Recently, there has been a lot of uproar about the weekly sales list in the car circle.
A few days ago, in a media group interview with NIO IN, Qin Lihong, co-founder of NIO, responded to the question of "there will be no new cars in 2024, but sales will continue to grow", saying:
Li Bin and I have always felt that NIO may not be an overnight rich-to-rich-type company, we consider the problem and plan for the harvest is relatively long-term, you may also understand that we do not make any form of sales forecast, do not release any unaudited order information.
Three weeks ago, I attended an industry conference organized by the Automobile Association, and the leaders said that the high-quality development of your automobile industry has done a good job, and low-quality volumes are not less, how to avoid low-quality volumes.
I raised my hand and said if I didn't want to post the weekly list. NIO has never authorized any agency to publish weekly lists with our name, and our company's data is known to no more than 10 people internally.
NIO IN media group interview, Li Bin and Qin Lihong (from left) - Image credit: Tram Lab
On the 30th, Ma Lin, assistant vice president of brand and communication of NIO, also picked up the words of "canceling the weekly list" on social platforms:
High-level tone: Don't engage in low-level involution. The volume weekly list is more or less a bit of a low-level involution, think brother @ Li Xiang Stop, the current mission of Chinese car companies is to achieve technological breakthroughs through research and development, isn't it? Power it up together!
Aite Li thought and shouted publicly, and Weilai pointed the spearhead of "low-level involution" at the ideal car that made the weekly sales list. Yang Xueliang, senior vice president of ZEEKR Group, also forwarded to express his support.
截图来自微博@蔚来马麟@杨学良Victor
That's not the end of it.
Li Xiang, who has long been "invisible" on social media, chose to fight back in the circle of friends: a fable of a children's picture book, coupled with a boo-shut and secretive expression, is suspected of alluding to NIO's practice of covering up and stealing the bell.
The picture comes from Weibo
The two leading new forces choked each other in the air, and "Wei Xiaoli" ended up this time.
Last night, at the Xpeng AI Intelligent Driving Conference, He Xiaopeng also talked about the controversy of the weekly sales list: "In United States, everyone is trying to do a good job end-to-end. When I went to China, I found that they were all on the weekly sales list."
The controversy caused by the issue of whether the weekly sales list should be released can be described in one sentence: the entire northwest of Shanxi Province has become a mess.
Weekly charts, Game of Thrones
In April last year, Li Auto broke the tradition of the previous auto industry to release monthly sales and spontaneously produced the list of "New Power Brand Sales in the Chinese Market", thus entering the era of weekly sales competition for the new car industry.
In the first week of April 2023, Li Auto topped the list with weekly sales of 4,177 units; In the second week, Ideal put some thought into the production of the list and changed the sales statistics unit from "units" to "10,000 units".
Ideal defended the top spot with a score of 6,300 units, and the results of the next few leading new forces are not so good. ZEEKR 01,600, Xpeng 01,300, Wenjie 01,000, NIO 00,700...
The change of units intuitively magnifies the sales gap between brands in terms of digital volume.
If in the first week's list, Li Auto still maintained restraint, then in the second week's change, the ideal is to lift the table.
China's new power brand weekly sales list - the picture comes from Weibo @ ideal auto
Li Auto is not the first car company to release a self-made list, such as "Pure Electric SUV Insurance Ranking", "More than 300,000 SUV Insurance Ranking" and "Large 7-seater Pure Electric Sales Ranking" and so on.
As long as the sentence is long enough and the conditions are tricky enough, there will always be a place for you, and you will always be able to get to the desired position as you wish.
It's Olympic Month lately, and speaking of which, such a list is actually very similar to the medal table controversy at the Olympics:
Athletes have won medals for their country, and the number of medals that changes in real time has become a dynamic settlement list. For example, the list released by the United States media B/R is sorted by the total number of medals, and on the fourth day of the Olympic competition, the United States topped the list with 25 medals.
The more official mainstream sorting method is to take the gold medal first, and sort the list according to the number of gold medals. Under this statistical logic, Japan and China ranked the top two, while United States slipped to sixth place.
The two statistical methods have their own focus, but the core concept is roughly inseparable from how to get to a more decent position on the list, and the difference between the gold medal list and the medal list can be reversed.
B/R makes the overall medal table for the fourth day of the Paris Olympics - Image credit: B/R
The statistical methods are different, the list is thousands, and everyone has the ability to make a map, but why is only the list of Li Auto widely disseminated and has become the target of the current public?
The weekly list is essentially a power game about the right to speak.
Continuing the platform dividends of its flagship L9 product, Li Auto officially released the Li L7, a five-seater extended-range SUV, in February last year.
Deliveries began in March of the same year, and Li Auto also ushered in its own sales boom cycle:
In April, Li Auto delivered a total of 25,600 new vehicles, a year-on-year increase of about 122.6%.
In the end, Li Auto delivered more than 50,000 new vehicles in a single month in the last month of 2023, and sold more than 376,000 new vehicles for the whole year, with an annual sales growth rate of 137%, far exceeding the industry average.
2023 has become the most successful year in the history of Li Auto, according to the financial report data released by Li Auto:
- During the year, Li Auto's sales revenue was 120.29 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 172.7%
- Total revenue increased by 173.5% year-on-year to RMB123.85 billion
- The annual net profit soared from 2.032 billion yuan in 2022 to 11.809 billion yuan, an increase of 481.15%, and Li Auto became the first new power car company in China to achieve 100 billion yuan in revenue
- Gross margin reached 22% for the full year, leading the industry
Behind the operation of car companies to a scale of 100 billion yuan is the pursuit of the ideal to speak on sales almost "pathologically".
Last year, when the sales of the flagship product L9 did not exceed 10,000 for a long time, Ideal officially launched the L9 Pro version in August, lowering the entry threshold of flagship products and reactivating sales.
According to a report by Late Auto, Li Auto also focuses most of its energy on market competition, paying attention to the same category and level of models, paying attention to the technical marketing of other car companies and technology companies, and caring about whether they are in the first place in the weekly sales list.
The output of each issue of the weekly list is a "monopoly" of Li Auto's right to speak in the market.
But this year, the situation has reversed.
After Li Auto was disappointed with its first pure electric product, the MEGA, it finally took a breather. And other new car companies have ushered in their own "spring":
1. NIO upgraded its BaaS battery leasing system to stabilize its pure electric sales at more than 20,000 in the past two months
2. ZEEKR launched the new pure electric sedan 007, innovated and delivered the main force 001, and became the sales champion of more than 200,000 Chinese pure electric brands in 2024
3. With the C10 and C16 models, Leapmotor has created its own comfort zone and pushed its monthly sales to the level of 20,000
......
New car companies are blooming, the market structure has re-entered a period of turmoil, and the competition for the definition of the list is naturally heating up, which is also giving rise to an illusion that "the world has been suffering for a long time".
Restraint of scale
Returning to the very beginning of the question, if Li Auto does not publish a weekly list, can such involution be stopped?
The answer is clearly no.
Just as the world has been suffering for a long time, everyone complains that the ideal has opened the head of this weekly involution, but the ideal will not publish the list, and there will be more "ideals".
The strong sense of anxiety will not be eliminated by the stop of the weekly list, but it will only bring the involution competition of new cars to another track.
Since the middle of last year, a marketing carnival of new cars has been staged frequently:
Yu Chengdong's sentence "far ahead" brought the world back to life, Lei Jun relied on his personal IP to build Xiaomi as the winner of the year, Li Bin twice drove thousands of miles to live broadcast, personally witnessed the product power of NIO, etc...
Li Bin, CEO of NIO, once described the involution of the live broadcast of the No. 1 position at NIO IN:
It's too much now, I've done two solo live streams since last year, but it's not a good thing, it's a not-so-good start.
The weekly list is just one of the tracks where anxiety is amplified, but it is not the only one.
The picture comes from Weibo @xiaomiauto
The appearance of the weekly sales list is not meaningless:
Although the fluctuation of sales on a weekly basis has brought more workload to car companies, it can allow consumers to have a clearer understanding of the reputation of new cars, brand temperament, and even the ability of car companies to adapt to operations.
However, this kind of competition cannot get out of control, we must pay attention to the grasp of the scale, and excessive pursuit of sales will not only distract car companies from focusing on products and cause misjudgment, but also produce disorderly competition.
The side effects of focusing too much on sales have been ideally apparent.
Stepping on the node of 100 billion financial reports, Ideal released the first pure electric model MEGA and the 2024 L series at the same press conference.
Li Xiang once said to Late Auto during the internal review:
Two completely different products were released at the same time, both because of the desire to (sell). If you focus on user value, you will definitely not talk about L7, 8, and 9 together.
In May this year, Li Auto's stock price continued to decline, falling by nearly 18%, which also created the lowest share price performance of Li Auto in nearly a year. The impact of misjudgment can be seen in the excessive pursuit of sales.
The second is disorderly competition, looking back at the weekly list of ideal finishing and production, we find:
Whether it is range extension or pure electric, new car brands in various energy forms are put in the same dimension to fight, even if there is a huge generation gap between the difficulty of pure electric and range extension markets.
Purely driven by sales, not only can the market perceive the generation gap between different forms of energy, but also easily obliterate the efforts of car companies to operate and cultivate in their respective market segments, such a competitive way is uncontrollable and by no means healthy.
Speaking of this, I am reminded of the words of the famous music producer Li Weixiang when he wrote "The Happiness I Want" for Stefanie Sun:
"The Happiness I Want" is the title song of Yanzi's second album, and the entire album has been recorded, just the so-called "opening song".
Then I thought, if I were her with such a big response to her first album, I would be excited now, and I don't know how to move forward, and I can't rush to death, so I want to express it at what speed. What if you rush blindly and there are potholes on the road? So, I formed a rhythm of fast and slow, 5 beats 6 beats....
One by one, excited and restrained.
Building a car is a muddy marathon.
China's new energy vehicles have been booming for more than ten years, but when we enter the next stage of development, what speed should we use to match the world?
China's new energy vehicles, which are still in their infancy, may wish to be more patient, long-term, restrained and healthy.