Text |Rust-free bowls.
In the new energy vehicle industry, the juxtaposed phrase "Wei Xiaoli" has become a thing of the past, and the new term replaced by "Bitley".
Once upon a time, about the next "ashore" brand of domestic new energy, Li Auto was still the answer that was deliberately ignored - only two years ago, the market's evaluation of this company was still full of views such as "color TV sofa", "fake green card", "marketing king" and so on.
Even now, the first pure electric model MEGA, which Li Auto has high hopes for, has been controversial in the market after its release due to its appearance and pricing. It is reported that the current large order for this model has not exceeded 10,000, and the number of small orders to large orders is limited.
Behind many negative impressions is the reversal of macro sales. The latest sales figures show that Ideal has reached 37With a delivery volume of 60,000, it has become the third place in China's new energy sales list in 2023.
On February 26, Ideal released its 2023 Q4 and annual results, which are in this "best financial report in history" stamped by Li Xiang himselfIdeal revenue for the past year is 1238500 million, a year-on-year increase of 1735%；Net profit 118100 million, cash flow reserves 1036700 million yuan.
On the bright side, in the current "most volatile year" of new energy visible to the naked eye, compared with some peers who are still hovering on the loss line, Ideal has obtained the "pass" for the next few years in advance.
The ancient adage that people have no long-term worries must have near-term worries", this time verified in the ideal - behind the seemingly glamorous financial report, the ideal is still trapped in the market surrounded by wolves, and the backlash of mega is a signal.
If BYD and Great Wall are the "technical mentors" in the field of powertrain to help independent car companies fill the gap, then the ideal is the object worth learning and learning from most Chinese car companies at the business level.
This is not an exaggeration, for two reasons:
Before the ideal, no Chinese car company had a firm foothold in the 300,000-400,000 range;
Before the ideal, no car company realized the importance of "marketing" and the correct way to open it.
For marketing, Chinese car companies have been clearly divided into two factions, one is a technologist such as Wei Jianjun, who believes that marketing is unnecessary, good products will speak, if the product does not sell, it must be that the discount is not large enough; The other faction misinterprets the way of marketing, believing that marketing is to be in the limelight, bragging, "returning to China next week" and "beating BBA at the same level".
In a sense, thinking that Li Auto is popular by relying on Weibo and "the best SUV within 5 million" is like thinking that Xiaomi is relying on "development and development" to eat, which is an "intellectual insult" to other struggling companies in this industry.
In fact, building momentum in social networking is only one of the many business secrets of Li Auto, and Caijing Wuji once gave Li Xiang a label in a previous article: the ultimate pragmatic product manager. And behind this label, it is the real "longboard" of Li Auto on the business side, which includes:
Differentiated product positioning, pragmatic demand insights and excellent cost management.
The first two points are specific to the market sideThat is, Li Auto always understands "who we want to sell the car to" and "what these consumers need" better than other brands.
In terms of product positioning, from the unique "300,000+ luxury extended-range SUV" Ideal ONE, to the MEGA that is dressed as an MPV and points to the BMW X5, Ideal is very good at finding a sufficiently segmented and broad market in the fiercely competitive Red Sea market.
In terms of market demand, the ideal takes the technology believers as the norm with a pragmatic attitude"Pure electric, handling, off the track".Thrown into the garbage heap and replaced with one that is more suitable for the physique of Chinese babies"Range extension, color TV, large space".
Coincidentally, Wang Fengying, the Iron Lady who once helped Wei Jianjun establish the Great Wall Empire, also pointed out in an interviewThe hidden needs of Chinese people to buy cars: large space.
There is no need to repeat the benefits of range extenders, after experiencing the reversal of word-of-mouth from backward to mainstream, the current automotive industry "range extender = profit" has become the development consensus of major brands. On the contrary, the debate in the market has never stopped around whether "large space for color TV refrigerators" is equal to "luxury".
But outside of the controversy, an easily overlooked fact is that when Chinese cars switch from fuel vehicles to new energy vehicles, there is a very obvious "standard window period", in the past, the high cost of automobile engines has given fuel vehicles a natural grading standard: power.
1.6t household, 20t mid-range, 30T business, V8V12 luxury performance, this is the thunderous range, so that "300,000 three-cylinder car" and "2 million + 2.."0t", have experienced the darkest moment of ridicule on the whole network.
In the new energy era, the gap in power has been infinitely smoothed out by the motor, and a 270,000 ZEEKR 001 can give you 3At the moment of acceleration of 100 kilometers in 5 seconds, new energy vehicles urgently need to re-establish a "luxury" standard, combined with market feedbackThe ideal "refrigerator color TV large space" may not be the most correct standard, but it must be the most suitable in front of you.
From this point of view, compared to looking at the ideal with colored glasses, for most domestic brands, learning the ideal product thinking is really helpful to the enterprise.
Compared with the positioning and insight on the marketing side, the cost management that is easy to ignore is the "encrypted information" that is ideally hidden in this financial report data.
After the release of the interim report last year, Finance Wuji once put forward a point of view:
Half of the ideal profit is "earned", and the other half is "saved".
In addition to the initial firm choice of range extender, which helped them save a lot of pure electric research and development expenses, the company's strict control of the cost link is also the key to helping it quickly move towards profitability.
The first is the optimization of R&D and production costs brought about by the unique "nesting doll layout" of the ideal L9, L8 and L7. In November last year, when Caijing Wuji visited the ideal Changzhou factory, he noticed that the parts commonality rate between the L8 and L9 models had reached 70%.In actual production, it is already possible to share production lines.
On this basis, Li Xiang, who was born in **, is also well versed in Musk's marketing cost reduction. From brand public relations, activities, advertising, to product launches, car owner operations, all marketing activities, if you can solve it by posting Weibo, don't spend money.
In May last year, Li Xiang also publicly boasted about his cost control ability on social **
The marketing expense rate of mainstream brands is 2%-3%, and we only have 06%, in the ideal, tens of thousands of yuan of marketing expenses I have to approve. ”
For reference, in 2023, the ideal annual delivery volume is **282 year-on-year3%, revenue year-on-year **2736%, but marketing expenses only increased by 172 compared to 20224%, showing a relatively good marketing efficiency ratio.
In addition to the "slamming the door" on the business side, the financial report data shows that the ideal has also entered the "scale dividend" that many car companies dream of.
In Q3 2022 alone, the ideal average delivery price and cost are 3410,000, 300,000, gross profit of 410,000, with a gross profit margin of 12%, and with the advent of new models, the ideal has further increased the gross profit in the case of the decline in the average delivery price, and in Q4 of 2023, the average delivery price and cost of the ideal have come to 3060,000, 2370,000 yuan, the gross profit of a single vehicle is as high as 70,000 yuan, and the gross profit margin is 23%.
For the dividends brought by the scale effect, Li Xiang himself is well aware that before 2023 ends, he has set a new sales target for 2024: 800,000 units.
This may also explain why the ideal is indifferent to the previous battle in the car circle, but it is only the rise of the question world.
Whether from the point of view of brand tonality, product positioning or price range, the M7 and M9 models are highly overlapping with the ideal product, and after the ideal car took the initiative to change the new energy sales list from "monthly report" to "weekly report", the question world has been beating the former for many weeks and topped the first.
In January 2024, with a delivery of 32,973 units, Wenjie surpassed its rival Li Auto, becoming the monthly sales champion of a new brand in the Chinese market for the first time.
Not only that, the M9, which was only launched in December 2023, is currently in the stage of soaring sales and has not yet been delivered on a large scale, and it is foreseeable that the delivery growth of Wenjie in the first half of 2024 may be very considerable.
As for the next goal after the hot sales of Wenjie, Yu Chengdong's attitude is also very clear: "The next top priority is to work with partners to ensure high-quality delivery and deliver more new cars to consumers." ”
In a sense, the test of whether the ideal car can complete the sales target as scheduled in 2024 is actually a test of how the car company competes with the question in the new year.
Up to now, the intensity of this competition has become white-hot.
In the face of the rising sales volume of Wenjie, Ideal has previously announced that the L series of models will be fully replaced, and the battery life, cockpit chips, comfort and other aspects will be upgraded, for example, the cockpit chips will all be upgraded to Qualcomm 8295, and the ideal L7 and L8 will also have car refrigerators. In view of the time node of the ideal replacement version on March 1, the M9 has officially announced a discount of up to 50,000 yuan in February.
On the one hand, from the perspective of product strength, the two brands have not formed an obvious gap; On the other hand, from the perspective of the first battle, the sufficient cash flow on the ideal book and the strong resources backed by Huawei's car BU department also determine that the game between the two will not end in the short term.
However, for the new energy vehicle circle, the "comprehensive firefight" between the two major car companies at the product and ** level may bring unexpected fluctuations to the industry.
After all,The eldest and the second are fighting, and the third is always the one who suffersThe price reduction and increase of Ideal and Wenjie will not weaken the competitiveness of their products, but it may bring a devastating blow to other friends in the same range.
A significant example is Weilai, although the main pure electric NIO, strictly speaking, cannot be counted as the competition of the above two major car companies, but the same new energy SUV sequence and similar ** range, it is still doomed to the fate of Weilai "Pond Fish".
In December, January, and February, when Wenjie and Ideal made all-round efforts, NIO's deliveries have shown a significant downward trend, with 18,012 units, 10,055 units, and 8,132 units, respectively.
Judging from the latest annual report released by this car company, NIO has not been able to get rid of the loss trend in the past year, with an operating loss of 226 in 202355.2 billion yuan, which also means that if the battle between the world and the ideal continues to extend, NIO is likely to be the first to withdraw from the battlefield due to "lack of ammunition".
But that doesn't mean that Ideal can "sit back and relax" for now.
Up to now, the cash flow and gross profit margin of the ideal book can be guaranteed, and the company will not exit in the next few years. Even with Huawei's blessing, it is impossible to completely defeat the ideal in the short term.
At present, if the ideal and the question world want to significantly distinguish the winner and loser, it will not be realized until at least 2025, after the pure electric models of both sides are fully rolled out.
From this moment on, the more than one year in the middle is a "buffer period" for the ideal to further enhance its competitiveness.
On this basis, Caijing Wuji believes that there are at least three key points that determine the victory or defeat of the ideal future competition:
At a time when many car companies are learning from the ideal marketing model, can the ideal create a new "positioning dividend"?
Will the MEGA, which is the first all-electric model, achieve the expected sales?
Can intelligent R&D quickly catch up with the first echelon?
So far, Ideal has not given a convincing answer to the above questions, especially the third point.
Although Li Xiang himself has said in public: "The integration of electrification, networking, and intelligence will produce a new automotive system and completely disintegrate people's traditional perception of automobiles." But at present, none of the three has yet become a "longboard" that the ideal is proud of.
Especially in terms of autonomous driving, compared with Huawei, which has been rolled out across the country in urban piloting, and Xiaopeng, which has landed in 243 cities, it is expected that the ideal of landing in 110 cities in Q2 has been opened up a significant gap, and it has basically fallen out of the "first echelon".
In this regard, although Ideal has repeatedly publicly stated that it will "speed up R&D", judging from the financial report, the ideal "R&D power" is obviously not as sufficient as they claim.
At present, Li Auto's R&D expenditure in 2023 totals 10.6 billion yuan, and the R&D expense ratio is 85%, for reference, NIO, which is "losing money", will spend 134 on R&D in 2023300 million yuan. From the perspective of cumulative R&D investment, Ideal has invested 22.9 billion yuan in R&D since 2019, NIO has invested 35.8 billion yuan in R&D in the same period, and Huawei's automotive BU department, which was established in 2019, is estimated to have exceeded 16 billion yuan by the end of 2022.
Considering that it is focusing on the smart car business, Huawei's R&D funds do not need to be invested in the development of specific models, butIt can be fully stud intelligent. In contrast, the ideal R&D investment is too frugal.
It is true that the amount of R&D investment does not necessarily depend on the R&D results, but in the case of obvious insufficient R&D investment, there is no evidence that compared with Huawei's team with rich experience in big data and intelligent servicesThe ideal R&D team has a better "cost-effectiveness-to-cost ratio".
However, last year, there have been rumors that Ideal has been actively expanding the intelligent driving team, and the salary is "significantly higher" than that of companies such as Weilai, "conservatively estimated to be 50% more". This also means that the ideal R&D investment is not much, and the actual effect may have to be discounted, and as for how much time the newly formed R&D team needs to adapt to the run-in and finally produce results, I am afraid it is even more unoptimistic.
Compared with the current bright revenue data, the hidden danger of "late start and small investment" on the R&D side will definitely put pressure on Li Auto's intelligent business in the future.
From this point of view, if the ideals tested in 2022 and 2023 can "make money" and "save money", then 2024, when the involution is increasingly intensified, is the time point to test whether the ideal will "spend money".