Recently, in the poster released by the official Weibo of AITO Automobile, the logo in the upper right corner was changed from the original “AITO” to “HUAWEI”.
Not long ago, Wang Jun, COO of Huawei’s automotive BU and president of intelligent driving solutions, was suspended. Currently, CEO Yu Chengdong will be in charge of Huawei’s smart car business. The outside world generally believes that this personnel adjustment may be the harbinger of Huawei’s own car-making. After all, Yu Chengdong has always been an executive within Huawei who firmly supports car manufacturing.
Although Huawei has denied the rumors of making cars more than once, after two years of precipitation, the AITO brand is no longer what it used to be, and has become the fastest growing new energy vehicle brand. In addition, there are still eight months before the deadline for “no car building” mentioned by Ren Zhengfei. How should Huawei choose next?
route dispute
Huawei has been involved in the automotive field for a long time. After the rise of trams, Huawei established a smart car solution business unit in 2019 to be an incremental supplier of smart cars. At present, Huawei’s automotive BU can be summarized into the following three modes: “Smart Selection Mode”, “Hi Mode” and traditional parts supplier mode.
The “smart selection mode” is led by Yu Chengdong, and provides products to cooperative car companies, namely the Hongmeng “smart cockpit” system. The most successful example so far is Cyrus. High attention.
This model makes the cooperation between the two parties unprecedentedly close. The design of smart cars, electronic control, motors, systems, and intelligent driving technologies are mainly provided by Huawei, and the online after-sales service is also managed and led by Huawei. Cyrus is mainly responsible for R&D, manufacturing, and delivery. , services, etc. At present, Huawei has strengthened the factory inspection of cars and the laying of after-sales networks.
Wang Jun is leading the “Hi mode”, which mainly provides software and hardware for intelligent driving to cooperative car companies, and does not participate in other aspects of the daily operation of car companies. Jihu and Avita, which have cooperated with Huawei before, all adopt this model.
The third is a service model similar to a first-tier traditional parts supplier, in which Huawei provides corresponding parts to vehicle manufacturers.
Obviously, the “smart selection mode” is currently the most out of the circle. According to data from the Passenger Car Market Information Association, the sales volume of the Wenjie M5 and Wenjie M7 models under the cooperation with Huawei’s smart selection model in January this year totaled 4,469, and the sales volume in the past year totaled 81,735 vehicles. In the whole year of 2022, the sales volume of AITO Wenjie series will exceed 75,000, making it the fastest growing new energy vehicle brand.
The performance forecast released by Cyrus also shows that with the increase in sales of new energy vehicles, it is expected to achieve operating income of 33.5 billion to 35 billion yuan in 2022, a substantial increase of 100.38% to 109.36% over the same period last year. In this way, Huawei has the confidence to continue to promote the smart selection model and even directly build cars.
If the core is trapped, the road can pass?
Previously, Huawei’s thriving consumer business, due to the successive bans in the United States, has greatly affected Huawei’s mobile phones in the market.
Not long ago, the United States reached an agreement with the Netherlands and Japan on restricting the export of some advanced chip manufacturing equipment to China. Some export control measures adopted by the United States in October 2022 will be extended to companies in the Netherlands and Japan, including ASML, a Dutch semiconductor equipment manufacturer, Nikon, a large Japanese optical instrument manufacturer, and Tokyo Electron Co., Ltd., a semiconductor manufacturing equipment giant. Suppress China’s chip industry chain.
That casts another cloud over an uncertain consumer business. However, it is not only consumer electronics products such as mobile phones and notebooks. Once these agreements are implemented, Huawei will completely cut off the supply from the part before the agreement, and will completely cut off the supply. To continue.
What I have to mention is that the performance of the cooperative models of Jihu and Avita in Hi mode is lower than expected, and it is difficult to bring obvious benefits to Huawei. However, relying solely on the smart selection model business, it is still difficult to support Yu Chengdong’s goal of realizing the profit of the automobile BU in 2025.
In fact, although AITO has grown rapidly, Huawei has also invested a lot in this regard and has taken relatively high risks. Yu Chengdong even said that automobiles are Huawei’s only loss-making business.
According to data released by Huawei, in the field of smart car solutions alone, Huawei will invest as much as US$1 billion in 2021, and its R&D team will reach 5,000 people. In addition, currently about 8 million smart cars that have obtained Huawei’s 4G/5G patent license are delivered to consumers every year. Furthermore, thousands of stores have to be used to help them sell, and profit sharing is also a relatively complicated issue.
If other terminal hardware under the consumer business cannot break through the core shortage dilemma, it will be difficult to obtain a large amount of profit to feed back the high cost required for car manufacturing.
Summarize
Many years ago, Ren Zhengfei once stated sternly that Huawei is determined not to make mobile phones. Everyone knows what happened next. Ren Zhengfei not only agreed to establish the project, but also announced on the spot that he would invest 1 billion yuan, which opened the road to the rise of Huawei’s mobile phone.
Now, Huawei seems to have reached another threshold, even though Ren Zhengfei had previously issued a “military order”, saying that whoever makes a proposal to build a car in the future will be transferred from his post. However, shortly after Ren Zhengfei issued the resolution, Huawei assigned the car manufacturing business to the Consumer Business Management Committee, which was directly managed by Yu Chengdong.
So this time, will there be the same reversal as ten years ago?
