Yesterday, Li Auto Inc. (hereinafter referred to as "ideal") formally submitted a prospectus to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, planning to be listed on NASDAQ. The document shows that the ideal will raise up to 100 million US dollars under the stock symbol "LI". The underwriters include Goldman Sachs Group, Morgan Stanley, UBS, CICC and other well-known institutions. This article does not intend to analyze the ideal prospectus in detail, but to talk about the holes that have been stepped on in the past five years since the ideal was founded.

As we all know, with the rise of the Internet car-building boom in 2014, NIO Inc. and XPeng Inc. were both born in that year, and the ideal started only a year later than them, but now they are in a state of backwardness, not to mention the total amount of delivery and financing. The richness of the product line is not as rich as that of NIO Inc., XPeng Inc., or even Weima, which was born in the same year, and all three players have begun to deliver two mass-produced models.

Obviously, the problem mainly lies in the ideal itself, which has taken many detours in the past five years since its establishment. Li Xiang, the head of the ideal, can hardly absolve himself of the blame and is rated by the autocarweekly as "the person who steps in the policy pit at every step." I conclude that ideal has stepped on at least four big pits:

First, the SEV project is completely cool

In 2015, when the ideal was to call a car and home, Li planned two roads for the car and home: the "small and beautiful" low-speed electric car SEV and the "big and complete" add-on electric SUV. In December 2016, he revealed that cars and families are about to launch shared travel services in Paris and San Francisco, and the SEV, the first model to provide services, is also on the road.

In December 2017, Li Xiang announced that he would suspend the SEV project after mentioning che Hejia's SEV,4 for the last time on Weibo Corp, and joined hands with DiDi Global Inc. to reformulate his business strategy and devote himself to the development of medium and large-scale SUV and ride-hailing products. In my opinion, there are three main reasons for the failure of the car and home SEV:

First, the policy is not clear. Although low-speed electric vehicles are in a gray area, there is a large market both at home and around the world. When they first made product planning, they predicted that the relevant industry operating standards for low-speed electric vehicles would be issued in the short term, and entered the timeshare market based on SEV, but there was no good news until the end of 2017. The policy is not clear for a long time, so that the car and the family have to quit.

Second, the product competitiveness is insufficient. Car and home SEV had a change in operation thinking midway, that is, the products originally oriented to the civilian market became subsidiary products developed by the leasing mode. In other words, it was originally aimed at ordinary consumers to solve the demand for short-distance travel of 0-30km in the city, but later abandoned the retail market to focus on operation, an important reason is that the market for low-speed electric cars is more complex than Li expected, and the configuration and service life of some competitive products are not weaker than those of cars and homes (priced at 50, 000 yuan), and their own products are not competitive.

Third, it is more cost-effective to marry DiDi Global Inc.. There is no light in the east and light in the west. The car and Home SEV project conforms to the European L6e low-speed electric vehicle standards and intends to open a shared travel service overseas. After switching to an operation-oriented model, the car and Home SEV is on a par with the current Renault Twizy in the European market, and when thinking about how to enter the timeshare and car-sharing market, Li wants to find a faster and better way than building a SEV timeshare model: working with a real travel company. As a result, you will see that car and Home are married with DiDi Global Inc. to customize the production of intelligent electric cars for shared travel scenes.

The three major factors superimposed on each other, prompting the car and home SEV project to finally become completely cool, Li Xiang had to pay for the miscalculation of the market and swallow the bitter fruit of failure.

Second, have no choice but to carry the pot for Lifan

Production qualification is required for automobile production. In order to solve the problem of production qualification, Lifan car will be purchased with 650 million yuan in December 2018, thus obtaining the production qualification of passenger car. After the acquisition, the legal person was changed to ideal co-founder Shen Yanan, and Lifan Motor officially changed its name to "ideal Smart Building" in January 2019. I thought the birth permit was in hand, everything was ready, just waiting for the impact of mass production.

Unexpectedly, the acquisition of Lifan brought a lot of trouble to the ideal, when it was busy with mass production, one contract dispute after another came to the door. Since June last year, ideal Intelligence has been sued by Sichuan set Refrigeration equipment Co., Ltd., Shenzhen Bic Power Battery Co., Ltd., Shanghai Fuyulong Automotive Technology Co., Ltd., Shanghai Fu Tailong Automotive Electronics Technology Co., Ltd., Nanchang Shangju HVAC Engineering and other 23 companies, and most of these lawsuits are sales contracts and bill disputes.

From September to December last year, ideal Intelligence was listed as the executor for three times, which seriously affected the ideal brand reputation and commercial reputation. You know, ideal ONE began mass delivery last December, when its company was listed as the person to be executed, putting it in an awkward position, more or less affecting user confidence. In order to reassure the outside world, the ideal official had to issue a statement to clarify.

"since the beginning of this year, ideal Zhizheng has been listed by the court as the person subject to execution three times. The lawsuits involved were all debts incurred during the period when Lifan Group held and operated Lifan Motor. After the litigation occurred, Lifan Group docked with relevant creditors and sought solutions, and Lifan Group was also responsible for the handling of later cases. "the ideal official said. Although becoming the executee is only an interlude on the ideal entrepreneurial road, and the misunderstanding is cleared up quickly after clarification, it still causes unnecessary trouble to it.

Third, the added program is not flattering.

Previously, ideal ONE has been promoting itself as an "added electric vehicle", emphasizing that this solution can help users bid farewell to mileage anxiety. On April 30 this year, he finally gave up this obsession. Li Xiang said that in the future, the ideal ONE will no longer be emphasized as an "add-on electric vehicle" and a unified caliber for plug-in hybrid vehicles. "it's good for users, for us, for the media. "behind the overthrow of the ideal, it highlights its helplessness at the marketing level and its compromise to the pressure of reality.

We should know that "add program" is a minority concept, which can not simply and directly convey the technical connotation to consumers in product publicity. If you specifically introduce this concept to consumers, it will increase marketing costs, and the effect will not be good. Ideal change is imperative, propaganda slogans are easy to change, but the troubles caused by route differences can not be easily avoided.

Before this year, compared with pure electric cars, plug-in hybrid cars already enjoy small subsidies; this year, setting a subsidy threshold of 300000 yuan makes the ideal fall into a dilemma. An important reason is that the retail price after the ideal ONE subsidy is 328000 yuan, which is not within the scope of the subsidy, and the ideal has to subsidize users out of their own pocket, which will undoubtedly increase their own financial burden and operating pressure.

You may say that the ideal ONE can be reduced to less than 300000 yuan to get subsidies, so as to enhance the competitiveness of products, even if Li wanted to do so, he did not have the courage to implement it. You know, ideal ONE just launched in December last year, pre-sale customers have not yet completed all delivery, hasty price reduction may lead to the first batch of seed users to complain, dissatisfaction, Xiaopeng to follow. Therefore, the ideal can only be used to subsidize users.

Adhering to the route of add-on electric vehicles not only puts great pressure on the ideal, but also gives it an advantage in the competition with pure electric vehicles, at least at a disadvantage compared with NIO Inc. and Tesla, Inc.. The former is protected by the "power exchange mode" and is not subject to the subsidy threshold of 300000 yuan, while the latter has the reason and necessity to reduce the price quickly to less than 300000 yuan, and also gets a subsidy, which is no small blow to domestic electric cars priced between 20 yuan and 400000 yuan.

IV. 8 quality problems in a row

Although Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Luo Yonghao, Shen Peng and other business leaders unanimously supported, the ideal ONE is not perfect at the product level, but was exposed a series of rollover black material, roof leakage, brake failure, broken axle, car spontaneous combustion and other eight quality problems all point to this star product. Although the ideal public relations crisis is handled properly, frequent quality control scandals will more or less make a bad impression on users and the market.

In this regard, an ideal person in charge said, "in terms of the current accidents, 80% are problems at the supplier level, such as brake failure because of Bosch ibooster failure, and 20% are our management level mistakes." Regardless of whether the division of responsibility is accurate or not, it is an indisputable fact that there is an ideal management error. Take the broken axle as an example, the owner thinks that there is a quality problem in the ideal ONE and puts forward the request to return the car, but the ideal official insists that the broken axle is caused by external forces and has nothing to do with the quality problems of the vehicle itself.

The above-mentioned ideal responsible person revealed that there is a certain degree of difficulty in analyzing the causes of the accident. Industry experts pointed out that the broken shaft may be the reason for the weak control of the production process, that is, the unqualified shaft is installed directly on the vehicle without being detected. "combined with the problems of out of control and leakage of brakes exposed by the recent ideal ONE, we can basically judge that this is a problem of factory management, and the new forces of car building are all weak points in this respect. "

As a matter of fact, the factory management of the automobile industry has not been achieved until it has been achieved for more than a hundred years, and this ability is ideal, and the new forces of car-building need to make up for it. Generally speaking, when new products, new processes and new equipment are first used, it is inevitable that they are not fully considered or there is a gap between theory and practice. Traditional car companies solve a lot of quality problems of new cars through trial production and verification with a long period (1 ~ 2 years). On the contrary, new car-building forces such as ideals have obvious shortcomings in this respect.

The importance of quality control is self-evident, and we cannot pay too much attention to it. Frequent quality problems have virtually sounded the alarm to the ideal. If we do not speed up to make up for the shortcomings, but let it go, quality control scandals may continue in the future. In the long run, it may lead to a crisis of trust. Li thinks it is time to strictly control the quality, because this is the ideal lifeline.

Conclusion

It is undeniable that ideal investors such as Wang Xing and Zhang Ying think highly of Li Xiang, but the ideal has gone through many detours along the way, and Li Xiang, as a leader, must bear the primary responsibility. In my opinion, born on the Internet, he is a typical product manager-type CEO, focusing on solving market pain points to make products, but relatively lacking in policy and marketing.

In particular, there have been repeated deviations in the grasp of policy, which is called bad luck at best, and strategic misjudgment at a bad point, resulting in the ideal being thankless and getting up early in the morning to catch up with the evening collection. Today, it is not easy for the ideal to get on the right track in an all-round way. The ideal ONE has delivered 10, 000 vehicles in just half a year, setting a record for the fastest delivery of 10, 000 new models from the new force of carbuilding, which is a very eye-catching performance, but there is still a big gap with the Flag established by Li Xiang at the beginning.

Last year, Li promised that the ideal goal is to sell 100000 vehicles by 2020 and 1 million by 2025. At the end of April this year, when asked by the media about "what kind of KPI will be set for himself in terms of sales in the next three years", he did not respond positively. Now that 2020 is halfway through and ideal ONE has sold only 10, 000 cars, it is almost certain that Li Xiang has put his heroic words behind him and chose to bow to reality.

It can be predicted that with the excellent record of delivering 10,000 vehicles in half a year, the ideal successful landing on NASDAQ is a high probability event, but this does not mean that its highlight moment is coming. on the contrary, survival is still a top priority. In the words of Shen Hui, the head of Weimar, the new power company of head car building is hardly safe. Weimar is so, and so is the ideal, and it will still be on the road in the future. It is not easy to build a car, and you can do it and cherish it!