“Fanquan” rescued Wei Lai.
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “Capital Planet Planet” (ID: zibenxingqiu), Author: Prime.
“Fanquan” rescued Wei Lai.
2020 is the year of Wei Lai’s rebirth.
Roughly speaking, in 2020, Weilai issued three convertible bonds, made three additional issuances, and received a strategic investment of 7 billion yuan from Hefei. After a wave of operations, Weilai, who was already short of money, had a staggering 42.5 billion yuan in cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash and short-term investment balances on the account by the end of 2020.
After “grain in the pocket”, Weilai’s annual delivery volume increased to 43,700 vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 112.6%. The stock price also rose from $3.72 on January 2 last year to $48.74 on December 30, a 13-fold increase in a year. According to data from NBD, as of the end of February this year, Weilai had a market value of more than 463 billion yuan, ranking second only to BYD’s 564.4 billion, while veteran car companies such as SAIC, GAC, and Changan were all left behind by Weilai.
From the perspective of the industry, NIO can do all this because of its “rice circle culture” formed among car owners. Relying on the “fan” economy, Wei Lai has taken a completely different development route from other car companies.
1. “Learning from Lei Jun”
Li Bin is a legend.
His entrepreneurial experience is very rich. In 1996, Li Bin started his first business, founded Antarctic Technology Company, whose main business is renting out servers and selling domain names. A year later, Li Bin followed Li Guoqing, the dean of the Department of Sociology at Peking University, and founded the Beijing Science Document Industry Information Technology Co., Ltd., which later became Dangdang.com. In June 2000, Li Bin founded Bitauto, which became the earliest auto e-commerce website in China, and was successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange in November 2010.
At the same time, Li Bin’s investment record is also very proud. Including the listed Uxin, Yixin Finance, the unlisted Tick Carpooling, Youyou Cars, Car Carrier, etc. There is also a Mobike that invested 1.46 million yuan as an angel investor, nearly a hundredfold in more than two years, and sold it to Meituan in exchange for a return of 1.34 billion yuan.
It stands to reason that these achievements are enough for Li Bin to retire early, but he happens to be a tossing person. In November 2014, Li Bin founded Weilai Automobile. His Peking University classmate Qin Lihong is the co-founder.
With years of intensive work in the Internet field, Li Bin has his own unique understanding of traffic, but he has almost no knowledge of fan economy. In order to start Wei Lai from 0, he took Qin Lihong to ask for advice.
At the end of 2014, the two came to Beijing to find Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi Technology. At that time, Xiaomi was in full swing, having just received US$1.1 billion in Series E financing, and its valuation reached an unprecedented US$45 billion. Lei Jun’s setThe seven-character mantra of “focus, extreme, word-of-mouth, fast” was regarded as a magic weapon by entrepreneurs at that time.
In this visit, Li Bin learned a lot, such as full customer service, not being hard-broadcasting, not inviting spokespersons, fully empowering front-line employees, allowing fans to become employees, year-end parties, and so on.
Later, even the annual Weilai NIO Day also borrowed from Xiaomi’s “Popcorn Festival”. Li Wanqiang, one of the founders of Xiaomi, wrote in the book “Sense of Participation”: “Popcorn allows users to participate in the whole process. They vote in the forum to decide which city to hold. There will be user performances on site, and performers are selected in advance in the forum. Come out, there will be rice noodle volunteers participating in the decoration of the venue. Every evening when the popcorn is over, the local senior rice noodles will also have a dinner and exchange with the team.” In August last year, Weilai NIO Day began to bid, and after an internal vote in the community, Chengdu finally Won the right to host the 2020 NIO Day. It is said that from the beginning of the planning to the closing of the conference, more than 5,000 fans have prepared for it for more than half a year.
The enthusiastic feedback from fans is based on the “extreme” service of the NIO staff. Sun, who had just become the owner of NIO in February this year, told Capital Planet (ID: zibenxingiqu) that after placing an order, the sales staff pulled him into a WeChat group of more than 300 people. The group was full of car owners and already The prospective car owner who placed the order. After his observation, this salesperson is very attentive to every customer in the group, and everyone can get a timely response to the questions and suggestions in the group.
After picking up the car, Sun wanted to change the color of his EC6, but during that time he was a little busy at work and did not have time to drive to the store to operate. The service staff of Weilai called and said that he could bring the tools and the car to the master. The membrane is operated in the customer’s garage. “This is really intimate. My last car was Volkswagen. Even such a global brand could not provide such a thoughtful service. It made me feel like a ‘God’,” Sun concluded.
The role of “Word of Mouth” was also grasped by Li Bin. According to another Weilai owner, Xiaoxin, he tested and drove a variety of new energy models such as Tesla, BYD, Ideal, etc., and was hesitant to be recommended by his own leadership Weilai ES6. After a test drive, I found the overall feeling. Not bad, plus the leader has always said that Weilai’s service is good, so he placed an order. After using it for nearly a year, he successively Amway a colleague of his own and a neighbor, and that neighbor led his colleague to become the owner of a Weilai car. Xiaoxin said, “Count it down, I am alone. I helped sell at least 4 NIO, and according to my contacts, there are many people who spontaneously spread NIO.”
Of course, Li Bin didn’t forget to repay his favor after stealing Lei Jun. It only takes 7.1 seconds to accelerate from 0-200km/h. The electric supercar Weilai EP9, which refreshes the lap record of New North’s fastest production car, is limited to only 6 in the first batch. Li Bin arranged one for Lei Jun’s boss.
2. Grab Wei Lai’s fansSilk”
After providing users with a high-quality experience, Weilai has opened up a new front-Weilai APP.
In November 2016, the Weilai APP version 1.0 was launched. It only has simple functions such as official news release, user points sign-in, and gift center. Later, the functions became more and more abundant. In the prospectus for Weilai’s IPO in 2018, Li Bin stated that Weilai aims to build APP into a community, starting with cars and developing with users, “NIO as a community will become more popular.”
After opening this APP, we found that it contains traditional car company APP functions, such as unlocking, window lifting, air conditioning adjustment, etc., and it is in UI design and body presentation with competitors Tesla, ideal, small Peng’s difference is not big.
From left: Tesla, Weilai, Xiaopeng, Ideal APP
According to the data of Qimai, in the sub-category ranking, Weilai APP ranks 78, while Xiaopeng Motors and Ideal Auto are out of 500. This is mainly due to the stronger community nature of Weilai APP. In order to maintain the high activity of the community, Li Bin will spend an hour or two at 10 o’clock every evening to send red envelopes in nearly 200 communities. If one day he can’t get out of his body, he will ask his assistant to send red envelopes instead of himself. In a later interview, Li Bin said, “Because I am too busy every day, communicating with users through red envelopes is an effective way in a limited time.”
Image source: Qimai data
In addition to the use of red envelopes by official personnel like Li Bin, many car owners also share their car experience, show their own cars, share energy-saving coups, etc. There are also KOL-type users active in it, making the APP form a community ecological cycle. . This is very similar to the early Bitche.com forums, or this is simply another landing of Li Bin’s experience in Bitche.
In the eyes of outsiders, Weilai’s users and its close-to-crazy “rice circle”.
“Fan circle” is a not new term, generally used to refer to a fan circle, and later extended to an organized and professional interest circle formed spontaneously by fan fans.
On November 22 last year, a 3-minute short video caused a lot of waves in the Weilai community. In the banquet hall of a high-end hotel, a northeast elder brother stood on the stage and sang, and a well-made MV was broadcast on the big screen behind the big screen. The lyrics read: Brother Bin, miss you, Wei Lai let you do it It’s pretty good; Brother Bin, be happy, the US stock market has almost reached 70 billion; Brother Bin, don’t go, it’s not easy to get together in Bingcheng once.
This brother Bin refers to Li Bin. Before he finished listening to this song, Li Bin took the white wine and walked onto the stage and drank it in front of more than a hundred people present.
Followingly, in January this year, a video swiping network of “Nio Shenzhen car owners chartered a plane to Chengdu to participate in a new product launch conference at their own expense”. On this flight from Shenzhen to Chengdu, the owners of Weilai sang, played the piano, and started an “in-flight party”, ignoring the “Guidelines for the Use of Masks in Flight in Guangdong Province” issued by the Guangdong Provincial Epidemic Prevention and Control Team. Passengers in China are required to wear masks. On January 11, relevant persons of Air China stated to the media that such behavior is definitely illegal, and the results of the investigation will be publicized.
There is such a question on Zhihu, “Why are the owners of Weilai cars brainwashed?”, there are more than 140 replies below. Among them, the answer with the highest number of likes wrote: “As for why the owners of Weilai have been brainwashed, I think it’s because Weilai has closely tied the users and families of the cars that have purchased the car together with the App. Check in every day and give points (this stuff) In the NIO car owner group, it’s a hard currency. Car owners can bring their families to spend points to participate in various activities organized every week. There are goods in the car mall and “surprise” that can be purchased with points (most of them are expensive, products sold by cooperation, such as portable wireless Vacuum cleaners are cheaper than a treasure), and car owners can participate in some decisions on the development of Wei Lai based on the value of Wei Lai (a very small number of people).”
The Sun also feels the same. He made it clear that many people think that the NIO car owner group is a “brainwashing organization”, but according to the car owners I have contacted, they are generally educated, socially and in work. Being alone and having his own judgment ability, I like Weilai completely because of the good service and experience, and it has nothing to do with brainwashing.
3. Li Bin’s troubles
The latest financial report shows that in Q4 2020, Weilai Automobile has a net loss of RMB 1.388.6 billion, an increase of 32.6% from the previous quarter; the net loss attributable to the company’s ordinary shareholders is RMB 1.492 billion, an increase of 25.6 compared with the previous quarter. %.
To make matters worse, NIO’s competitor, Tesla, has cut prices nearly 20 times in the past 30 months. The current starting price of Model 3 is 249,900 yuan, which is nearly 100,000 yuan cheaper than when it was first launched. . The price of Model Y has also come to 340,000