Gong Mengze Recently, BMW and BYD insurance qualifications have been approved, which has triggered heated discussions in the industry about the cross-border "risk-related" of car companies. Although the relevant car companies advertise that "insurance qualifications have been approved", in fact, there is a big difference between the insurance license and the insurance brokerage license, for example, BYD has obtained the license of the insurance company to operate insurance business, that is, the insurance license, which is far more valuable than the insurance brokerage license. From the perspective of car companies that have been involved in the auto insurance business, they are mainly divided into two categories: direct establishment of insurance companies and "curve entry" of brokerage business. The former is extremely difficult, and only a handful of car companies have been granted insurance licenses. In addition to BYD, there are currently only Zhongcheng Insurance under GAC Group, Xin'an Insurance under China FAW, and Hezhong Insurance under Geely Holdings. It is more common to "enter the insurance market in the curve" through ** and brokerage methods. Since 2018, more than 10 car companies such as Xpeng Motors, Tesla, Li Auto, and NIO have taken this opportunity to enter the auto insurance industry. Car companies are optimistic about the insurance business and have entered the game, of course, hoping to benefit from it. But as we all know, the insurance industry is not only a profitable industry, but also has social security attributes. So, is it a good business for car companies to sell car insurance?In the author's view, auto insurance is a fully competitive market, and in the short term, car companies operating auto insurance cannot be compared with leading insurance companies in terms of business scale, service network, and customer recognition. However, with the relative convenience of shareholder relationships and information access, car companies have corresponding advantages in insurance scenarios such as user data, software and hardware iteration, extended warranty, and battery protection. On this basis, operating auto insurance can help expand the value chain of car companies. Auto insurance is the largest "cake" in the aftermarket, with the national auto insurance revenue exceeding 800 billion yuan in 2022. In terms of company valuation, car companies can directly increase their size and scale in terms of insurance business. In terms of products, with the accumulation of insurance practice data such as accident liability determination and claim settlement methods, optimization iteration and risk reduction will feed back the development and improvement of automotive product functions. Second, car companies selling car insurance can help build a data-driven service system. The era of intelligent electric vehicles has given car companies more room to exert themselves, and because new energy vehicles are more intelligent than traditional vehicles of the same level, and the data dimensions that can be collected are wider, they have a greater say in the insurance field. Compared with traditional insurance brokerage companies, car companies have the advantage of resources and information when setting up insurance companies, and in the future, through intelligence and Internet, there will be more development possibilities in terms of liability and claims, user service system establishment and business model. Finally, auto companies selling car insurance can help improve their profitability and user experience. The pain points of new energy vehicle insurance mainly include the relatively high insurance rate, the high average loss ratio of cases, the relatively high insurance premium**, and the large secondary disasters of the insurance. With the deployment of auto insurance, automobile companies can appropriately reduce user insurance premiums, provide customers with more value-added services, and build a closed-loop management of the whole life cycle of automobiles by virtue of data advantages. It should be pointed out that although auto companies seem to have many benefits in carrying out auto insurance business, auto insurance has the characteristics of high threshold, high cost and localization, and short-term cross-border "risk-related" not only has high construction costs and long time cycles, but also has high underwriting and compensation pressure, and complex docking with the insurance company's system.
* |Station cool Hailuo production |Zhou Wenrui