He is probably the most inspirational left-behind child in China, who grew up in a mountain village with his grandfather, but was admitted to Peking University in one go when others stopped at junior high school education. started a business before graduating, and along the way, he founded two listed companies and voted for several unicorns.
He is China's "Godfather of Travel" Li Bin.
Founded Yiche in the early days of Internet popularization, invested in Mobike during the sharing economy boom, and then stepped on the new energy tuyere to establish NIO, it seems that Li Bin is an out-and-out tuyere hunter, doing whatever is popular, and he has done it.
But in Sister Ting's view, Li Bin is not chasing the outlet, but building a moat. Why? Click to follow, Sister Ting will take you to reacquaint yourself with Li Bin.
In June 1974, Li Bin was born in Wuling Village, Anqing, Anhui Province, and was my hometown.
Don't be in a hurry to pity the poor family, Li Bin took the first business class in his life at his grandfather's place.
It turned out that the old man was not an ordinary farmer, but a businessman, who was engaged in the business of ploughing cattle. He bought the cattle at a low price when they were not in good health, raised them fat and strong, and then sold them.
And Xiao Li Bin's job is to find a good pasture and feed the cattle.
What is this called today? AMC! Non-performing asset management, buy unfinished buildings, revitalize operations and then sell them, and people will be small.
In addition to selling cattle, the old man also wholesaled medicinal wine and tobacco, and even had a two-level ** businessman, the old man was busy making money, and Xiao Li Bin was at home to help keep accounts. A left-behind family has become a business school.
It is said that he learned to do business, and the ** decade was full of opportunities, Tsinghua University and Peking University are not as bold, Li Bin should enter the society early, right? No, he knows that academic qualifications are the moat, and others are satisfied with studying a secondary school, but he has to go to high school and take the university entrance examination. Hui merchants are like this, only reading is high.
In 1992, Li Bin was admitted to Peking University and became the first Peking University student in the county.
During college, Li Bin showed his true character as a scholar, took 17 exams in a week, majored in sociology, and passed the computer system analyst exam, becoming the first liberal arts student in the country to pass this exam.
Li Bin, who spends all day in the computer room, found that the Internet industry on the other side of the ocean is making great progress, and it is estimated that the opportunity of China's Internet is also coming soon.
Therefore, he wanted to start a business, in order to start a business, he did more than 50 part-time jobs during college, selling stationery and serving plates.
In 1996, Li Bin, who had not yet graduated, had already saved tens of thousands of yuan, relying on this money, he established Antarctic Science and Technology Company, which could earn hundreds of thousands of yuan a month, and the wages of workers in state-owned enterprises at that time were only a few hundred yuan a month.
Such a lucrative business should be very technical, right? On the contrary, he did much the same as the fallen master.
At that time, the Internet servers were all in the United States, and domestic entrepreneurs had the need to register domain names, so Li Bin first registered in the United States and then sold them to Chinese to make the difference.
How high is this spread?
Let's put it this way, the famous investor Cai Wensheng made his fortune on domain names, he owned more than 5,000 domain names at that time, Tudou, iQiyi, Storm Audio, and Ctrip's domain names were all bought from him, and each domain name was sold for more than one million, and how much does it cost to register a domain name? Less than 100 yuan, the yield is 10,000 times the base.
But only 1 year later, Li Bin gave up on this chicken that laid golden eggs, or for the same reason, he thought that there was no moat.
Later, after a short period of joint entrepreneurship with Li Guoqing, in 1999, Li Bin came out and founded Yiche.com.
At that time, Internet information was like psoriasis advertising, east and west, not enough aggregation, consumers wanted to buy a car can only run around 4S stores, running people have lost a lot of weight, and they may not be able to buy the right one.
Everyone else is complaining, but Li Bin has realized the way to start a business, and poor information is the moat!
Gather car information and make a platform for everyone's reference, car companies can advertise, 4S stores can get clues, consumers can compare prices, open, transparent and comprehensive, there must be a big market!
Sure enough, BitAuto became popular as soon as it was launched, with more than one million daily visits in less than three months.
In 2010, 36-year-old Li Bin sent Yiche to the New York Stock Exchange.
It's all on the market, isn't it meritorious? On the contrary, Yi Che was the first to eat the crab and found that the cream was full of yellow fat, and then a group of people pounced on it and rushed to eat it. The largest of these is Autohome, which is no slower than Yiche. At this time, the moat of poor information seems to be no longer useful.
What is a moat that is always reliable?
I think one is ecology and the other is technology.
Li Bin later invested in a large number of companies such as Mobike, Uxin second-hand car, Tick Travel, Electric Bang, Netcom, and Master Maintenance, covering riding, car trading, maintenance, taxi, and **, so he used capital to establish a travel ecology.
And technically, it can't be avoided from the well-known Weilai, which he has devoted all his efforts to.
After 2010, China's new energy vehicles into the fast lane, the country put forward a new energy strategy, local ** also pay for subsidies, almost every car company is working hard to transform.
But then we found out that the so-called transformation is actually mixed, many car companies do not develop at all, and the car is directly pulled into the car cemetery, and it makes a lot of money by eating subsidies anyway.
On the contrary, Li Bin, a layman from the Internet, prefers to die technology and build cars seriously.
In order to find talents, he went abroad 17 times in a year, brought Mazda COO and Motorola CTO under his command, and established R&D bases in Beijing, Shanghai, San Jose, Munich, Germany and other places, and launched a comprehensive attack on vehicle research and development, on-board software, and intelligent driving.
Of course, the automobile is a capital-heavy industry, forced by financial pressure, Li Bin also knows how to make trade-offs first, his research and development is focused on intelligent driving, and the car manufacturing link, directly signed an OEM agreement with JAC.
In 2018, the first NIO ES8 rolled off the assembly line, and in September, NIO landed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Li Bin rang the bell for the second time.
The moat of intelligent driving is not enough, in order to make NIO stand tall in the tram wars, he also dug 3 moats that he thinks are right:
The first is the mode moat, others are studying fast charging, and NIO directly replaces the battery; the second is to serve the moat, to be the home of NIO, to mingle with car owners, and to build a user enterprise; The third is the moat of the car machine, and he personally went out to make Weilai mobile phones, just to let car owners enjoy better car machine products.
Up to now, NIO's mass-produced vehicles have approached 400,000 units.
But no matter how deep the moat is, it will be filled by time, not to mention that the process of digging the river is laborious and costly. The speed advantage of battery replacement is being attacked by new super fast charging technology. From 2019 to the first half of 2023, NIO has accumulated a loss of 76.4 billion, if it weren't for Hefei state-owned assets and Middle Eastern tyrants frantically playing money, NIO may have entered history. At least in terms of sales and finances, NIO does not seem to be the most beautiful boy among the new forces.
Then we have to ask: in this case, why is capital still willing to continue to invest money in him?
I think it may be Li Bin's idea of constantly digging moats.
On December 6, 2023, NIO spent more than 3 billion yuan to acquire the JAC foundry to fill the manufacturing moat; At last year's press conference, Li Bin also announced the "Yang Jian" self-developed chip, which is one of the best lidar chips in the industry.
Author |Wu Ting.
References: 1] "careerist" Li Bin, "100 billion ** hand" Li Bin, "left-behind teenager" Li Bin. Titanium**. 2017
2] NIO survived the ICUBT Finance. 2023
3] The Godfather of Travel, Li Bin, and his Hidden Empire. Smart stuff. 2017
4] Chinese name "Yang Jian" NIO released the first LiDAR self-developed chip. International**. 2023