Last year, it cooperated with BYD to launch the customized online car D1.
Editor’s note: This article from the micro-channel public number “deep ring” (ID: deep-echo), of: Tingting, Anthony.
Another one.
Yesterday, “LatePost” reported that Didi started to build a car project. The person in charge is Yang Jun, the vice president of Didi and the general manager of Xiaoju Auto Service. The report also quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that Zhu Jiang, who was the vice president of user development of NIO, may join Didi. Zhu Jiang has many years of experience in car companies and has worked in BMW Brilliance, Lexus, Weilai, Ford China and other companies.
However, in the evening, Zhu Jiang denied the news of joining Didi to the media: “The dark horse will be listed next week. Don’t spread rumors to disturb our military’s mind! This news is too fake.”
Under the rumors of true and false, Didi fell into suspicion of car building. Although the news has yet to be further verified, after Baidu and Xiaomi have announced that they will build cars, it does not seem to be a surprising news for Didi to build cars.
In fact, Didi has long been involved in the wave of car-making. The customized car-hailing D1, which it has built in cooperation with BYD, was launched in November last year.
According to the plan mentioned by Didi founder Cheng Wei at the press conference, Didi’s customized online car-hailing will continue to iterate. By 2025, the customized version of online car-hailing D3 will be popularized on the Didi platform by more than 1 million units. . With this news, it is a logical move for Didi to continue to explore the direction of customized online car-hailing.
In addition, Didi also has a long-standing deployment in the field of unmanned driving, which is strongly related to car manufacturing. Didi started to set up an autonomous driving research and development team in 2016, and set up its first overseas AI laboratory in California the following year. In 2018, it upgraded the autonomous driving part to an independent company, Woya Technology. In May of last year, Didi Autonomous Driving Company received a US$500 million investment led by the SoftBank Vision Fund, which is also the highest single financing in this field in China.
Whether it is for higher operational efficiency or for the implementation of driverless technology, Didi, which is already doing business, does have a reasonableCar building logic.
Combined with the rumors of Didi’s IPO on the market, the news of its car building is more intriguing. However, even with the hot car concept “escort”, under the anchoring effect of Uber’s “dragging”, can Didi continue to impress those investors who are not cold about the online car-hailing model?
After all, building a car is not a panacea.
Conjecture of building a car
Didi may be the most experienced in the craze for Internet companies to build cars across borders.
During the customized D1 with BYD, Didi Travel Automotive Innovation Center assembled automotive engineering, design, and technical teams, and participated in vehicle engineering packages, ergonomics layout, interior and exterior trim modeling, vehicle configuration, seat prototypes, Design of car networking software architecture, etc. This also means that Didi has been deeply involved in the car building process.
The D1 customized by Didi and BYD is behind the story of the “car operator”. According to the assumption, Didi will purchase and arrange financial solutions in a unified manner, and play a role of a full life cycle manager in maintenance, refueling, charging and disposal, with the goal of maximizing the operational efficiency and user experience of online car-hailing.
At the same time, as the “battle” on the travel track has basically stabilized, Didi may focus more on refined operations and seeking new growth points in the future. If Didi’s car is confirmed, it will undoubtedly bring an imaginative story.
According to the “LatePost” report, Didi’s new car plan is likely to be a further exploration of customized online car-hailing along D1. But in terms of model, it will be different from the way in which automakers dominate when D1 was previously launched. At the same time, Didi will not set up a wholly-owned subsidiary to build cars like Xiaomi, the model may be lighter than Xiaomi.
According to this kind of thinking, Didi is likely to use the foundry + supplier model to truly step into the current hottest new energy vehicle track. It is facing a huge market of over 10 trillion yuan, and the current pattern is undecided. , A market full of opportunities.
Currently, the secondary market’s high expectations for new energy vehicles have driven the stock prices of related companies to skyrocket. Tesla, with an annual sales volume of only 500,000 vehicles, has its latest market value of more than $660 billion, far exceeding the traditional giant Toyota, which sells nearly 10 million vehicles per year; its Chinese “apprentices”-Weilai, Xiaopeng, and ideal market value , Also reached 62.7 billion U.S. dollars, 29.2 billion U.S. dollars, 23 billion U.S. dollars, although their delivery last yearThe number has not exceeded 50,000, and it is still at a loss.
Among them, Weilai is already close to the upcoming Didi in terms of market value. According to “LatePost” reported that Didi plans to go public this year, and the listing location may choose Hong Kong, with a target valuation of approximately US$60 billion to US$80 billion. In November 2020, Didi Chuxing announced that its domestic monthly active users exceeded 400 million, ranking first in the industry for a long time.
Previously, after the news of Baidu and Xiaomi entering and making cars, their stock prices began to rise immediately. Since December 2020, Baidu’s stock price has risen by more than 50% since it was confirmed that it had left the market to build a car; after the news of Xiaomi’s car building, the stock price also rose immediately.
Secondly, Didi was also given the opportunity to build cars. It has more room to play in the field of autonomous driving and can better coordinate operations between software and hardware. It is understood that Didi has established an autonomous driving technology research and development department in 2016, focusing on L4 autonomous driving technology. In August 2019, Didi announced that it would upgrade its autonomous driving division to an independent company. Then quickly obtained a large amount of financing. In May 2020, it received over US$500 million in financing from SoftBank. In January 2021, Didi once again received a new round of US$300 million in new financing.
Currently, Didi’s autonomous driving plan is mainly carried on D1. According to Cheng Wei’s previous description, in 2025, Didi will popularize 1 million D1s and be equipped with autonomous driving technology; in 2030, Didi’s customized cars will even remove the cockpit and realize fully autonomous driving.
Behind this is Didi’s advance layout of Robotaxi’s huge market. It is understood that the application of L4 level autonomous driving technology in the future will be more in the field of commercial vehicles, and autonomous driving taxis are one of them. UBS previously predicted that by 2030, the Robotaxi market will exceed $2 trillion. A McKinsey research report shows that China will be the world’s largest autonomous driving market. By 2030, the total sales of autonomous vehicles will reach 230 billion U.S. dollars, and the amount of travel service orders based on autonomous driving will reach 260 billion U.S. dollars.
Again, building cars will help Didi achieve an ecological closed loop. At present, software redefines automobiles and has been generally accepted by the industry. Didi has already made arrangements in the areas of agent driving, finance, freight, carpooling, ride-hailing, errands, insurance, Xiaoju charging, Xiaoju car suits, driverless, maps, etc. It is conceivable that in the future, with Didi’s diversified business layout, all C-end services can be aggregated on new cars, thereby achieving an ecological closed loop.
DidiBuilding a car allows it to have more room for growth and a higher valuation outside of travel, and it will also have the opportunity to create the “next Didi” in the future.
Find new stories
With Didi’s more and more in-depth exploration in car building, the questioned online car-hailing model has a new story.
When Didi was first established in 2012, online car-hailing was the sexiest business story on the market. The focus of the narration at that time was to maximize benefits through model innovation.
Based on private car sharing, the online car-hailing model allows some vehicles that were idle most of the time to become capacity. Carpooling, ride-hailing and other scenes are more people packed into fewer cars through overlapping routes. Greatly improve the efficiency of asset use. Behind this is one of the simplest economic principles: to maximize the benefits of limited resources to meet people’s needs as much as possible.
Today, online car-hailing has indeed become an important part of the operation of society, and it has contributed a lot to the upgrade of urban travel. However, the model of online car-hailing has never allowed the platform to solve its own money-making problem.
In the most simplified model of online car-hailing, the profitability of the platform is determined by two parts: one is the total turnover (order volume x unit price per customer), and the other is the commission ratio. After the initial stage of burning money to complete the market education, the platform wants to make itself blood. According to the above model, two ideas can be adopted: increase the customer unit price for the user side, or increase the commission rate for the driver side.
But these two methods have their own logical contradictions. In high-tier cities with the greatest demand for online car-hailing, public transportation systems are equally developed. In most scenarios, online car-hailing is not a necessary choice for users. Therefore, users are actually sensitive to the price of online car-hailing. If the price of online car-hailing is too high, the order volume will decrease accordingly.
In another way of thinking, if the proportion of the driver’s side is increased, it will most likely lead to a shortage of capacity, which will also affect the decline in order volume. A driver of the Sunshine Travel Platform recently told Shenxiang: “I used to run Didi at night, but Didi is now too high, and many drivers now transfer to other platforms.”
Whether it is for users or drivers, the profit margins that Didi can dig further are very limited.
But huge operating expenses have to be spent, and market share still needs to be secured with money. Didi has therefore been struggling in the quagmire of losses. Relevant statistics show that as of the end of 2019, Didi has accumulated losses in the 7 years since its establishment. Is expected to exceed50 billion. It was only in April last year that Liu Qing, the president of Didi Travel, revealed for the first time that Didi’s core business was profitable, but Didi did not elaborate on this.
This is not just Didi’s dilemma, but the shackles brought about by the online car-hailing model. After Uber went public and publicly disclosed financial data, doubts about the online car-hailing model gradually overwhelmed expectations for the sharing economy model, and Uber’s stock price remained sluggish.
Uber stock price chart Tuyuan Xueball
Under the restrictions of the mode, online car-hailing seems to have become a thankless business, and players of all walks of life have to find their own solutions.
In order to solve the problem of making money, Uber chose to focus on the food delivery business. As the proportion of food delivery revenue continues to increase, Uber’s stock price has also risen. At present, the food delivery business has supported half of Uber’s revenue.
Meituan, Baidu, and AutoNavi have chosen the aggregated taxi-hailing model. The platform has greatly reduced operating expenses through the asset-light model. This is a way to break the shackles of the traditional ride-hailing model, but the problems that Didi faces are still unresolved. The rise of the aggregation model has even further intensified the intensity of competition encountered by Didi.
So, can car-making provide Didi with a way to break the shackles of the model and solve the profit dilemma?
Didi tells a new online car-hailing story: Didi customized cars can change the current high cost led by fuel vehicles, and are linked with technologies such as autonomous driving and big data to further optimize the online car-hailing model. Operational efficiency, optimize the profit model without overly compressing the interests of users and drivers.
Although the car building rumors have yet to be implemented, and the implementation and implementation of the project will take more time, Didi, who has been lingering in front of the IPO for a long time, really needs such a new story to answer investors’ questions that Uber has never been able to answer. problem.