Plans can never keep up with change.
Xpeng Motors, once one of China's three major new car-making forces, is now in an awkward situation. To make matters worse, the company is trying to rescue investor expectations with high-risk bets on eVTOLs and AI, but there is little to no clear timeline for a return period and still can't restore market confidence.
According to the financial report for the first quarter of this year, Xpeng Motors' revenue increased by 62% year-on-year to 6.55 billion yuan, however, compared with the fourth quarter of 2023, it fell by more than 40% quarter-on-quarter. In addition, in the first quarter, Xpeng sold 21,800 vehicles, an increase of only 19.7% over the same period last year, and a sharp decline of 63.79% from the previous quarter.
In comparison, NIO's sales in the same period were 30,100 units, and the ideal was 80,400 units. In addition, Xpeng's quarterly year-on-year growth rate is even lower than the average growth rate of the pure electric market in the same period (20.09%).
The only positive thing is that since the first quarter of this year, the revenue from "platform and software technology services" has begun to become an important source of profitability for Xpeng Motors; According to the official statement, this indicates that the company has developed an innovative business model that is different from that of traditional car companies.
However, the gross profit margin of platform and software technology services also needs the guarantee of the brand's own sales volume to maintain a certain cost competitiveness. You must know that taking intelligent driving as an example, in addition to Xiaopeng, Volkswagen Group also has strong competitors such as Horizon, DJI Automotive, and Huawei are also accelerating the progress of the project.
This means that Xpeng has started the "two-line parallel" forward mode.
As an intelligent solution provider, Xpeng's new role (similar to Tier 0.5) relies on the first-mover advantage brought by the vertical integration effect of R&D, production and sales of its own models in the past few years. After all, so far, there are only a handful of car companies and suppliers in the whole market that have truly run through the full scenario NOA.
For example, the first batch of NVIDIA domain control solutions on the car, the first self-developed to open perception, the first to land on highways and urban NOA and other industry-leading labels, which also won enough bargaining chips for Xpeng in Volkswagen's cooperation negotiations.
As a new power car company, it has changed from the top three in the past to a catch-up today. According to the data of new cars from January to April this year, Xpeng's delivery ranking has fallen to the 8th place among new power brands, followed by Ideal, Wenjie, Aion, Leap, Zeekr, Weilai and Deep Blue.
Interestingly, for Xpeng, the two business models are not parallel, but closely related.
Last year, during the Xpeng Motors Science and Technology Day event, Li Liyun, who appeared for the first time as the head of Xpeng Motors' autonomous driving, said that while further opening up the coverage of urban NGP, the shadow mode will be launched to invite users to participate in the open plan to improve more information data such as traffic lights and lane lines with regional characteristics.
"In the future, even in cities that are not open, we will use the shadow mode, and I hope that we will have more and more friends, and we will have more and more ways to help us, and the speed of opening up cities will be faster and faster." Li Liyun emphasized that the return of user data is crucial.
This means that more cars are sold and more road data is obtained, which is undoubtedly the key to the completion of the high-end intelligent driving system from usable to easy to use. In other words, the number of models equipped with intelligent driving sensors will be a strategic resource reserve for the continuous and rapid improvement of algorithms of car companies in the future.
And foreign brands such as Volkswagen are also interested in data.
Wu Xinzhou, former vice president of autonomous driving at Xpeng Motors, once admitted that the scene of the city is extremely complex, and the road rules of each city are different, so a large number of generalization tests need to be done to solve a large number of engineering problems.
This means that it is a fatal wound for Xiaopeng, whose current sales have not reached the expected target. According to the data, Xpeng's new car sales in 2023 will be 142,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 17%, and it failed to achieve the annual sales target of 200,000 units.
Another set of data highlights the embarrassing situation behind it.
According to the information released by Xpeng Motors, during the Spring Festival in 2024, the cumulative total mileage of Xpeng owners will exceed 3.72 million kilometers, which is equivalent to about 500,000 kilometers per day. And at the beginning of 2023, Tesla CEO Elon Musk disclosed that users now drive 1 million miles (equivalent to 1.6 million kilometers) per day using the FSD beta version.
In fact, the gap behind it lies in the hardware configuration rate and sales volume.
According to the data, less than 30% of the new cars delivered by Xpeng Motors in 2020 are equipped with forward-facing ADAS; In 2021, it fell to 22.44%, and in 2022, it rebounded slightly to 24.81%. With the optimization of new car configurations in 2023, this proportion will quickly climb to more than 90%.
As of December 31, 2023, Xpeng's cumulative deliveries have just exceeded the milestone of 400,000 units. Data shows that in the first five months of this year, Xpeng Motors delivered a total of 41,360 vehicles, an increase of only 26% year-on-year. According to the annual sales target of 280,000 units set at the beginning of the year, only 14.78% of the target was completed, ranking at the bottom of the new forces.
At the same time, in terms of several other models, in addition to the X9 performing well in the niche MPV market, the G6 and G9 obviously missed a wave of dividends due to slow hardware updates (mainly because the cockpit was not upgraded to 8295 from the previous generation of the 8155 platform). In contrast, the ideal is to achieve the 8295 upgrade of all models in the first half of this year.
After all, according to Xpeng's official data, based on 8295 and a new generation of XOS Dimensity system, compared with the previous generation of cockpit platform, the boot speed is increased by 33%, the application response speed is increased by 50%, the system fluency is increased by 30%, the sliding speed is increased by 30%, and the touch response speed is increased by 30%.
From the perspective of vehicle sales, MPV is always not the key to supporting sales; For Xpeng, the X9 is more like the icing on the cake than a send-off. According to the data, from January to April this year, Xpeng X9 delivered 9,426 units, while the overall MPV market delivery in the same period was 275,800 units.
This means that the impulse still depends on the SUV or sedan.
On April 18, 2023, at the Shanghai Auto Show, the Xpeng G6 was officially released. As the first model to be equipped with SEPA 2.0 technology, the G6 carries a heavy responsibility. In particular, the G9 model, which was unveiled half a year ago, failed to become a "hit" for various reasons.
At the press conference on the same day, He Xiaopeng shouted, "In the next 10 years, the market will have a '32 into 8' knockout game, only a few mainstream brands can survive, and the scale of 300-5 million vehicles is the threshold for promotion." ”
If you want to reach this magnitude, for any car company, you must lay out the market below 200,000 yuan or even 150,000 yuan in advance. According to the monitoring data of the Gaogong Intelligent Vehicle Research Institute, in China's passenger car market, the delivery of new cars below 200,000 yuan accounts for about 60% of the overall market in the whole year.
However, before that, Xpeng G3 and P5 two models below 200,000 yuan were not successful. At the same time, due to the intelligent technology label flaunted by Xpeng, it was also subject to cost factors and could not be completely devolved to this price range.
This is why He Xiaopeng bluntly said last year that the goal in 2024 is to achieve a 50% cost reduction in intelligent driving. Building "the first AI intelligent driving car for young people" is also Mona's important task. Whether it can become "China's first car company to bring high-end intelligent driving capabilities to the 10-150,000 yuan A-class car market" seems to be Xpeng's hard work.
Judging from the pace of new car releases this year, Mona has become one of the biggest potential opportunities for the Xpeng brand. Mona is positioned at the 150,000 level with intelligent driving as the highlight, and will successively launch a number of new models with different levels of intelligent driving capabilities.
At present, in terms of public opinion, the relatively positive evaluation is: Xiaopeng MONA and P5 still have a lot of similarities, especially the side face, maybe this is the optimized version of P5, if P5 could have been designed like this earlier, it may have a better ending.
And the negative evaluation is: MONA's shape looks really like a p5 facelift, and it makes so much foreshadowing and finally collapses on this picture. Xpeng's approach of stacking models has made a limited contribution to sales, with strong explosiveness but insufficient staying power.
Xiaopeng's situation is still relatively dangerous, the edges and corners of intelligence are smoothed by competing products, sales lag behind, there is a lack of popular models, and there is also a high uncertainty in the sales of MONA, which is labeled as AI intelligent driving.
But the most important thing is the help of Didi (Mona as an asset acquired by Xpeng from Didi). According to the plan, in addition to the private consumer market, Mona's important target market is ride-hailing. Among them, Didi will be responsible for the sales of Mona models in the online ride-hailing channel, with the goal of annual sales of more than 100,000 units.
In 2023, Xpeng's annual new car deliveries will only be 133,600. The characteristics of online car-hailing mean that Mona has the opportunity to help Xpeng quickly boost sales (from BYD to Aion), and at the same time, it can strive to quickly collect large-scale road data in urban scenarios.
According to public information, the daily mileage of full-time online car-hailing is usually about 300-400 kilometers, which is about 4-6 times that of private cars. In addition, compared to the high-frequency fixed AB point commuting mode of private cars, online car-hailing can cover the main roads in urban areas, even some relatively remote routes.
According to the data previously released by Didi, the online car-hailing registered on the platform can obtain nearly 100 billion kilometers of effective driving scene data every year. According to industry predictions, unlike the early reliance on engineers and software dividends, data will account for more than 80% of the long-tail cost of end-to-end autonomous driving solutions.
This is seen as the third path for Xpeng's future survival. But the worst-case scenario is that Mona has turned the entire brand recognition of Xpeng into another Aion, which relies on ride-hailing to gain traction.
Just this week, He Xiaopeng announced on his personal Weibo that new classmate Candice (Yuan Tingting) has now joined the Xpeng Motors team as the senior director of Xpeng Motors' autonomous driving products. Previously, in addition to serving as the head of the autonomous driving business operation of Alibaba DAMO Academy, Yuan Tingting also has a key resume: the deputy general manager of the new energy vehicle travel platform "Panda Yongche".
Panda was founded in 2016 when the new energy time-sharing leasing market was rising, and was strategically invested by Lifan Holdings; According to the data, by the first half of 2018, Panda had more than 3 million users nationwide, and once became the timeshare rental platform with the largest number of registered users in China.
At that time, in terms of intelligence, Panda also launched the shared car autonomous driving demonstration park project with Baidu Apollo in Chongqing, officially announcing the landing operation of autonomous driving shared cars. One of the key scenarios is to solve the problem of finding people and parking autonomously in the scenario of user picking up and returning the car.
However, due to the company's operating reasons (the core is the sustainability of the business model and the problem of corporate profitability) and the industry winter (vicious competition from a large number of travel platforms and the sharp decline in market demand), Panda announced in 2021 that it would completely cease operations.
Since then, Yuan Tingting has moved to a rookie, and Yuan Tingting has served as the person in charge of the operation of the autonomous driving laboratory of the Damo Academy, and one of the important business scenarios is the large-scale operation of the unmanned vehicle "Xiaomandonkey" at the end of domestic logistics.
This can't help but remind people of the future direction of Xpeng Mona's commercial breakthrough.
On the other side of the ocean, as Xpeng's long-standing benchmark player, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is also in the sales dilemma cycle, suddenly announced on X this week: "Tesla Robotaxi will be released on August 8". (Interestingly, previously, Musk has repeatedly revealed that he is considering licensing FSD to other car companies, similar to the cooperation between Xpeng and Volkswagen)
Obviously, Tesla and Musk, who are deeply involved in the scene of making and selling cars, will also find it difficult to overcome the sudden changes in market conditions. Since the beginning of this year, the global market demand for pure electric vehicles is declining, especially in the Chinese market, and the sales of hybrid models are becoming the main force.
According to the monitoring data of the Gaogong Intelligent Vehicle Research Institute, in 2023, the delivery volume of plug-in hybrid (including extended range) and pure electric vehicles in the Chinese market will be 1:2.1, and from January to April this year, this number has become 1:1.42;
This is a pressure for some car companies that still adhere to a single pure electric route.
In fact, this sudden change in the current market situation is difficult to turn around even for Wang Fengying, president of Xiaopeng, who is known as the "Iron Lady" of China's automobile circle. After all, relying only on pure electric models, Xpeng's market tentacles have been limited.
This means that both Tesla and Xpeng urgently need to divert everyone's attention (especially the capital market) to win more initiative for the company.
According to Musk's vision a few years ago, if fully autonomous driving is realized, the vehicle itself can be shared among many users, which can increase the use value of the vehicle by 5 times. At the same time, Tesla's corporate (valuation) label will also be truly transformed from a car-making company to a future mobility service platform.
Previously, an investment institution had predicted that if the above-mentioned business transformation can be implemented as scheduled, Tesla's mobility business revenue will reach $17 billion by 2030, becoming a new business growth pole. And this move is also Musk's hope to weaken the capital market's attention to new car sales, and instead focus on future travel scenarios with more room for imagination.
Nowadays, for Xpeng, the whole vehicle, technology output and travel services are three visible paths; However, the existing resource dilemma, the market situation and the white-hot competitive environment are the three mountains that weigh on the body.