In November 2023, Xingtu Auto sold 15,296 units, a year-on-year increase of 1733%；January - November sales totaled 111,352 units, reflecting a 129% y/y increase5%。Back to the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2023, Xingtu Auto's brand sales target was to achieve monthly sales of more than 10,000 in the second quarter.
Unfortunately, Xingtu sold 9,842 vehicles in June, one step away from the goal of breaking 10,000 units. At the same time, the cumulative results from January to June were 42,240 units, which makes people wonder if this is the limit of Xingtu AutoHowever, with the launch of the all-new Lingyun, Xingtu achieved sales of 11,462 units in July, breaking all doubts.
Since taking up the post of General Manager of Xingtu Marketing Center on June 14, 2022, Huang Zhaogen has spent a whole year bringing the Xingtu brand on the right track and achieving the goal of increasing sales. So, now that the new car of Xingtu New Energy brand Star Era is about to be launched, can it create a miracle of Chery again?
According to Chery's official statement, the Star Era is a new energy product series under Chery's high-end brand Xingtu. At present, Chery's new energy sequence also covers Chery Fengyun and Jietu Shanhai, but these two are mainly hybrid, while Star Era and Chery New Energy focus on pure electric.
The positioning of 20-500,000 yuan is undoubtedly high-end enough in the mainstream passenger car market, so can the latecomer Xingtu Xing Era rise again in the face of the chaotic market occupied today?
First of all, intuitively starting from the product, there are a total of 5 products in the medium and long-term planning of Xingtu Star Era, in addition to the Star Era ES (medium and large sedan) and Star Era ET (medium and large SUV) that have been unveiled for pre-sale, there will also be three products: large 7-seat MPV, large-size SUV, and hunting SUV.
Among them, the pre-sale of the upcoming Star Era ES is 248-35.80,000 yuan, in terms of selling price, the starting point of the product is not low. After all, the products of the same level on the market, such as BYD Han EV, Feifan F7, Haobo GT and other products, will be more cost-effective than Star Era ES.
However, compared with models such as AVATR 12, ZEEKR 001, and VOYAH Chasing Light, its price is much cheaper. Therefore, in terms of pricing, Star Era ES is in the relatively insensitive range of consumers, and products are particularly important to attract consumers' attention.
According to the official description, the Star Era ES will come standard with dynamic suspension damping control and air suspension, while using an all-aluminum chassis and a one-piece die-cast body. In terms of underlying technology, the car is worthy of the positioning of a high-end model. In addition, Jin Xin, executive deputy general manager of Xingtu Marketing Center, also said at the pre-sale conference of the car, "If there are new forces, there will be Star Era".
What do you mean by the new forces?51 Jun can be roughly summarized as intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit, high safety, high output performance, high energy efficiency and so on. According to the official product description, the Star Era ES is equipped with LiDAR, Zero Hundred Acceleration 37S, the maximum endurance of 900km+ endurance, can be regarded as an all-round product.
In terms of product strength, today's new energy products with similar price products basically have advantages. What aspects of the product should be highlighted by Epoch ES to attract consumers?
First of all, look at the positioning of the Xingtu brand on the user group, "urban new middle class", according to official statistics, the proportion of teachers, doctors, civil servants and other occupations among users has reached 36%. In other words, there are a large number of people from the middle strata of society in the Xingtu user group, and the demand of this group of people for cars can be summarized simply as the internal experience is greater than the external presentation.
They are more concerned about the chassis texture brought by the air suspension than the electric rear wing.
They care more about the experience of the 23 speakers in the car than about the light show.
Compared to 3With an acceleration of 7 seconds, they care more about the function of the large sofa.
In this way, the actual user base of the Star Era is still similar to the user base of more traditional cars such as BYD Han. Therefore, functions such as air suspension + CDC as standard in the whole system will be more worthy of publicity. Grasping the product highlight of "luxury home" is conducive to the rapid establishment of the product image of the car.
Grasping this point, we can also distinguish the difference between the Star Era ES and the products on the market and models with similar prices, such as the Zhijie S7 (24Sold from 980,000 yuan), VOYAH Chasing Light (25280,000 yuan). Zhijie S7 is empowered by Huawei, and intelligent technology will become the highlight of the product, while VOYAH light chasing positioning is more administrative.
According to Xingtu's plan, by the end of this year, the dealer network will be expanded to 500, of which 200 will be exclusive to Xingtu, 200 will be exclusive to Xingyuan, and 100 will be shared with the network. It is understood that in Guangzhou as the first first-tier city, many Star Era exclusive networks have been built, but most of the stores look a little deserted.
The reason is very simple, suffering from the lack of the current number of products in the Star Era, it is still unable to form a product matrix. For a brand with a high-end positioning and the same high-end requirements of offline stores, if consumers do not feel the influence of high-end brands when they enter the store, it will have an impact on the purchase decision.
Therefore, for the Star Era, the next step to improve is the frequency of product updates, after all, it has been 8 months since the official announcement of the Shanghai Auto Show, and many new brands have completed the accumulation from 0 to 1 during this period. If Star Era can't keep pace with the times in product updates, it will naturally lag behind in the competition.
As a leading brand among its own brands, Chery Automobile has come a long way on the road of exploring new energy, but its previous achievements are not enough to be proud of. However, in the face of today's fiercely competitive market changes, Chery still has a lot of work to complete if it wants to make achievements in the field of high-end new energy.