Li Bin: The thing I regret the most is that I asked the wrong question two years ago

Produced by丨Tiger Sniff Automobile Group.

The author is thoughtful.

Header picture丨Visual China.

"One of the things I regret the most in the past two years is that I said two years ago, 'I don't understand why anyone still wants to buy a petrol car'. ”

At this year's NIO annual ** communication meeting, Li Bin, the company's founder, chairman and CEO, rarely launched a "soul reflection" on his "out of the circle" remarks. He "profoundly" reviewed that this sentence made him a "arrogant and ignorant and uncannibalistic" person"I'm going to admit I said the wrong thing. So many users who buy fuel vehicles must have their own reasons. Two years ago, I thought it must have been too early to say that. ”

Compared with Li Bin, who often said "golden sentences" to ** in the past, this year's Weilai annual ** face-to-face he focused on an "honest". On the one hand, he took the initiative to replace Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of NIO, to become the main coffee in answering ** questions this yearOn the other hand, Li Bin answered dozens of questions about the battery swap system, market, technology and strategy in one breath, which can be called "hard work".

Obviously, 2023 is an extraordinary year for NIO: the second-generation model has been fully released, the company has carried out the first "price reduction" at the official level, and the company's biggest barrier, the battery swap system, has officially ushered in a partner.

On the other side of the coin, the doubling of the number of models has not led to a proportionate increase in sales, and the average selling price of NIO models is already lower than that of the "latecomer" Li Auto. These key issues have become the most direct questions about NIO from the outside world.

In other words, Li Bin needs to respond more openly to a wider range of questions from the outside world and share his thoughts as a decision-maker as much as possible.

Please stop blowing about NIO's long-termism."

For a long time, in addition to "high-end positioning", "battery replacement" and "good service", the most distinctive label on NIO is "long-termism". At the NIO Innovation Day held in September this year, the company unveiled a full stack of 12 self-developed technologies involving six levels of vehicles. The reason why NIO spends a huge amount of manpower on self-research and development of technology is based on the long-term consideration of building its own competitiveness.

However, all this has changed in recent times. In an internal speech on November 20 this year, Li Bin proposed: "Long-termism is not an excuse for not doing a good job in short-term implementation, and every step of the marathon must be run well." ”

And this time, his expression is more down-to-earth:"You keep labeling us as long-termism, and many of our colleagues really believe it. Long-termism tends to give rise to a culture in the company that doesn't look at short-term execution, which is definitely not good. ”

In a literal sense, Li Bin's official complaint is very understandable, after all, everyone has worked:Compared with detailed planning around the business development in the first half of next year, it is definitely easier to plan for the next five years.

But the deeper reason must be that NIO's current development environment has changed dramatically compared with a few years ago. In Li Bin's mouth, NIO's "good days", that is, in 2021, although the company did not launch a single car throughout the year, its annual gross profit margin exceeded 20%. At that time, Tesla's Model 3 and Y were both hovering in the range of 20 to 300,000 yuan, while the ideal car was only priced at 32An ideal one car of 80,000 yuan is on sale. Not to mention, the newly released ZEEKR 001 is still struggling to ramp up production capacity, and Huawei's question world is simply gone.

At that time, NIO, which had only three models on sale and an average price of more than 350,000 yuan, was truly "far ahead".

Today, Ideal relies on three large-size range extenders to achieve sales of more than 40,000 in a single month. What's worse is that the average price of the company's products has surpassed that of NIO. At the same time, Wenjie, Zeekr, Zhiji and even Xiaopeng have all entered the high-end new energy vehicle market of more than 300,000 yuan, which was originally "controlled" by Weilai. Not to mention, Xiaomi cars are still eyeing up.

What's more, the economic environment in China and the world has ushered in great uncertainty this year, and the reduction in future income expectations has directly affected the willingness of consumers, especially the middle class, to buy cars. That's why NIO needs to adjust its sales strategy in a more appropriate manner.

This is also the part that tests NIO's short-term execution ability the most. Li Bin said that one of the biggest lessons in their decision-making was that they did not realize in time in February that they needed to add more sales consultants in order to prepare for the ET5T and ES6, the key models to be launched in February.

It will take some time for our user consultants (i.e., the sales staff on the front line of the 4S store) to be trained and matured. If it takes 6 months to mature, there are only more than 3,000 "skilled hands" in the current company, and many colleagues are still novices. Li Bin said, "By the second quarter of next year, the vast majority of user consultants will be able to become mature hands, so we are still very confident in the sales increase at that time."

Frankly, this is a lag compared to the launch cycle of new vehicles on the second-generation platform. Li Bin himself admits that due to the lack of mature user consultants, some of their orders were not followed up in time after the launch of the new ES6 in June this year, resulting in the loss of users. "Otherwise, it shouldn't be a problem for us to sell an extra 10,000 cars for the whole year. ”

The all-new ES6In addition, another part that everyone is most concerned about is NIO's cost reduction and efficiency increase. In an internal letter in November this year, Li Bin proposed that he would adjust the projects that have not been profitable for three years or have not contributed to the improvement of gross profit. In particular, the business segment of NIO's self-developed batteries has been the most affected.

In this communication, he further pointed out that NIO did not completely stop its efforts to operate its own batteries, but divided the business into two links: R&D and production. "R&D is obviously helpful in improving gross margins, after all, after all, R&D can be done by partners to produce, which in turn improves performance and reduces costs. "However, the production and manufacturing of batteries requires a long investment period, which will not only occupy valuable cash resources, but also overcome challenges such as capacity ramp-up and yield improvement, and the cycle is relatively long." As a result, NIO does not currently have the resources to support this business. ”

This is why, NIO announced this year that it will integrate resources with Honeycomb Energy, a power battery company under the Great Wall Motor Group, to jointly develop large-size cylindrical power batteries. Obviously, for this new technology route, which even Tesla can't quickly improve the yield rate, NIO has chosen a more pragmatic approach.

How to strike a balance between sales network, cost reduction and efficiency increase, and new technology research and development are all testing how far and how long NIO's "long-termism" can go. However, with the continuous changes in the economic and market environment, NIO will inevitably make dynamic adjustments. In this process, it is obvious that sharp turns, U-turns, and even the "slap in the face" that the people like to see the most are indispensable.

But fortunately, Li Bin's attitude towards this is quite pragmatic.

NIO's biggest variable next year will never be battery swapping.

For NIO, the biggest positive in the near future is that the company has reached cooperation with Changan and Geely in the battery swap business. The two leading domestic OEMs will develop battery-swapping models in the future and share battery-swapping infrastructure with NIO. And on this topic, it is also a key point for them to ask.

However, in the author's opinion, given that the partners' battery swap models are still early to be launched, and the specific business model needs to be finalized, cooperation with other companies in the battery swap business is definitely not the biggest variable affecting NIO in 2024.

In contrast, given that NIO's main brand will not have any new models on the market in 2024, all the variables will come from the upcoming second brand for the family market, priced at 20.3 million yuan, codenamed "Alps". For this brand, the style of play will be "very different" from the main brand of NIO.

First of all, the brand will not focus on mainstream tracks such as mid-to-large SUVs and sedans like the main brand, but will also launch individual cars such as EC6, EC7 and ET5T to take into account the market segment, but "there are really only three cars".

Second, Alps' product design and marketing strategy will focus more on efficiency than brand tonality, and will focus more on providing models for the family car market. The author boldly speculates that NIO is likely to adopt a "matryoshka" product strategy similar to the ideal L in the Alps, using "one car" to cover as much market demand as possible to reduce hardware costs.

Last but not least, Alps will focus on value for money. To this end, the brand and NIO have shared a large number of R&D resources and systems in the fields of intelligent cockpits and intelligent driving. But Li also pointed out that the brand will use unique designs and differentiated functional features in order to clearly distinguish the two brands.

To put it bluntly, Alps was born on the shoulders of a giant named NIO, and it wants to cover a wider market with a lower selling price, and then "monetize" the R&D advantages accumulated by NIO through long-termism. And its biggest connection with NIO, in addition to R&D and software, may be the ability to share the battery swap system.

So the question is, what is the future of the Alps?

In this regard, the author cannot assume the function of a fortune teller. However, if we analyze the competitive landscape of the pure electric vehicle market, then we can draw conclusions:It is indeed not optimistic.

After all, in the pure electric vehicle market of 20 300,000 yuan, it is already crowded with competitors: Xpeng's mid-size sedan P7 and mid-to-large SUV G9, Zeekrypton 001 after several price cuts, single-motor AVATAR, Tesla's new generation Model 3 and the upcoming new generation Model Y ......Not to mention, industry giants BYD's Seal, Han EV and Tang EV are also eyeing up. For the Alps, the rival lineup really shouldn't be too strong.

Not to mention, there are also 2 benchmarks for cost-effective hybrid cars in this ** range: Ideal L7 and Wenjie M7. What's worse is that the sales network layout and brand user mentality of these two competitors are really not the same as the nascent Alps.

Therefore, for NIO and Li Bin, it is not so much the product route and technical form as the sales strategy that determines the survival of Alps. What kind of timing to choose and what kind of cards to play has become the next issue for Li Bin and his team to consider.

However, Li Bin's answer to this is still his usual style of "lifting weights as light". He revealed that the new brand of VB (verification build) has long been off the assembly line, "but we are not in a hurry, we decided to wait for a while, and then we will go in when everyone is exhausted." Otherwise, the price will be reduced now, and there will be no splash. ”

Look at it, it seems that the author is a little anxious.

Written at the end: Although this year's NIO ** communication meeting mainly revolves around the company's business itself, the author's deepest impression of Li Bin comes from the entrepreneur's thinking about the times who has founded three listed companies:

"Most of our entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in China are very fortunate to live in an era of unilateral upward movement. For the past few decades, we have been living in an era of high economic growth, so much so that many of us don't feel much about the economic cycle. ”

But from a historical and social perspective, this is not the norm, and we should be more aware of cycles and risks. However, many of us entrepreneurs may need to make up for this lesson. ”

Obviously, in 2024, the ones who need to make up classes the most may not really be Li Bin and Weilai.

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