Author |Wang Yajun.
Cover** NIO official website.
10 years is enough time for a new car star company that believes in long-termism to hand over a phased answer.
According to the financial report released by NIO on March 5, the annual loss in 2023 will exceed 20.7 billion yuan, a record high, and the annual gross profit margin will be close to "halved" compared with the previous year. At the same time, businesses other than selling cars, such as battery swap stations, continue to burn money.
Since last year, efforts to reduce costs and increase efficiency have not yet yielded results, and the results of long-termism are even more far away. Li Bin still wants to solve the current practical problems: saving money and selling cars.
Saving money will continue to be one of the main themes of NIO in 2024.
Feng Wei, CFO of NIO, said in the financial report that this year, the company will prioritize business goals, improve system capabilities, and further optimize cost management efficiency.
This is in line with the line set out by Li Bin in his open letter in early November last year: projects that do not improve financial performance for three years will be postponed and cut to ensure the company's long-term competitiveness. He also stressed earlier this year that he wanted to save every penny that doesn't create value for the company and users.
Upstream ** chain enterprises feel deeply about this.
A person from the first chain who supplies to Weilai told Snow Leopard Finance that after the Spring Festival, Weilai put forward a request to reduce the price of parts by 10% to 20% this year. This is the highest price reduction since his company's cooperation with NIO, "in the past, it was reduced by less than 5% every year, and last year it was finally reduced by 1% to 2%."
Reducing costs and increasing efficiency is to save money, and making money depends on selling cars.
In two all-staff letters in November last year and January this year, Li Bin mentioned "ensuring that sales and service capabilities can cope with fierce market competition" and ensuring that sales can be converted into sales as soon as possible.
He realized in June last year that NIO was lagging behind its competitors in terms of sales numbers and sales capacity, and has been working hard since July. At that time, the plan he gave was to increase the number of stores and increase the number of sales to about 5,000. At present, the goal of 5,000 people has been achieved, and improving operational efficiency has become the top priority this year.
The deployment of battery swap stations will also be more from the perspective of increasing sales. As of March 3 this year, NIO has deployed 2,379 battery swap stations, and it is expected to build more than 3,310 battery swap stations by the end of the year. Li Bin plans to let more battery swap stations appear in third- and fourth-tier cities to improve the user experience in the sinking market, "We need to find some more efficient ways to increase our sales in the sinking market."
In addition, Li Bin also believes that the lag in sales ability training and the loss of intended orders due to untimely follow-up are the biggest lessons for NIO in 2023.
However, Li Bin's efforts to save money and sell more cars have not yet been clearly reflected in the financial report.
In Q4 2023, NIO's cost of sales, selling, general and administrative expenses all increased compared with the same period last year, and although R&D expenses narrowed year-on-year, the narrowing range was only 02%。
During the same period, NIO lost 536.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 72%。CMB International said in a research report before the release of the earnings report that NIO's Q4 loss is expected to narrow, but the reason is that the decline in battery costs has offset the terminal discount, rather than reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
In terms of sales, from January to February this year, NIO delivered a total of 1820,000 new vehicles, down 12% year-on-year. In Q1 this year, NIO is expected to deliver 310,000 330,000 vehicles, the same as the same period last year.
In this industry, NIO has always been considered by ** and peers to be a company that prefers long-term thinking. Li Bin said at the 2023 Annual Meeting of Chinese Business Leaders.
The battery swap network, which has been unfavored by the outside world for a long time, is described by him as "a very important competitive advantage in the long run". The reason for making a mobile phone is explained that it is not for profit, but that NIO users need a mobile phone that connects seamlessly with NIO.
Even the huge losses that have long been the top in "Wei Xiaoli", Li Bin also regarded it as "an investment, on the one hand, R&D, and on the other hand, infrastructure" at the NIO Innovation and Technology Day in September last year.
But with NIO's revenue, it is not easy to support these "investments".
In April last year, Li Bin joked that if the company's monthly sales were still about 10,000 units, he would have to find a job with President Qin Lihong. However, in the whole year of last year, NIO only delivered more than 20,000 vehicles in July, and delivered a total of 160,000 vehicles throughout the year, only 65% of the annual sales target3%。
The decline in deliveries also hurt the company's profitability. In 2023, NIO's gross profit margin will be 55%, down 49 percentage points.
When long-termism struggles to deliver exciting short-term returns, inefficiencies begin to grow in the name of long-termism.
At the beginning of 2023, Li Bin said in an open letter that "inefficient organizations, inefficient teams, inefficient processes, and inefficient projects need to be comprehensively sorted out and optimized." The goal of the layoffs in November last year was to "improve organizational efficiency, merge redundant departments and positions, and change inefficient internal work processes and division of labor."
Li Bin himself is also a little more "wary" of the seemingly beautiful word long-termism.
In December last year, he publicly listed three pitfalls of long-termism:
Organizational inertia: "We used to engage in self-development of batteries. It may be true in the long run, but if you don't balance long-termism with short-term rhythm in the process, you could spend very, very much money."
Resource boundary: "If the short-term return of many long-term investments is insufficient, it will form a squeeze on the resource boundary";
It is easy to form a corporate culture that shirks short-term execution efficiency and ignores short-term execution efficiency: "Therefore, NIO has strengthened its internal capital efficiency since the beginning of this year."
At a recent NIO Day communication meeting, Li Bin didn't even mind being seen as "short-sighted". "You can say that NIO is a company that pursues short-term execution, and that it is okay for us to be short-sighted, so we will be encouraged, and we are a company that pays attention to execution efficiency. ”
He said that the original intention of long-termism will not change, "but long-termism is not an excuse for not doing a good job in short-term implementation."
Li Bin pinned his hopes for this year on the improvement of sales capacity and the new brand Alps.
In his plan, as the sales consulting business matures, it is expected that after Q1, NIO will be able to stabilize above the baseline of 20,000 units per month. The NIO brand is responsible for ensuring gross margins, and the Alps, which will be launched "when everyone is exhausted", will mainly take on the task of moving volumes.
The Alps brand will be officially launched in Q2, with the launch of its first product, Q3, and mass deliveries in Q4. NIO aims to open no less than 200 stores within the year to create a sales network that is "more efficiency-oriented".
Li Bin revealed that the brand's first new car will be a "battery-swappable Model Y", which costs about 10% cheaper than Tesla, so "the pricing can give a good space".
But the competitive environment is becoming more volatile, and time is passing little by little.
Li Bin once bluntly said that this year we should give up the illusion of "whether market competition will improve". In the all-staff letter, He Xiaopeng described 2024 as the first year for Chinese auto brands to enter the "sea of blood" competition.
In such a competitive environment, even the top players have to make compromises on **. In the first two months of this year, Tesla and BYD have cut prices one after another. Open source ** said in a research report that the result of the price reduction tide is to accelerate the arrival of the knockout competition in the passenger car industry, and the increase in industry concentration is the general trend.
This is not good news for NIO, which does not plan to participate in the ** war.
At the user meeting three days before the release of the financial report, Li Bin said that the pricing and positioning of the follow-up cars of the NIO brand will go up a little bit and distance itself from the Alps. He once again emphasized at the financial report meeting that he would not use the form of a war to exchange volume.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered its price target and rating on NIO in a recent research note due to the lack of new models this year. At the same time, Xpeng, BYD and Xiaomi are expected to launch new models, which may further intensify the competition for Alps.
In the face of challenges and doubts, Li Bin responded that the company "still has tens of billions of cash, so you don't have to worry." According to NIO's financial report, in Q4 2023, NIO's cash reserves will be 57.3 billion yuan.
CMBI believes that the investment of more than RMB 20 billion by the Abu Dhabi sovereign** in NIO last year can support its development needs from 2024 to 2025. This is also an important window period that determines the company's survival, and NIO still needs to clarify its strategic direction before it can expect to turn a profit in the foreseeable future.
In February this year, Li Bin was asked in a live broadcast "when will NIO go out of business". He replied: "If you don't support us, we don't have any point in living, and if you support us, we will live a long life." ”
Before achieving the goal of "living a long life", he needs to let NIO get through the current predicament as soon as possible.