Made for Weilaicell phoneRegarding the incident, a Weilai car owner replied to the reporter: “You must buy it.”
Contrary to the confidence of Weilai car owners in Weilai mobile phones, some mobile phone industry practitioners still have doubts about the prospects of Weilai mobile phones. On Maimai, the hottest post about Weilai mobile phone is to discuss whether it has prospects. More than 200 people responded to this post, and several of them said that they had already received the offer (admission letter) of Weilai mobile phone, but they did not choose to join the company in the end because they were “fearing that their resumes would be spent” and “worrying that they would not be able to work for a few years.”
On August 4, Qichacha revealed that “NIO Mobile Technology Co., Ltd.” has been formally established with a registered capital of US$100 million, and its legal representative is Qin Lihong, the co-founder of NIO.
Source: Enterprise Check
Weilai mobile phone is still crazy to recruit people
In March this year, in a video interview, Li Bin officially announced that Weilai would make mobile phones, and the dust settled.
Judging from the posts on social platforms such as Maimai and the revelations of relevant people in the industry, at present, Weilai mobile phone is still in the stage of a large number of recruitment. On the Maimai platform, after many posts discussing NIO’s mobile phone offer, you can often see NIO’s active headhunters.
Various types of information are displayed on the platform,At the beginning of this year, Weilai began to recruit mobile phone teams, mainly in Shanghai andvivo、OPPO、MilletShenzhen waiting for mobile phone brands to get together. Backed by the convenient geographical location of Shenzhen, most of the recruitment of NIO mobile phone project is aimed at employees of surrounding mobile phone manufacturers such as vivo, oppo, and Xiaomi.
Judging from the messages of many people on Maimai, since the beginning of this year, employees of mobile phone manufacturers such as vivo, oppo, and Xiaomi have frequently received headhunting calls, and some even received three times a day. Most of the recruits are senior mobile phone industry practitioners. Many of them have 5-10 years of experience in the mobile phone industry. In order to poach people from other mobile phone manufacturers, Weilai is also quite sincere in salary.Most of the salary increases are between 30%-50%. A person who works at Xiaomi confirmed that three colleagues around him recently joined the NIO mobile phone project.
As a predecessor of Weilai, the Geely mobile phone team is still recruiting. According to the recruitment information released in July by a self-proclaimed employee of Xingji Times (a Geely mobile phone affiliate), the newly recruited positions involve software testing, hardware testing, Android performance optimization, image algorithms, chip design and other branches. Some netizens revealed that the office of Hubei Xingji Times is located next to Yijiatong in Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone. There are more than 1,000 employees, and there will be a separate office building in the future.
In April this year, the State Intellectual Property Office disclosed the authorization of two “mobile phone” appearance patents applied by Hubei Xingji Times Technology Co., Ltd. Patent pictures show that Geely mobile phones useiPhoneSimilar to the right-angle frame design, the rear lens module adopts a equilateral triangle centered arrangement.
Can 220,000 car owners support a market of tens of millions?
In the context of a sharp drop in global mobile phone demand, why does NIO still insist on entering the mobile phone market?
In the interview video on March 31, Li Bin, the leader of Weilai, explained the original intention of making a mobile phone: “Our starting point for considering making a mobile phone is very simple, we want to give Weilai owners a mobile phone with the best car-machine interconnection experience, and It’s not about thinking in terms of business success. NIO looks at the phone from the perspective of the car, not the car from the perspective of the phone.”
Car-machine interconnection is an important place for many car companies to enter the mobile phone industry. When Geely laid out the mobile phone industry last year, the vehicle-machine interconnection system was the focus of its research and development.
On July 4 this year, Geely acquired Meizu, which also caused a lot of heated discussions in China. Many professionals speculate that Geely’s acquisition is intended for Flyme, Meizu’s car version system. However, at present, the interconnection of vehicle-machine systems still takes time.On August 4, Geely Automobile’s brand Geometric Automobile announced that it will carryHuaweiHarmony OS car system. The cooperation between Meizu and Geely is still difficult to see results.
In contrast, mobile phone companies are making more and more breakthroughs in the automotive industry. According to media reports, the Xiaomi car project will enter the soft-model car offline stage in September, and will enter the field test and winter test cycle as scheduled. Although Xiaomi cars are still on the road, the success of the first-month sales of the Qjie series jointly launched by Huawei and Celis has shown the possibility of mobile Internet breaking through the automotive industry.
As a blockbuster product in Huawei’s cross-border automotive industry, the delivery volume of the Asking series in July reached 7,228 units, approaching 10,000 units. Although the number did not reach the goal of breaking 10,000, this number has also helped the industry reach a new record high. According to Sun Yanbiao’s analysis, the success of Inquiry is mainly due to Huawei’s brand advantages and sales channels.
According to public information, Huawei has more than 600 stores across the country that can provide the experience and test drive services of Wenjie Auto. Although Huawei stores do not provide car pickup and purchase services, relying on nearly 600 million user groups, it can successfully attract users. to more than 122 AITO user centers covering more than 109 cities.
In Sun Yanbiao’s view, the success of the industry has also prompted auto companies to accelerate their entry into the mobile phone industry and try to maintain their moat by running through the mobile Internet model.
Even so, Sun Yanbiao believes that the profit base of the mobile Internet model must have at least 10 million user groups, and the announcement released on the official website of NIO on August 1 stated that as of July 31, 2022, NIO had delivered a total of 227,949 vehicles. That is,Even if the owner of the NIO car has a mobile phone, the users of NIO mobile phones are still far from the profitability standard of tens of millions of users。
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The layout of low-end models is more reliable
Compared with other new auto brands, Weilai was born with a “golden spoon” and is popular in the capital market. It is the darling of the new auto industry. As a leader among the new forces in car manufacturing, NIO has always created a myth of sales in the field of new automobiles.
However, when the time came to 2022, the myth of Weilai could not be continued. “Wei Xiaoli”, who entered the market with the positioning of high-end electric vehicles, also failed to maintain the advantages of “new forces”.
The “In-depth Analysis Report on the National New Energy Market in June 2022” released by the Passenger Federation shows that in the first half of 2022, the retail sales of new energy passenger vehicle manufacturers in the narrow sense ranked among the top five, and none of “Weixiaoli” was on the list. High-end pricing just became their stumbling block.
According to data released by the Passenger Federation, in the past 10 months, among the sales of new energy vehicles, the sales of vehicles priced above 300,000 yuan have always been less than 20% of the total sales. Among the top five brands, except for Tesla, the prices of other listed brands are around 100,000 to 300,000 yuan.
Not only that, in July this year, second-tier brands such as Nezha and Leapmotor have already surpassed the latecomers in terms of sales, surpassing “Wei Xiaoli”. The data shows that among the new car-making forces, Nezha Auto became the sales champion in July with 14,000 units delivered, Leapmotor ranked second with 12,000 units, while Xiaopeng Motors, which had won the sales championship several times before, became the sales champion in July. It won the third place with 11,500 vehicles.
Even among the three brands of “Weixiaoli”, Weilai’s sales are not impressive. Limited by the supply chain and other reasons, the sales of ET7, which NIO had high hopes for this year, did not perform well, with only 2,473 units. This also led Li Bin to call suppliers directly at the press conference.
In the face of weak sales, NIO needs a new story. Adding sub-line brands with lower prices and entering the mobile phone market are all new stories NIO hopes to tell investors.Recently, it has been reported that NIO is developing a mid-to-low-end product line. The new brand, codenamed Firefly, focuses on the lower-end 100,000-level entry market. The previously exposed Alps hopes to cover the 200,000-300,000 range. So far, the three brands of NIO have completed a stepped matrix.
I have to say, this method really works. On August 1, stimulated by the double news of the preparation of the sub-line brand and Weilai mobile phone, Weilai’s share price rose all the way, once rising by more than 11% to HK $166.8, and the stock price reached a new high since July 19.
Compared with building Weilai mobile phones, Li Bin’s new story in the automotive field is obviously more convincing.
