Maybe Shen Yanan wants to ignore it, but he can’t stand by and watch the ideal future.Welcome to the WeChat subscription number of “Sina Technology”: techsina
Text/Black Sheep
Source: AI Blue Media Collection (ID: lanmeih001)
Shen Yanan once said: “Li Xiang is the most likely person in China to become Jobs.”
But he denied that he wanted to be Cook. As the president of Ideal Motors and the number two person after founder Li Xiang, he said: “If Li Xiang is ten steps away from Steve Jobs, I feel like I am a hundred steps away from Cook.”
Discuss who can become Jobs, this is the ultimate question for Chinese entrepreneurs. As for becoming Cook, it is very similar. Cook has also reduced his holdings of Apple’s stock more than once.
This is the case with Shen Yanan. On September 2, he reduced his holdings of 400,000 Hong Kong shares in Lili Auto, cashing in US$5.2888 million; four days later, he sold 600,000 shares again. The continuous reduction of holdings allowed him to get about 91.13 million yuan, and his shareholding ratio also dropped from 1.74% to 1.68%.
In addition to Shen Yanan, Meituan Wang Xing, who holds shares in Ideal Auto, is also reducing his holdings. In March of this year, Wang Xing reduced his Hong Kong stock holdings of Ideal Auto three times in two days, with a total cash out of about 310 million yuan.
It is reasonable and legal for shareholders or co-founders to sell stocks for cash, and there is no need to go into the reasons. Just put it in the context of the current situation of the ideal car is not very good, it is easy to cause external associations.
According to the second quarter financial report of Li Auto in 2022, the total revenue in the second quarter was 8.73 billion yuan. Among them, vehicle sales revenue was 8.48 billion yuan, an increase of 73% from 4.9 billion yuan in the same period last year, and a decrease of 8.9% from 9.31 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2022. The net loss in the second quarter of 2022 was 640 million yuan, an increase of 172.2% from the 235.5 million yuan in the second quarter of 2021.
Losses are expanding, and at the same time, Ideal is also facing unstable supply chain control, frequent product quality problems, and the influence of Ideal ONE’s “discontinued production” – although, Ideal posted an article in the official community on the evening of September 22nd. “A Letter to Ideal Owners”, which explained the after-sales service, software assurance, and data services of the Lili ONE after it was discontinued. However, it has been three weeks since the publication of this letter.
At such a critical moment, the reduction of the number two character Shen Yanan is somewhat confusing – this calm and steady person, who is diametrically opposed to Li Xiangyang’s personality, seems to have suddenly become a famous person in the “water retrograde” of the ideal car. “outsider”.
outsider
If it wasn’t for Shen Yanan to cash out, the ideal’s recent days would not be comfortable.
The ideal L9 that claims to be the best SUV within 5 million is not very worry-free. During the road test, there was a negative news about the broken axle. Now, after delivery, another car owner reported that the car broke down halfway, which made Li Xiang appease the customer, and at the same time have to make a case for the discontinuation of the previous generation car, the ideal ONE.
The fact that the production of the Ideal ONE was discontinued was just a rumor at first, but then the rumors came true, and the car owners were really anxious, and they kept posting and yelling.
Then in August, the China Passenger Transport Association released the sales volume of new energy vehicles. After calculation, Weilai sold 10,677 vehicles, ranking 12th, and Xiaopeng sold 9,578 vehicles and ranked 15th. In this TOP15 list, there is no ideal.
In September, the ideal was revolving around various negative news, and the fact that President Shen Yanan reduced his holdings and cashed out made all the figures and details above add fuel to the fire.
Inside the ideal, Shen Yanan, whose power is second only to Li Xiang, manages almost everything. His “user business group” has six departments, covering manufacturing, supply chain, quality and safety, sales, charging network, after-sales, overseas – these departments do not have responsibilities and rights classification, because within Ideal, they all belong to “Level 1”.
However, the powerful Shen Yanan is not well known to the outside world. The ideal focus is always on Li Xiang himself. For example, in the middle of the night, he blogs about “extended programs”, and arguing that those “extended dissidents” at the meeting are stinky with technology. For example, “the best SUV within 5 million yuan”. Li Xiang can come as soon as he opens his mouth, and Shen Yanan usually keeps silent.
Shen Yanan’s EMBA alumni commented on him: There are not many distinctive labels on him; the ideal employee’s impression of the second-in-command is: calm and pragmatic, calm and restrained every time he speaks to the outside world.
Calm and restrained, this is in stark contrast to Li Xiang’s unruly swordsmanship. This kind of silent emotion is usually brought to work. At the end of July this year, when a media asked Shen Yanan how to achieve the goal of 2 million sales, he just said: This is one of the biggest challenges.
For Shen Yanan, it seems particularly important to judge the results and then eliminate the bad emotions in the process.
He likes Albert Camus’s The Outsider, which is hailed as an existential classic: Meursault’s indifference to major events—the death of his mother, the death trial, has not had a big impact on him. He has always been like an outsider, looking at the trauma that happened to him indifferently.
Shen Yanan once said that he is very similar to Meursault: in the face of a particularly big impact, it is probably that the body has activated a self-protection mode, and suddenly feels withdrawn, and there will not be too much despair and pain.
This may also be reflected in the current reduction in holdings. When Shen Yanan reduced his holdings of ideal stock by 1 million shares twice in September and cashed out more than 90 million yuan, even if the market exploded again, he was still calm like an outsider.
However, since cashing out cannot leave the game, Shen Yanan is still an ideal insider.
Ideal Supply Chain Bureau
The ideal situation is now more difficult to understand.
In this bureau, the problem of stuck necks released by the supply chain also caused headaches for the three brothers of the new car-making forces.
He Xiaopeng, the founder of Xiaopeng Motors, was asked how to solve the problem of lack of chips when he participated in a talk show at the end of 2021. He said who can give me chips now, and I flew to him for a drink. The host also asked him, what about the brothers?
He Xiaopeng said: The same.
When Shen Yanan and Li Xiang first co-founded Lixiang Auto, what they were doing was supply chain work. He is an expert in this field. When he studied at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom in his early years, he obtained a master’s degree in logistics and supply chain management. After several toss and turns after returning to China, he became the vice president of Lenovo, and his work was also responsible for supply chain management.
However, the supply chain of car manufacturing is difficult to manage – three-quarters of Shen Yanan’s daily work is communicating with supply chain companies. However, people have never been able to keep up with the changes in the current situation. The epidemic has made the already difficult and fragile supply chain even more difficult to control.
The market did not give face, and blamed the decline in the ideal performance on the supply chain, which made Shen Yanan have to explain.
Ideally when the first quarter was losing money, Shen Yanan said at the performance meeting: “Affected by the epidemic, users’ willingness to consume has decreased. The biggest uncertainty in the future is whether the supply chain can return to stability.”
Then in May, the ideal delivery volume dropped sharply by 62%. Shen Yanan did not speak this time, but the ideal official gave an explanation: the impact of the supply chain caused by the epidemic.
A person familiar with new energy vehicle manufacturing told AI Blue Media: the Yangtze River Delta is a place where new energy vehicle supply companies are concentrated, and it is also where the outbreak of the epidemic in the first half of this year. In such an environment, it is possible to control the supply chain. The first is the big car manufacturers. With the shipment volume of the new forces, there is not much room for bargaining.
The ideal problem boils down to the supply chain, and the supply chain problem boils down to the epidemic — in public information, the ideal range extender suppliers Lister and Delphi, chip suppliers Texas Instruments and Bosch, tire suppliers Michelin, these companies China The district headquarters are in Shanghai.
Under the epidemic, Shen Yanan, who manages the supply chain, has almost nothing to do—there is a problem upstream, which affects Chiyu.
The greater pressure is that the questioned technology of range extension will be “ineffective”-Beijing has announced that range extension cars cannot use tram green cards, and Shanghai has also announced that from 2023, it will no longer issue extended range cars. Free green card. For the ideal, whether it is to benchmark the 500 million Marriott car, or to recreate the concept of a “Daddy’s car”, it is not as important as the license plate.
Under the pressure of the situation, sticking to the ideal of increasing the program, it has also announced that from next year, at least two pure electric vehicles will be launched every year.
And the pressure passed to Shen Yanan again. In addition to facing the fragile Yangtze River Delta automobile supply chain, he also had to face the Ningde era with pure electric vehicles. Before that, due to the use of extended-range technology, the demand for batteries It’s not very big, and there is much less room for bargaining in front of King Ning. The change in this model also allows Shen Yanan to face the giant beast in front of him again.
Maybe Shen Yanan wants to ignore it, but he can’t stand by and watch the ideal future.
control your own destiny
After all, Shen Yanan is the ideal co-founder. Apart from Li Xiang, he is the person who understands the ideal car situation best.
Like other companies, there are some proverbs posted on the wall of the ideal automobile headquarters, one of which is: control your own destiny and constantly challenge the limit of growth.
Shen Yanan likes this sentence.
In 2015, 38-year-old Shen Yanan was already the vice president of Lenovo Group and chairman of Motorola China. On the eve of joining Lili that year, he was responsible for an internal layoff. The list of layoffs includes many senior Motorola employees who participated in the design of the RAZRV3 blade mobile phone with an annual sales of 130 million units. However, at a time when the mobile phone industry is undergoing drastic changes, they are still in their early 50s and have not been able to retire at Motorola. That day.
For half a year, Shen Yanan felt closely the fact that “persons cannot survive the tide alone”, and he began to deeply explore himself: in the 18 years before retiring at the age of 55, are there other options?
It is also based on these thoughts that Shen Yanan joined Lili Auto and participated in the car-making business now.
Also as a co-founder, at the end of 2020, when Shen Yanan talked about the ideal and controversial program extension technology, he almost copied the phrase “control your own destiny”.
He said: “Why do we do range extension? This is a typical example of controlling your own destiny. Because if you do pure electricity, your destiny depends on whether your customers can install charging piles and how many foundations they have. facility.”
The belief is firm, but the ideal fate, not just by grasping the supply chain, can be controlled by oneself.
“The biggest problem facing the new car-making forces at present is that the traditional car companies can kill you as soon as they turn around.” The aforementioned person who knows about new energy car manufacturing told AI Blue Media Hui: “The new forces will, and traditional cars will do it. Enterprises can operate, but the accumulation of traditional car companies does not have new forces.”
Judging from the data, the pattern of market competition is already obvious – Wei Xiaoli is “embarrassing” in terms of sales.
In August this year, traditional independent brands such as BYD and SAIC-Wuling still ranked first in the industry with a 70% share, a year-on-year increase of 4.2%; however, the new power camp dominated by Wei Xiaoli had a share of 15.3% in August, a year-on-year decrease. 3.9%.
BYD’s sales in the first half of the year were 641,000 units, a year-on-year increase of 314%, while the semi-annual reports of the three new car-making powerhouses showed that Xiaopeng delivered 69,000 units in the first half of the year, a year-on-year increase of 124%; Li Auto delivered 60,400 units, a year-on-year increase of 124%. An increase of 100%; NIO delivered only 50,800 vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 21.1%.
With such a comparison of numbers, anyone can see the “speed and gap” between traditional car companies and new forces.
Therefore, the ideal road ahead is not easy – the supply chain has been unsteady for a long time, production capacity has been suppressed, and any transformation of traditional car companies may put the ideal, which has only been born for seven years, into a embattled situation.
The ideal at this time, how to continue to “control one’s own destiny”.
But before answering this question, for Shen Yanan, does this “self” refer to him personally, or to the ideal company? A clear answer is also required.
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