SAIC has invested heavily in car companies .. is it a good business for car manufacturers to travel?

SAIC invested about1700 million yuan to enter the automobile company ... will the travel field be a good business for the whole vehicle manufacturer?

Text | car novel? Green lemon

On the evening of July 2, SAIC announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary SAIC Hong Kong Investment Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "SAIC Hong Kong") had cooperated with Shenzhou UCAR Co., Ltd. and its subsidiaries on the same day. UCARLimited 、? UCAR？ Service? Limited? UCAR？ Technology? Limited by Share Ltd (hereinafter referred to as "UCAR") and? Amber. Gems? Holding? Limited (hereinafter referred to as "amber? GEM ") signed a tender offer. According to the relevant contents of tender offer, SAIC Port plans to buy UCAR and Amber in cash at a price of HK$ 3. 10 per share. The number of CAR Inc. Limited (hereinafter referred to as CAR Inc.) held by GEM shall not exceed 613,377,424? Shares.

After the transaction is completed, SAIC will hold shares in CAR Inc. and become the largest shareholder of the company.

Why the car company?

For this transaction with a total amount of about HK$ 65.438+90.2 million (about RMB 65.438+73.4 million), the reason given by SAIC in the announcement is that SAIC is currently striving to accelerate the innovation transformation (from a traditional manufacturing enterprise to an integrated supplier providing mobile travel services and products to consumers). CAR Inc is a leading car rental enterprise in China and has relatively mature operation and management experience in related fields. If the acquisition can be completed as scheduled, it will help accelerate the development of SAIC's tourism business.

For SAIC's shareholding in CAR Inc, the initial reaction of most people in the automobile circle was somewhat unexpected. Because just before, BAIC just reached a cooperation agreement with CAR Inc ..

According to the announcement issued by CAR Inc. on June 1, the board of directors of CAR Inc. received a notice from the major shareholder UCAR on May 3 1, and reached a strategic cooperation agreement with BAIC. According to the agreement, BAIC will acquire no more than 450,790,855 shares from UCAR, which is equivalent to about 265,438+0.26% of CAR Inc' s total issued share capital. ..

This means that SAIC will replace BAIC as the largest shareholder after the transaction of CAR Inc. is completed, and Lieutenant General UCAR will no longer hold CAR Inc. shares. ..

What kind of car company has attracted BAIC and SAIC successively? In other words, why did the two automobile manufacturing groups choose CAR Inc?

According to SAIC in the above announcement, as of 20 19 12 3 1, CAR Inc has audited total assets of 24.633 billion yuan, total liabilities of165.4 billion yuan and net assets of 8.093 billion yuan. 20 19? The annual operating income is 76.91billion yuan, and the net profit is 3 1 billion yuan.

In addition, public information shows that by the end of last year, CAR Inc had a total fleet of 65,438+048,894 vehicles and more than 65,438+0,000 stores nationwide.

From a fundamental point of view, as a leading enterprise in the industry, car companies are in a leading position in both economic scale and offline volume.

On the other hand, due to the impact of the "Luckin Coffee Financial Fraud" incident, the current share price of CAR Inc has fallen by nearly 50% compared with that before the incident. In terms of timing, CAR Inc' s current situation has also created opportunities for the outside world to "bargain-hunting".

Will tourism be a good business?

With the intensification of competition in the automobile market and the rapid decline of bicycle profits, the traditional profit model has been unable to calmly support the existing scale system operation of automobile enterprises. Especially for the dealer system, just selling new cars can no longer support the healthy operation of dealers. When the automobile consumption market changes from incremental competition to stock competition, it is also one of the main reasons why more and more marginal traditional automobile enterprises are caught in the dilemma of stopping production and paying wages.

In fact, the transformation of traditional car companies is not a topic that has only appeared in the past two years. The transformation with the "new four modernizations" as the general direction has already started in the automobile industry. As one of the transformation options, "travel market" is frequently favored by car companies.

At present, there are (travel by road), (travel by Huaxia), Guangzhou Automobile (travel by bike), FAW (travel by FAW), Dongfeng (travel by Dongfeng), Chang 'an (travel by Chang 'an), Geely (travel by Cao Cao, travel by Yao), Great Wall Motor (Europe Travel), (Friends Travel), Xinte (travel by new store),.

Is the "travel market" a good business for automobile manufacturers in transition?

In terms of market scale, Bain Company, a global consulting company, released the Asia-Pacific Tourism Market Report 20 19 in August last year. According to this report, consumers in China market show great enthusiasm for online car sharing and bicycle sharing. Although the development of online car-hailing was once affected by security problems and the regulatory authorities issued a strict licensing system, the report still predicts that the transaction scale of China travel market will still reach 60 billion US dollars in 20021year.

According to the forecast data given by Peng Bo, global managing partner of McKinsey, in a public place last year, by 2030, the travel market will be around $7 trillion.

Based on the above forecast, it is obvious that there is still a lot of room for the macro-level travel market in the future, but at the micro level, this does not mean that every single entity in the current market can benefit from it.

Judging from the development of Didi Chuxing, a leading travel enterprise, for many years (according to the consulting data of Ai Media, Didi Chuxing has occupied more than 60% of the market share in the online car market), at least the current travel market is somewhat similar to the vehicle manufacturing industry, with high investment and slow recovery.

According to Cheng Wei, the founder of Didi, last year, "the company never made a profit from 20 12-20 18". Since its establishment six years ago, Didi's accumulated losses have reached 39 billion yuan. At present, statistics show that Didi has received 18 rounds of financing since its establishment, with a cumulative amount of $2 10 billion.

Didi, a leading enterprise with multi-round financing and full-time operation of the travel market, is still the case, and vehicle manufacturers are naturally not much better. Up to now, the travel business of the above-mentioned automakers has developed, and few cases have achieved profitability.

The Logic Behind Car Enterprises' Admission and Travel

The investment is large and the recovery is slow. Why do car companies choose to enter the travel market without hesitation?

SAIC's statement in the above announcement may be a good reference. According to SAIC, "If the acquisition can be completed as scheduled, it will help SAIC's tourism business? Accelerate the development of. At the same time, based on the principle of marketization, automobile companies and SAIC can improve their asset efficiency. Cooperation in rate improvement and service innovation model exploration. "

Collaborative development may be the fundamental reason behind the involvement of vehicle manufacturers in the travel market.

In this regard, in the view of Zhang, secretary of the Party Committee of Great Wall Motor Co., Ltd. and chairman of Eurotravel, car companies' involvement in the travel market is mainly a change in business philosophy, that is, from product management to user management.

According to his speech at the "20 19 Global Future Travel Conference" held last year, "customers directly spend money to buy cars. Considering the replacement of used cars and the transfer of life cycle, a car may be transferred to five people. However, if we change to the thinking of user management and travel service, each car can serve 30 users every day, and there may be 654.38+10,000 users under one car. 5 to 65438+ 10,000 is a very big concept. "

In fact, this is similar to what He, the founder of Xpeng Motors, once said: "The core of smart cars is operation, not manufacturing".

Of course, Hao Fei, CEO of Zebra Network, holds the same view. He once publicly stated on 20 18: "after five years, the operating profit of (automobile) is neck and neck with the profit of the whole vehicle."

In this regard, Ren Zhe, executive director of Chongqing Changan Chelian Technology Co., Ltd. said on the same occasion that the development of travel services has brought car companies the opportunity to directly contact users and obtain the most real needs of users. In his view, there is a gap between the traditional automobile manufacturing industry and customers (4S shops), and they do not directly provide services to users. With the change of travel, OEMs will have more opportunities to face users directly, provide services for users, and then understand the real needs of users.

In addition, unlike pure internet travel companies, the intention of vehicle manufacturers to get involved in this field is to make strategic layout in advance and collect effective data for the future autonomous driving business.

Autopilot, a term that seems far away from our real life, has actually come to us.

As early as 20 18, Waymo launched the world's first commercial self-driving taxi service in Phoenix, USA.

Domestic self-driving for the public is concentrated in the first half of this year. First of all, on April 22, Baidu's Changsha Robotaxi self-driving taxi was officially opened to the general public, and citizens could call the self-driving taxi in the area in real time through the mobile APP. Then, on June 23, Gaode taxi announced that it had reached a cooperation with Wenyuan Star, a self-driving travel company, and officially launched Robotaxi service. Passengers in Guangzhou can take a taxi from Gaode and call a driverless car with one click. Four days later, in Shanghai on June 27th, Didi Chuxing opened the self-driving taxi service to the public for the first time.

Although these self-driving taxi projects led by internet travel companies are still in the testing stage, opening them to the public will help them collect more data close to real life scenes.

What are the pain points for car companies to get involved in travel?

Although compared with internet travel companies, vehicle manufacturers seem to have more deep pockets, at least there is no financing problem in the short term. But also has an absolute advantage in vehicle supply. But it is obviously not enough to play the tourism market alone.

After Didi was put into operation, it continued to lose money for six years and could not make a profit, which is enough to show that the business of travel is far from as beautiful as it looks.

Generally speaking, the travel brand of the automobile factory looks very lively, but its business scope is mainly concentrated in the location of the enterprise. For example, Dongfeng travel is mainly concentrated in Wuhan and Xiangyang, Hubei; European tourism is mainly concentrated in Baoding, Hebei and Shijiazhuang.

For car companies, the first pain point to be solved is how to promote the influence (brand awareness) of their travel brands from their cities to the whole country. Only when the influence goes up will it be possible to grab market share from Didi.

In addition, how to improve traffic is also one of the pain points faced by automakers. Fight independently and focus on building your own platform? Or access third-party aggregation platforms such as Meituan and Gaode. The pros and cons of this need to be comprehensively considered by car companies.

Of course, compared with the first two points, the biggest pain point is when it will be profitable. Although vehicle manufacturers are richer than internet travel companies that rely on financing for survival, this does not mean that car companies have enough funds in their pockets to "burn money" for travel business indefinitely.

Especially in the context of the downward pressure on the entire automobile consumption market and the decline in bicycle profits, there are more and more car companies with "landlords without surplus grain". Even some car companies began to stop production and pay wages.

Automobile novel review;

For SAIC in the transition period, the key to accelerate the development of tourism business is not to enter automobile companies or other enterprises, but to create a distinctive core competitive advantage as soon as possible. Generally speaking, it is also the core selling point.

At this stage, the homogenization of travel brands created by vehicle manufacturers is more serious, which is why Didi still occupies an absolute leading position in the travel market even if many new brands are added overnight.

Judging from the business composition of CAR Inc. and SAIC's travel business, the significance of SAIC's entry into CAR Inc. may be to help it explore the car rental market for individual users. After filling this market gap, SAIC will collect travel services such as time-sharing, online car rental, business car rental and personal car rental.

However, these still need to be officially landed before they can make more specific judgments. After all, in the announcement, SAIC also clearly stated that "there are still uncertainties in the implementation process".

This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.