The “German” label can’t fool users.Welcome to the WeChat subscription account of “Sina Technology”: techsina
Text/Pan Lei
Source: Venture State (ID: chuangyebang)
In 2005, Christian Borgward, the heir to the Borgward brand, planned to revive his family’s car brand “Borgward”.
But at that time, Borgward had disappeared as a “German” car brand for 40 or 50 years, and this plan seemed more like a fantasy.
However, a few years later, Christian Borgward registered a company in Lucerne, Switzerland, claiming to use a “new business model” to integrate global resources – in fact, selling brand authorization.
Business was not going well for several years until he met the Chinese around 2014.
What happened later showed that the Chinese were the only investors willing to throw real money for a shell brand, just because of Borgward’s “German” status.
At that time, a group of top entrepreneurs in China had sensed that the auto industry was about to reshuffle. Li Bin, Li Xiang, He Xiaopeng, Jia Yueting and other well-known entrepreneurs in the Internet field were all preparing to build cars.
What they chose is a new energy direction that conforms to the trend of the times and the will of the country.
But there are also people who choose to enter the car-making track from another angle – such as drawing on the rigorous car-making experience of the Germans to create a car brand that is completely Chinese – it is best to get a pure German brand.
The most powerful player in this regard is Beiqi Foton, a commercial vehicle giant that has always wanted to expand its passenger car business.
In January 2014, Beiqi Foton, through its wholly-owned subsidiary in Germany, acquired the company registered by Christian Borgward for 5 million euros, and officially owned the ownership of the Borgward brand.
This is the process of the revival of “Borgward” in China, and it is trying to create a luxury personality of “Germany Borgward” – Borgward is packaged as a German luxury brand alongside Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi, referred to as “BBBA”.
The time when Borgward officially belonged to a Chinese company was earlier than the three most representative start-up car companies, Weilai, Ideal, and Xiaopeng, as well as Jia Yueting’s “LeTV Super Car”, which is almost the earliest experience of this wave of car manufacturing. Crab player.
Borgward has various favorable factors related to car manufacturing – it has a smart factory built in accordance with German Industry 4.0 standards in Miyun, Beijing, has a senior management team from major car companies, and also has money in hand.
The Germans were also uncharacteristically this time. They did not belittle the Chinese plan to revive Baowo, but believed that the savior from China would wake up Baowo, the “sleeping giant”.
“These people (reviving Baowo) are not a bunch of gamblers, but car people with real passion-they know how to produce good cars and how to tap the value of Baowo.” The German “Auto Bild” also commented The revival of the German brand is full of praise.
Overall, no matter how you analyze it, you are optimistic about Borgward, but the final result is not satisfactory.
On November 29, 2022, Borgward was officially declared bankrupt. At this time, it has been less than 9 years since it acquired the “Borgward” brand.
Learning from “Nokia” is difficult to have a future
There are many reasons for Baowo’s failure, but the most important reason is that Baowo originally wanted to build a traditional fuel vehicle brand in the name of German genes.
However, Li Shufu and Wang Chuanfu did this kind of thing almost 20 years ago.
Li Shufu dismantled two Mercedes-Benz, and made a “Mercedes-Benz” with his own spare parts, which he named “Geely One”.
But in the era when the Borgward brand was revived and started to build cars, things were obviously different.
The national policy encourages new energy, and entrepreneurs such as Li Bin, Li Xiang, and He Xiaopeng are also working on new energy.
These people disclosed their car-making progress on social media, mingled with users, and also received strong support from venture capital institutions.
In the case that Tesla has not yet achieved domestic production and must rely on imports to cause high prices, “Wei Xiaoli” is regarded as a “replacement”-just like the relationship between Xiaomi mobile phones and Apple mobile phones.
Therefore, the first wave of traffic users harvested by the “new car-making forces” and those users who choose Borgward are two completely different types of people-the former are relatively young and advocate new thinking, new experiences, and new products, while the latter are The last batch of German fans who listened to propaganda.
This leads to mixed results.
After the word-of-mouth effect of new forces fermented, more users were attracted, and the experience of German fans has remained unchanged for decades-thick closing sound, precise pointing, stiff suspension adjustment, and extremely high fuel consumption.
Borgward sold more than 100,000 new cars in the three years from 2016 to 2018, which is the highest achievement a new brand in a “German” cloak can achieve, and the cost is a loss of more than 4 billion.
Of course, new car companies also lose money, or even lose more, but the ever-expanding user base convinces investors that these companies still have a future, and what they need now is to persevere.
But Borgward’s investor Beiqi Foton, after seeing the declining trend of fuel vehicles, decided to stop losses in time to get rid of this black hole of funds as soon as possible.
“(Borgwo’s bankruptcy) can only be said that the thinking has not kept up.” Li Ming, who works for a new car manufacturer, said that when Internet entrepreneurial giants + top investment institutions set foot in car manufacturing, their gameplay is the most advanced and most promising. play.
“Borgwo’s style of play is similar to building a brand based on the Nokia template to compete with Nokia when Nokia has already declined.” He believes that there is no chance of winning in this situation. But Nokia can’t beat Xiaomi, let alone Apple.
Borgward BX5 models
“German Borgward” can hardly justify itself
“It’s hard to live a genuine joint venture, let alone a ‘fake foreign brand’ like Borgward.”
In Li Ming’s view, in this era of “the rise of domestic products”, Borgward’s “fake foreign brand” is a burden.
Because apart from getting a brand, “German Borgward” has almost no technical or design heritage.
As a brand, Borgward went out of business in the early 1960s, and car technology has changed so drastically since then that cars didn’t even have seat belts.
Even the styling has changed drastically.
Borgward once held an event in the suburbs of Beijing, the purpose of which was to showcase the brand culture and resonate with users, but almost all the “classic cars” present showed that Borgward had long been out of touch with the market.
Borgward classic car
This makes “German Borgward”, which focuses on the Chinese market, unable to find any elements that can continue the brand’s genes.
The fact is that after 50 years of dating, Borgward has completely become a historical brand symbol. If Beiqi Foton did not buy it back, no one would pay attention to this brand.
Of course, under the packaging of Christian Borgward and Heinz Knox, Borgward has made some progress in “integrating global resources”. Responsible for new car design.
In general, Christian and Heinz spent almost 10 years planning for Borgward’s revival, but without finding investors, they could not accumulate new technologies only with business plans.
If Foton hadn’t appeared, there would have been no big pie worth 5 million euros, and no other investment institutions would have paid attention to their “business plan”—Borgward was actually an empty shell, and the so-called revival was just a “ idea”.
In today’s era, Borgward’s situation before being acquired by Foton is all public information, without any secrets.
This makes it difficult to justify the “German Borgward” personality – a large number of Chinese people still believe in “Made in Germany”, but they are not willing to pay for a brand that only has a German shell but is actually “Made in Futian”.
Borgward BX6
Luckin’s fraud, implicating Borgward
After Fukuda wants to quit, if there is a powerful person to take over, Borgward actually has some hope of standing up again.
After all, Baowo has also launched a new energy vehicle, ready to transform.
At this time, Lu Zhengyao appeared.
At the end of 2019, UCAR, a subsidiary of Lu Zhengyao, acquired 67% of Baowo Automobile at a price of 4.109 billion yuan, officially controlling Baowo Automobile.
But only one year later, Lu Zhengyao was unable to support the daily operation of Baowo Automobile because of the financial fraud incident of Ruixing Coffee.
Moreover, in terms of operating mode, UCAR once wanted to go to the “front store and back factory”, that is, to place orders and purchases through UCAR to maintain the operation of Borgward.
Shenzhou Car Rental is the largest car rental company in the country. It operates a huge fleet of more than 100,000 vehicles, and many cars need to be updated every year.
If Borgward provides vehicles exclusively for car rental in Shenzhou, it should not be difficult to make a living.
But a new problem has emerged—Borgward mainly focuses on fuel vehicles, and has little accumulation in new energy. Under the trend of new energy for online car-hailing and taxis, the high fuel consumption of Borgward has pushed up operations. In terms of cost, users are not willing to rent a car that is close to a “gas tiger”.
Therefore, it is difficult for Shenzhou car rental to fundamentally solve the survival problem of Borgward.
“The bankruptcy of Baowo Automobile is doomed, but I didn’t expect that the last straw was the Ruixing fraud incident that had nothing to do with the auto industry.”
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