On February 22, Gaohe Automobile, which has been mired in the whirlpool of salary cuts, shutdowns and production, and arrears of commercial payments, said that the self-help window period would be at most three months. Another high-end electric vehicle brand, Lotus, held a bell ringing ceremony on the NASDAQ exchange in New York on February 23 EST time and was officially listed for trading, becoming the first vehicle company to be listed in the United States this year and the largest IPO of Chinese concept stocks in the past two years.
It is also aimed at high-end new energy products, but the situation of the two is very different. It is generally believed in the industry that most of the high-end brands and luxury models in the automotive industry rely on the cash flow of the group's products. For the new forces, if the third product is not profitable, it is basically difficult to amortize the company's operating costs. At this time, there is either someone who "transfuses" or can "make blood" by themselves, and there is no third way.
The competition of domestic new energy vehicle companies will enter the finals in 2025, and the finals are an endless road. Li Bin, chairman and CEO of NIO, said in an interview with ** reporter that competition is also accompanied by opportunities, and high-end smart electric vehicles will enter a stage of explosive growth from 2024 to 2025.
The scale of sales is difficult to become a climate
As a representative of the failure of high-end electric vehicle business, from the beginning of its establishment, Gaohe Automobile has always adhered to the high-end route, its first model HiPhi X starting price of 680,000 yuan, the highest price of 800,000 yuan.
Although Gaohe Automobile has successively launched relatively low-grade products since then, its overall positioning is still high-end: at the end of 2022, Gaohe Automobile launched its second model, Hiphi Z, with a price of 510,000 yuan to 630,000 yuan; The HiPhi Y, which will be launched in July 2023, will also be priced at 3390,000 yuan to 4590,000 yuan.
However, the benefits under the high cost investment were scarce, which eventually led to the obvious shortage of funds of Gaohe Automobile, and the company's operation began to enter a vicious circle.
In comparison, at present, Lotus has four models on sale: the pure electric supercar Evija, the gasoline supercar Emira, the pure electric SUV Eletre and the pure electric sedan Emeya. According to the data, Lotus's global annual sales in 2021 will be 1,566 units, and in 2022**, it will exceed 60%, with only 576 units, and the entire brand was once hovering on the edge of life and death.
In the first four weeks of 2024, Lotus' first production model, the Eletre, sold 46 units, 7 units, 9 units, and 4 units, respectively, and sold only 66 units in the four weeks. Combined with the actual situation, the evija, which is priced at 21.88 million yuan, has not yet been delivered. In theory, its sales support can only be given to Eletre and the newly launched emeya (Chinese brand name Fanhua).
Although some industry insiders speculate that Lotus is more concerned about the ecological niche of high-performance sports than cash flow and scale, Lotus is more concerned about the ecological niche of high-performance sports first, and then use this brand to seek high-end market in the global market in the future. However, it is undeniable that with the advent of the new energy era, super performance that would have cost a huge amount of money to achieve has been able to be obtained at a low cost.
The reporter counted the luxury electric vehicle market, and no car company has yet handed over a satisfactory answer. Even Porsche and Mercedes-Benz are powerless in the era of electric vehicles. For example, in 2023, only 40,629 units of the Taycan will be sold worldwide, in 2022, only 1,583 units of the EQS will be sold in China, and only 226 units of the HiPhi X, which has been officially announced to be suspended, will be sold in 2023.
The popularization of intelligent and electrified vehicles has allowed more cost-effective domestic electric vehicles to have higher performance, and the era of 'horsepower depreciation' has made Lotus's so-called performance gene lose its scarcity. In the view of Zhang Xiuyang, director of the China Passenger Car Industry Alliance, new energy vehicles have transitioned from "the same price of oil and electricity" to "electricity is lower than oil", and behind the sluggish sales of high-end electric vehicles, the domestic new energy vehicle market is becoming more and more "involuted" reality.
Continued loss in performance
It is difficult to achieve "hematopoiesis" through its own sales, and Gaohe Automobile can only join the financing "blood transfusion" queue. In order to ensure sufficient funds, Gaohe Automobile plans to list on the Hong Kong stock market in 2022, but the listing of Gaohe Automobile was suspended due to the fact that its sales volume and revenue did not meet the requirements for listing on the Hong Kong stock market. During this period, Gaohe Automobile also obtained funds through financial leasing**.
Most recently, in June 2023, Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Investment signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Human Horizons for approximately US$5.6 billion to establish a joint venture to develop, manufacture and sell automobiles. However, a person familiar with the matter told the reporter that at that time, the Middle East investor required Gaohe Automobile to introduce the first chain and production line in Saudi Arabia, and have the corresponding production capacity. If the above requirements can be met, the investor will hand over US$5.6 billion to Gaohe within 10 years of reaching the cooperation. Facts have proved that Gaohe Automobile did not reach an agreement with the Middle East investor, and this investment has not been implemented so far.
From the perspective of management, Lotus is much luckier. Due to the importance of its brand value and track genes, Geely generously donated from the beginning and listed an upfront capital plan of up to 26.3 billion yuan for Lotus. Still, Lotus was short of money. In November 2023, 8After committing $700 million in financing, Lotus still chose to go public as a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company).
It should be noted that behind Lotus's eagerness to complete the listing, it may be related to the performance of continuous losses. Public data shows that from 2021 to 2022, Lotus's pre-tax losses were 86.6 million pounds and 1£4.5 billion. Such a loss is not a small pressure on the controlling shareholder Geely.
Chai Xiaodong, director of the Travel Industry Economic Research Center, told the reporter: "Behind all the investment comes from high expectations and high returns, if Lotus is still unable to achieve brand revival after going public and cannot bring the expected benefits to Geely, I am afraid it will change hands again." ”
In Chai Xiaodong's view, the future competition of high-end electric vehicles will focus on the large computing power platform and intelligent driving experience.
From 2Counting from the Mobileye Eye Q4 mainstream computing platform with 5TOPS computing power, it took about 5 years for domestic high-end electric vehicles to go through several stages of NVIDIA's X**ier platform (30 TOPS computing power) and dual Orin-X (508 TOPS computing power). The premise of moving towards global integration is computing power integration, and we can see that NIO's CCC (** computing power cluster) and Xiaopeng's Fuyao Intelligent Computing Center are doing similar actions, which means that the large computing power platform for smart electric vehicles is the trend. Chai Xiaodong believes that for high-end electric vehicles, whether they have a sufficiently powerful integrated computing platform will determine whether they can occupy the highland of intelligent technology and better create a differentiated product experience. （*