foreign R & D team, and ideally after IPO, he also began to recruit talents and develop intelligent driving; in addition to the perception of intelligent driving, Weilai also carried out self-research on planning, control algorithms and batteries.

In terms of chips, for this hardware, which requires a lot of resources and capital investment, Li Bin wants to walk on two legs and first adopt the supplier scheme to achieve mass production of models, but also build his own capacity, and at the same time adopt Qualcomm's chip scheme. Ideally, in the 1-10 stage, will not develop their own chip, and Xiaopeng, both lock Nvidia's Orin, computing power up to 200TOPS, power consumption of 45W.

Tesla built a super factory all over the world after his initial attempt to cooperate with Daimler. since setting up the factory in Shanghai, the stock price has also risen, and the market likes Tesla's game very much, but, while boosting the market's confidence in electric cars, it also widens the gap with the new domestic power Wei Xiaoli.

Throughout 2021, Tesla sold 484100 new cars in China, of which 320000 were sold in China. As for Wei Xiaoli on one side, the annual delivery data are 91429, 98155 and 90491 respectively. By the time the cooperation agreement between Weilai and Xiaopeng and the contract factory expires, Xiaopeng has turned to self-construction.

At this time, there is another problem, just like Wei Xiaoli does not do 4s stores, the former must first establish an integrated system in order to have the absolute right to say, but most of the direct stores are opened in shopping malls, the gap in the sales model also raised the threshold to enter: the premise is to have a strong market share, in order to have a strong bargaining power.

The same is true for the construction of a factory.

An electric car company with only a few models, coupled with the poor overall performance of the market and difficult to sell, has invested a lot of money in marketing education and price war, and at this time to build a factory at the same time, it is easy to outweigh the gain. Tesla can achieve high gross profit, mainly due to fewer models, large sales volume and low cost. From 2017 to 2021, Tesla's global vehicle sales compound growth rate reached 56.54% and tripled in five years. The advantage lies in core technology and brand strength.

The common rate of spare parts of Tesla's full range of models is as high as 70%. For example, the motors used on Model S Plaid and Model 3 are the same, the former has only made some optimizations: the protective cover of carbon brazing dimension is added on the motor rotor, and the precious metal content and the complexity of manufacturing process are reduced on the battery. in addition, the weak dependence on the chip controls the discourse power of the chip value chain at the same time. It also indirectly promotes the negotiation right to control production capacity for contract manufacturers.

Comparison of gross profit margin of new energy automobile enterprises what is the imagination space for new energy vehicles in the stock market of Tu Yuan Shengang?

Limited to long-term losses, it is difficult to answer this question, if the market share continues to rise while losing money, and if the market share falls while losing money, the result can be imagined. "you can build a few factories on a small scale and try to receive some things. This is what everyone should do." Some people in the industry said, "but this is not completely autonomous and controllable."

It is useless to get angry. Xiaopeng, who is on a par with Tesla at the technical level, adheres to the route of full-stack self-research and low-cost mass production, but this does not make it step into the same happy river as Tesla.

In the early stage, it was restricted by the policy to carry out contract manufacturing cooperation, and after reaching the threshold of building a factory, it built factories in Zhaoqing and Wuhan. Xiaopeng's plan is very similar to Tesla's strategy of quickly capturing the market with two mid-range models, the Model 3 and the Model Y.

Li Xueling, an investor in Xiaopeng Motor, has said that in China, car building should pay more attention to the sinking users of Pinduoduo, "He who wins a diaosi wins the world". Therefore, the overall price of Xiaopeng car is lower than that of the other three, and compared with the price of the ideal one and Lailai ES8 in the same period, the average price on arrival of the G3 is less than 150000, which attracts some young people and a large number of ride-hailing owners driven by new energy policy subsidies.

However, the performance of the G3 in the market is not perfect. Xiaopeng also recalled a batch of more than 10,000 defective inverter products, with a failure rate of 70%. Although the pricing of the subsequent sedan car series P7 and P5 reached more than 200000, the delivery performance was mediocre, and the price was still lower than the middle and high end of the competitors.

In fact, Xiaopeng's low-line positioning does not affect the high costs of research and development, sales network, after-sales and so on. In the first quarter of 2018-2022, Xiaopeng's cumulative R & D expenditure reached 10.2 billion yuan, accounting for 27.8% of the cumulative revenue, and the R & D expenditure rate has long been ahead of the domestic new forces. The consequence of "spending money on R & D" regardless of cost is that Xiaopeng has achieved good patent results, a leading R & D expense rate, and a gross profit margin that lags behind other players.

On the other hand, seizing the window that the FSD service of Tesla's users in China could not be updated for a long time, Xiaopeng captured a number of car owners who needed auxiliary driving functions. however, in the current demand, coupled with more restrictions on domestic terms of use, it could not become the preferred consideration for users. the slightly lower delivery volume in the same period was several times higher than Xiaopeng in revenue.

Of course, buying a car depends on the brand, and the premium brought by product positioning and brand power has become the most significant difference between the automobile industry and the Internet industry. The key is such an impact, the timeliness is still very long.

The path of Wei Lai is different from that of Xiaopeng.

"A lot of people think they can make products, but I think very few people in the automobile industry can make products." The problem of the product needs to be specifically solved, and there is no need to get angry. In Li Xiang's view, Weilai is a steady conservative who does not report too high expectations. Li Bin is his old rival and one of his "few."

For a long time, people have been most impressed by the fact that it is not its self-research and technology, but the more and more salvage services.

For example, as long as you can enjoy the right to buy a car, remote power supply, lifetime warranty, road rescue, car networking services, applicable to the ES8, ES6 models that are being sold by Xilai. The "Weilai driving service", which is directly operated by the Weilai road service team, can be called the housekeeper level, providing users with not only driving and picking up, but also picking up and taking care of children and the elderly, and doing homework with their children. as well as other car companies basically do not bother to invest in intelligent system maintenance services.

When it comes to the issue of battery life, Xiaopeng not only emphasizes the charging station, but also emphasizes the charging station; although Tesla has considered the technology of changing electricity, he has not introduced a replacement station, on the contrary, he continues to invest in overcharging stations and overcharging piles. Li Bin, who watches the fire from the sidelines, has always claimed that "it is more convenient to power up than refueling" to give users a better driving experience, so Weilai chose the astonishing cost of "changing power stations + mobile charging cars" as the main charging mode.

In 2022, the total number of power stations in the whole country has increased by 528, and the cumulative number has reached 1305 (including 346 expressway power stations). At present, more than 1500 electricity changes have been made by users in Lulai. In addition to the product itself can fight, Weilai service is also an important support for enterprises to gain a foothold in the high-end pure electricity market.

The whole set of things such as self-research, recharging and service is called systematic ability.

With the massive investment of manpower and material resources, the ever-expanding variable is that the investment may not necessarily be transformed into product competitiveness and market returns. Li Bin is also aware of the risks, so he stressed to his employees, "if time and money are spent, nothing will be done by 2025," and then Weilai may fall into the second echelon.

Weilai quarterly net loss Tu Yuan Soochow Securities, then the problem arises. If users were originally required to buy a car to enjoy the service effect that enterprises spent so much money on, is it possible that as the first-mover advantage of car-building enterprises gradually diminished, the worry-free service in the past has become a benefit that can be enjoyed as little as 200,000 to 300,000, or even more than 100,000? The cost side continues to be under pressure, and the competitiveness of the brand may be impacted. In this case, can the service of Weilai continue to maintain its value and quality?

This is a question that will not be answered for the time being.

According to insiders, the sub-brands polished by Xilai will operate independently, with prices falling below 200000 in an attempt to enter the sinking market before the end of the dividend period for new energy vehicles.

But at the same time, it also means that in fact, in terms of brand, Weilai has made concessions in terms of differential positioning.

04, Tesla, competitors and himself in 2021, Li Bin mentioned in an interview that the mobile phone industry was diverse at the beginning, and gradually converged after the iPhone, and cars were also in the process. He believes that by 2025, smart cars will find the ultimate product, the technology will slowly converge, and Weilai will bet on self-driving.

"self-driving will change the appearance of the car, the internal structure of the car, and the shape of the digital cockpit." Li Bin said, "if you make a cell phone again today, it will be a little ridiculous."

But this argument did not last long. Last year, Li Bin changed his tune, saying that Weilai would develop a mobile phone every year like Apple. He explained in the group of car owners that more than 50% of Weilai users use iPhone, which is relatively closed and does not open the interface, which is "equivalent to that the keys to the home are in the hands of the opponent." He believes that car-to-machine interconnection is a trend, and it is necessary to study mobile phones and car-centric intelligent terminal devices from the perspective of user privacy and experience.

Wei to build the logic of mobile phones, the outside world is not willing to pay the bill, but reveals between the lines is the atmosphere of Weilai's growing anxiety about the increment of users. However, at the beginning, Li Bin was right. Now standing on the node of 2023, domestic electric vehicles have been developed for nearly a decade, and it is indeed approaching the time of reshuffle.

Just after January, Li Bin reminded everyone in his internal letter that the growth rate of delivery volume lags behind that of China's intelligent electric vehicle market as a whole. and criticized the company's problems: supply chain management, quality problems, accidents, user feedback, internal organizational efficiency, these are common problems encountered by new car companies, and then Lei Jun beat chicken blood to the car manufacturing team. Guan Xuan Xiaomi is expected to release as soon as possible. It will go on sale in 2024.

The tension spread to Tesla. In the fourth quarter of last year, Tesla delivered a total of 405278 cars, but still failed to meet analysts' repeatedly lowered expectations, and the annual delivery volume of 1.31 million failed to meet the promise of 50 per cent annual growth. Tesla's share price fell 37 per cent at the end of the year. Not long ago, on the sixth day of the replacement of new energy, Tesla's domestic models began an unprecedented price reduction. In addition to the large drop in Model Y, Model 3 was the lowest entry price in the history of domestic Tesla.

Analysts forecast delivery volume source Bloomberg it is worth noting that this crisis is different from the previous capacity climbing, but Tesla's order reserves are not enough, supply far exceeds demand. According to public data, Tesla's global backlog of orders has been rapidly decreasing in recent months. Under the direct operation mode, without the ability of dealers to carry inventory, the market has higher requirements for enterprise products and sales. The direct reason behind this is that the growth rate of sales in the Chinese market is far lower than Tesla's production capacity.

Tesla capacity Forecast Tuyuan Soochow Securities Tesla's price reduction has become the most direct and effective strategy to increase sales. On the other hand, new car-building forces and new energy brands owned by traditional car companies have all released sales reports for 2022 one after another. Judging from the data, the sales completion rates of Wei Xiaoli and Wei Xiaoli are 78.38%, 48.30% and 81.66% respectively, and the vast majority of car companies still fail to meet the annual sales targets set at the beginning of last year.

Among them, Xiaopeng had a month-on-month decline in sales for five consecutive months last year, and after giving the promising G9 "defeat", Xiaopeng gradually fell behind. GAC Eian won the top sales in 2022 with 270000 vehicles, and Nezha of the second echelon counterattacked and surpassed in the second half of the year, ranking second with annual sales of 152000 vehicles. At the same time, BYD delivered more than 1.86 million vehicles a year, exceeding its 2022 target and raising its sales target this year to 4 million. Although car sales do not represent an absolute excess, they also reflect the intensity of competition in the market.

According to the official forecast of the Federation of passengers, wholesale sales of new energy passenger vehicles in China may reach 8.4 million in 2023, an increase of 30 per cent.

With the market stimulating consumption and the withdrawal of new energy subsidy policy, in addition to the traditional luxury brand BBA, with the addition of Xiaomi, Huawei, Jidu, polar krypton and other new brands, many car companies have raised model prices to cope with cost pressure.

But if the competitor reduces the price, do you follow or not?

Do not have gross profit, lose market share, follow up can protect share, but will lose profits, in short, the market is gradually a red sea, the elimination of the electric car industry will only be more cruel.

In an interview in 2018, he Xiaopeng was asked about the gap between him and Musk. He was neither humble nor arrogant: "he is better than me now, and I may be better than him in the future." Two years later, in the face of the same question, he Xiaopeng's answer became: "I don't think there is any difference between us. He is in his field and I am in my logic of thinking."

"We didn't know anything about cars at that time," he said in 2021. "We thought maybe the car war would be over in 10 to 15 years at the most, but now it may be more than that." the changes in the industry and the market are beyond his expectations.

In the past, Lei Jun and Li Xiang both thought that the competition in the industry would eventually leave five companies and put themselves in it. When the same question was thrown to Xiaopeng, he said that there were no more than seven, of which only Tesla was sure, other companies were still on the way, and there might be Xiaopeng.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: new eyes (ID:xinmouls), author: Lu Yao

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