On February 1, Zhiji Auto announced that it will sell a total of 5,305 vehicles in January 2024. Officially, the Zhiji LS6 sold 4,766 units, and since the launch of the Zhiji LS6, it has won the sales championship of "medium and large pure electric SUVs" for three consecutive months, with a cumulative delivery of more than 20,000 units.
In the three years since its establishment, Zhiji Automobile has launched a total of three models. Among them, the sales of the first two models have not improved for a long time, and only the third model, LS6, slightly highlights the potential of "explosive models". But the reason is that Zhiji lowered his figure and joined the battlefield of the most volatile 200,000 yuan level new energy vehicles.
Behind this, in fact, the fierce competition of new energy, after the big waves, some car companies are gradually marginalized, forcing the new energy vehicle "national team" to save themselves.
In order to create a popular model, the price has been reduced
Let's take a look at Zhiji's sales in 2023. In the whole of last year, Zhiji Auto sold a total of 3820,000 new vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 665%, but not completed in April 2023The sales target is 50,000 units.
Among them, from January to October 2023, the cumulative sales volume of Zhiji Automobile will be 1910,000 units, the cumulative sales volume is less than the monthly sales of the leading new car brands, and the average monthly sales are less than 2,000 units. The turning point for Zhiji began in the fourth quarter. From October to December 2023, Zhiji Auto sold 4,018 units, 8,703 units, and 1040,000 units, and the cumulative sales in the fourth quarter exceeded more than 60% of the annual sales.
The relative increase in sales in the fourth quarter was due to the third model of Zhiji - Zhiji LS6.
On October 12, 2023, the Zhiji LS6 model was officially launched. The biggest highlight of the new car launch is**. The listing price of the Zhiji LS6 is 22990,000-29190,000 yuan. According to the policy at the beginning of the listing, if you place an order within a month, you can also enjoy 1A cash discount of 50,000 yuan, that is, the price is reduced to 21490,000-27690,000 yuan.
For a mid-to-large SUV positioned as luxurious, the 22The minimum sale of 990,000 yuan is far lower than the industry average. Compared with the starting price of 400,000 yuan previously set by the Zhiji brand, the ** of Zhiji LS6 has almost halved. Compared with the ** of the previous two models of Zhiji, the price of Zhiji LS6 has also leaped.
However, the "big dive" of Zhiji LS6, with the contrast between ** and policy, also stimulated the sales of Zhiji LS6. Taking Zhiji's sales in December last year as an example, Zhiji LS6 sold a total of 9,878 units, accounting for more than 94% of sales, helping Zhiji achieve monthly sales of more than 10,000 units to 10,412 units; Sales of the Zhiji L7 and Zhiji LS7 models remained sluggish, accounting for only about 6%.
Obviously, Zhiji LS6 is cost-effective, or price for quantity. But the question that arises after the "explosive" trend is, should the goal of Zhiji Auto's high-end impact be temporarily shelved?
From impacting 400,000 yuan to retreating 200,000 yuan
As a premium brand under SAIC, Zhiji Auto was established in December 2020 and is jointly built by SAIC, Zhangjiang Hi-Tech and Alibaba Group.
As the brand's first model, the Zhiji L7 was launched in April 2022 with a price of 36880,000-40880,000 yuan, entering the 400,000-level luxury car market. In February 2023, Zhiji Auto launched the Zhiji LS7, a mid-to-large SUV with a price range of 30980,000-45980,000 yuan.
Zhiji L7 and Zhiji LS7 are both focusing on the market range of 300,000-400,000 yuan. However, despite the backing of SAIC, Zhangjiang Hi-Tech and Alibaba's big tree, the sales of the two models are still not optimistic, and the Zhiji brand has been tepid. Because of this, it forced Zhiji to lower his value.
Zhiji LS6 is different, the price directly breaks through the bottom line of 300,000 yuan high-end models, and the starting price directly comes to 22990,000 yuan. This means that the Zhiji brand has retreated from the impact of 400,000 yuan to the ** range of 200,000 yuan.
In October last year, Liu Tao, co-CEO of Zhiji, said in an interview with ** that the pricing of Zhiji LS6 was a great determination within the company, and it did lose a considerable part of the gross profit. However, this is based on the perspective of users and market competition, and it is more important for an auto company to participate in market competition and stay at the table, so it is more important to maintain product and brand popularity.
It may be said that in order to survive in the market competition and create a "hot model", the launch of Zhiji LS6 is a "gamble" for Zhiji and even SAIC at the expense of gross profit margin.
According to SAIC's lineup of its new energy vehicle brands, it has its own brand layout in the high-end, mid-to-high-end and low-end, namely Zhiji, Feifan, Roewe and MG. Among them, Zhiji and Feifan, the former is positioned at the high-end, focusing on the market range of about 400,000 yuan; The latter is positioned in the middle and high-end, focusing on the market range of 200,000-300,000 yuan.
Now, Zhiji has lowered the product ** to 22Starting from 990,000 yuan, there is some conflict with Feifan's ** positioning, such as Feifan F7, which was launched in March last year, and the listing price range is 22990,000-30190,000 yuan. The industry believes that the downward exploration of Zhiji ** may also affect consumers' choice of Feifan.
According to market rumors, in order to avoid competition in the same ** range, Feifan and Zhiji will take 200,000 yuan as the new dividing line for product pricing, Feifan will focus on the 100,000-200,000 yuan ** range in the future, and Zhiji Automobile will continue to be a high-end brand, with product pricing of more than 200,000 yuan. The authenticity of this rumor is currently unknown, but it can be seen that Zhiji's mistake to hit the high-end may disrupt SAIC's layout of new energy transformation to a certain extent.
Exchanging price for quantity is also quantity, but what about high-end dreams?
Although the sales volume in exchange for the following exploration range has been criticized, in 2023, when it is rolled to the extreme, it is not easy for Zhiji to sell more than 10,000 sales. At least this time the "gambling" got off to a pretty good start.
However, back to reality, there are many problems in Zhiji, such as the recent large-scale vehicle and machine failure turmoil. Coincidentally, the protagonist who fell into the turmoil was the LS6 model, which had just entered the state.
On the first day of New Year's Day in 2024, there will be a sound on the Internet that Zhiji LS6 owners have a large area of car machine failure. Fault problems include the instrument screen suddenly does not display vehicle speed, gear and other information, radar reminders, turn prompt sound disappears silently, etc.
According to Zhiji Auto's customer service, the reason is that the vehicle is updating the system. During the installation of the system, the vehicle could not use the driving, entertainment and other functions normally, and the upgrade time was more than 4 hours.
By the evening of January 3, Liu Tao posted a Weibo to apologize to users and explain the cause of the car machine failure, saying that it was due to a timestamp conflict problem in the PDC (Reversing Radar) prompt renderer integrated by IMOS.
At the same time, Li Weimeng, executive director of Zhiji Auto Software and User Duoyuan Contact, also issued a Weibo apology, saying that the incident was a very naïve software bug, and he had been busy with the repair of software versions and the push of OTAs in the past few days, and failed to communicate with everyone in the first time.
The problem of the car machine is actually an old problem, and it does not only appear in Zhiji's models. However, there were a large number of complaints about the Zhiji LS6 as soon as it entered the threshold of 10,000 units, which is certainly not a good thing for Zhiji. It is related to the reputation of the brand and the product, which has a more or less negative impact.
When it comes to brand reputation, the marketing of Zhiji Auto is also part of the criticism from the outside world. In terms of brand marketing, Zhiji has had many "overturns" before, and they are all related to CEO Liu Tao.
In November 2022, in order to demonstrate the performance of Zhiji L7, Liu Tao drove a vehicle to demonstrate on the highway, and was found by netizens to have illegal driving behaviors, including illegal parking at high speed, lane change on solid line, lane change without lights, high-speed speeding, etc., with a cumulative deduction of about 17 points. After that, Liu Tao posted on Weibo that he had seriously paid attention to the criticism of netizens, conducted deep introspection, and took the initiative to cooperate with the investigation, and accepted the punishment on December 5.
In November 2023, Liu Tao appeared again. In order to show the "IM Mag magnetic docking station" of Zhiji LS6, Liu Tao personally went into battle to broadcast the "dumplings in the car". As a result, netizens have questioned the safety and necessity of this marketing method. For this reason, Liu Tao had to delete the propaganda**.
Brand promotion through the CEO's personality marketing is indeed a means for more and more new energy brands, but at the moment, as a "national team" from a traditional car company, the heritage and capital of many years of car manufacturing and the down-to-earth and reliable brand image are actually the advantages of the high-end new energy market, and the personalized marketing beyond the conventional does not seem to be pleasing to the people.
As for SAIC's high-end dream, it may need a new way of playing. In 2024, the wind and waves of the new energy knockout competition will be more violent. From a pragmatic point of view, SAIC's current goal may be to expand the sales scale and leave Zhiji on the table of new energy, after all, it needs to survive before it can talk about rushing higher.