Sudden! Li Bin’s internal speech revealed: Weilai will open the power swap network, and the first partner will be announced tomorrow
Survive and pass the coldness to everyone.
In August last year, Ren Zhengfei said this in a conversation with Huawei internals. Now, this cold air has blown to the rims.
When the cold wave passes, all living beings are equal.
In October, Chery Jaguar Land Rover started a new round of layoffs, with a layoff ratio of approximately 15%-20%, involving multiple departments such as product engineering, quality management, production and manufacturing, and logistics and shipping management.
Joint venture car companies are shivering in the cold wind, and new forces are also "unable to escape". At the beginning of this month, Li Bin issued a heavy all-staff letter to NIO, stating that NIO will optimize its organization, reduce costs and increase efficiency, and will reduce department positions by about 10% as planned.
NIO is like the elephant in the room.
The brand line of "lift high and fight high" has shaped NIO. However, the high-end luxury that everyone talks about is now becoming an indelible gown of NIO. In order to tell high-end stories, NIO has touched upon a large number of supporting businesses in recent years, including expansion of battery swap station resources, investment in battery self-research, entry into smartphones, self-research of chips, and even overseas deployment.
NIO’s semi-annual report this year shows that NIO’s net loss for the first half of the year expanded by 139.7% year-on-year, with cumulative losses reaching 10.79 billion yuan.
To pay for its own large-scale expansion, NIO is now in a pit of shock.
Just today, Li Bin launched a speech to all employees within NIO, focusing on topics such as recent organizational optimization, sales pressure, and development direction in the next two years.
Li Bin also responded positively to questions raised by employees about whether the battery swap business is sustainable.
He said that battery swapping is NIO’s huge first-mover advantage. It has now reached the moment of opening up to the entire industry, and NIO’s first partner will be announced tomorrow. At the same time, Weilai is still negotiating cooperation with 4-5 car companies.
In fact, at the China Electric Vehicle 100 Forum held in April this year, Li Bin said that "the battery swapping service has reached a stage where it can be exported to the outside world." He hoped that other companies could share and build charging and swapping infrastructure with NIO. He also revealed that car companies are already discussing this matter with NIO.
In August of this year, there was news on the Internet that NIO and Mercedes-Benz had reached a cooperation, and NIO would open the battery swap platform to the latter and open up a new profit model. But at that time, Weilai did not respond to the authenticity of the news.
The current market is full of huge opportunities and places higher demands on every company.
NIO President Qin Lihong said this at the Guangzhou Auto Show. Both he and Li Bin believe that in the face of current market opportunities, Weilai will not go bankrupt, and it is impossible for it to go bankrupt.
The following is the original text of Li Bin’s internal speech:
We are not the only one doing battery replacement in the entire industry, there are 7 companies that are doing it seriously. The road to battery replacement is very difficult, but it is difficult and the right thing to do. So far, we have provided users with more than 32 million battery swaps.
Imagine that battery replacement is like Amazon's cloud service in 2003. There are several points that are very similar:
First, the network effect is strong. Power exchange is very similar to cloud services. The power exchange network is equivalent to the cloud service infrastructure of the Energy Internet. Certainly not without a reliable national or even global network. Today, many people are doing battery replacement and cannot build a nationwide network.
Second, the investment scale is large and the investment cycle is long. Amazon, Google, etc. have invested more than tens of millions of dollars in factories and equipment. Of course, our investment in power replacement is not as large as theirs, but the time period is also very long. But converted to equivalent investment efficiency, it is still very high.
Third, once you make the transition from serving yourself to serving external customers, the threshold is very high. Because at the beginning, others didn’t believe it could be done, but when it reaches a certain stage, others will find that the investment threshold and operation threshold are very high, because this is infrastructure construction.
Overall, the power exchange network is equivalent to the cloud service infrastructure of the Energy Internet. If you look at the cloud services of Alibaba, Tencent, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. today, a large part of their market value comes from "cloud services."
Without the cloud, their market value would be discounted. In the process of establishing "cloud services", these companies all suffered losses for many years before finally achieving their current success.
Today's node of our battery swapping business has reached the point where it can be opened to the outside world. We will provide the standard of our next-generation battery pack, an 800V high-voltage quick-swapping platform, to the entire industry. Tomorrow we will announce the first cooperation, and there will be 4-5 more companies we are negotiating with.
Therefore, we are not the only one in the industry doing battery swapping, but we are the first and most determined in the industry, and we already have a first-mover advantage. We welcome other companies to join us.
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