Produce the Tiger Sniff Car Group
Author thoughtful
Head picture | Visual China
Although Landau Auto, the second brand of Weilai, tried to create a relaxed and happy atmosphere at its brand launch conference, the capital market did not give face.
On May 15, US Eastern Time, after climbing to $5.8 at the opening, the share price of Weilai quickly dropped by more than 10%, to a minimum of $5.2. In terms of its market value, the largest decline reached nearly $1 billion. Some people commented that the capital market did not buy the Ledo brand and its first new car, the Ledo L60. Currently, Weilai is in a state of "giving full play to the good".
In other words, Wei Lai has finished telling the story.
But in my opinion, it is too early to define Weilai and Ledo.
Wei Lai, why do you have to do music by yourself?
"Ledo brand will be prepared in 2020 and officially launched in 2021," Li Bin said at the media communication meeting on May 16.
Before that, Wei Lai under the leadership of Li Bin had tried to cooperate with other Chinese automobile groups for several rounds, but in the end there was no following.
As early as April 2017, Weilai, which had just released its brand, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Chang'an Auto, announcing that it would build a new brand of electric vehicles by establishing a joint venture. In the following December, Weilai also signed a similar strategic cooperation agreement with GAC Group.
However, neither of the two companies developed as originally planned. With the fading out of Weilai, the former has changed into today's Avita; The latter became co creation.
On the surface, the reason why these two "matchmaking" failed was that the two traditional car groups and Weilai did not even out the graininess in OKR's "O" (target).
Chang'an and GAC initially chose to cooperate, with the purpose of achieving their own brand upward by virtue of Weilai, and building a luxury car brand by absorbing social and even global capital beyond their existing system. While Weilai hopes to cooperate with traditional automobile groups with experience in research and development, production, manufacturing and sales services of affordable automobiles to build products with lower brand positioning but more volume.
However, from the perspective of deep analysis, it is too early to talk about exporting technology and engineering capability to Weilai, which has not delivered a single vehicle in 2017. Li Bin revealed to the author that the positioning of the first generation vehicle platform (NT 1.0) of Weilai at that time was too high to reduce the cost.
Taking the first generation ES8 delivered in 2018 as an example, this car's BIW aluminum alloy content is up to 96.4%, and its torsional stiffness is 44140Nm/deg, reaching the ceiling level of Chinese automobile brands. You should know that the torsional rigidity of the ideal MEGA launched in March this year has only reached 44000Nm/deg, and the aluminum alloy content is incomparable.
The first generation of Weilai ES8
The direct result is that Weilai is out of control in cost control. From a macro point of view, from the US stock IPO in September to Q2 in 2020, the gross profit rate of Weilai's single car has been negative, and one car is sold at a loss. In terms of micro details, if the joint venture partner uses NT 1.0 as the technical base to sell cars, the initial financial pressure is too great. "Even if the 'monkey version' of the reduced allocation and then the reduced allocation is used, it cannot meet the requirements of the joint venture".
As a result, this idea was hidden after Li Bin became "the saddest man in 2019". But in the layout of Li Bin, affordable car brands are a must. Therefore, in 2020, when Weilai NT 2.0 platform new car finished planning and NT 3.0 platform began to be defined, the company again put the work of the second brand on the agenda. At this time, Weilai finally has the ability to export technology and engineering.
"In the past few years, Weilai has transformed its R&D business line into a competence center and completed a very important organizational change," said Li Bin.
Wei Lai needs a brand with a high volume.
Ledao L60
From the perspective of profitability, it is difficult for Weilai to turn losses into profits by itself. In the past 2023, Weilai sold 160000 new cars, realizing a total revenue of 55.62 billion yuan. Its R&D cost reached 13.43 billion yuan, accounting for 24% of its total revenue, which directly led to the annual net loss of 20.72 billion yuan.
In contrast, BMW's global sales in 2023 will be 2.55 million vehicles, with R&D expenses accounting for 5% of the revenue, which is 7.538 billion euros. The annual sales volume of Mercedes Benz was 2.4916 million, and the R&D expenditure was 10 billion euros, accounting for 6.5% of the revenue.
Obviously, it is the sufficient global sales base that enables BMW and Mercedes Benz to calmly have several times more R&D funds than Weilai. Therefore, if Weilai wants to maintain its long-term R&D intensity, it must improve its product sales. As a result, the second brand was immediately put on the agenda after Weilai "recovered" in 2020.
Ai Tiecheng was selected as the person in charge of the second brand. The senior professional manager who successively served in Procter&Gamble, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Disney and Wework China was dug up by Li Bin in person for several months. He is also a good friend of Qin Lihong, the co-founder and president of the company, who is the No. 2 position of Weilai.
"Ai Tiecheng was my 'teacher father' after I joined P&G in 2001," Qin Lihong told the author.
Qin Lihong on the left and Ai Tiecheng on the right
As early as 2015, when Ai Tiecheng was preparing for the opening of Shanghai Disneyland, he had contact with Weilai. At that time, the latter was building a user experience team, and Aitie has helped "how to design a more perfect user experience journey". In 2016, he was also invited to share internally in Weilai. Later, Ai Tiecheng became one of the first members of Weilai Community, and as the owner of No. 107, he placed an order to purchase the first generation ES8.
After finally entering the Ulai system in 2021 to take charge of the second brand, Aitiecheng was asked to "close the market" for three years, and was officially unveiled after the launch ceremony of the 500000 new car of Ulai on May 9.
However, as expected, the executive did not directly become the "talker" of the brand's entire business. Whether it was the media communication on the 9th or the music conference on the 15th, Li Bin introduced Ai Tiecheng to the outside world as a "introducer".
In fact, even Li Bin himself admitted that he would help "continuously calibrate" the development of Ledo from the direction.
Coordinate system of music track
As for the definition of Ledo brand, Li Bin gave it quite clearly: happy family, good housekeeping. Interestingly, as a fan of "strategic thinking", he even gave a formula to calculate the "value" of family cars like Ledao:
As shown in the figure, he and Ledao believe that the value evaluation model of family cars should be a division. Among them, the molecular part is the product force that family users most care about, including safety, space, intelligent cockpit, energy supplement, driving and driving, and intelligent driving. Among them, safety and space rank first, and driving experience and smart driving rank last.
In the denominator part, the comprehensive cost of a household car should be minimized, and the residual value should be protected to the greatest extent. Only in this way can the value of the vehicle be maximized. Specifically, the L60, the first new car of Ledao with a pre selling price of 219900 yuan, reflects the pursuit of safety, space and energy consumption.
L60 is extremely good at "stealing" space and energy consumption
Interestingly, during the whole press conference, Li Bin and Ai Tiecheng did not mention the word "performance" at all, and the acceleration performance of this car at 0-100km/h could only be known after its official launch in September. As for the driving control of the L60, this press conference only announced the performance of the vehicle suspension in terms of comfort, as well as the achievements of the whole vehicle in terms of turning flexibility.
Comparison of turning radius of Toyota RAV4, MINI COUNTRYMAN, Lando L60 and Tesla Model Y
The reason behind this is that Li Bin's requirement for "concentration" of the Ledo brand, "I play soy sauce in Ledo, and one day a week I will put it on the product meeting inside the new brand. But my participation, more importantly, makes everyone insist on returning to the scene of home users, and focus on them, otherwise they will sometimes be distorted by the outside."
Ledao had a design scheme before, which was led and developed by a designer in Munich, Europe. "We particularly like that shape, and the space is also very good. But the wind resistance is not perfect enough, and we don't think much about it, so we are rejected."
In other words, it is not enough to "keep the house in order". Later, Weilai replaced the person in charge of the car model with Raul Pires, a former Bentley designer, and finally created the L60, which is not surprising in appearance but extremely windage coefficient.
Although it took an additional half year, Li Bin still insisted on his decision. The fundamental reason is that, compared with Weilai, which is based on the high-end car market and focuses on beauty, personality and benchmarking BBA in terms of appearance design and model positioning, Li Bin defines Ledao as a learning object not only Tesla, but also Toyota.
As shown in the press conference PPT above, the L60 benchmarking products include not only Model Y, but also FAW Toyota RAV4 (Chinese name "Rongfang").
In Li Bin's opinion, although the RAV4 is only 4.6 meters long and is a compact SUV, it and Toyota are the models of Ledo brand. In addition to what has been mentioned above, compared with competitors at the same level, it has excellent space, comfort, fuel economy and urban driving convenience. It is worth mentioning that this car also has a sense of design in appearance and is very recognizable on the street.
It is for these reasons that RAV4 has become one of the highest selling passenger cars in the world in recent years. If this car is added to GAC Toyota Fenglanda on the same platform in China, it can still achieve 32500 monthly sales in China today. In the global market, this car will achieve the delivery volume of 1 million vehicles in 2022, ranking first, until 2023 when it is surpassed by Tesla Model Y.
In addition, Li Bin also told the author in the exchange that Ledao should learn from Toyota not only product definition, but also lean management. He revealed that during their internal meetings and decision-making process, the formula mentioned above was much more detailed than that shown outside
However, Li Bin, Qin Lihong and Ai Tiecheng did not disclose the specific sales target of Ledo L60. You should know that although there are many medium-sized SUVs of 200000 yuan level in China, there are few pure electric versions. In fact, except for Tesla Model Y, the current steady sales volume of both BYD Song L and Zhiji LS6 is less than 5000.
Therefore, it is really a bad thing whether Ledao can help itself or even electric vehicles to open up the market and grab market share from fuel vehicles and even hybrid vehicles by relying on Weilai's technology, power exchange system and brand awareness. This not only depends on whether the final interior details of the model and the comprehensive performance of the product can satisfy consumers, but also has a direct relationship with the sales system and team building of Lando.
In this view, whether Ledao, the "second in the family" who is under the pressure of measurement, can quickly help the family "get rid of poverty and become rich" needs more resources from Li Bin and his team.
Next, how does Ledao plan to go?
According to the planning of Ledao, L60 will be launched and delivered in September this year. As for the reason why they chose to launch the brand 4 months in advance, Li Bin and Ai Tiecheng said that the average family user purchase cycle is 3 to 6 months. "We need to get familiar with everyone first, so that everyone can put us on the list of consideration."
According to the plan, before listing, the brand will have more than 200 stores in supermarkets and stores in the auto park. At the initial stage, Ledao will share the delivery center with Weilai in most cities, and later build an independent delivery system according to the delivery rhythm in different regions.
Li Bin and Qin Lihong also partially explained the differences between the rights and interests of users of Ledo and Weilai that are concerned by the outside world. At the level of the company's well-known points system, the two brands are connected at the level of points and malls. After all, they are all within the same framework of a listed company. At the same time, in terms of after-sales and service systems, Ledo and Weilai also share a set of maintenance stores, and can exchange power stations in general (Ledo can only use 3 and 4 replacement power stations, which has exceeded 1000 at present).
However, compared with Weilai, the rights and interests of Ledao users at the service level are bound to be reduced. It is known that the former cannot enter NIO House without the latter's users, and some items in the worry free benefit package of Weilai service will not be open to Ledao users.
"The invisible part shall be shared by both parties as much as possible, and the visible part shall be separated from each other as much as possible." This can be understood as Weilai's operation ideas for Ledao user services.
However, among the three battery packs currently planned by the Ledo brand, at least two specifications of 60kWh and 90kWh are different from the current 75kWh and 100kWh configurations of Weilai. Therefore, how to allocate the 22 and 23 battery compartments in the third and fourth generation replacement power stations of Weilai has become a problem to be solved. Not to mention, Weilai has now launched a 150kWh battery pack.
But Li Bin is optimistic about this. He revealed that at present, the company's energy team has adopted a modular design idea when planning the fourth generation station, which can provide more battery compartments or power change station options according to the needs of surrounding users and site conditions, thus providing different solutions. "I can't wait to use more people."
This is all we can know about the products of Ledo L60. However, for the second of the three models planned by Ledao, the executives of Weilai also disclosed some information in the communication on May 16. At present, this car has been basically identified as a medium and large pure electric SUV with 6/7 seat optional version, which is expected to be launched and delivered in 2025. "At the same level as the ideal L8 or L9, the price is more than 100000 yuan cheaper."
Similarly, the design of this car continues to be completed by Raul Pires. It is understood that Weilai is not the first enterprise that this famous designer serves in China. As early as 2021, as the senior vice president of styling at Great Wall Motors, he talked about the design inspiration of Great Wall Motors in conjunction with Tank 700 during the Shanghai Auto Show.
On the right is Raul Pires, then vice president of design of Great Wall Motors
"In those years, Raul Pires came to work in China and directly arrived in Baoding after landing in Beijing. He had no experience of living in the first tier cities." A person familiar with the matter said to the author, "I told him at that time that you should visit more big cities in China."
Now, having settled in Shanghai, he obviously has more opportunities to show his creativity in design. In addition, Raul Pires has another trait that is highly valued. He was born and raised in Brazil, a big developing country like China.
"Raul Pires is not a native European designer, which is very valuable. It helps him to have a deeper understanding and insight into the needs of users in developing countries for consumption upgrading." Qin Lihong told the author.
According to the current plan, there will be a third model of Ledao brand launched in 2026, but it has not been finalized. But when that happens, the third brand of Weilai, the code name "Firefly", will also continue to launch. Qin Lihong revealed that the brand will focus more on the purchase needs of young people, and the model size will be relatively smaller, "similar to MINI in BMW". At the same time, the brand's operation may be more lightweight, "will be directly displayed and sold in Weilai stores".
From this perspective, Weilai's story is far from finished. If all goes well, this time next year, Weilai may become an automobile group with three brands running at the same time.
Write at the end:
At the press conference of the Ledo brand, careful viewers may find that there are a lot of similarities between the Ledo L60 and the new generation flagship ET9 released by Weilai at the end of last year. Both adopt the same 900V high-voltage architecture, horizontal central control screen, and the same 4D millimeter wave radar.
The central control screens of Ledo L60 and Weilai ET9 both adopt a horizontal screen scheme different from that of current mass production vehicles
In other words, both belong to the NT 3.0 platform model of Weilai. But ET9 was released first, and Ledo L60 was delivered first. However, this information was intentionally ignored at the press conference.
In the era of traditional fuel vehicles, a new whole vehicle architecture, design language or power mode is generally preferred to be upgraded in flagship models or product lines, and then gradually installed in models with lower positioning and price. However, Weilai took the lead in breaking this convention this time.
In this regard, the author does not know whether the future users of Weilai ET9 have any opinions. But for Weilai, which runs multiple brands for the first time, this is likely to become a problem to be solved.
