Geely is suffocating his dream of marching into new energy, flying cars with currency scatter, and rocketing with great fanfare.
Editor’s note: This article from the micro-channel public number “Alpha Workshop” (ID: alpworks) , of: in Chen Qi.
There are unspoken rules in China’s car manufacturing industry. Any entrepreneur who enters the new energy vehicle must advertise that he is China’s “Musk”.
Even the company ’s public relations image must be 100% imitated by Tesla: super factory, first-principles, from zero to one. There are also many dazzling words in the mouth when entrepreneurs give speeches.
Despite the tumultuous talk, the imitation show of the vast majority of Chinese car-making entrepreneurs is just talking. Only a doer like Li Shufu can come up with real money to build rocket satellites, flying cars, and new energy vehicles.
The next person who “choke on the dream” appeared.
01 New energy dilemma
Under the upsurge of electric cars for all people, Geely Automobile (HK: 00175) did not fall behind, the slogan shouted out, and the real gold and silver were cast.
In 2018, Geely said, “Geely is increasing its investment in research and development of new energy vehicles. By 2020, more than 90% of Geely vehicles will be new energy vehicles.”
Whether this percentage goal can be achieved, through Geely ’s performance last year, you can get a glimpse of Leopard.
In 2019, Geely’s cumulative sales volume was 1,361,560 units, which achieved its annual sales target. Among them, new energy vehicles sold 113,067 units in 2019, a year-on-year increase of 66.5%. Although the growth rate is very fast, this sales accounted for only 8.3% of the total sales.
Geely ’s new energy dilemma is quite similar to other Chinese new energy vehicle companies. Unlike Musk, a company that builds Tesla’s product line from scratch, Geely’s huge volume of traditional models is a huge burden for transformation.
In order to save costs, Geely electric vehicles build EVs on the basis of the emperor of gasoline cars. Whether it is resource investment or technology leaning, Geely is difficult to get rid of the shackles of historical experience.
Taking the old Geely Emgrand EV350 as an example, this ministry has a cruising range of 300km.
Actually, it can run about 280km without air conditioning, 200km in summer, and winter in winter.The air conditioner can only run about 150km. Choosing to change the gasoline model will certainly save costs, but Geely’s technical shortcomings have appeared on the core performance sign such as cruising range.
Similar situations are common in other domestic electric vehicles.
Different from Tesla ’s strong battery life, Geely and other domestic electric vehicles often have limited mileage, which also makes the price-performance ratio of electric vehicles after the facelift different from gasoline vehicles of the same price.
Therefore, to compete for customers, Geely can only work on prices and subsidies. After subsidizing the subsidies, the decline in sales of new energy vehicles laid the groundwork for the decline.
Without subsidies, the price gap with the same gasoline model suddenly widened, and the sales of new energy vehicles showed a premature premature phenomenon: the original production of small-scale new energy vehicles, the cost remains high, and as the scale shrinks , Will further stimulate the deterioration of the price-performance ratio of new energy vehicles, thereby forming a “synchronous circle of rising costs and falling demand”.
But whether it is out of the pursuit of subsidies or the desire for technology, Geely has done its best.
02 Geely coins
Musk ’s partner Peter Thiel said: “We thought we would invent flying cars, but in the end we invented 140 words of Twitter.” In the eyes of Musk and Thiel, flying cars are more like a stalk, proving Technological inventions are not as fast.
However, in Geely’s eyes, there is no technological progress that cannot yield to money.
Terrafugia, a flying car company acquired by Geely, has developed a flying car transition.
terrafugia transition flying car
The speed of this flying car is very light, with a total length of 6.02m, a width of 2.3m, and a height of 1.98m. The curb weight is only 440kg, which is much lighter than that of a general car. Up to 185km / h, cruising range up to 800km.
Despite the huge momentum, the flying car has not yet appeared in China. The high price and the difficulty of driving are the main reasons.
For Chinese drivers, to own it, they first need to prepare 190,000The US dollar is equivalent to about 1.28 million yuan.
Secondly, to drive this flying car, the driver needs both a car license and a flight license. In China, there are only 68,446 flying driver licenses. This narrow target user group makes flying cars destined to be a ticket-like product in a super market segment.
Geely ’s encounter illustrates a truth: Spreading currency is an art.
03 target star sea
Geely ’s latest move is to enter the rocket industry.
In March, the Taizhou Geely Satellite Project was officially launched, and the first two low-orbit satellites independently designed and completed by Zhejiang Space-Time Daoyu Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Space-Time Daoyu”), a subsidiary of Geely Technology Group, have passed various identification Trials and tests are expected to be completed in 2020.
On April 17, SugarDesign (Weibo ID) released a screenshot of Geely ’s public recruitment of the Rocket Chief Engineer, and then Geely Automobile ’s Vice President Yang Xueliang responded to Weibo ’s “Recruit Rocket Chief Engineer, welcome to register, resume @ Geely Recruitment. “
It is worth noting that, according to Geely ’s recruitment conditions, the salary level of the Rocket Chief Division is still far from the average market level.
Generally speaking, from the salary and experience requirements of a company when recruiting teams, it can be clearly judged whether this company is trying to be original or trying to imitate. If you want to use a monthly salary of 50,000 to get a rocket chief, Geely wants to do what is already self-evident.
Soon, Yang Xueliang clarified that the work of this rocket chief is used for the satellite technology reserve of the Geely autonomous driving team in the future. In the future, he is mainly responsible for the formation and operation and maintenance of the Geely global travel constellation system.
In other words, the low-orbit satellite that Geely wants to engage in this time mainly serves Geely’s future autonomous driving plan. Frankly speaking, it remains to be seen how this pixel-level rocket program that imitates the Musk Starchain project will ultimately work.
But Geely ’s real-time chasing hotspots deserves admiration for his spirit of full-time reproduction.
04 The crux of DreamWorks
Like most Chinese manufacturing companies, Geely’s advantage lies in the horizontal expansion of volume, not the vertical breakthrough in technology.
First of all, with the acquisition of Volvo, Geely successfully built a global marketing and capital network. With the vigorous acquisitions around the world, Geely has also spread Geely around the world.Blooming.
Secondly, with the localization of global R & D resources, Geely successfully launched an explosive model such as Emgrand, which has taken the start-up dividend of the Chinese auto market.
However, once you jump out of the traditional car framework, try to innovate in the technological dimension and imitate and surpass companies such as Tesla. Geely has hardly achieved anything. Moreover, it is not just Geely, most Chinese auto companies also have poor performance in new energy vehicles.
This intermediate reason can be explained with one data:
Tesla almost spares no effort in research and development. As a new energy startup, R & D costs are close to 10 billion yuan per year;
Geely Auto ’s cumulative cost-based R & D investment in the past ten years is only 2.322 billion yuan, with an average annual share of 0.56% of revenue.
This shows that Geely ’s ten years of innovation is not enough for Tesla to develop one year.
05 sequelae of cottage
The aftereffects of Geely ’s insufficient R & D investment and their passion for mergers and acquisitions and capital operations have gradually emerged: the core product Emgrand series has entered a transitional period of product power in the past few years, and has lost the explosive power of explosive product scale expansion. .
Generally speaking, fist products fail, under normal market conditions, the performance of auto companies can only barely maintain, let alone Geely will soon face a longer period of auto down cycle.
Know that for the automotive industry, which is an asset-heavy industry, the strength of the core product line is an important factor in increasing its share and even its turnover.
What makes Geely even worse is that the once proud globalized business is facing the possibility of a global economic recession. In addition, the subsidy of the new energy industry will decline, and it is likely that Geely will be further disappointed.
Maybe, in the face of the inability to guarantee the basics of traditional business, Geely will quickly dispel the illusion that he can enter the flying car and rocket satellite, and wake up from the engraved Musk ’s dream.