Kunpeng Project
The text is as white as a mirror
Edited by Zhou Xiongfei
AVATR is undergoing high-level changes recently.
On December 12, AVATR Technology announced that Zhu Huarong, Secretary of the Party Committee and Chairman of Changan Automobile, will serve as the chairman of AVATR Technology. Correspondingly, Tan Benhong will no longer serve as the chairman and CEO of AVATR Technology, and will be transferred to the deputy secretary of the Party Committee of Changan Automobile.
This news quickly became the focus of attention inside and outside the industry, not only because this personnel change involved the replacement of the top level of AVATAR, but more importantly, it also confirmed that Zhu Huarong is taking up his new promise to the AVATR brand.
At the AVATR 12 press conference held not long ago, Zhu Huarong once said, "As long as AVATR needs it, Chang'an will ask for money, people, and technology." ”Zhu Huarong's appointment as the chairman of AVATR Technology is an important manifestation of the great importance attached to AVATAR.
As for "giving money" and "giving technology", Changan Automobile has always been generous to AVATAR.
At the beginning of the establishment of the AVATR brand, Changan Automobile not only injected its own car-making technology into the brand, but also found Huawei and CATL to jointly develop the CHN platform to create the brand's products. In the past few years of the development of the AVATR brand, Changan Automobile, as an investor, has also maintained an annual frequency of capital injection.
The reason why Zhu Huarong and Changan Automobile attach so much importance to and support AVATR is also because AVATAR, as the "eldest son" of Changan to impact the new energy market, has a heavy responsibility.
At the beginning of the establishment of AVATAR, Zhu Huarong publicly stated that the birth of AVATR carries the upward mission of the Changan Automobile brand, and its development is the top priority of Changan Automobile. Therefore, in the past few years, Changan Automobile has pulled Huawei, CATL and other allies to pour a lot of resources, technology and funds into AVATAR.
However, in terms of the brand's subsequent sales performance, since the first product AVATR 11 was officially launched in August last year, the sales performance has not been optimistic.
AVATR 11, source AVATAR official website
According to the data of the Passenger Association, as of November this year, the AVATR brand has completed a total of 1The sales volume of 940,000 units, on average, is only 1,000-2,000 units per month, which is almost a fraction of the sales volume of "Wei Xiaoli" in the same period, and the sales compliance rate in 2023 is less than 20%. Under the current situation of declining sales, consumers' awareness of its brand is not high.
In the face of AVATAR's predicament, Changan Automobile did not give up, but gave more support in management, technology and capital, and also created AVATAR's first-class product - AVATR 12. Perhaps in the eyes of Zhu Huarong and Changan Automobile, AVATR is still a "sharp weapon" for its own advancement.
Now, the new energy vehicle industry is about to enter a more competitive battle in 2024, can AVATR really take on the responsibility of the "eldest son"?
Chang'an Group officially announced that Zhu Huarong personally took command of AVATAR, ending the previous speculation in the industry about the future direction of AVATAR.
Looking at the top executives of domestic first-tier car companies, Zhu Huarong is a rare technical background. According to public information, Zhu Huarong graduated from the Department of Vehicle Engineering of Beijing Institute of Technology and worked in Jiangling Machinery Factory after graduation. After eight years of work, Gangneung Machinery Factory and Changan Machinery Factory merged to form Changan Automobile.
Zhu Huarong has served as a technician, director of the Engine Research Institute, deputy director of the technical department, chief engineer of the automobile factory, assistant to the general manager, director and deputy general manager of the automotive technology center, and president of the Changan Automobile Engineering Research Institute in Changan Automobile.
In December 2014, Zhu Huarong officially served as the president and party secretary of Changan Automobile, and in 2020, Zhu Huarong became the chairman of Changan Automobile. With Zhu Huarong's promotion within Changan, Changan Automobile has also become the first domestic automobile company to achieve sales of its own brand exceeding 20 million units.
Zhu Huarong, chairman of Changan Automobile, source AVATR official website.
In addition to inviting "veterans" with rich qualifications to serve as soldiers, Changan Automobile also arranged for Vice President Wang Xiaofei to assist Chairman AVATR in business operation, major project promotion, and key business operations.
Correspondingly, Tan Benhong will no longer serve as the chairman and CEO of AVATR Technology, and will be transferred to the deputy secretary of the Party Committee of Changan Automobile. However, it should be noted that Tan Benhong is the executive vice president of Changan Automobile, and has previously experienced many positions such as R&D, marketing, brand public relations, product planning, and styling design.
From this point of view, from Tan Benhong to Zhu Huarong, Changan Automobile's "allocation" to the management of AVATR is not low. After this personnel change, AVATR officially said that under the leadership of the new management team, AVATR will accelerate the pace of high-end brand and build a world-class Chinese smart electric vehicle brand.
This time, Changan Automobile's "person" to AVATR is already the chairman of the top group. And in terms of "giving money" and "giving technology", Changan Automobile is also unambiguous.
According to Wired Travel, the predecessor of AVATR was "Changan Weilai", which was founded in July 2018 and was jointly established by Changan Automobile and Weilai Automobile, and later Weilai's equity was gradually withdrawn, and Changan turned to the support of Huawei and CATL, and "Changan Weilai" was officially renamed AVATR in May 2021.
Source: AVATR official WeChat.
In order to make the AVATR brand, which was established late, have a strong "late-mover advantage", Changan Automobile not only contributed its own vehicle design and manufacturing capabilities to it, but also allowed Huawei and CATL to come up with their own technologies. The former provides AVATR with a complete set of full-stack intelligent vehicle solutions, while the latter is responsible for technical support in batteries and other aspects.
As a result, CHN, a new generation of intelligent electric vehicle technology platform jointly created by the three parties, was officially unveiled with the launch of the AVATR brand. AVATAR's products will also be built based on this platform.
If AVATR wants to build a car, in addition to giving technology, it is also necessary to give money.
According to the data of Tianyancha, a total of three rounds of financing have been completed since the establishment of the AVATR brand, and in November 2021, AVATR Technology completed the first round of 24200 million yuan of strategic financing, of which Changan Automobile participated in this round of investment as the lead investor. In the two years since, AVATR has completed another 25With 4.7 billion yuan in Series A financing and 3 billion yuan in Series B financing, Changan Automobile also ranked first among investors.
After the completion of the three rounds of financing, the total financing of AVATR is close to 8 billion yuan. According to Tan Benhong's previous disclosure, "In order to make AVATR 12 go into mass production, we, Huawei, and CATL have invested a lot of resources, and the three have invested more than 2 billion yuan." ”
From the above point of view, Changan Automobile has successively completed the support of "giving people", "giving money" and "giving technology" to AVATR in recent years, and this time Zhu Huarong, who has nearly 40 years of experience in car companies, is invited to serve as the chairman of AVATR Technology, which is undoubtedly a signal to the market - Changan Automobile cannot allow AVATR to fall behind.
Backed by the three giants of Changan Automobile, Huawei and CATL, AVATR deserved to perform well, but the result was not satisfactory.
AVATR 11, as the first product under the AVATR brand, has been jointly promoted by Changan Automobile, CATL and Huawei before it was launched, but its sales performance is not impressive.
This year, as of last month, the model only achieved a total sales of 19,463 units, according to the observation of connected travel, the monthly sales performance in the first 11 months of this year, the highest sales volume was only completed 2,825 units, and the sales of the rest of the months remained at the level of about 1,000 units.
According to the plan set by AVATR at the beginning of the year,This year's sales target is to complete the delivery target of 100,000 units, but in terms of sales completed so far, AVATR has only achieved 19 percent of the annual target46%，AVATR has no hope of realizing this year's sales dream.
Due to the decline in AVATAR's sales in the past two years, it has also affected the performance of the brand.
According to the data of the capital increase report released by Changan Automobile, AVATAR's losses in the three years from 2020 to 2022 are 1500 million yuan, 2100 million yuan and 20200 million yuan, it can be seen that its loss is not only expanding year by year, but also the loss last year has expanded significantly, expanding by 89 year-on-year6%。
In the first half of the year, such losses continued. Data shows that in the first half of this year, AVATR lost 175.6 billion yuan, which is close to the loss amount of last year.
AVATAR's 2023H1 performance, source Changan Automobile's semi-annual report.
In this regard, Changan Automobile explained in its 2023 semi-annual report that "due to the fact that the first high-end product in 2023 is in the early stage of introduction and the industry's leading war, the sales volume did not meet expectations".
AVATR 11 was officially launched in August 2022, and less than half a year after it was listed, Tesla fired the first shot in the first battle in 2023, announcing a reduction in the prices of all models of Model 3 and Model Y, and the one-time price adjustment of both products exceeded 10 percentage points, setting a record of the lowest ** in history.
As of now, the "* war" has not ended, and the low-price involution may continue until next year. Li Bin, founder and CEO of NIO, clearly mentioned in the internal speech meeting that "the next fierce competition will be beyond imagination, in fact, everyone can already feel that many peers are directly reducing prices by 70,000 or 100,000 yuan, and many of them are doing negative gross profits."
The starting price of AVATR 11 itself is about 350,000 yuan, and the average transaction price is more than 360,000 yuan. On major social media platforms, AVATR 11 is often compared with Model Y, Wenjie M7, Li L9, Xpeng G9, NIO ES8 and other models.
In terms of intelligent cockpit, AVATAR's cockpit system is developed based on HarmonyOS, but as an AITO brand that maintains closer cooperation with Huawei to build cars, the HarmonyOS intelligent cockpit 3 is equipped with the M70, which is obviously better in terms of performance experience.
In terms of intelligent driving, AVATR 11 and Xpeng G9 are both models that focus on intelligent driving, AVATR 11 is equipped with Huawei's high-performance intelligent driving computing platform, with 3 lidars, 6 millimeter-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic radars and 13 high-definition cameras, while Xpeng G9 has 2 lidars, 5 millimeter-wave radars, 12 ultrasonic radars, and 11 exterior cameras.
Compared with AVATR 11, the old Xpeng G9 is slightly less competitive, but in September this year, Xpeng launched the 2024 Xpeng G9, and the price range of the new car is 2639-35.990,000 yuan, 3-40,000 yuan less than the minimum price of AVATR 11, for the most sensitive and wavering consumers, the price reduction and addition of Xiaopeng G9 is of course "more fragrant".
Based on the above analysis, the general view in the industry is that AVATR 11** is slightly higher, but compared with other competing products, there is no breakthrough "far ahead" in terms of product power.
In addition, in terms of sales network layout, AVATR is also weaker than other new energy brands. According to the latest data queried by Connected Travel on AVATAR's official website, AVATR currently has less than 350 sales outlets in 27 provinces and cities across the country, including three major store types: experience center, experience space and AVATR center.
Among them, AVATR has more than 45 stores in Guangzhou, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, which are the top three provinces and cities with the largest number of stores in the country. According to the official data, most of the users of the more than 10,000 large orders for AVATR 12 come from Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Chengdu, which does not fully correspond to the city with the largest number of stores in AVATAR.
Chengdu AVATR Center, source AVATR official website.
In addition, as a comparison, as of the latest data, NIO has 440 service outlets across the country, Xpeng has officially disclosed that it has opened 469 sales and service outlets, and Ideal announced on official Weibo that it will have 463 national retail centers by the end of this year.
Although AVATR has successively settled in Huawei stores in December last year, according to most of the most common reports, limited by the sharing method, Huawei's sales staff will take the initiative to introduce Wenjie instead of AVATAR. In 2022, the total sales of the three models of the Wenjie series exceeded 750,000 units.
More importantly, judging from the development in recent years, the smart car model has brought greater benefits to Huawei, so Huawei naturally pays more attention to the partners of the smart car model.
The AITO brand, which was jointly built by Celis and Huawei, delivered annual sales of more than 80,000 units last year, setting a new record for first-year deliveries by a new EV manufacturer. With the "successful case" of Cialis, several large enterprises such as BAIC, Chery, and JAC have announced that they have reached cooperation with Huawei on the smart car model this year, among which the "Zhijie" brand cooperated by Chery and Huawei has been unveiled.
At the beginning of 2022, Wang Jun, former president of Huawei's intelligent driving solution product line, said frankly, "The HI model needs to invest hundreds of millions or even billions of yuan every year, and it is still in a state of loss, and it is difficult to make a profit in the short term." This also suggests that Huawei will pay more attention to the cooperation of the smart car model with higher profit potential.
On the other hand, CATL, which AVATR is holding hands with, is also one of the largest companies in the field of new energy trams, and also maintains in-depth cooperation with other auto brands, such as the recent announcement of CATL's cooperation with Nezha Automobile. In other words, CATL does not "favor" AVATAR.
Based on the above analysis, it can be seen that the current situation of AVATR is not optimistic, but it may still be the hope of Changan Automobile to break through in the new energy vehicle battlefield.
"AVATAR" is taken from the English **atar, which means "incarnation". On the official website of AVATAR, the positioning of the brand is "the embodiment of wisdom that understands you". For Changan Automobile, AVATR should be an "incarnation" of its high-end dream.
In fact, as early as May 2018, Changan Automobile wholly established Changan New Energy to strengthen its new energy business. In 2017, Changan Automobile also announced the "Shangri-La Plan", which plans to completely stop selling traditional combustion engine vehicles by 2025.
In order to realize this vision, Changan Automobile first integrated the fuel vehicle brand under the Changan brand to transform to new energy, and at the same time, in addition to AVATAR, it also launched the main mid-range and low-end dark blue brand and Qiyuan brand, in order to form a joint force to impact the new energy vehicle industry.
However, compared with other traditional car companies that have transformed to new energy, Changan Automobile has been "half a beat slower". BYD sold a total of 1.26 million vehicles in the first half of this year, ranking first in the industry. GAC Aion sold a total of 210,000 units in the first half of the year, ranking third. Geely's Zeekrypton sold more than 40,000 units in the first half of the year. In contrast, Changan's Deep Blue and AVATR combined, the cumulative sales in the first half of the year only reached about 50,000 units.
Because of this, as Changan Automobile's first brand to impact new energy, no matter how AVATR performed in the past, AVATR must take on the responsibility of "eldest son" in the future. As a result, AVATR launched AVATR 12 to try to break through the predicament after encountering the decline of AVATR 11.
According to the official data, the new car AVATR 12 has been on the market for more than a month, and now has more than 10,000 large orders and an average price of 350,000 yuan, far exceeding the sales of Chinese auto brands in the first three quarters of this year by 14The average price of 60,000 yuan also exceeds that of imported brands by 25The average sales price is 50,000 yuan.
AVATR 12 was launched, the source of the picture is Changan Automobile official***
In terms of delivery capacity, AVATAR's official mini program shows that the current delivery cycle of AVATR 12 is about 3 to 5 weeks after locking the order.
Less than a month away from 2024, car companies including BYD, Ideal, and Weilai have publicly stated that the competition for new energy vehicle companies will enter a more white-hot knockout stage after 2024. Li Xiang, CEO of Li Auto, even said that the first battle in the new energy vehicle industry will last from 2023 to 2025.
The battle continues, but for AVATAR, there may be more challenges.
From the perspective of product strength, compared with AVATR 11, AVATR 12 has a more avant-garde shape, larger body space, and more distinctive electronic rearview mirrors. In terms of intelligent cockpit, AVATR 12 is equipped with a HarmonyOS 4-based HarmonyOS cockpit. At the same time, AVATR 12 is also equipped with Huawei's high-end intelligent driving system ADS 20。
Compared with the same medium and large pure electric cars of more than 300,000 yuan, the Zhijie S7 is equipped with Huawei's new generation DriveOne 800V high-voltage silicon carbide power platform, with a minimum speed of 22,000 rpm, a maximum speed of 25,000, and a dual-motor zero hundred acceleration of 33 seconds, while AVATR 12 uses Huawei's previous generation 750V platform, with a maximum speed of 20,000 rpm and the fastest 000 acceleration of dual motors39 seconds.
In terms of battery, AVATR 12 uses CATL's specially customized H-type ternary lithium battery, with a range of 650 kilometers in the standard version and a maximum range of 700 kilometers. On December 17, Li Bin, CEO of NIO, drove an ET7 equipped with a 150kWh battery pack and completed the 1,000-kilometer range challenge.
In addition to the slight lack of product power, as a new brand, it does not have the high popularity of the giants behind it, and the brand heritage and high-end positioning are not deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
In addition, as the entire industry enters the battle situation in 2024, it has become a clear trend to combine vertical and horizontal and group operations. For CATL and Huawei, which have a wide range of partners, it is also very possible for the leaders of various industrial chains related to automobiles to deepen cooperation in the future, so the giants that AVATR relies on may gradually weaken around the "halo" in the future.
Perhaps, AVATR also expected this.
According to a recent report by the Financial Associated Press, AVATR is considering listing in Hong Kong in 2025, but AVATR has not responded to this as of press time. In addition, according to Autohome and other reports, AVATR is planning to launch AVATR 15 and AVATR 16 next year, or will be positioned as a model of 200,000 yuan in order to promote the volume of products.
In the context of the decisive battle of new energy vehicles in 2024, whether it is to promote the market or to use lower-priced products to promote sales, it is a means for AVATR to seek a breakthrough. Next year's battlefield will be very cruel, and compared with relying on the support of Changan Automobile, Huawei and CATL, AVATR should make itself self-reliant and self-reliant, so as to shoulder the heavy responsibility of "eldest son" on its shoulders.
With the inauguration of Zhu Huarong, AVATR may have changed compared to before, but it also needs to catch up with the gap of falling behind faster. Otherwise, in the more fierce final battlefield, there will be only a one-word difference between the "eldest son" and the "abandoned son".
The header picture of this article is ** on AVATAR's official WeChat. ）