Under the cold winter, why is Xiaomi helping Xiaopeng electric vehicles

New energy vehicles are inevitable in the future, but there are many uncertainties in this necessity. Among them, the consideration of life and death has become the biggest variable related to the entire industry.

According to data from the China Automobile Association, in the first half of 2019, the overall sales of automobiles fell by 14%. In October, the production of new energy vehicles was 95,000 units, a year-on-year decrease of 35.4%, and the sales volume was 75,000 units. A year-on-year decrease of 45.6%. Not only the overall trend is down, but the major new power car companies have also lost their way in the journey. At the beginning of 2019, Min’an Automobile planned to lay off 50% of its employees and owed many employees’ wages; Byton Motors was exploded in arrears with FAW Xiali 310 million yuan; the new force “unicorn” Weilai Automobile also had a new round of delay due to delay. Financing and fell into the “closed down” storm.

Therefore, no matter from which point of view, the new energy vehicle market in 2019 can be regarded as the approaching winter.

However, under the cold winter, we still saw the strong counterattack of Xiaopeng Motors-on November 13, 2019, Xiaopeng Motors issued an announcement announcing the official completion of the $400 million Series C financing, with the participation of Lei Jun’s Xiaomi Group in.

In the midst of a downturn in the industry, Xiaopeng completed a huge amount of financing and successfully overcame the calamity. So, why did Xiaomi, who had never set foot in this field, lend a helping hand, and what plans did Lei Jun and his Xiaomi have for future travel?

The wind is still and the trees are still

Compared with the efforts made by new power car companies such as Weilai, Tesla, and Weimar in terms of delivery, due to various reasons such as reputation, Xiaopeng’s frequent bounces have not been paid enough attention by the market – reputation Not being loud enough is sometimes not necessarily a bad thing, and it may also play an unintentional role.

Taking Weilai as an example, it officially released Weilai ES8 on December 16, 2017, and it was delivered in a hurry only half a year later. Although according to NIO’s financial report, it delivered a total of 11,348 ES8s in 2018, but the quality of the cars has fallen behind. Since April 2019, for three consecutive months, NIO ES8 has a spontaneous combustion accident.

In the end, Weilai had no choice but to announce in June 2019 the recall of 4,803 ES8s produced as of October 19, 2018. According to public data, by the end of June 2019, Weilai had delivered a total of 17,550 ES8s, which means that Weilai recalled nearly a quarter of the ES8 at once.

According to Weilai’s speech at the 2019 Q2 financial report conference, the main reason for Weilai’s Q2 profit decline was due to the recall incident. It is no exaggeration to say that desperately increasing production capacity is a major reason for NIO’s losses.

In fact, not only Weilai, but also new power car companies including Tesla, in order to let consumers get cars as soon as possible, have repeatedly tried their best to increase production capacity, ignoring quality problems, which has led to frequent spontaneous combustion accidents.

At this time, when we look at the delivery date of Xpeng’s frequent delays, and the status quo of Xpeng Motors with zero quality problems after one year of delivery, it seems that we can also understand the reasons for Xpeng’s delayed ticket delivery from a certain aspect.

In fact, although Xiaopeng was extremely difficult to give birth in the early stage of delivery, when the production line matured, Xiaopeng’s production capacity was not weak at all. According to the data of the National Passenger Federation, as of September 2019, the sales volume of Xiaopeng G3 was 12,829 The number of vehicles is much higher than that of new front-line car companies such as Weilai.

Considering that NIO has raised nearly 10 billion in financing scale than Xiaopeng, it is definitely a surprise that Xiaopeng can achieve such a result.

It can be said that perhaps it is thanks to the pursuit of products, refined operation and precise capital use efficiency that Xiaopeng avoided Weilai’s “giant loss god pit”.

The new story of Xiaomi and Xiaopeng

The most significant investor in Xpeng’s financing this time came from Xiaomi. On the one hand, of course, Xiaomi recognized Xpeng’s business model, and on the other hand, Xiaomi’s ambitions were exposed.

In fact, Xiaomi and Xiaopeng showed signs of friendship long before financing.

On December 15, 2017, Shunwei Capital, a subsidiary of Lei Jun, participated in Xpeng Motors’ A+ round of financing. On September 24, 2019, Xiaomi announced that the Xiaomi Mi 9 Pro 5G version can serve as the key to the new Xpeng P7, which will be launched in Q2 2020.

As early as 2015, Xiaomi began to deploy IoT through the vigorous “chain building” movement, hoping that IoT will become another driving force for Xiaomi in addition to mobile phones.

With the arrival of 5G network, IoT will bloom with greater vitality. According to the National Cable Television Association (NCTA), with the explosion of 5G networks, the number of installed IoT devices is expected to grow to more than 50 billion by 2020.

And with the development of the 5G network, self-driving cars may also become possible, and once the car enters the autonomous driving stage, the potential of the “platform” of the car may explode as infinite possibilities as the functional machine enters the smart machine.

However, since automobiles belong to a high-threshold industry, it can only be nonsense to enter the automobile industry through “chain manufacturing”. More importantly, IoT manufacturers seem to be gradually dissatisfied with Xiaomi’s unique IoT share obtained by closed data, and gradually begin to surround Xiaomi.

Combining these two considerations, Xiaomi laid out automotive products early in the stage of new forces, which was also the last piece of the puzzle for its IoT puzzle.

It can be said that Xiaomi’s investment in Xiaopeng is also a supplement to its own resources and capabilities, which is a win-win situation for Xiaopeng and Xiaomi.

Although at present, Xiaopeng can be regarded as a “proud horseshoe disease in the spring breeze, and I can see all the Chang’an flowers in one day” among the new power car companies. However, considering the industry, Xiaopeng still has two major problems to face, one is the product upgrade, and the other is the encirclement and suppression of Tesla Model 3.

Looking at Xiaopeng’s products, the average price of its G series is only in the range of 140,000 to 200,000. Compared with a number of new power car companies, it is quite a bit of “Xiaomi’s high cost performance”.

Although this is of great significance for improving its own market share, cars are different from mobile phones after all, and the simple cost-effectiveness is destined to not be too high.

And limited by the price cost, if Xiaopeng continues to adhere to the “low price strategy”, it will be difficult to support the corresponding products in the face of the autonomous driving technology brought by the upcoming 5G network.

Therefore, Xpeng urgently needs to launch Xpeng P7 to prove its potential in the high-end market, and to achieve technological breakthroughs as soon as possible through Xpeng P7, forming an unbreakable technical barrier.

But on the other hand, the Xiaopeng P7, which sells for about 300,000 yuan, inevitably encounters a new energy legend that has been tested by the market, the Tesla Model 3.

In comparison, Xiaopeng P7 has a cruising range of more than 600KM, supports L3-level automatic driving assistance systems, accelerates 100 meters in 4 seconds, and sells for about 300,000 yuan;

The domestic Tesla Model 3 long-endurance version has a cruising range of 590KM. If you purchase AP+FSD separately, it can accelerate to 100 meters in 3 seconds, and the final price is about 400,000;

Although the Tesla Model 3 is more expensive in terms of price, the current Tesla Model 3 has not been fully “localized”. I believe that with the gradual “localization” of the Tesla Model 3, its price can be increased drop some. More importantly, with the gradual completion of Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory, its production capacity will increase to 500,000 vehicles per year within two years, which is no less than dimensionality reduction for Xiaopeng, who is “seeking progress while maintaining stability”. blow.

Therefore, although Xiaopeng has temporarily won the popularity of the capital market with its products and a firm ally of Xiaomi. However, in the external environment, Xiaopeng still faces a lot of challenges. The key to all of this will be on the Xpeng P7 delivered by Xpeng in Q2 of 2020. In the face of Tesla’s encirclement and suppression, can Xpeng continue to perform abnormally and steadily? Lei Jun’s electric car x Whether the lofty ideal of IoT can be realized or not depends on the product itself.

Author: Yuan Chuang Source: Electric Technology