Author: Zicheng.
At a time when new domestic car-making forces have successively suspended production and laid off employees, Li Auto has handed over a report card that can be called explosiveThe revenue exceeded 100 billion yuan, and the net profit exceeded 10 billion. As soon as this financial report came out, it directly detonated the global capital circle, and the value of the ideal beauty rose by 50 billion overnight.
There is no doubt that Ideal is the best performing new EV maker in the whole of 2023. It sells the most cars, is expensive per unit, and has a high profit margin. Its cash flow is also very good, with more than 100 billion yuan in cash on its books, and its current market capitalization is $49 billion, which is much higher than that of NIO and XPeng combined.
Under the dazzling results, the ideal who has always been the best has issued a year-end bonus red envelope, and some employees have received 8 months' salary.
Where do tens of billions of profits come from?
The higher the end of the product, the higher the profit, and the automotive industry is no exception.
Since the advent of the ideal one, the first positioning has fallen in the market of more than 300,000 yuan, and the main focus is a high-end bureau.
Among the three players who were once the hottest new forces, everyone is the least optimistic about the ideal, thinking that it is the most untechnical. Many people say that the extended-range model has no technology to speak of; Refrigerators, sofas, and large color TVs can be done by any car company.
Despite the controversy at the time, the Ideal ONE was "unexpectedly" successful, and the L7, L8, and L9 continued this success.
The range extender reduces the mileage anxiety of the car owner, and the "refrigerator, sofa, and large color TV" meet the needs of consumers, and it can only be said that Li Xiang understands people's hearts very well.
Now, Ideal has sat on the top seat, and Weilai and Xiaopeng are still half-dead.
Under the leadership of such a super product manager as Li Xiang, Li Auto has delivered a perfect answer in 2023.
According to the ideal financial report, it can be seen that in 2022, it delivered 130,000 vehicles, and in 2023, this number has almost tripled, reaching 370,000 units for the whole year.
On a quarterly basis, the ideal four quarters of 2023 will deliver 5 new cars20,000 units, 860,000 units, 105 cars and 1310,000 units.
Sales are getting higher and deliveries are getting faster.
There's an overlooked point here – the *chain.
For some car companies, how many cars they can sell each month actually depends on how much they can produce. In the past, NIO and Wenjie have all had orders coming, but they couldn't deliver the car. And the ideal is doing a good job in this area.
Zou Liangjun, vice president of Li Auto, who is responsible for delivery, said, "The average lead time of Ideal is less than seven days. Ideally, look at the inventory in "days", ask the customer to place a deposit of 5,000 yuan, and then transport a car out of the Changzhou factory for an average of 3-4 days, and the remaining 1-2 days to complete all the delivery work.
Zou Liangjun said that in December 2023, the company sold 50,000 vehicles, probably. 3 channel inventory coefficient, the efficiency is several times that of BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
As sales continue to rise, the ideal store is also soaring at a rate of one a day. As of the end of the fourth quarter, Li Auto had 467 retail centers across the country, covering 140 cities.
Zou Liangjun said: "Li Auto will increase its layout in first- and second-tier cities in the future, covering third-tier cities, and by the end of 2024, almost more than 190 prefecture-level cities will have directly operated stores." The goal is to open 800 stores by the end of this year, with an average of one new store a day. ”
At the same time,While the delivery volume has increased significantly, Li Auto's gross profit margin has also increased simultaneously.
According to the data, Li Auto's gross profit margin in the quarter of 2023 will continue to increase, and the four quarters are. 5%；For the full year of 2023, the gross profit margin reached 222%。
Let's put it this way, in terms of deliveries, last year's ideal car was BYD's 1 8, but BYD's profit was only 3 times higher than that of ideal car, which shows how high the ideal single car profit is.
Looking at Li Auto's financial reports in the past five years, from 2018 to 2022, the cumulative net loss exceeded 64500 million yuan. Two years after landing in the United States, Li Auto's revenue in 2022 will be less than 50 billion yuan, and its net loss will exceed 2 billion yuan.
And now,In one year, I directly earned back all the money I lost in the past five years, and I made a lot of money.
It is worth mentioning that starting from the fourth quarter of 2023, in order to start the update and transition of the product in advance, Ideal has started a price reduction discount.
Surprisingly, although the bicycle has declined, the ideal gross profit margin is still growing, which is enough to see that this company controls the chain procurement, and also fully illustrates the importance of scale effect in the automotive industry.
In addition to the technical route and cost advantages at the product level, the good sales of Li Auto are also inseparable from Li Xiang's own marketing.
Li Xiang himself often speaks amazingly on social platforms, which indirectly earns traffic for the company, and he also has high requirements for the service level of sales, for example, many flight attendants changed careers to do ideal car sales last year.
Now, the ideal new car MEGA is about to be launched, and if you have seen a lot of information about MEGA recently, or Li Xiang has made another shocking statement, I am afraid that it is another hype.
Two battles in 2023
Last year was a year of extreme involution in China's new energy vehicle market, and everyone started a first-class war, followed by the volume of products, volume technology, and the upstream and downstream of the volume industry chain. Under the involution of the entire industry, Li Auto cannot stay out of it.
During 2023, the ideal focuses on two battles. The first is the first battle of the entire automobile circle.
Compared with Tesla, which took the initiative to cut prices and took the lead, Ideal was not willing to get involved in this battle at first.
In March last year, in the wave of table-lifting ** battle, Ideal was the first to jump out and refuse, launched a price insurance policy, and promised not to reduce prices. Subsequently, Denza, Leap, Nezha, and Lynk & Co all followed up, and refused to fight in unison, and everyone tacitly formed a "price insurance alliance".
But in China's auto ecology, when everyone is fighting for the best, it is almost impossible for you not to reduce the price, the difference is who has a smaller reduction and the cost can be lower.
So the resistance didn't last long, and the "insurance alliance" collapsed. Since August last year, Ideal stores around the country have launched various forms of discounts, with a range of 150,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan. At the end of the year, the actual purchase discount of the ideal L series model was about 20,000 yuan.
The second was a head-to-head hand-to-hand fight with Huawei. With the blessing of Huawei's halo, Wenjie launched a direct challenge to the ideal, and the gap between the two sides continued to narrow.
In January this year, with the delivery of 32,973 vehicles in a single month, Wenjie beat Li Auto to win the first place in the new force delivery list, showing strong delivery strength. This is the first time that Wenjie has become the monthly sales champion of a new power brand in the Chinese market, and it is also the first time that Wenjie's monthly delivery volume has exceeded the 30,000 mark.
In the face of the delivery report card handed over by Wenjie in January, Yu Chengdong laughed at himself, "Our estimate of the popularity of smart cars is not conservative enough, and 'Yu Dazui' has become 'Yu Xiaozui'."
In addition, the M9, which received orders for 30,000 units within seven days of its launch, will be delivered at the end of this month as the benchmark model is the Ideal L9. In other words, Huawei will compete with Ideal in the product matrix.
In the face of strong opponents, it is difficult for Li Auto to remain indifferent.
In fact, as early as June last year, Li Xiang posted on Weibo that he mentioned Wenjie, "In the third quarter of 2022, the release of Wenjie M7 and ** directly disabled the ideal one, we have never encountered such a strong opponent, and we have no power to fight back for a long time."
Li Xiang said frankly, "Huawei's super ability directly caused the sales of Ideal One to collapse and stop production ahead of schedule, losing more than one billion yuan in a quarter, and the team was disabled, I couldn't sleep at all, our ability was too poor, and it collapsed in the face of people's very basic moves, and it caused a large number of product experts who were struggling in the front line to leave."
Li Xiang also said that at the Yanqi Lake Strategy Meeting at the end of September 2022, an important consensus was reached to comprehensively learn from Huawei and the most advanced enterprises.
For Huawei, no matter whether Li Xiang really wants to learn or is hypocritically modest, the two sides are ruthless.
In December 2023, an Ideal L7 was involved in a serious traffic accident in Qingyuan City, Guangdong Province, rear-ending a large truck on a highway, resulting in the death of the driver and one passenger of the car, and the injury of another passenger. Subsequently, at the press conference of the M9, Yu Chengdong specially showed the crash test of the M9 being squeezed by a large truck**, saying that the A-pillar, B-pillar, C-pillar, and D-pillar were not deformed. This scene is also considered to be in the "connotation" of ideals.
In this regard, Li Xiang also replied unceremoniously. On February 20, Li Xiang bluntly said when reviewing what he did not do well in 2023: "If you can't do some brands of cars, you can rear-end a large truck at 180 mph, and you can crash the truck into Jupiter's orbit, and the driver of the car will be unscathed." This remark was considered by many people in the outside world to be a response to the question.
Some netizens left a message under Li Xiang's Weibo, saying, "As the founder of a well-known company and an Internet celebrity public figure, is it really good to make such a yin and yang statement."
Some netizens also said, "The matter of the big truck, whether it is an ideal responsibility or not, should not be ridiculed like this." There is also a message with more than 2,000 likes, saying, "Summary, I'm in a hurry to be asked."
For 2024, Li Xiang has set a goal of 800,000 units, saying that he will surpass Mercedes-Benz BMW and achieve the goal of No. 1 luxury brand sales in the Chinese market.
According to a number of people familiar with the matter, the annual sales target for 2024 is 600,000 units, which is 200,000 units less than ideal. As the product lines of the two sides become more and more overlapping, a fierce battle is inevitable. With Huawei's rival on the sidelines, Li Auto wants to complete the annual goal of 800,000, and the pressure can be imagined.
It should be noted that the number of Chinese auto companies is still too large, and the war continues. Zhang Xiang, a visiting professor at the Yellow River Institute of Science and Technology, said bluntly, "Only a few car companies can stand out with their excellent management and technical strength." ”
Ending
Since the beginning of this year, the new energy vehicle market has been really exciting, and BYD Qin has bargained to 798, and then look up to the release of a sports car with a price of 1.68 million.
On the 26th, the tank 700 Hi4-T was launched, followed by the new Zeekrypton 001, and the ideal immediately released the MEGA, Xiaomi SU7 ......
According to incomplete statistics, new energy vehicle companies will release 106 new cars this year.
And just now, Apple announced a decision that shocked the industry:
Instead of a decade-long dream of building a car, he threw himself into generative artificial intelligence (AI).
It started for 10 years, involved 2,000 employees, and suddenly gave up.
If there has to be a reason, it must be that the global new energy vehicles are scared by Chinese companies, and Apple feels that it does not have a great advantage.
And it is really difficult for Xiaomi cars to kill at this point in time.
The battle of new energy vehicles is really exciting.
From the battery subsidy more than ten years ago, a cross-era strategic layout has been planned, and the current situation is reaching the climax, and it is unknown who will die.
But there is no doubt that the big track of automobiles will definitely be gnawed down by these volume kings in my country, and the global market is also a matter of time.
Ideal car