After more than five years of persistence and investment, NIO has finally formed its own "circle of friends" from "fighting alone".Behind all this is NIO's thinking and change of its own situation in combination with the industry environment.The "Battery Swap Alliance" centered on NIO was officially established and accelerated its expansion. Following the signing of a battery swap business cooperation agreement between Changan Automobile and NIO in Chongqing on November 21, Geely Holding and NIO signed a strategic cooperation agreement on battery swap in Hangzhou on November 29. As central enterprises and private car giants have joined forces with NIO to jointly lay out battery swaps, the "battery swap alliance" has taken shape.
At present, the new energy vehicle market is evolving from a single product competition to an ascending game, and the days of winning market development opportunities by the challenge of a single product and then differentiation are gone. In 2024, the market will usher in a shuffle elimination, and the competition caused by category innovation will become less and lessIntelligence, space efficiency and better energy replenishment efficiency.
A new form of competition is also emerging, starting with Huawei's establishment of a technology-based platform. The automotive BU division established a joint venture with Changan. Once this cooperation experiment is successful, Huawei's technology-enabled traditional car companies will become a replicable and transferable resource portfolio, forming an independent force in the ever-squeezing pattern.
At present, NIO has 2,103 battery swap stations in China, and according to the calculation of about 3 million yuan for a battery swap station revealed by Qin Lihong before, NIO has invested as much as 6.3 billion yuan in the construction of the station alone, not including batteries and daily operating expenses. On the other hand, NIO's cash pool was 137 in the first half of this year200 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 71800 million yuan, short-term borrowings amounted to 120600 million yuan.
It is estimated that the breakeven of each battery swap station is 50-60 orders per day, and the average number of battery swaps per battery swap station is only 35-36 times per day. This means that if NIO is unable to improve the efficiency of battery swap stations, the operating pressure on NIO will increase exponentially as the number of battery swap stations increases.
In the face of continuous profit pressure, some voices in the industry have pointed out that the battery swap model chosen by NIO is a key factor dragging down profits, and the opening of the battery swap ecosystem may be the most priority solution to change this problem.
In addition, NIO may also have greater ambitions, through the establishment of the infrastructure of the energy network and the establishment of the battery swap industry standard, the battery swap route industry will run through, and only by popularizing and implementing the battery swap technology on a large scale in the industry can it achieve profitability, and at the same time achieve a unified battery size, battery capacity and battery swap efficiency standards, and then make this route a long-term vision of the industry consensus.
If you imagine the battery swap as the time when Amazon wanted to do cloud services in 2003, you will find that there are several points that are very similar: First, the network effect is strong. The battery swap network is equivalent to the cloud service infrastructure of the energy Internet. Second, the investment scale is large and the investment cycle is long. At that time, Amazon, Google and other factories and equipment invested more than 100 billion US dollars. Third, from serving oneself to serving external customers, once it is done, the threshold will be very high.In addition, the battery swap station laid out by NIO also has such characteristics. Swap station as 2The 1 MWh natural energy storage facility can help the power grid absorb more clean energy and reduce energy waste.
Not only that, but the energy replenishment experience has obviously become an important part of the competition of car companies. On November 30, following the expansion of the battery swap team, Mercedes-Benz (China) Investment*** and BMW Brilliance Automotive also announced the signing of a cooperation agreement, under which the two parties will establish a joint venture in China with a 50:50 share ratio to operate a supercharging network in the Chinese market.
With the entry of the national team, private and traditional multinational car giants, this competition is becoming a game of ascending: it is becoming more and more difficult to stand out alone, and the permutation and combination of resources has become a new process of competition.
NIO Power has always been the best asset for NIO in my heart, and I have always felt that how to maximize the benefits of this asset is only a matter of time for NIO to operate. Although NIO's battery swap business has been opened up after going around and around, I still feel that it is not enough to support this new force to build cars smoothly through the winter, and NIO still needs to solve a series of problems in a big way before it can break and stand, because soon, China's auto market will only be left with life and death.