The difference between traditional cars and technology companies

When technology companies such as Apple, Baidu and Xiaomi enter the field of car-making under the banner of redefining cars, the word "OEM" may be redefined first.

Although OEM is a routine operation in 3C electronics field, OEM is not the mainstream form in automobile field.

At one time, when Wei Xiaoli, as the representative of the new ancient car-making forces, entered the automobile industry, OEM was regarded as an "unreliable" model.

At that time, not only did all kinds of Weilai car owners cut off the logo of "Jianghuai" on the Internet, but Freeman Shen, the founder of Weimar Automobile, also a new force in making cars, even said at the press conference that "if I choose OEM, I will not sleep every day".

Today, a few years later, Weilai, a new force that originally chose OEM, crossed this hurdle, and Tucki and Zero Run turned to build their own factories. The right or wrong of OEM mode is still inconclusive.

However, one thing is certain. When Baidu, Xiaomi and other technology companies enter the field of automobile manufacturing and make a more radical delivery plan-mass production within three years, OEM is gradually becoming a popular model.

With the popularity of this model, under the impetus of new players and new goals, OEM has also begun to show new characteristics.

1

Big brother enters the market and redefines OEM.

When it comes to "OEM" factories, people may first think of Jianghuai, Haima and Yangtze River ... In the last round of industry competition, the independent products of these car companies all belong to the category that is not optimistic. This is also one of the main reasons why the outside world has doubts about automobile OEM.

At the beginning, in order to break the stereotype of Jianghuai, Weilai made great efforts in cooperative production with Jianghuai.

For example, in order to ensure product quality, Weilai not only spent 200 million yuan to build a trial production line in Nanjing at the initial stage, but also tried to run through all the processes; Even the later Jianghuai Weilai factory was rebuilt by Jianghuai at a cost of 2.3 billion yuan, and all production standards were formulated by Weilai.

After some efforts, Weilai has changed the outside world's doubts about the product quality under the OEM mode to a certain extent. When the enterprises responsible for production become first-tier car companies such as Geely and BYD, the voices questioning product quality are decreasing.

When Baidu announced that it would cooperate with Geely to build cars and Didi announced that it would cooperate with BYD to produce cars, no one ever worried that these vehicles would be seriously damaged in quality.

Earlier, in response to Freeman Shen's statement that "if I choose OEM, I won't sleep every day", some insiders bluntly said: "If Toyota OEM Weimar, Freeman Shen won't complain".

Mainstream car companies participate in OEM, not only the external evaluation of OEM has changed, but also the cooperation mode itself has changed.

In the previous cooperation mode, the relatively weak car companies mainly rented production capacity and production qualifications, simply carried out OEM production and charged processing fees.

However, in the cooperation mode between BYD and Didi, Geely and Baidu, the cooperation between the two parties has become a joint venture company, with * * * developing and * * * operating, and * * * enjoying intellectual property rights.

According to public information, Baidu holds 55% and Geely holds 45%. In the cooperation between BYD and Didi, the two parties jointly established Wonderful Travel (Hangzhou) Automobile Technology Co., Ltd., in which BYD holds 65% of the shares and Didi holds 35%.

Technology companies rely on the mature car-making technology of traditional car companies to make their products land quickly, and traditional car companies rely on the software capabilities of technology companies to accumulate intelligent transformation experience. This way of cooperation is far deeper than the former.

At the same time, due to the underlying platform architecture and complete supply chain, these car companies also have more say in cooperation.

Due to the huge difference with the previous OEM model, in the view of Li Shufu, chairman of Geely Group, this model can no longer be called "OEM".

In his words, Geely and Baidu cooperate in automotive engineering technology, manufacturing technology, automotive frontier technology and other fields. "Geely is a great ideal to help Baidu realize (to build a smart electric car)."

2

Before normalization, challenges remain.

However, with the entry of technology enterprises, although automobile OEM is being redefined, compared with mobile phone OEM, the expansion of automobile OEM mode is not easy.

First of all, it is the difference between the cooperation demands of technology companies and traditional car companies.

Previously, after Apple officially announced that it would build a car, there was constant news that it was looking for a foundry on a global scale. Both Hyundai and Nissan were the targets of the Apple scandal.

Although the rumors once involved the details of where to build the factory, but with the attitude of directly denying postmodernism and Nissan, there is no news of Apple building a car until now.

As for the reason why the cooperation ended fruitlessly, according to Reuters's report, the root cause may be that Apple only wants to find a foundry instead of a strategic partner, but in the view of most traditional car companies, simply becoming a foundry will damage its brand image.

Each side has its own abacus, and it is not easy to find a balance point after various games.

Even though the D 1 model jointly built by BYD and Didi has been on the market, in April, several sources disclosed that Didi has started the car-making project, with Yang Jun, vice president of Didi and general manager of Xiao Ju special car service, as the leader, and has started to recruit people from the car factory to form a team.

Although how Didi will operate in the future is still inconclusive, the twists and turns of cooperation between technology companies and traditional car companies can be seen.

When Apple announced that it would build a car, Foxconn, which became famous for its cooperation with Apple, also began to vigorously promote the automobile OEM strategy.

However, whether Foxconn can reproduce its OEM legend in the field of mobile phones again this time has been marked with a big question mark.

As the jewel in the crown of modern industry, the automobile industry has a long industrial chain, difficult equipment generalization and strong technical expertise compared with mobile phone OEM. If the overall level of OEM platform is insufficient, OEM enterprises may need to build a special assembly line for each brand. The investment of automobile production line is high and professional, and the development, manufacture, installation and debugging of production equipment are professional and time-consuming processes.

In the round after round of car-building craze, there are not a few new forces that have spent tens of billions not building cars. Like Foxconn, it may be more difficult to build a more general platform from scratch.

It can be said that in today's background, powerful traditional car companies are reluctant to become foundries, and the lack of technology of barbarians who are interested in OEM business is still a problem facing the rapid promotion of the current automobile OEM model.

In fact, if other factors are not considered, car OEM itself is a good business from the perspective of income alone.

Take Jianghuai as an example. In the past three years, JAC has earned an average of 1.400 yuan's main engine factory expenses and about 6,000 yuan in loss compensation for each production of a Weilai car.

In order to take over this business, Jianghuai invested 2.3 billion yuan to rebuild the factory, which will recover the cost this year.

Under such favorable conditions, I wonder if more traditional car companies have turned to OEM.