Recently, I saw a very interesting point: the end game of the electric vehicle market is very likely to be the competition between Huawei and Xiaomi. The reason is that the current new car-making forces such as NIO, Ideal, and Xpeng are completely marginal in one of the biggest wars before - the battle for smartphones, and they will not be able to keep up with the pace of the business war between Huawei and Xiaomi if they do not really participate in the white-hot war.
As for BYD and other traditional car companies, they have completely avoided the changes of the Internet and mobile Internet, and are still basically in a primitive state of ignorance and uncivilized.
The factual basis of this argument
There is some factual basis for this view. In 2000, Li Bin founded BitAuto.com, which is the earliest automobile in China. In the same year, Li Xiang founded Bubble.com, which belongs to the IT vertical portal**, and was later acquiredIn 2004, he founded Autohome, which also focuses on the automotive field. Both of them seized the development dividend of the first wave of the Internet industry and achieved financial freedom.
However, when the mobile Internet wave was launched around 2010, the core goal of the two was to promote the listing of Yiche and Autohome, and they did not do much in the mobile Internet era.
As for He Xiaopeng, he participated in both the Internet and mobile Internet era. In 2004, UC Youshi was founded, and has made outstanding achievements in both desktop browsers and mobile browsers, and the most popular Quark browser is launched on the basis of UC browser. In 2014, UC was acquired by Alibaba.
However, in the competition of mobile Internet, browsers, maps, ** and other branches are only local battlefields for Internet giants to compete, just to acquire and improve the layout, and the competition between browser companies is far from life and death.
As for BYD and other traditional car companies, a few years ago they were still fighting a bitter hardware war, the system was bloated, the management was chaotic, they didn't understand marketing, they only knew how to smash brand advertising, and the closest relationship with the Internet was to send money to Li Bin and Li Xiang, and it was not unreasonable to be discriminated against.
Can the Internet "gene theory" be applied to the car?
However, if you think about this point of view, it is completely a variant of the "genetic theory" in the mobile Internet era.
After so many years of the development of the mobile Internet, the "gene theory" is very popular. can only do search, Tencent has social genes, "Ali's core is e-commerce, everything else is to drain e-commerce", Meituan relies on the ground to push, such arguments are not uncommon.
The "theory of genes" is not without reason. Tencent's moat is search and social networking, no one can break through, and it is more secure and easier to succeed in doing business from these two points, but it may not have found a suitable entry point between search and other businesses. Ali does not have a stable moat like Tencent, and is faced with the problem of protecting the big and the small, and in the end it can only sacrifice other businesses to drain and transfuse the e-commerce business. Meituan has emerged from the battle of thousands of groups and has a strong local push team, so it can quickly promote diversified businesses such as food delivery and grocery shopping.
So, is it too arbitrary to put the "genetic theory" of the Internet era in the automobile market and predict that the end game will be the battle of Huami?
Internet genetically modified automotive industry
The combination of the automotive industry and the Internet is not a new idea, so I won't repeat it here. Let's choose a new angle here: network sense, to talk about the Internet genes of car companies.
The current best-selling car company may not be ideal, but the founder of the most talked about car company is definitely Li Xiang. In recent months, the ideal monthly sales with an average price of more than 300,000 yuan have exceeded 40,000 units, a performance that is the envy of new and old car companies. The success of Li Auto is the success of its product strategy: to meet the needs of the daddy group with range extender and large space.
But the ideal success is also inseparable from Li Xiang's "big mouth". He scolded the user, and before the mercury incident, he replied before there was a conclusion, "The people who spread rumors about us use mercury and **, I wish you mercury in your blood and mercury in your brain!."", causing a large number of user dissatisfaction;has also scolded friends, and car companies such as Zeekr, Great Wall, and Weilai have all encountered Li Xiang's poisonous mouth;He also scolded some business celebrities, and scolded Lu Zhengyao, the founder of Luckin Coffee, as "shabi, a fraudster" on Weibo.
Li Xiang's big mouth made Li Auto full of topicality and attracted greater attention on the Internet. The so-called "true temperament" has also brought a group of fans to Li Auto, which has greatly accelerated the popularity of the brand.
Other car companies also want to spread brand voice through the platform of Weibo, such as all the executives of a car company have opened Weibo, but it is still too difficult to expect a group of middle-aged people in their forties and fifties to operate Weibo to gain popularity.
So far, the executives of traditional car companies on Weibo are also cautious in their words and deeds, and there are almost no big mouths like Li Xiang. Without "man bites dog", where is the attention?
Of course, purely from the point of view of Weibo topic, the Internet gene of the enterprise is definitely unreasonable. However, Huawei and Xiaomi, which have already been on the field, also have the advantage of having strong combat effectiveness in social networking, and other car companies have to guard against it.
Pull the enemy to the battlefield you do best
In the view of the "Huami Ultimate Battle", why is the "smartphone war" regarded as the decisive factor?
The reason is very simple, in the past decade, the highly fierce competition in the smartphone market has trained Huawei and Xiaomi to train teams that have always been very efficient in execution. Internet companies and high-execution teams are simply beyond the reach of Wei Xiaoli and other traditional car companies.
How important is execution efficiency in the Internet industry?Just look at Ali at the beginning of its establishment, Meituan in the battle of takeaways, and Pinduoduo at present. Recently, Pinduoduo's market value has surpassed Alibaba's, and one of the hot searches is "more than 20 million people". This is also difficult for Wei Xiaoli and traditional car companies to achieve.
Huawei's wolf culture has always been learned Xi the business world, but generally "painting a tiger does not become an anti-dog". The combat effectiveness of the Huawei team is indeed the top in China, and there is not even one of them. As for Xiaomi, although I feel that Xiaomi's performance has been poor in recent years, in the fast-paced mobile phone market, Xiaomi can maintain its current position, and its execution should not be underestimated.
In the smartphone market, Huawei and Xiaomi are the loudest. Huawei's "Yu Dazui" is strong, and the phrase "far ahead" has even become Huawei's label. At the beginning of the month, he and He Xiaopeng exchanged words and then made peace, which earned a lot of attention. As for Xiaomi, Lei Jun himself has his own popularity, and Lu Weibing is a general who "sympathizes" with Yu Chengdong, and his strength is strong. As soon as Huawei and Xiaomi come out, can Li Xiang, the "king of Weibo", still be maintained?
Between car companies, mutual blackouts are the norm, and this is how a large number of cars make money. But in the face of the Huawei Legion and the Xiaomi Legion, there is a question mark about how destructive such a mutual hack can be.
A battlefield outside of the core battlefield
Smartphones are a combination of hardware and software, which is also a feature of smart electric vehicles. It is precisely because of this that the current car machine system is the best, in addition to Tesla, is Wei Xiaoli and Huawei.
However, the biggest difference between electric cars and smartphones is that building a car is a big project. Smartphones may invest 1 billion to make a good finished product, and electric vehicles need at least 10 billion to be mass-produced and marketed. This threshold results in fewer players in the EV market and less of a large number of miscellaneous cars;The industry is being phased out faster, and this feature has long been verified.
What is most important for the current domestic auto market?
Technology can be simply divided into hardware technology, vehicle machine system and intelligent driving, hardware technology basically has no threshold, OEM to solve the problem of Internet car manufacturing;In terms of car machine system, Internet companies have great advantages, especially Huawei and Xiaomi, which have been working on the smart phone system for more than ten years and have strong strengthIn the field of intelligent driving, Huawei currently has its own computing power chips, continuing its core competitiveness in the mobile phone era. Other car companies basically use third-party chips such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Horizon.
In terms of brand, Huawei is higher than Xiaomi, Xiaomi is higher than Wei Xiaoli, and BYD is between Wei Xiaoli and Xiaomi, but there is still an upward trend. The brand influence of other traditional car companies is relatively weak.
In terms of capital strength, Huawei and Xiaomi have solid cash flow support, which is stronger than ideal, and stronger than NIO and Xpeng, which have not yet made a profit. Similarly, the influence of Huawei and Xiaomi is also destined to have more capital support.
*, "** butcher" will not appear. Even Xiaomi will not choose the route of "selling hardware at cost and making money with software". Because Xiaomi Group has verified that mobile phone software can make money at the expense of user experience;Smart home software doesn't make money at all. As for cars, the use scenarios of the software itself are limited, and autonomous driving is far from satisfying the actual use, and it is out of reach to make money from this. Therefore, at least on the **, except for BYD, the lower limit of other car companies is basically the same.
In terms of channels, traditional car companies have traditional 4S stores, new forces have shopping mall stores, and Huawei Xiaomi itself has mobile phone stores all over the country.
On the whole, the competitiveness of Huawei and Xiaomi is still in brand and technology. With core technology, it is easy to improve the brand, which is the case with Huawei and BYD. With an excellent software system, it is easy to circle a group of loyal users.
The conjecture of the endgame of the car
At present, if the autonomous driving technology fails to achieve a breakthrough, and the autonomous driving is still at the L2 level of intelligent assisted driving (almost all electric vehicles are currently at this level), then there is indeed the possibility that the car will end up in the "Huami dispute".
It's just that Huawei may not be just Huawei. In the short term, Huawei will not build cars in person, and Huawei itself is positioned as a third-party parts supplier, which is also proved by the recent shareholding agreement with Changan. Huawei's automotive BU business operates independently, focusing on the R&D, production, sales, and service of intelligent driving systems and incremental components for ICVs.
Huawei's understanding of brand building and high-end business is far beyond that of current domestic car companies. However, at present, this capability has not been exported to the outside world, and only Huawei's core has been applied. Xiaomi's understanding of the product is also quite in place, and the recently exploded Xiaomi car looks like a Porsche Taycan, and the high-end appearance is in place.
If Huawei builds its own cars or fully dominates the Wenjie brand in the future, then Huawei has great hopes of becoming one of the participants in the endgame.
The brands in the second echelon are Xiaomi and BYD. Xiaomi's advantages have been said before, BYD is more like Huawei in the automotive industry, and the construction and promotion of brand influence is simply a copy of Huawei. However, BYD has a big disadvantage in enterprise management, which needs to be overcome. These two brands are also likely to have the last laugh.
In addition, the ZEEKR brand also has a lot of potential. After Geely acquired Volvo, it did have a deeper attainment in high-end. What ZEEKR needs to solve is to make up for the shortcomings of the vehicle machine system and intelligent driving.
As for other car companies, they do not currently reflect outstanding strength. That doesn't mean there aren't opportunities for these brands, though. You must know that the automobile is a market with multiple aesthetics, and no car company can completely monopolize this market. At least for now, all car companies still have a chance.