With factories shutting down, 4S stores closing, and no cars to sell, this car company is afraid of going cold.

Will Zotye be the first traditional car company to fall in 2020?

From the beginning of 2019, this car company has been y involved in the negative news of work stoppages, arrears and even bankruptcy, although the official has repeatedly refuted rumors and released good news, but it is still difficult to cover the performance and sales of a plunge.

In 2019, Zotye is expected to lose 6-9 billion yuan, a year-on-year decline of 850%-1225%; last year, the entire year, Zotye car sales were only a mere 116,600 units, down nearly 50% from the same period last year.

In order to complete the 2018 performance commitment compensation, the parent company Tie Niu Group had to state that it would sell houses and land to compensate. In the face of the 2019 performance commitment once again skipped, but hopefully Tieh Niu Group has enough real estate to sell.

As a car company, sales and performance decline is not terrible, the key is that zhongtai because of the supply chain owed money, resulting in the stoppage of work, rely on the turnaround of the new model can not be marketed, the capital chain problems.

If you can't raise funds in time, resume work as soon as possible, and restore the channel, Zhongtai Automobile is afraid that it won't survive this year.

Looking through the reports on Zotye, I found that the car company is in big trouble.

At the beginning of last year, there were rumors of substantial wage arrears, involving Yongkang, Hangzhou, Linyi and other bases; by July, most of the country's provincial capitals and municipalities have been switched to the National Six emission standards, just as other car companies have been on the new models, Zhongtai has not met the standard of the National Six models on the market, which has led to the dealers around the country have no cars to sell.

At the beginning of August 2019, Zotye Junma Automobile also appeared more than 100 dealers to defend the rights of the incident, allegedly more than 100 Junma Automobile dealers gathered in Yongkang, Zhejiang Province, the headquarters of Zotye Automobile to defend the rights.

After the CCTV "name" report, Zotye Auto production stagnation, the factory is in a state of semi-suspension, a number of stores have no car to sell these situations are all exposed, the brand of a huge blow.

And its Junma Automobile was also rumored to be bankrupt, all the senior staff left, in a state of unmanaged; and later also because of the battery supplier BAK Battery owed more than 600 million yuan of payment, the other party sued and froze part of the assets.

In 2016, the parent company Tie Niu Group, in order to successfully let Zotye Automobile smoothly shell Golden Horse shares listed, had signed the "Profit Forecast Compensation Agreement", the commitment of 2016-2019 Zotye's net profit of not less than CNY1.21 billion, CNY1.41 billion, CNY1.61 billion and CNY1.61 billion.

Who would have thought that it was from that year that Zotye began to go downhill.

In addition to the over-completion of the standard performance in 2016, in 2017 and 2018, the performance completion rate of Zotye Automobile was 95.15% and -30.52%, respectively, and the cumulative completion rate was only 49.25%.

So Tieh Niu Group had to admit compensation. However, because of the current iron cattle group holds the shares of zhongtai automobile 100% in the restricted state, even the performance of 2018 compensation is difficult to implement, have no choice, iron cattle group commitment to sell the land and property to obtain cash to compensate.

In the face of huge losses in 2019, Tie Niu Group has a bigger hole to fill.

Although rumors of Zotye's bankruptcy and liquidation were denied last year, 2020 is indeed a life-and-death year for Zotye.

The constant rumors of non-payment of wages and work stoppages have shown that ZTE's financial crisis is already very serious, and as long as there are problems with the capital chain, it will lead to a series of problems in the supply chain and factories not being able to start work, which will ultimately affect the launch of new models on the market as scheduled. If this year's new model can't be listed on the market as scheduled, Zhongtai will have to cool down.

The TS5, which was originally scheduled to go on sale in the first quarter of this year, is the first model to be developed on ZFA's new platform, and is also this year's flagship model.

Zotye is counting on this car to become a hit again, reversing the decline in its sales and profits, and most importantly, this is related to the key to the success of the Zotye brand transition, so the importance of the TS5 model is self-evident,

But this car's seems to have fallen into a difficult to produce, and the listing has been postponed time and time again, coinciding with the epidemic of 2020, which Zotye said that because of the company's financial constraints, the supply of raw materials is not timely, resulting in the suspension of some models. The supply of raw materials is not timely, resulting in the discontinuation of some models. 2020 new car listing can be carried out according to plan, is still an unknown.

If you can't repay your suppliers properly, you won't be able to go into production because of the shortage of parts, and the models won't be able to hit the market and affect sales and performance.

If ZTE wants to solve this deadlocked cycle, money is the key.

The capital chain problem of Zotye Automobile started in 2018, and with the suppliers' debt collection escalating again in 2019, last year's three-quarterly report showed that while its total liabilities have exceeded 14 billion yuan.

In August last year, led by Zheshang Bank, Bank of China, Construction Bank, and Yongkang Agricultural and Commercial Bank*** with 3 billion yuan of loans issued to Zongtai Automobile, as well as 60 million from the government's new energy vehicle subsidies, as a stage of restoration of production to save the emergency.

At the time, Zotye was also confident that the problem would be solved. However, half a year later, the situation has not been alleviated.

According to the compensation agreement, the maximum performance compensation of Tieh Niu Group in 2019 is expected to require share compensation of more than 792 million shares, which is about 1.7 times that of 2018. Now that the multi-billion dollar hole in the 2019 loss is here, and future loans and financing will be affected, will last year's measly 3 billion yuan loan be enough to renew the life of the company?

If the situation is still not better in 2020, the parent company will not sit back and wait to be dragged down, once the capital chain is broken, do not rule out the possibility of bankruptcy reorganization.

In a sense, the rise and fall of Zotye is a microcosm of the development of some independent brands.

The history of Zotye's development is familiar to everyone, and the title of "Bao Shitai" and "Leather Ruler Department" is by no means a waste of time, and this high-fashion strategy has indeed made Zotye a success in some sense.

Whether it's the Zotye SR9, which is known as the "Bao Shi Tai", or the T600, Zotye has created a few hits.

With the Zotye T600, Zotye Automobile first broke through the annual sales of 200,000 units mark; to 2016 and 2017 for two consecutive years, sales exceeded 300,000, entering the top ten sales of independent brands, to reach the peak of the "car life".

Success is also Xiaohe defeat, there is no technology, do not focus on quality, rely on copying to profit speculation will not last long.

"Jade outside, the failure of the flotsam in the" is the outside world on the above evaluation of the explosive, the quality of the Zotye automobile complaints have been high, the consumer reputation continues to decline.

The trouble with Zotye is not just a simple decline in sales and losses, but also a crisis in its product updates and channels.

Due to the lack of focus on independent research and development, the model upgrading is slow, and since 2018, there has been no brand new fuel model launched on the side of Zongtai, and only some of the small facelift models.

In the case of the market has been rapidly upgraded, Zotye can only rely on a few old models to eat old money, the competitiveness is obviously insufficient.

At the same time, the lack of supply of parts due to financial problems has led to the lack of production capacity of the originally hot models, which has also affected delivery and sales.

By 2018, Zotye Auto's annual sales fell to 234,000 units, a year-on-year decline of 26.23%, halfway to the year's 480,000 sales target.

The most unbelievable thing is that by the second half of 2019, Zotye actually did not have a model of the National Six to put in, and in the second half of the most prosperous sales in the second half of the months actually no car to sell.

The above multi-layered reasons, zhongtai also dragged their own distribution network, which is the fundamental to ensure sales.

Zhongtai repeatedly rumors of dealers collective rights time, the reasons include Zhongtai product quality problems lead to dealers large losses, after-sales service can not guarantee that no car can be sold to lead to losses, and so on, around a lot of dealers closed down.

Zotye has actually tried to brand up, such as the launch of the Junma automobile has also made a lot of noise.

Junma Automobile was established in June 2017, the purpose is to brand upward, get rid of Zotye cottage and low-quality brand influence.

Unfortunately, Junma did not get rid of the parent company Zotye development path, technology and brand is still a change of soup, and finally fell into the brink of bankruptcy.

Originally, Zotye had the opportunity to turn the tide with new energy.

As the earliest batch of enterprises to enter, the peak sales in 2017 into the top five. At the height of the moment, Zhongtai also signed a joint venture with Ford Motor, mainly engaged in the field of new energy, but two years later, there has been no substantial progress.

Zotye electric car can be seen or Z100, E200, such a poor product, and later launched the T300EV and Z500EV is basically considered a failure. In other independent brands have entered the new intelligent pure electric 2.0 era, Zotye new energy has lagged behind by a large margin.

Despite this, we can't dismiss the efforts Zotye has been making, including the launch of new brands such as Junma and Hanlong, entering the field of intelligent driving, and also planning to launch a fuel cell model, inviting Volkswagen's former designer Martin Kropp to join us, etc. But it doesn't seem to have had much success. But it doesn't seem to have had much success.

So where exactly is the way out for Zotye now?