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Text |Zebra Consumption, Author |Fan Jian.In the past few days, Li Auto has ushered in a big carnival.
On February 26, the company disclosed a "history-making" 2023 annual results announcement: revenue exceeded 100 billion, overall profit exceeded 10 billion, and cash reserves exceeded 100 billion. It has become the third new energy vehicle company in the world to achieve profitability after Tesla and BYD, and it is also the first profitable new car-making force in China.
After the results were disclosed, Li Auto ushered in a significant increase in both U.S. and Hong Kong stocks. On the 27th, Li Auto-W closed up 2545%, with a market value of more than HK $70 billion in a single day, which is higher than the total market value of Xpeng Motors-W.
Around 2014, "Wei Xiaoli" and other new car-making forces have broken ground, on the same starting line, chasing new energy vehicles. During this period, some people squeezed in with their heads sharpened, and many more people hit their heads and bled out.
In just a few years, China's new energy vehicle market has turned from a blue ocean into a sea of blood.
During this period, the first place in the sales list of the new forces, the city changed the king's flag, and Li Auto never tasted the taste of reaching the top. In 2023, it will counterattack in one fell swoop and take the lead in "going ashore".
What makes an ideal car? Naturally, there are many reasons for this. If I had to sum it up, it would be the "temporary triumph of pragmatism".
As the founder of Li Auto, Li Xiang, born in the 80s, is undoubtedly smart and an extreme pragmatist.
Perhaps it is based on this that he used his astonishing amateur income level in high school to impress his parents and agree that he would give up the college entrance examination and devote himself to entrepreneurship. From the personal ** "graphics card home", to the bubble network, and then from the bubble network to incubate the car home.
As the founder of Autohome, the largest automotive information in China, Li Xiang can easily receive first-hand information from the automotive industry and understand the needs of car users more intuitively.
He is open to new things. As early as April 2014, he became one of the first 8 Chinese owners of Tesla Model S and received the car keys from Elon Musk.
At this time, China's new energy vehicle manufacturing force is ready to move. In October of that year, Li Bin found Li Xiang and wanted to pull him into his NIO car-making plan. Li Xiang agreed to the investment, but refused to be a partnership. Because, he himself also has a plan to build a car.
In June 2015, Li Xiang resigned as president of Autohome, and immediately established Chehejia and started his car-making journey.
According to Li Xiang's understanding of the new energy vehicle industry and user needs, Chehejia plans to start with Smart Electric Vehicle (SEV) small smart electric vehicles, with the help of relatively simple technology and low cost, to provide new energy solutions for urban commuters.
This car speed does not exceed 45 kilometers and tens of thousands of products, which is equivalent to a smarter and more fashionable "old man's music".
However, this low-speed electric vehicle product failed to wait for the new standard to land and was stillborn.
The market waits for no one, and opportunities are fleeting. The car and the home soon turned to the development of the ideal ONE for the mid-size SUV.
At that time, there was also a great controversy within the company about what kind of technical route Ideal ONE would take. Tesla, as well as NIO, Xpeng, etc., are all in pure electric, which is the future direction of new energy vehicles.
Li Xiang insisted that the battery, charging and other technologies are not yet mature, and the transitional range extender can alleviate the cost pressure in the early stage of the company's development, and from the user's point of view, it can also solve the range anxiety.
As a result, from the release of Ideal ONE in October 2018 to the present, all of Ideal's products are range extender cars.
During this period, the ideal range extender technology has been repeatedly dismissed as backward, bad and outdated by both inside and outside the industry. Li Xiang was extremely disgusted by this kind of controversy, and even publicly scolded him.
Judging from today's results, Li Xiang bet on the first half of new energy vehicles. In 2023, Ideal will achieve 37The annual delivery of 60,000 units is the top sales of SUVs of more than 300,000 yuan and new energy vehicles of more than 300,000 yuan, and it is also a new force in China's annual delivery of more than 300,000 vehicles.
By the end of 2023, Li Auto has delivered more than 630,000 vehicles. But to ask the ideal friends around you, what is the ideal core competitiveness? Probably a lot of people can't tell. This is precisely the truest ideal. The large size can fit more people; the stacking of visible materials such as sofas, refrigerators, and large color TVs; Don't worry about the lack of electricity......It is the biggest demand for family cars in China at the moment.
Li Xiang was a believer in Jobs, and his ideals once followed Apple in the creation of products.
After the launch of the first product, Ideal One, a single product was sold for 4 years. It wasn't until 2022 that ONE completed its historical mission and launched L9, L8 and L7 intensively, and the product matrix was slightly enriched.
The ideal slamming door is well-known in the industry. Even the number of words in the brand name, Li Xiang can associate it with the cost.
Li Xiang once said on his personal Weibo that the brand is "ideal" (not ideal intelligent manufacturing, nor ideal car), and the light box at the rear of the car and offline stores has changed from four words to two words, which can reduce costs.
At present, the 3 models of the L series on sale by Ideal, whether it is the appearance or the interior, look like "nesting dolls". In this way, it can be produced on the same platform, the same parts can be used repeatedly on different models, and even in marketing and promotion, you can also spend less money, and the saved money becomes profit.
Such a product strategy once caused the ideal to encounter a big crisis.
In 2022, the M7 will be released, with the same range extension technology, and Huawei's blessing, plus a lower **, which directly cripples the ideal ONE. As a result, its sales collapsed and production was stopped ahead of schedule.
Just before ONE was delisted, Ideal did not forget to take a handful from the car owner. The news of the discontinuation of production was kept secret, resulting in many car owners facing a significant depreciation and price reduction of the vehicle soon after purchasing the ideal ONE. The owners of the leeks who were cut even planned to launch a class action lawsuit against Li Auto for "deceptive sales".
The ideal picking is also reflected in the employees. In the past few years, Li Auto has frequently released various sales reports and achieved various firsts, but when it comes to giving employees year-end bonuses, they will issue year-end bonuses at a discount on the grounds that the sales volume is not up to standard.
In 2023, Li Auto will make a profit of more than 10 billion, and the ideal employees should have cramps in their hands with year-end bonuses, and it is also time for Li Xiang to fulfill the promise of "clear rewards and punishments".
The range extender route that Li Auto has been adopting is not too demanding on core technology, and the company's early investment in technology is much lower than that of its peers such as NIO and Xiaopeng, which has a greater cost advantage. Therefore, even when all new energy players are losing money, Li Auto can better control the loss range.
Once a certain sales scale is reached, the profitability reflected in the cost advantage is fully revealed.
In 2023, the gross profit margin of ideal car sales has reached 215%, and the overall gross profit margin has come to 222%。
However, with the improvement of new energy batteries, charging and other technologies, the range anxiety of pure electric vehicles has been greatly alleviated, and the range extender technology will end its historical mission, and the ideal will eventually return to the mainstream competition track. In the past, it had to make up for the shortcomings in technology quickly.
Among the leading new car-making forces such as "Wei Xiaoli", the ideal R&D investment has always been the smallest. From 2020 to 2022, the cumulative R&D investment is far inferior to that of NIO, only on par with Xpeng, which has a smaller revenue scale.
Yicai once issued an article to take out the research and development results of the new car-making forces. As of August 2023, NIO has the highest number of patent applications, reaching 6,071; XPeng and Ideal have 4,118 and 4,069 items, respectively.
In the index of authorized patents, the gap between Wei Xiaoli has further widened. Xpeng ranked first with 1,004 items, NIO ranked second with 995 items, and Ideal ranked only 336 items.
Although the number of patents is not directly equivalent to the strength of the technical strength of the enterprise, under normal circumstances, enterprises with many patents have strong technical strength.
In 2022 and 2023, Ideal has significantly increased its R&D investment, investing 67 in R&D expenses respectively800 million yuan and 105900 million yuan. The research and development direction is mainly intelligent space, intelligent driving and high-voltage pure electric solutions.
In 2024, Li Auto will usher in another big year of products, with 4 extended range and 4 pure electric models on the market. Among them, the long-preheated MPV model Ideal MEGA has been officially released and delivered on March 1, with an estimated price of less than 600,000 yuan, which is also the first pure electric product of Ideal.
At the beginning of this year, Li Xiang released the company's new year's goal through his Weibo, which corresponds to an annual delivery of 800,000 vehicles and a monthly delivery of more than 100,000 vehicles.
However, the start of this year is not too ideal, with 31,165 units delivered in January, doubling year-on-year, but down more than 38% month-on-month. During the same period, with the big sales of the new M7, Wenjie delivered 32,973 units in a month, squeezing the ideal out of the first place in the new forces.