On January 29, at the annual meeting of Geely Holding Group, An Conghui, President of Geely Holding Group, made remarks about Geely Holding Group's intention to become a Volkswagen Group in the new energy era. The shouting of this slogan has caused a lot of heated discussions in the new energy vehicle circle for a while.
Fragmentation of "great auspiciousness".
For a long time, whether in the eyes of consumers or competitors, Geely is fragmented, Zeekr is also Geely, Lotus is still Geely, and Volvo, smart, Polestar, etc., are inextricably linked with Geely.
In January 2024, Geely released a report on the production and sales data of the holding group. In this report, the sales volume of "Dageely" in 2023 will reach 2.79 million units, of which the sales of new energy vehicles will exceed 980,000 units, and the penetration rate of new energy will reach 35%, a year-on-year increase of 51%.
At present, Geely Holding Group's most important business unit in China is Geely Automobile Group, whose brands mainly include Geely, Lotus, Zeekr, Lynk & Co, Geometry and Ruilan.
In 2023, Geely Automobile Group will have a cumulative sales of 168650,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 18%, accounting for more than 6% of Geely Holdings' 2.79 million units.
As of 2023, the Geely brand under Geely Automobile Group has formed three main product series, namely the Geely automobile series dominated by fuel vehicles, the geometric sequence of pure electric vehicles, and the Geely Galaxy new energy sequence just launched in 2023.
The road to new energy transformation
At the Geely Annual Meeting in 2024, Geely Holding Group officially announced that in 2024, Geely and Lynk & Co brands will each launch three new energy models.
As a long-established independent brand car company, Geely still has a deep view on the current trend of the transformation of the automobile market to new energy: there is no so-called "fuel vehicle feeling", and firmly follows the market trend to invest in the development of new energy models.
In the first half of 2023, Geely's total investment in new energy R&D reached 59100 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 628%。
Among the different sequences of new energy models, ZEEKR focuses on high-end pure electric vehicles, Galaxy focuses on new energy vehicles for people-friendly families, and Lynk & Co currently focuses on plug-in hybrids.
Among them, ZEEKR's high-end intelligent pure electric market will deliver a total of 1180,000 units, up 65% year-on-year.
The average order value of ZEEKR 001 exceeds 3360,000 yuan, becoming the world's first luxury car to exceed 100,000 units; The average order value of ZEEKR 009 reached 5270,000 yuan, becoming the sales champion of more than 500,000 luxury MPV categories.
Lynk & Co has also completely stopped investing in fuel vehicles, accelerating the pace of new energy transformation, and its future product planning will focus on the EM-P super hybrid solution, supplemented by BEV, and achieve sales of 820,000 units, up 6% y/y.
The launch of the new energy series Galaxy is even more highly anticipated. Benefiting from the blessing of Raytheon electric hybrid and vast pure electric technology and platform, the first model of the series, the Geely Galaxy L7 plug-in hybrid series, is 139-17.With a price of 40,000 yuan and excellent product power, it quickly opened the market, and the sales volume reached 19,731 units in two months after its launch, becoming the fastest plug-in hybrid SUV in the hybrid market to achieve "monthly sales exceeding 10,000", and quickly entered the first camp in the market.
Geely Automobile's annual sales target for 2024 is 1.9 million units, and new energy sales will increase by more than 66%. It was also at this annual meeting that An Conghui, President of Geely Holding Group, shouted out the sentence, "Geely Holding Group will become a Volkswagen Group in the new energy era."
Transformation is not easy
Although Geely has increased the penetration rate of new energy vehicles to a certain extent, from the perspective of profitability, the increase in sales of new energy vehicles has not brought much profit to Geely.
According to the financial report, in the first half of 2023, Geely's gross profit margin will be 144%, a slight decrease of 017 percentage points. According to the interim report, this is mainly affected by factors such as intensified market competition and the increase in the proportion of new energy.
The competitive price reduction at the beginning of 2023 has had a big impact on Geely. Geely Automobile CEO Gan Jiayue bluntly said that the discount rate of new energy vehicles in the market in the first half of 2023 is as high as 115%。
Subdivided brands, in the first half of 2023, the ZEEKR brand suffered a significant loss of 80.9 billion yuan, a loss of 7 over the same period last year5.9 billion yuan expanded; Lynk & Co's net profit was a loss of 6600 million yuan, while its net profit in the same period last year was 200 million yuan.
In August 2023, the "** war" in the automobile circle will be staged again. More than a dozen brands such as Tesla, SAIC Volkswagen, Chery New Energy, Ora, Nezha and Leap have officially announced price cuts, and these price reductions naturally include ZEEKR.
On August 11, 2023, ZEEKR announced the 2023 ZEEKR 001 limited-time** rights policy, which can be enjoyed from 30,000 to 370,000 time-limited** reductions, with a price reduction of about 10%. Among them, the entry-level WE version is directly down to less than 300,000 yuan, and the latest ** is 26From 90,000 yuan.
Although the bloody wind of market competition throughout 2023 has had a big impact on Geely's gross profit margin, it is fortunate that the annual sales target of 1.65 million set at the beginning of 2023 has been completed at the end of the year. For Geely, it seems that they want to open the market with sales more than profits, but they do pay a corresponding price for this.
At the end of January 2024, Geely released data showing total sales of 21 in January350,000 units, a positive year-on-year growth, and the sales of new energy vehicles accounted for more than 30%, reaching 6580,000 units, an increase of nearly six times year-on-year and a month-on-month increase of 143%。Among them, the number of pure electric models increased by three times year-on-year, and the number of plug-in hybrid models surged to 2950,000 units.
But it's worth noting that Geely though with 21The sales volume of 350,000 units surpassed BYD, but BYD's new energy vehicle sales in January, which were mainly sold by Dynasty and Ocean Network, were 20150,000 units. In comparison, the sales of more than 60,000 new energy vehicles are still a little far from BYD.
Geely's sales target for this year is 1.9 million units, of which 800,000 are expected to be new energy vehicles. Geely still needs to make a lot of effort to achieve this goal.
To be the public in the era of new energy vehicles
Compared with BYD, Chery and other independent car companies, Geely's multi-brand combat method is very special. At present, the multi-brand of Chinese automakers is deliberately created for different brand images in the terminal market under the background of unified internal technology, management and performance.
Taking BYD shares as an example, the BYD brand is split into dynasty and ocean sequences, and at the same time, the DENZA brand, Yangwang and Equation Leopard are fissioned. By splitting the series, the company is prevented from being too one-size-fits-all, unable to break through the commercial ceiling.
The difference with Geely is that for the past nearly 10 years, Geely Holding Group has been pursuing internal and low-level unification.
First, the strategic construction of brand independence. In this process, Geely built cars through architecture, forming a unified technical architecture. However, in terms of the entire management structure, it is to achieve thorough market-oriented management of Geely Holding's business units.
If you want to be a public, you have to learn from the public. At present, the Volkswagen Group has 10 brands, each of which is not very closely related to each other, but has a strong extension and inheritance of internal technology. In terms of external and internal cooperation, each brand of the Volkswagen Group is very independent, has its own operation and management model, and constantly strengthens its own brand attributes, and forms its own competitive advantage in the global market through its own brand building. In this regard, the current Geely is indeed very similar to Volkswagen.
An Conghui, President of Geely Group, emphasized that Geely has always pursued a multi-brand strategy, but it is by no means "having more children is good for fighting", and Geely's brand matrix has a very clear differentiated positioning segment. Geely's brand positioning is popular, and the power form is diverse, through the entire Geely Holding Group's technology synergy, economies of scale, chain competitiveness, and innovation capabilities, to reduce R&D costs for each brand and improve the market competitiveness of each brand.
Finally
Geely's shift to new energy is abrupt, but it is also comprehensive, from high-end and low-end pure electric to hybrid, making different choices to adapt to the market. Throughout 2023, it has also experienced many tests, and the competition in the new energy vehicle market in 2024 is bound to be more intense.
From the perspective of objective data, Geely still has a long way to go if it wants to become a public in new energy. The transition to new energy is not all smooth sailing, Geely still needs to make a lot of efforts, and I wish Geely can achieve its goal as soon as possible.