Musk cuts prices and Tesla appreciates.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat official account “deep dive insight” , author: Rickzhang.
After just dropping the price to more than 200,000 yuan, Tesla ushered in new rumors of price reduction.
On October 15th, a reporter from the automotive media published a message in a group chat, showing that Tesla and the Shanghai government have a gambling agreement that the price of model 3 will be reduced to less than 200,000 by March 2021 .
After the news came out, it quickly detonated the public opinion field. Some media commented that this is no longer a question of “the wolf is coming” and “the wolf is not coming”, but Tesla’s overseas “Big Bad Wolf” will be a dilemma for new domestic car-making forces such as Weilai and Ideal.
Subsequently, Tesla’s public relations department stated that it had confirmed with Shanghai and the National Development and Reform Commission that the rumor was false and that it would prosecute the first Weibo users. In addition, in Tesla’s Car Friends group, Tesla China General Manager Wang Hao responded to the rumors of “re-price reduction” and said: “This It was a complete rumor. “
However, this false news is superimposed on the news that Tesla officially made “to reduce the price of model 3 to less than 250,000” at the end of September, which greatly boosted Tesla’s stock price.
On October 15, Tesla’s stock price reached a high of $461, with a market value of more than $400 billion. In terms of comparable prices, Tesla’s stock price has risen by more than 400% this year.
Another noteworthy point is that with Tesla’s continuous price cuts, the attributes of its black technology companies are gradually fading.
The Tesla Battery Conference held at the end of September was originally seen by many media as an Apple mobile phone released by JobsThe epoch-making technology conference turned into a product introduction with a small upgrade of existing battery technology.
Interestingly, on the one hand, Musk is constantly superimposing black technology attributes on other industries he invests in, such as rockets, satellites and manned spacecraft; on the other hand, he gradually puts mediocre but profitable settings on himself The core of Tesla.
The latest news shows that Tesla released its third-quarter financial report after the US stock market was closed on Wednesday. Data show that Tesla’s third-quarter revenue was US$8.77 billion, a year-on-year increase of 39%; net profit was US$331 million, a year-on-year increase of 131%.
Therefore, after his battery conference and the news of the latest price cut and profit came out, some American media commented that “Musk does not want to be Jobs, but is going to be a new Cook”.
Of course, from the standpoint of a tech fan, perhaps Musk has let everyone down; but from the perspective of capital, it is a very practical choice for Musk to follow Cook’s example.
1, Cook and Apple
If Apple’s structure and technical confidence were built by Steve Jobs, then his choice of Cook as his successor actually laid a good foundation for Apple’s complete transformation into a profitable technology business company.
The two stages of Jobs controlling Apple and Cook controlling Apple are very different for all fruit fans.
After all, compared to the black technology that Master Qiao brought out a series of surprises every year, Apple in the Cook era is more often doing minor technological upgrades, not even iterating the appearance.
However, with the increase in prices and the provision of related technology extensions, Cook has managed to make consumers feel that the price is within an affordable range while maintaining the attention and recognition of the Apple brand.
Actually, this is very powerful.
The Steve Jobs era really laid a good foundation for Apple’s development, and it also gave Apple a label of “black technology”.
Black technology will certainly attract the attention of people like geeks, and they are also willing to invest a lot of money for such technology, but if you want to increase the scale and value of the entire enterprise, only a small number of customer groups can’t do it. .
So in the Cook era, he wanted to find a way to make Apple’s entire product “Mediocre” his core work idea.
On the one hand, Cook is adhering to the concept of “small technology iterations”. He is afraid that many technologies that are in place in one step will make consumers lose interest in new Apple products; on the other hand, Cook will increase Apple’s products to other products. The attractiveness of consumer groups, such as adding new color schemes, reducing the weight of mobile phones, and launching affordable models.
When the market fluctuates, Cook is notOften flexible, he will promote the downgrade of part of the product technology and launch new products with a value lower than the expectations of consumers in order to gain the attention of new consumer groups.
Cook did this because he has accumulated many years of experience in the industry.
In the Steve Jobs era, the most successful Apple mobile phone was actually the iPhone 4. After 4 generations of perfecting the technology, the ownership of the entire iPhone has experienced an explosive growth.
But the subsequent iPhone5 and iPhone6 ushered in a major market decline. The reason is that the technology of these two products has not made an overwhelming breakthrough and the price has increased a lot, which is not so attractive to the original iPhone4 users.
This lesson has been remembered by Cook for a long time.
After he took office, each generation of Apple’s iPhone has some breakthroughs that surpass the core capabilities of the previous generation, and these are unparalleled in consumer appeal and can ensure the continuity of Apple’s market expansion.
This is why the market value of Apple in the Cook era continues to rise, even surpassing all high-tech companies, ranking first in the US stock market.
“Cook is the one who understands the capital market.” Lin Xi, an investment bank analyst in Hong Kong, told “Deep Dive Insight” that the capital market’s focus on Apple’s development is completely different from the perspective of consumers. “Capital focuses on profitability. In fact, it is in the interest of investors that he does so, so Apple’s stock price will be sought after.”
The latest news shows that Apple’s total market value has exceeded 2 trillion. You know, when Cook officially took over in 2011, Apple’s market value was almost the same as the current Tesla.
The market value of 5 times in 9 years also proves that Cook’s choice is accepted by the entire market.
2, stay away from black technology
I don’t know if Musk has studied Cook’s overall business philosophy, but judging from his current performance, he clearly has the same perception.
Starting from the second half of 2019, Musk quietly reversed Tesla’s impression in many people’s minds: In the past, Tesla, which had longed for breakthroughs in black technology every quarter, gradually calmed down.
Of course, Musk is not without technical iteration. He focused his work on automated driving and vehicle software tuning.
By 2020, Musk proposed what Tesla needs to solveIt turned out to be a problem with the basic battery system. He successfully used his personal image to shift the focus of the media’s attention to Tesla’s technology to a “thankless” infrastructure improvement.
After all, everyone knows the difficulty of battery system improvement, and how many iterations of evolution Musk launches can be allowed.
From this perspective, at the battery conference that just ended, Musk was able to come up with a new battery system technology that increased the capacity and efficiency by nearly 10% over the existing technology, which was already above 80 points.
This operation is exactly the same as Cook’s idea of arranging Apple’s iPhone conference every year.
Western media commented on the similar choices made by Musk and Cook in order to avoid companies falling into the “black technology trap.”
After all, those black technologies that can surpass many companies are faced with huge investment and long-term research and development behind them. Although Tesla’s losses in the past few years are due to the lack of production scale, but more importantly, it is also related to the large amount of funds used for research and development and technical reserves every year.
In Cook’s view, technology is not the most advanced and best, just enough, and those that can promote corporate profits are good technologies.
Therefore, he will come up with a 5G version of the iPhone one year later than others, which also means that he has made a year more money than others with 4G technology.
Lin Xi believes that Cook’s approach is very smart, and it will make the financial report look very good. “After all, the cost of 4G technology is much lower than that of 5G, which means that the profits of Apple’s mobile phones in 2019-2020 will have a substantial increase.” Lin Xi said.
Now it seems that Musk has also accepted this concept.
It can be seen from the latest reports that one of Tesla’s future technological iterations will focus on autonomous driving and the other on batteries. And every generation of Tesla in the past will have an “explosive black technology” situation, which will never return.
After all, to seize the deepest feelings of consumers for a small iteration, this is AppleThe fruitful experience is also the way Tesla is going to go now.
Behind this, Musk may have other considerations.
“Apple operates in this way, and the market agrees very much. It is Tesla’s turn, and the market agrees very much.” Lin Xi told “Deep Diving Insight” that investors are not actually concerned about how many black technologies the company has. It is the profitability and market positioning of the company.
3. Re-adjust the positioning
For a long time, Musk has actually not thought about something clearly.
On the one hand, Tesla’s pricing in the United States and the world is aimed at the luxury coupe market; on the other hand, Tesla is desperately expanding its production capacity to increase the number of product sales, bringing itself into the market. Family car range.
There is a huge market positioning contradiction between the two.
“Generally speaking, the luxury sports car market is a niche high-end market. In order to ensure the quality and price of their bicycles, most car companies will not launch too many models and output.” A securities fund analyst in the United States Zhang Yiran told “Deep Diving Insight” that the core brand concept of many luxury sports cars is mass production quantity and global limit, which can come at sky-high prices.
“Tesla actually took the road of popular family luxury cars such as BMW and Audi at the beginning, but the pricing was for overseas luxury coupes that were one level higher than them.” Zhang Yiran said that although this has attracted some geeks Attention and purchase, but the brand gap makes it really difficult to support such a high price.
“The core of Tesla is still the car itself. Many of his so-called black technologies can actually be applied by traditional car companies.” Zhang Yiran believes that those luxury car brands have spared no effort to increase the technological attributes of their cars in the past two years. , And some do not even do worse than Tesla.
In addition, Tesla has a very obvious disadvantage.
Everyone knows that Tesla has major problems and no minor problems. Problems in workmanship make the owners of Teslas often “tortured” in details for a long time.
This is actually related to Tesla’s identity as a new car manufacturer.
After all, the quality management experience accumulated by traditional car companies for decades or hundreds of years is not the thirdIt can be resolved within five years.
“And if there is no very good solution in these quality details, it will be embarrassing for Tesla to support such a high price.”
Zhang Yiran told “Deep Dive Insight” that after the price cut, Tesla’s impression of the market is not so obvious, “because consumers currently use the standard of five to six hundred thousand luxury cars to consider Tesla’s workmanship. , If you put it into the range of a family car of 100,000 to 200,000, then his workmanship is above the average level.”
This may be one of the important reasons for Tesla’s recent price cuts.
4. Capital awareness
Of course, if you look at it from a deeper perspective, Tesla’s price cuts also have the pursuit of profit.
After the opening of the Chinese super factory, Tesla’s production yoke was further released. And based on this technology, how to quickly resolve inventory has become the most important task for Tesla.
Therefore, price cuts promote the rapid development of the marketSpeed Extension exhibition, becoming Musk’s only choice.
Although the price has dropped a lot, the super factory in China has reduced the cost of Tesla’s production to less than 60% of the original estimate, so Tesla’s profit margin has not decreased but increased.
This is also an important reason why Tesla announced profit in every quarterly report since the second quarter of this year. At the same time, this also means that Musk is transforming Tesla into a traditional car company.
“In the past, Tesla’s price and tonality were there, so American investment banks generally regarded him as a new car brand with an annual output of 2 million to 3 million.” Zhang Yiran said to “Deep Dive Insight” Said that this makes many investment banks actually have a basic expectation on Tesla’s stock price.
But after the price cut, it was completely different.
“Tesla’s current price range is close to the core family car price range in the U.S. market,” Zhang Yiran believes, and Tesla has gradually changed its impression of a “black technology company” , It becomes a small-step iterative method, which reduces the technical risks valued by investment banks. “This makes all investment banks invariably increase their expectations for Tesla’s market share and stock price.”
And Lin Xi told “Deep Dive Insight” that as far as he knows, many foreign investment bank analysts have made a positive prediction of Tesla’s market share after lowering prices. “This is a thousand A 10,000-weight market, and once it enters such a market, Tesla is likely to threaten the status of traditional car giants such as Toyota and GM.”
Lin Xi believes that there is too much room for imagination, “This is why Tesla’s stock price suddenly rises.”
Because Musk’s focus on Tesla has shifted from technology to profit, investors in the stock market can begin to understand Musk’s various development decisions on Tesla.
“After all, enterprises have to return to the essence of economics after they have developed to a certain stage.” Lin Xi believes that in the past Musk appeared as a breaker, “the stock market has a fault tolerance rate for him, but so A long time has passed, and Tesla has gradually matured. At this time, it is not appropriate to use the standards of start-ups.”
“Therefore, Tesla, which is currently focusing on profits and small iterations of technology that is not so cool, is the favorite Tesla in the entire capital market.” He added.
After all, investors pay attention to the core of the enterprise, which is still profit and risk.
From this perspective, the gradually mediocre Apple has succeeded, and the gradually mediocre Tesla is also on the road to success.
This is an unavoidable trend.
*The picture in the article comes from: piqsels, based on the CC0 protocol.