Wang Ziyang/text
Since the take-off of the new energy vehicle market, major brands have launched a round of sales competition every month, which has become an increasingly normalized, and now even somewhat old-fashioned drama. The reason why I say "old-fashioned" is because most of the time, the sales list reflects only a quantitative change that you catch up with, and there is no real qualitative change in the industry pattern.
However, the June report card released by Hongmeng Zhixing on July 1 is different, which has made the sales competition between major brands begin to have an eye-catching qualitative change. From the perspectives of new energy vehicles, luxury cars, and price wars, HarmonyOS has shown new power of subversion and restructuring for the entire industry.
The perspective from which you look at sales is more important than the sales figures themselves
In the automotive industry, sales volume is the most basic and important indicator to measure the strength of a brand, but the number itself is meaningless, and the significance of sales depends on the perspective of external observation.
From the perspective of new energy vehicles, Hongmeng Zhixing delivered 46,141 vehicles in June, and the total number of vehicles delivered by Hongmeng Zhixing in the first half of 2024 was 194207, becoming the leader of new energy and even the entire automobile market and the benchmark of the new power camp.
Among them, the luxury technology flagship SUV Wenjie M9 delivered 17,241 units in June, with a total of more than 100,000 units; Wenjie delivered 18,493 units of the new M7, ranking first in the sales of China's new power models in the first half of 2024; The new M5 delivered 7,046 new vehicles in June, with a total of more than 10,000 vehicles; The Zhijie S7 delivered 2,995 units in June.
From the perspective of luxury cars, HarmonyOS Zhixing has subverted the dominance of traditional first-line luxury brands and become a first-line luxury brand in the "post-oil car era".
As the most expensive model of Hongmeng Zhixing, the M9 is in the 500,000-level market, which has long been dominated by the "56E" (BMW 5 Series, Audi A6L, Mercedes-Benz E-Class), and the 56E can be called the pillar model of BBA in terms of value and sales scale.
A few days ago, the portrait report of the first batch of owners of the M9 released by Jielan Road (automotive industry consulting agency) shows that the first batch of owners of the M9 are mostly purchased or replaced, of which the luxury brand is the main source of additional purchases, accounting for about half of the total, and the sources of additional purchases even include a certain proportion of sports cars/high-performance cars, including Porsche 718 and Mercedes-Benz AMG. Behind the rapid growth of Hongmeng Zhixing's sales is a strong word-of-mouth effect.
In the first half of 2024, the new energy vehicle brand health study of Jielan Road investigated the attitudes of users of different new energy brands towards whether to recommend relatives and friends to buy the brand's products, among which the NPS (brand net promoter score) performance of Zhijie ranked first among all brands, while AITO Wenjie ranked second, and the NPS of the two major brands of Hongmeng Zhixing led other new energy brands.
According to a recent research report by Changjiang Securities, the M7 and M9 have been recognized by the market, marking the phased success of Huawei's high-end smart selection. Based on the success of the M7 and M9, Huawei Smart will enter a new round of model iteration cycle and reshape its independent leadership position in the mid-to-high-end and luxury price bands.
The M9 surpasses the "56E" in terms of sales, which is a microcosm. The more macro situation is that with the rise of China's luxury cars represented by Hongmeng Zhixing, the traditional luxury brands that have been high have been forced to choose to exchange price for volume.
Not long ago, the topic of "BMW's halving price cut" rushed to the hot search on Weibo. Some netizens reported that the standard version of the BMW pure electric model i5, which was originally priced at more than 400,000 yuan, was less than 300,000 yuan after discounts, and there is still some room for concessions on this basis. Coincidentally, some Mercedes-Benz dealers recently lowered the price of the C200L from 334,800 yuan to 202,700 yuan, a decrease of nearly 40%.
From the perspective of price war, Hongmeng Zhixing has become a leader in fighting against the vicious involution of the industry and realizing value upward. In the past two years, some Chinese brands in the luxury car market, which originally soared to more than 300,000 yuan, have fallen back into the low-end market as the price war has intensified. It has become a consensus in the industry that the crude price war prevents the industry from developing on a healthy and sustainable track.
Although some car companies rely on their strong cost control capabilities to survive the rapid growth of their performance in price competition, this has also objectively intensified the price war. The sales growth of Hongmeng Zhixing relies on an increasingly high-end product system, which brings peers not only more confidence in fighting price involution, but also a path demonstration of how to take a high-value route.
If you understand the changes in the era of luxury cars, you will understand the value of Hongmeng Zhixing
For traditional luxury brands, the subversion of their market position by Hongmeng Zhixing will undoubtedly bring great pressure to them, but this change has positive significance for the entire industry.
Decades or even centuries ago, traditional luxury brands gained market recognition as technology leaders and gradually built up a strong reputation. However, with the consolidation of their position, some traditional luxury brands are accustomed to easily reaping sales under the influence of their existing brands. Moving towards the era of smart electric vehicles, they are increasingly taking on a conservative and sluggish image.
The 2024 McKinsey China Automotive Consumer Insights survey lists a number of brand attributes and records the brands corresponding to the major attributes in the minds of respondents: In emerging dimensions, such as sense of technology, new energy vehicle technology, autonomous driving technology, intelligent cockpit technology and other attributes, the leading brands are mainly from Chinese automakers and a U.S.-funded new energy vehicle manufacturer, while traditional foreign brands are "famous".
The traditional luxury brand of "lying flat" has now been pulled down by Hongmeng Zhixing, which is not an old drama of changing the dynasty on the "traditional luxury" track, but a once-in-a-century change in which "technology luxury" replaces "traditional luxury". In the new era, this trend is driven by consumer demand, not by the will of individual companies.
"Consumer interest in all types of autonomous driving technologies is increasing...... China's high-end new energy vehicle brands have successfully won the favor of consumers through intelligent and other technological advantages, and the top three German luxury car owners are almost being converted into China's high-end new energy vehicle consumers in the form of 'one-way flow'. The above-mentioned McKinsey report said.
The era of intelligent electric vehicles is very different from the era of traditional fuel, and the technology of traditional fuel vehicles is extremely mature, and enterprises only need to maintain the experience of users in existing scenarios. However, in the electric era, with the rapid development of science and technology, the imagination space is unlimited, and high-level enterprises know how to create a higher value intelligent scene experience for users.
From the HUAWEI XPIXEL smart lights, HUAWEI DATS 2.0 dynamic adaptive torque system, and HUAWEI ADS 2.0 advanced intelligent driving system, HarmonyOS brings a series of intelligent scene experiences to luxury car users in the intelligent electric era. At the same time, through continuous OTA upgrades, Hongmeng Zhixing has brought continuous iteration of intelligent driving technology and technological experience.
In addition to the scene experience of the car itself, HarmonyOS Zhixing's smart car terminals can also form a complete ecosystem with Huawei's smart terminals, smart spaces, smart offices, smart homes and other products, building a seamless full-scene ecological experience of smart travel.
The new scene experience brought to users by HarmonyOS is not an experience where the gimmick is greater than the actual value, but an experience that meets the internal needs of users, which takes intelligence as the core, which not only brings a new value dimension such as "freeing" hands and human-computer interaction, but also strengthens the traditional value dimensions such as safety and durability.
From Chinese brands to HarmonyOS Zhixing, the inevitability of subversive identity
The era of intelligent electric vehicles is an era in which Chinese brands have truly stepped into the center of the stage of the automotive industry. When it comes to disrupting the industry landscape, Chinese brands have both internal motivation and a mature foundation.
On the one hand, the upward road of Chinese brands has gone through more than ten years of ups and downs. In the era of traditional oil vehicles, the breakthrough of Chinese brands consumes a lot of energy, but the effect is very limited. Standing at the top of the industry pyramid one day is an obsession that every aspiring Chinese car company will have.
On the other hand, China's auto industry has developed rapidly in recent decades, forming the world's most complete and efficient industrial chain, and has huge human resources, which are all favorable support for Chinese brands to break through in the new era.
On the road to the upward movement of Chinese brands, it is no accident that Hongmeng Zhixing has become a leader. From the world of questions to the world of wisdom and enjoyment, the pillars that support the development of Hongmeng Zhixing have become thicker and thicker in just a few years.
According to the above-mentioned research report of Changjiang Securities, from the perspective of price band and model positioning, Huawei's intelligent selection of cooperative car companies has a clear positioning, and the high-end price band has made full efforts. Hongmeng Zhixing has a clear product line, and the cooperative car companies rely on their respective endowments to have a clear division of labor, and the Wenjie M9 has entered the high-end flagship market, and the new Wenjie M7 and Zhijie S7 have benchmarked the high-end family SUV and high-end sports coupe markets respectively.
The reason why HarmonyOS has been able to unite more and more Chinese enterprises and build such a mature model is inseparable from Huawei's willingness to empower other enterprises with its core capabilities to achieve a win-win situation rather than a win-win situation. Huawei leverages its more than 30 years of experience in the ICT field, as well as its excellent experience in quality control, sales and service, and brand marketing accumulated over the past 10 years in the consumer business of Huawei devices, to empower its partners.
Guosheng Securities Research Report believes that considering Huawei's industry-leading effect in autonomous driving, intelligent cockpit, intelligent security, etc., in the environment of intensified competition among machine manufacturers, Huawei's partners are expected to improve their product strength, and companies related to the industrial chain are expected to rely on ecological advantages to benefit from the development dividend of domestic smart cars and form a first-mover card position.
In fact, the success of Hongmeng Zhixing is not only the success of the model and concept, but also the success of the strength. Huawei's significant advantages in innovative technologies such as intelligent driving, intelligent networking, intelligent cockpit, and AI large models are the key to the rapid success of the HarmonyOS Intelligent Mobility model, which is difficult to easily replicate by the outside world.
In addition, Huawei has also taken the lead in traditional dimensions such as product quality. At the 16th China Automotive Blue Book Forum, Yu Chengdong, Executive Director of Huawei, Chairman of the Device BG, and Chairman of the Intelligent Vehicle Solution BU, said that although Huawei is a newcomer to the automotive industry, it attaches great importance to product quality. "We have won the first place in the quality ranking of new energy brands for two consecutive years, but (we) are not enough to achieve the first place, and we must make further efforts to open a bigger gap with the second and third places."
More valuable than "broken" is "standing"
In the period of change in the automotive industry, the "disruptor" is not the most valuable identity, but the "founder". Although the process of breaking the old pattern is more likely to make people excited, how to build a new pattern is the key to affecting the direction of the industry in the next few years or even decades.
From this point of view, it can be seen that for Hongmeng Zhixing, the leading position of other brands in sales is only a "by-product" to some extent, and the real focus of its eyes is always to do a good job of "establishment" in the new era of intelligence - to run through the path of value competition, redefine the standard of "luxury", and build a new model for Chinese brands to go up.