Is BBA really dangerous?
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “Tech Planet” (ID: tech618), Author: Yang Xiaohe.
Just last night, “Iron Man” Elon Musk officially replaced Jeff Bezos as the new richest man in the world.
The founder of the smart car company surpassed the value of the founder of the Internet e-commerce platform. “This is the new era. This is the biggest historical opportunity in the past 30 years.” Zheng Gang, the founder of Zihui Ventures, who is now building cars in the United States Tell Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618) that the translocation of the richest man is a new era node.
In 2020, Tesla’s market value has soared by about 700%. As of the close of January 7, 2021, Tesla’s stock price has risen by 7%, bringing its market value to $773.5 billion. Tesla CEO Musk’s net worth is US$188.5 billion, which is US$1.5 billion more than Amazon CEO Bezos’s net worth. Musk, who became the richest man, said in “Versailles”: “Really strange” and “go back to work. Right”.
Different from Musk’s calmness, Musk was appointed a god earlier in China.
Tesla entered China in 2014, including Sina CEO Cao Guowei, Carhome President Li Xiang, and Zheng Gang, the founder of Zihui Venture Capital, who has invested in Momo and Hammer Technology, as one of the first nine car owners. A lot of domestic bigwigs became fans in front of Musk.
“I was very excited at the time, because you know that electric cars must be the future.” Zheng Gang recalled that at the handover ceremony, he volunteered to take a photo with Musk, but he did not expect that Musk would become the world’s richest man so soon.
It’s true that the new car-building forces did not have a smooth journey.One can foresee the grand scene of the new car-making forces today. 2017-2019 was the darkest moment for Tesla. During the difficult mass production process, Musk had the idea of selling Tesla to Apple, but Apple CEO Cook did not even meet with him.
The domestic new energy vehicle industry also fell to the bottom in 2019. The first Internet-based new car-making power NIO to be listed on the market, due to the rumored Yizhuang State Investment’s 10 billion investment has not landed, NIO’s share price fell to a minimum of $1.19 . Li Xiang, the founder of Ideal Auto, also felt helpless against the pressure of his powerful enemy Tesla: “Tesla ran over everyone!”
In 2020, the industry will usher in a turning point. New energy vehicles hit by the epidemic bucked the trend and sold 1.8 million vehicles, a year-on-year increase of about 40%. Affected by the boom in production and sales, the market value of Weilai, Ideal and Xiaopeng has been rising. When the time comes to the beginning of 2021, Tesla’s Shanghai super factory has begun to show off, and Model Y has cut the price by up to 160,000, which makes the new domestic car manufacturers feel the pressure of “price war”.
In 2021, will the new car industry replicate the madness of 2020? Tesla continues to cut prices, how do domestic new energy vehicles respond? What is the real situation of Evergrande and Jia Yueting’s car building? Where is the technological evolution of new car-making forces heading? How is Zheng Gang’s new energy vehicle progress? In response to these issues, Tech Planet conducted an exclusive interview with Zheng Gang, the founder of Zihui Venture Capital.
Building a car is a historical opportunity for this generation
Tech Planet: In 2020, the stock prices of new car companies have risen a lot. Have you bought Tesla or domestic new energy vehicles? Do you earn more?
Zheng Gang: When the global stock market fell sharply during the epidemic last year, I bought some Tesla shares when Tesla stock was more than $300, earning about 10 times. This has something to do with belief and cognition, because from the beginning to the end, I am determined to be optimistic about the pioneered by TeslaPure electric vehicle industry. Because of the entrepreneurial relationship, I basically don’t play stocks. To be honest, if I really only want to make money and buy Tesla stocks with the entrepreneurial money, the return on investment will come faster and more directly.
Tech Planet: How to look at the difference between investing and making money and starting a car to make money.
Zheng Gang: For a long period of time, the entrepreneur who built the car looked very much like what Zhang Ying said, “The money earned by accident is spent wisely”. But in fact, the essence of smart money is how to invest the money earned accidentally into places that others do not understand and miss, turning uncertainty into a deterministic opportunity, and then creating value to make money. Speaking of building a car, it is stressful and anxious every day. This is a process that I have prepared my mind at the beginning and am willing to go through. It is painful and happy in itself, that’s it.
Tech Planet: Earlier, it was reported that the first new car you started was a pickup truck. Will the new models be expanded to the SUV and sedan fields in the future?
Zheng Gang: Pickup trucks can also be regarded as passenger cars. They are the mainstream models in the US market. Our benchmarking company is only ahead of us at present, and the market space is huge. We will mass-produce an SUV at the end of next year in China and benchmark Model Y. This time the price reduction of Model Y has caused a great shock to the market. I believe that our new car will also have a big shock from all sides. .
Tech Planet: Recently, the domestically produced Model Y has cut its price by up to 160,000. Tesla has actively compared its cost advantage. What do you think of this matter for new energy The impact of the car market?
Zheng Gang: I think whether it is to compete for brand, manufacturing technology, orFighting for automatic driving/intelligence, cost-effectiveness, after-sales and user usage costs, can currently form differentiated competition in many aspects. The current competition of pure electric vehicles is far from the level of a price war. The price cuts of Tesla Model Y compared to other electric vehicles are too early to derive the conclusion of the price war. Last year, pure electric vehicles in the country only accounted for less than 5% of the overall market. There is still a lot of room for differentiation. There is a lot of room for growth and stock development. Price is not the only factor that affects the pattern.
Tech Planet: Tesla has cut prices so drastically, maybe even this year, can domestic new energy vehicles be able to carry it?
Zheng Gang: No problem at all. This market is too big, and users have many considerations for choosing new energy vehicles, such as services, quality, interiors, battery life, safety, and so on. Tesla’s interior has a minimalist style, which many Chinese do not like.
Although I still drive a Tesla, what do you say I like it? It must not be its interior. I have lived in the United States for so many years, and I also know why Americans can accept Tesla’s cool style, but because I’m still Chinese, I still don’t like his interior very much. I prefer the interior of domestic new energy vehicles. Ornaments, such as Weilai, Xiaopeng, Ideal, and BYD Han. Therefore, I think that the competitiveness of the new domestic car manufacturers is still very strong. Although there is a long way to go on the road of intelligence and humanization, it is far from a conclusion that “cannot bear”.
The understanding of the product, the understanding of the user, and the requirements for after-sales I think our Chinese local companies must have advantages. The pattern of the domestic new energy automobile industry is difficult to say clearly within 10 years and 15 years.
Tech Planet: Recently, Foxconn invested in Byton, which almost went bankrupt. How do you see the remaining opportunities in the domestic new energy vehicle market? How many do you think can be accommodated?
Zheng Gang: I think there is no problem accommodating 15-20 companies, because the market is too big and growing rapidly. There is also the second one. People think that the threshold for starting a new energy vehicle is very high, but I think it is actually much lower than before.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, there were no new car companies in the traditional American automobile industry. However, new energy vehicle brands in China and the United States have sprung up after the emergence of Tesla. Although there are some negative reports in the media, when the disruptive change caused by the killerapp of pure electric vehicles is coming, it is normal for thousands of troops to flood in. Therefore, everyone has the mud and sand. You see the early scans of the mobile Internet. Which of the various industries in the past is not this phenomenon? After that, the market will wash its own way, leaving some very competitive companies. From the perspective of industrial chain collaboration, how difficult it was for Tesla to do everything on its own at the beginning, but now the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain are rapidly growing and expanding. The clear and mature division of labor is the result of this. Even simpler. But simple things are not easy to do. The market needs people with the ability to integrate resources to participate in the opportunities brought about by this century’s great revolution.
Therefore, there will be giant companies in the future, as well as many personalized car manufacturers.
Tech Planet: Do you still believe that there will be companies entering the new energy industry this year. Is this the biggest entrepreneurial opportunity in the past 10 years?
Zheng Gang: There will definitely be, and it will happen next year. I think one of the biggest opportunities in these three decades. I have another point of view that the emergence of new energy vehicles has broken the brand pyramid structure of the century-old auto industry established by traditional cars in one fell swoop. There will be brands, but the competitive elements that make up the brand have been redistributed and redefined. Traditional BBAs If you don’t realize this, it’s really hopeless. It is precisely because of this that it gives a huge opportunity for new car-building forces.
New domestic car-making powers and geometric shapes
Tech Planet: Tesla’s Shanghai super factory has a significant effect on capacity improvement. Then Xiaopeng has its own factories in Guangzhou and Weilai in Hefei. Do you think super factories will be a trend?
Zheng Gang: I think if it reaches a certain scale, I definitely hope to have its own factory, so that you can control the full life cycle of the product. If it is foundry, it can be short-term, but it will still encounter different problems in the long-term.
Tech Planet: Where is your new car manufacturing base?
Zheng Gang: First of all, our words will be in China, and it may be determined soon.
Tech Planet: How do you evaluate Evergrande and Jia Yueting’s car building, do you think they have a big chance?
Zheng Gang: I have some knowledge about Evergrande’s car manufacturing, and I have been to Jia Yueting’s factory several times. Jia Yueting’s car is very good and forward-looking from the product point of view, but the key is that this thing has not been played well. He does everything in order to build the car and is very respectable.
Tech Planet: Battery technology is one of the core competitiveness of new energy vehicles. How to evaluate the hotly discussed blade battery?
Zheng Gang: First, the emergence of blade batteries is an important innovation, allowing lithium iron phosphate to have a longer product market life cycle, and its comprehensive cost performance is very high. However, what I understand is that the blade battery technology is very difficult at this stage, the challenge is great, and mass production is not possible, resulting in a serious shortage of capacity; the prospects for recent breakthroughs are not so optimistic. Recently I heard that they have modularized blade batteries. This kind of “innovation” is not so subversive. Of course, we support various innovations in the field of new cars.
Tech Planet: Weilai will release a sedan on January 9. Are you optimistic about this market?
Zheng Gang: There is a huge market for electrification of any vehicle that runs on the ground, not to mention that Weilai now wants to enter the mainstream passenger car field of 200,000 yuan. I estimate that Weilai’s new car will sell 30 Around ten thousand yuan.
It is said that the new car claims to have a cruising range of more than 800 kilometers, which will cause great concern in the market.
Tech Planet: In the future, domestic new car companies will be worldwideWhat role will it be? Will the next domestic richest man Musk be born?
Zheng Gang: I think China is destined to be the world’s largest consumer of new energy vehicles, and it is more likely to be a superpower that supplies the global market. In the future, it is possible that 80% of global pure electric vehicles will be made in China. Not only because of cost advantages, but also because of market advantages, policy advantages and talent advantages, there will be the next Tesla and Musk in China, and the market competition will become more and more exciting.
“New Rome” will not follow the old market positioning
Tech Planet: Some people say that the pattern of the new energy vehicle market is a three-part world. Tesla rules the cities, BYD rules the countryside, and builds new cars. The power is also one pole.
Zheng Gang: Now everyone is grabbing the market share of fuel vehicles. Now everyone is doing their own thing. New energy vehicles only account for 5% of the entire market. Future market changes have unlimited possibilities.
Tech Planet: Public opinion believes that Tesla does not want to do BBA (Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi), but the next Volkswagen, and the three carmakers still want to maintain the BBA position, what do you think of the new car power in the future Positioning?
Zheng Gang: You can’t look at Tesla’s products and positioning from a traditional perspective. Many people are now in a misunderstanding. Model S was 120,000 US dollars in the United States in the early days. Many people compare it to the Mercedes-Benz S600 in the United States. Later, Model X was sold at 700,000 to 800,000 in China, and then many people turned to traditional models such as Audi Q7 for benchmarking. Tesla’s one pass price cut disrupted this benchmarking system.
Tesla has not positioned its car as a car of a certain brand from beginning to end. You have to understand Elon Musk. What he wants to do is change the world. Can a luxury car change the world? The way to change the world is to let everyone drive an electric car, which is called changing the world. If you understand this, you can understand Tesla’s various show operations.
Traditional Auto WorkerThe 100-year-old brand has been fragmented. It doesn’t matter who is the (new) Mercedes-Benz, who is the (new) BMW, and who drives the farmers in the countryside. In the future, electric vehicles will no longer be positioned according to this system.
Tech Planet: Should a new leader formulate the new pattern?
Zheng Gang: Yes, the so-called brand, the so-called pyramid, the so-called system and coverage are no longer applicable. Now is the era of intelligence. Electric cars have surpassed just the hardware itself. The way you get information and the new lifestyle are closely related to this new car. This is the greater significance of smart cars.
Tech Planet: What kind of situation do you think the domestic new car competition will go this year, can you simply predict?
Zheng Gang: 2020 is the first year of new cars, and 2021 is a year of explosive development. It turns out that we think that electric vehicles will replace fuel-fueled vehicles into the family on a large scale. The time node may be 2025. I think it can be reached in 2023 or even 2022. This gives the new car-building forces that have a firm foothold a huge opportunity. The capital market gives them such a high valuation. I think it contains speculation that they can seize market opportunities in the next 3-5 years, while traditional cars have not resisted. ability.
Of course, there are still certain problems in this. For example, at the current stage, new energy vehicles are difficult to charge and the charging speed is slow, but there is no way to deal with it. We have made a lot of attempts by ourselves, and we have been independent in charging. Innovating and creating new business models to change the problem of difficult charging is also a secret project of ours. Once successful, it may drive the development of the entire new energy automobile industry.