Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1755
2 million, 5 million, 8 million… never stop
The 2 millionth new energy vehicle off the assembly line is a node that BYD has deliberately downplayed and blurred. It did not hold a grand ceremony in public, and there was no trace even on the official Weibo. A BYD person said that around March 2022, when the company realized that sales were about to hit the first place, it said not to do it, but to be “low-key”, “this speed is somewhat beyond internal expectations”, “we have not yet be prepared”.
It took BYD 13 years to produce its millionth new energy vehicle. It took a year to reach the second million. Six months later, it reached three million. This speed was unexpected by BYD itself.
Even with such a scale, BYD’s growth rate today still far exceeds that of the entire industry. According to data from the Passenger Federation, in the first half of 2023, the retail sales of new energy vehicles in China as a whole will be 3.08 million units, a year-on-year increase of 37%. Among them, 1.15 million were sold by BYD, and its sales growth rate was as high as 82%. Its rival Tesla sold 890,000 vehicles, up 57% year-on-year.
BYD has replaced Volkswagen as the sales champion of the entire passenger car market in China, and surpassed Tesla as early as the second quarter of 2022. It is the brand that sells the most new energy vehicles in the world and remains so far. This year, BYD’s sales target is 3 million units, and the completion of this target seems to have no suspense.
“Burst” is a term that accurately describes BYD over the past two years. In 2020, BYD’s sales did not rank among the top 15 auto companies in the country. At that time, it was experiencing two consecutive years of decline, and its sales reached the lowest point since 2018.
Just like in a 100-meter race, the runner who was left behind suddenly accelerated and surpassed everyone in the sprint stage.
Employees began to refer to BYD as a “big factory”. In the past, it was just “big factory”, but now it is “big in all directions”. They have witnessed BYD’s most violent, fastest, and largest expansion since its establishment: In 2022, BYD’s employees will expand to 570,000, half of which were added last year. Calculated by the size of the workforce, BYD may be the largest private enterprise in China today, second only to Foxconn. It even has nearly 200,000 more people than Toyota, the world’s largest car company.
The most intense battleground for new energy vehicles in the world takes place in China, where there are more than 100 automakers offering more than 300 new energy vehicle models, but today the German automakers’ share in China’s new energy vehicle market is so negligible Not counting: Volkswagen accounted for 2.9%, and BMW and Mercedes-Benz accounted for less than 1%.
According to the sales data released by BYD, its market share in May has exceeded 41%. The last one to obtain a market share of more than 40% in a single large market was Huawei mobile phones in 2019 and early 2020.
If Tesla opened up the era of electric vehicles in one fell swoop by relying on extreme product and manufacturing innovations, which ignited demand, then BYD took the largest market share by relying on its cost leadership strategy.
An analyst said that BYD’s success is due to the fact that Chinese people can drive cheaper new energy vehicles – working class can buy a compact plug-in SUV with a battery life of 110 kilometers for 150,000 yuan – Song Plus . BYD’s Seagull series sells for only 73,000 yuan, less than one-third of Tesla’s cheapest model.
Compared with the uneasy state of being the first champion in 2022, today’s BYD is calm enough for victory. According to a statement from a BYD management person at the Shanghai Auto Show, the off-line ceremony of 5 million cars in the second half of the year, “be careful After 8 million or even 10 million vehicles roll off the assembly line, “may go abroad to do it”. Wang Chuanfu said, “BYD is currently in the best period in history”, even though they just experienced a big storm two months ago-Great Wall Motors publicly reported that BYD’s use of atmospheric fuel tanks was suspected of substandard pollutant emissions.
Nothing can stop BYD. No matter how many setbacks, that never seems to change. Fifteen years ago, 42-year-old Wang Chuanfu set off from Detroit, where BYD Auto made its debut at the North American Auto Show. Finally, he arrived on the west coast of the United States and met Buffett for the first time. Buffett asked how BYD maintained its leading position. Wang Chuanfu replied: “We ‘ll never,never rest.” (We will never, never rest)
Pragmatic business philosophy, restraint and hunger
The essence of competition in the auto industry is to make better cars at a lower cost. Cost control is the lowest-level capability of a manufacturing company and the physical law of manufacturing, which determines everything.
The success of Ford, General Motors, and Toyota all stems from the cost advantages brought about by leading manufacturing efficiency. The assembly line allowed Ford to produce more than 17 million Model Ts in less than two decades, accounting for more than half of the world’s car sales after World War I. It changed not only the automotive industry, but the entire manufacturing industry. Its biggest impact is that the United States will soon dominate the global economy.
BYD also relies on the strategy of total cost leadership to win in the competition, not because of its higher manufacturing efficiency, but because of its pragmatic business philosophy, including hiring more but cheaper manpower, and vertical industry integration bringing great benefits. Low purchase price etc.
The idea of using manpower to compete with automated production lines is a helpless move, and it is also the best choice made by BYD after combining its own resource constraints and China’s unique bonuses for workers and engineers.
In terms of research and development, BYD had a “301” concept in the early stage of development, that is, use 300% of engineers to obtain 1% of technological leadership. In terms of manufacturing, BYD also has a concept, which is to use a large amount of labor and a small number of necessary machines to form a production line, that is, “human + machine = robot”. This approach reduces BYD’s equipment investment per unit of production capacity. When there is excess capacity, it can directly lay off employees without having to bear high equipment depreciation.
When Wang Chuanfu founded the mobile phone battery company in 1995, the start-up capital was only 2.5 million yuan lent to him by his cousin Lu Xiangyang. At that time, a nickel-cadmium battery production line required an investment of tens of millions of yuan.
BYD manually manufactures production equipment and breaks down the production line into processes that can be completed manually. Calculated according to the efficiency at the time, BYD needed 2,000 workers for a production line with a daily output of 100,000 lithium batteries, and invested 50 million yuan in equipment. The battery production lines of enterprises such as Sony and Sanyo with the same output only need 200 workers, but the investment in equipment is as high as 100 million US dollars.
In 2003, BYD acquired Qinchuan Automobile to enter the automobile industry. It did not have enough funds to try and make mistakes, and it did not have experience in making cars. The industry marvels at the manufacturing innovation brought about by Tesla’s integrated die-casting design. People talk more about the first principles, while ignoring the huge investment behind it. It was born in Tesla because of Musk’s super financing ability, and before becoming Tesla CEO, Musk was already a billionaire.
Although BYD was listed in Hong Kong at that time, its opponent was a joint venture car company that was leading in technology, manufacturing, brand, and sales channels. BYD was not optimistic about making cars. Three days after the Qinchuan acquisition was announced, BYD’s share price fell from HK$18 to HK$12.
When BYD went public in 2002, it raised 210 million US dollars (about 1.73 billion yuan at the time), and used 270 million yuan to acquire Qinchuan Automobile, including only production qualifications and a car factory.
In order to get the auto business running, BYD did not directly bet on electric vehicles like Tesla did, but first made a fuel vehicle with no technical accumulation. Wang Chuanfu believed at the time that making electric vehicles would not bring any profit to BYD within 5 years.
In order to reduce costs, Wang Chuanfu reused the method of manpower manufacturing batteries to automobiles. “It is all manufacturing, and experience can be copied.” Wang Chuanfu was full of confidence in his methodology at the time, and he also teased Yang Rong, the founder of Brilliance Zhonghua Automobile: “He is a finance student. If he had the experience of making batteries like I do, he wouldn’t invest 5 billion in Brilliance China. I can do the same thing with one-tenth of his money.”
In production, in order to ensure that the accuracy of manual operation is comparable to that of machines. BYD has self-developed some equipment and fixtures suitable for manual operation, and uses fixtures to fix products and set the operating range of welding and other processes.
Customized equipment has become the beginning of BYD’s vertical integration route and changes in the supply chain structure. This route further reduces manufacturing costs.
BYD self-developed the mold for the F6 model, which shortened the development time by nearly half compared with outsourcing, and reduced the mold cost from nearly 150 million yuan to 80 million yuan. Automobile mold development was a job done entirely by manpower at that time, and Chinese engineers were cheaper.
BYD began to deploy the production and manufacturing of automotive electronics in 2003. From 2005 to 2008, BYD successively added production departments such as injection molding interior parts, lamps and paints. By 2010, BYD had more than 100 component factories. In addition to glass, tires, etc., BYD’s manufacturing involves almost all car components. At that time, BYD was the only company other than Toyota that had lithium battery and car manufacturing technology.
Relying on a lower-cost supply chain and manufacturing method, BYD has created a car with a very competitive price. In 2006, the BYD F3, which looked and performed like a Toyota Corolla, cost half the price of the Corolla. According to the media at the time, the F3 was built in an “overcrowded” semi-automated workshop.
The main hardware cost of an electric vehicle is divided into five parts, the battery accounts for 40%, the electric drive system accounts for 12%-13%, the automotive electronics accounts for 13%-14%, and the body and chassis account for 14%-15%. , 17% for interior and exterior decoration. At present, BYD’s wholly-owned Fudi company’s business covers the R&D and manufacturing of these five core components.
This is the foundation for BYD to become the largest new energy vehicle company. These businesses also allow BYD to make most of the money on the car. For reference, the battery company LG New Energy, which has the same installed capacity as Fudi Battery, had a net profit of 4.3 billion yuan last year.
Doing more things by yourself means that you can decide what you want to make the car yourself – something that the joint venture car factories at the time could not do.
The more technologies developed, the more technologies that can be integrated. Wang Chuanfu said in 2007, “BYD DMi’s single technology is not leading, but we have solved a lot of running-in problems between cars and batteries, such as low temperature, fast charging, electric steering, etc.”
The lithium iron phosphate battery used by BYD was considered to be a backward technical route before 2020 due to its low energy density. However, BYD has improved the technology so that the lithium iron phosphate battery can reach the same endurance level as the ternary lithium battery, and it is better than the ternary lithium battery. Lithium batteries cost about 15% less. Now it is mounted on BYD’s million-dollar model.
After more than ten years of development, BYD is today the world’s most vertically integrated car company, higher than Toyota and Tesla.
The highly vertically integrated model has put BYD under tremendous pressure during the decade of nearly stagnant growth. From 2009 to 2020, BYD’s sales have always hovered at 400,000 to 500,000 vehicles. Until 2021, BYD has sold 710,000 vehicles, and its net profit margin is still only 1.4%. In 2022, its sales volume will increase to 2.6 times, and its net profit margin will also increase to 3.9%, reaching 16.6 billion yuan. Sales continue to rise. In the first half of 2023, BYD expects net profit to increase by more than 192% to 10.5 billion.
A large number of self-made parts can be understood as a kind of financial leverage. When the car sales are good, you can earn money for all the parts. When the sales are not good, this is a huge burden. “People who choose this route often have a strong heart,” said a person who has followed BYD for a long time.
A person who started a business with Wang Chuanfu in the early years said that Wang Chuanfu has always been thinking in his heart, “You can do anything by yourself, as long as you dare to do it.”
Wang Chuanfu has an engineer-like ultimate ideal for energy, mixed with shrewd business judgment. He was the first person to practice Tesla’s “Master Plan 3”, building electric vehicles, photovoltaic power generation and energy storage batteries, and promoting energy transformation.
In addition to vertical integration, BYD has also expanded horizontally. It has entered many major industries such as photovoltaics, semiconductors, and rail transit. In 2008, Wang Chuanfu bet on an unfamiliar and fiercely competitive field – photovoltaics. He still wants to vertically integrate and continuously get involved in the manufacture of silicon mines, monocrystalline silicon and photovoltaic modules. These businesses are usually completed by different companies in the three links.
Directly adopting the vertical integration model in the early stage of entering a new industry has brought extremely high financial pressure to BYD. Wang Chuanfu was forced to reduce the investment in the automobile business and let the automobile business “transfuse” photovoltaics. “The automobile business does not eat food to lay eggs, and lays more eggs.” Wang Chuanfu said at the time.
In 2009, BYD invested more than 5 billion yuan in the initial investment in the energy storage battery and photovoltaic business alone. At that time, the plan was to build a photovoltaic production capacity of 1 GWh, which cost more than 10 billion yuan. In the next two years, due to the European debt crisis and the reduction of photovoltaic subsidies, BYD and the entire photovoltaic industry suffered heavy losses. By 2012, Wang Chuanfu said, “The photovoltaic business has suffered an annual loss of 700 to 800 million yuan in recent years.”
Even so difficult, BYD has hardly quit any of the big industries that it has entered in a big way, including Yungui, which is facing many difficulties today.
According to the person mentioned above, BYD is restrained to a certain extent. Most of the private giants that started in the 1990s pursue infinite growth and promote the parallelism of real and financial wings. However, BYD does not enter finance or real estate, only manufacturing , BYD basically does not do capital operations, and all new businesses, no matter how big the losses, are listed in listed companies, and the risks are shared.
But BYD is also greedy, because it believes that its boundary is “manufacturing”, everything from mobile phones, cars, batteries to masks can be manufactured. In early 2020, amid the COVID-19 outbreak, BYD quickly gathered 100,000 employees and built 2,000 mask production lines in a 500,000-square-meter factory building, with a maximum daily output of 100 million pieces, making it the world’s largest mask manufacturer.
We once asked a senior executive of BYD Group, “BYD has entered so many fields, there must be some businesses that cannot continue, have you given up anything?” The other party looked surprised: “Why did you give up?”
Ultimate Cost Control, Chaos & Efficiency
All business owners want to be Toyota-style lean producers. The reason why lean production is called “lean” is that compared with mass production, all inputs are more refined – from factory personnel, production space, equipment investment to development cycle, only half of the original is required.
All lean producers have an extremely low tolerance for chaos. It can be said that the life’s work of the lean producer is to fight chaos and inefficiency.
But BYD is different.
BYD is now the world’s largest car company, surpassing Volkswagen with 626,000 employees. With a similar number of people, Volkswagen produces 4 times as many cars as BYD. Tesla, which has only 130,000 people, produced 1.31 million vehicles last year.
The engineer who joined BYD a few months ago told his new colleagues that he could only work in the guest house because there were not enough seats. Later, they were assigned to a new office area to accommodate the large number of school students who were about to join.
By the end of 2022, each employee will bring BYD 740,000 yuan in revenue on average. In Tesla, the revenue brought by each employee last year was 4.36 million yuan. BYD’s human-efficiency ratio is not as good as that of Foxconn, which also chooses to use intensive labor to complete manufacturing. It has 1.2 million people, and Foxconn brings an average of 1.16 million yuan in revenue per person.
Because it has the longest vertical industrial chain and implements the “human sea tactics”, BYD has recruited a large number of new employees for a long time. They continue to break down complex tasks so that more novices can complete the same tasks.
It is understood that in a certain factory of BYD, the production pace of its cars is comparable to that of ordinary car companies, but the number of workers on the production line is larger. Installing controllers, interior decoration and other processes are usually completed by a single worker, but BYD will use two workers, one on the left and one on the left.
In order to adapt to the production method with a low automation rate, when a product upgrade is implemented, the production department needs to review the production difficulty and prepare a detailed list to regularly check whether the product design has affected the manufacturing process. When landing, the engineers in the R&D department will spend about a week going to the factory to watch the line and correct the workers’ operations.
The same goes for R&D. An engineer from the BYD Auto Engineering Institute said that when developing an engine, it will start dismantling when the task is set, for example, one person is responsible for placing the sensor, and the other is responsible for debugging the equipment. Other car companies can finish it by one person in an afternoon, but BYD requires two people, and sometimes brings a school recruit to teach.
When mistakes occur in R&D work, engineers are generally not held accountable, but only those who assign tasks are held accountable, because the responsibility of the assignor is to ensure that everyone can do the assigned tasks well.
In BYD, some links are inefficient like a traditional company, and sometimes chaotic like a start-up company. As a company with strong execution, when its goals are clear, efficiency and chaos often occur at the same time. At this time, it It looks like a fast-growing Internet company.
In 2019, BYD decided to develop the Han model. The above-mentioned R&D personnel recalled the sense of urgency at that time. The model and powertrain were developed together. When the test vehicle was tested, the assembly had not yet come out, so the old version was used first. The software and hardware of the test vehicle were updated every day. To refresh the system.
The development process has also experienced many unexpected situations of suspension and revision. For example, the fuel version was first planned by Han, but due to strategic considerations, it was directly abandoned during the development process. BYD also considered whether to cut Han, but finally decided to “give it a try”.
“Although it is chaotic, it is very efficient.” In the end, BYD completed the development of the powertrain and model within 18 months, while the large car companies at that time needed 3-4 years to complete the development of the powertrain only.
The most important criterion for BYD to evaluate efficiency is not comparison with peers, but whether it meets BYD’s most important goal at the moment, which is to move forward at full speed.
An auto industry analyst said that the entire industry, especially traditional car companies, did not believe that the era of smart electric cars had arrived early until 2020 and felt caught off guard. They all began to transform in a hurry in the second half of 2020.
At this time, BYD has already launched a pure electric C-class car worth more than 200,000 yuan to the market. A few months later, Qin PLUS, Song PLUS, and Tang DM-i three hybrid models were released intensively, and BYD pulled the price of new energy vehicles to the price of fuel vehicles of the same level. At the end of 2021, the ocean network was officially released, and four models were announced, focusing on developing young consumer groups.
In just one year, BYD has launched and released seven new models. By December 2021, monthly sales will be close to 100,000 vehicles.
Han is BYD’s first model to reverse its brand image, and it is also a successful case of implementing BYD’s cost control concept and goal orientation.
Before Han, BYD did not have a very competitive pure electric model, let alone a pure electric car with a price of more than 200,000 yuan. At that time, the top management directly set three goals: the cost of powertrain should be low; the cost of car owners should be low;
A person from BYD said that BYD’s management has always advocated management by objectives, not resource management. The former is to set goals first, and then find ways to achieve them. Resource management is as capable as it is capable of doing.
When BYD designed the Han DMi solution, it replaced the water-cooled motor with an oil-cooled motor, which improved the efficiency of the motor and reduced the number of wires needed for the motor. Ordinary car companies will choose to make enough profits on new products and then reduce costs. But BYD chose to directly cut off the profits of the DMi system, reducing the cost of the entire system to about 10,000 yuan.
BYD chose to use the drag coefficient as the highlight of the Han. In order to ensure wind resistance, even part of the shape design was sacrificed, but this can increase the battery life of the car. The battery life of the Han is the same as that of the Tesla Model 3 at the time, but it is 20,000 yuan cheaper.
From these aspects, BYD can be regarded as a practitioner of the “lean” concept.
BYD does not do “superfluous” things. The above-mentioned BYD Auto Engineering Institute engineer said that he once asked his superiors why they did not use parts with better performance in a certain car. What does Qin’s poor sales mean?”
“Car owners don’t need extra performance, the core is cheap, and grasp the main contradiction.” Before he could answer, the superior directly gave the answer.
What is the main contradiction?
For the working-class users that BYD is facing, they need a cheap and adequate car, not leather seats, not streamlined shape, but a car that is not only cheap, but also has the lowest cost family car.
Neither Geely nor Great Wall has launched a model that is strong enough to compete with BYD in the 100,000 yuan market. Great Wall began to distance itself from the mainstream working class in terms of product definition and naming, and launched the Euler series pure electric models that are biased towards young women, and the Wei brand hybrid models are priced at more than 200,000 yuan. Geely’s Emgrand series hybrid models are priced about 30,000 yuan higher than Qin, and Geely has not launched models with lower prices, but turned to the high-end Jikrypton and Galaxy brands.
Through continuous improvement of power system technology, the price of BYD Qin series models has dropped from around 200,000 yuan in 2013 to the current 99,800 yuan. The fuel consumption per 100 kilometers of Qin Plus DMi is 3.8 liters, and the fuel consumption of Toyota Ralink, Corolla and other hybrid models exceeds 4 liters per 100 kilometers, and the price is 40,000-50,000 yuan higher.
After launching the fist model, BYD’s logic in product design tends to use cheaper parts to achieve the same performance as competitors, rather than use better parts to achieve performance leadership. The normal-pressure fuel tank of the Song Plus model, which was reported by Great Wall Motors for possible emission problems, also follows this logic. The cost of the normal-pressure fuel tank is about 600 yuan lower than that of the high-pressure fuel tank, and it will hardly affect the product experience of consumers.
BYD will not stop. When changing models every year, BYD will re-evaluate all parts and reduce costs by replacing parts and choosing cheaper suppliers. The cost reduction path is determined by the product department, and the R&D department makes an assessment, draws a red line for the places that cannot be reduced, and gives a report on the impact of the reduction on the product for the remaining parts.
In this regard, BYD and Tesla are similar. They are both reducing costs in various ways to keep the price of electric vehicles dropping.
Both BYD and Tesla started to develop new energy vehicles in 2003. BYD’s first new energy vehicle, F3DM, rolled off the production line in 2008. Tesla’s first new car, the Roadster, was also delivered in 2008. The two vehicles began to develop The time coincided with the time when the product rolled off the assembly line, but the F3DM eventually became the world’s first mass-produced plug-in hybrid car, while the Roadster only delivered 2,450 units. The following year, Wang Chuanfu became the richest man in China. In the United States, Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy due to the financial crisis. In March 2009, Tesla launched its second car, the Model S. At that time, no one knew whether it could actually be produced.
They are completely different, and they win in different ways. BYD wins through a highly vertically integrated industrial chain model, crowd tactics and car tactics, while Tesla wins through underlying engineering innovation and technological innovation (smart driving). . The essence is that the two companies have different living conditions and different business endowments.
“Tesla is making products, while BYD is making industry chains.” Yu Jianyue, a commentator in the auto industry, said, so why is it Tesla and not BYD that started this era.
Good products can arouse people’s desire and really change everything. Model S defines products belonging to this era, which integrates advanced manufacturing, high-performance central computers, intelligent network connections, etc., while the delivery of the lower-priced model 3 is a moment similar to Apple’s iPhone4, and smart cars begin to Launch a large-scale attack on the traditional automobile front.
And BYD is the only traditional car company that has made all preparations when the big change comes. It is well prepared in terms of technology, products (multiple models), channels, and supply chain, so it can take the largest share of this market and leave its past opponents far behind.
Manage 600,000 people, contradiction and unity
The complexity of the car is unimaginable. A new energy vehicle generally consists of more than 10,000 parts, and a traditional car has more than 30,000 parts. For automotive companies, managing a huge system of parts and suppliers is a big challenge.
BYD has solved this problem to a large extent: core components are self-produced, and almost all work can be done within its own company. But it has brought about a bigger management problem: how to manage the six major research institutes, five major business groups, more than 20 business divisions including the Fudi Department, and nearly 600,000 employees?
Located at No. 3009 BYD Road, Pingshan District, Shenzhen, BYD headquarters is like a “small kingdom”. After leveling more than 30 hilltops and filling in more than 120 fish ponds, the headquarters was completed in 2007. It covers an area of 2.3 million square meters, 900,000 square meters larger than Huawei’s Songshan Lake base, and is the first of the nine BYD factories. Employees clock in three times a day, and travel to and from the office area and dormitory in the unmanned BYD Yunba, which costs 100 million yuan per kilometer. It accommodates fifty or sixty production plants, several staff dormitories, several canteens, and Wang Chuanfu’s office “hexagonal building” (one corner more than the Pentagon in the United States).
This huge base has become obsolete: the exterior paint of the hexagonal building is mottled, and the windows are old push-pull. But the exhibition reception venue in one corner is brand new and bright. Since the revenue surge in 2021, BYD has renovated the reception venue on one side of the hexagonal building, but it has not renovated its headquarters much-the alternation of old and new is a reflection of BYD’s situation today.
In the past few years of BYD’s rapid development, its family culture that has been implemented for more than ten years has been gradually replaced by competition culture.
The family culture was promoted by Wang Chuanfu, which means “taking the factory as home and loving the factory as home”. In the early stage of development, BYD’s recruitment competitiveness was not strong, so it rarely recruited the best people, and it could not recruit this group of people. Forming a sense of identity with family culture is one of the ways to retain people.
BYD’s salary and benefits are not the top in the industry. In 2022, its per capita salary will be 139,100 yuan, which is higher than that of SAIC (181,000), Great Wall (163,900), and Changan (221,000). But in BYD, employees will feel a kind of stability that is rare in modern private enterprises. Not only are they simply hired, but their lives seem to be “hosted”.
There are not a few people who have worked for BYD for more than 15 years. They share similar life trajectories: they came to BYD for their first job after graduating from university, lived in a dormitory when they were young, bought a BYD car with a car subsidy, and after a certain length of service and rank qualified, they can buy the company’s Asian building at an internal price. House in Di Xincun. Of course, obtaining the real estate certificate also requires working hours. An engineer said that it was more than ten years. After giving birth, they will be sent to Yadi School, which includes kindergarten, elementary school and middle school, and the teaching will be fully managed by Shenzhen Middle School, a key provincial middle school. Some children will join BYD after graduation, continuing the trajectory of their parents.
Some old employees will say that they think they can work in BYD for a lifetime.
For many years, there was almost no elimination mechanism here. In 2022, some business divisions will begin to eliminate the last position, with a ratio of 5%. But employees say the impact has been minimal, with one employee saying the only layoff he’s seen in two years was for 18 days of absenteeism.
Many engineers said that there is an unwritten rule in BYD that it is difficult for an engineer to come back after leaving BYD unless they get “special approval”. So they will be cautious when they leave.
The BYD rank system is set in alphabetical order, and the “ladder” is simple and clear. Employees are divided into nine AI ranks, and each rank is further divided into three sub-levels. AG is a management and technical post, and H and I are production line workers.
The difficulty of each small level promotion is increasing, of course the most difficult is to cross the letter. Most of the undergraduates entering BYD are F1, and they have the opportunity to be promoted twice a year. After 3-5 years, some will be promoted to E, and after a few years, some will be promoted to D. An E-level engineer who jumped to BYD said that he had seen a colleague who failed to go from E to D in five years.
With BYD’s rapid expansion in recent years, the ladder is already very crowded. BYD began to adjust the promotion standards. After 2022, senior promotion requires patent achievements and technical defense. In the past, from performance to promotion, all were evaluated by the immediate leader.
The keywords of corporate culture have also changed. In 2017, BYD adjusted the first article of corporate culture “equality, pragmatism, passion and innovation” to “competition”. By 2022, it has developed into a set of “competition culture”, including “comparing with others to learn from others”, “comparing with yourself, with peers, with benchmarks, and with time.”
The “big pot of rice” is gone, and the performance gap among employees is rapidly widening. An engineer gave an example, the same as the E level, some people get 200,000 a year, while those with high performance can get 500,000.
It is understood that the models of BYD Ocean Net series are selected by multi-team PK, which is the product of competition culture.
No matter how it changes, one thing remains constant in BYD, and that is the absolute authority of founder and CEO Wang Chuanfu.
BYD has six major research institutes, five major business groups, and more than 20 business divisions, including the Fodi Department, all of which report directly to Wang Chuanfu. According to statistics from the media in 2022, there are more than 30 executives reporting directly to Wang Chuanfu.
Wang Chuanfu once said in an interview with the media that BYD “has only one voice, no second”, and believes that “98% of its decisions are correct”, even if it is wrong, “if you make a mistake, you will do it wrong.” He believes that “the market is like a battlefield”, so extreme decision-making is required, “in some cases, it only takes 2 seconds at the fastest.”
BYD’s core management is solid, with a total of 13 people, including Wang Chuanfu and Lian Yubo, who has just stepped down as vice president. Three of them (Li Ke, Wang Jie, and Wang Chuanfang) joined BYD in 1996, and Yang Dongsheng, who joined the company the latest, has spent 18 years in BYD, and four of them had their first job with BYD. BYD tends to cultivate school enrollment internally. They believe that abilities can be cultivated, but values are difficult to transform. In 2023, BYD will recruit 30,000 fresh graduates.
The smart driving business, which is increasing its efforts, is also launched in this atmosphere. It is understood that within BYD, several departments are involved in the self-development business of intelligent driving. The Planning Institute is mainly responsible for high-level intelligent driving development tasks, the fifth business department is responsible for relatively low-level solutions, and Fudi Technology is also involved in some technology research and development. A Fudi Technology engineer said that the research and development focuses of each department are different. But the competition is not limited to departments. An engineer related to the intelligent driving business said that within the same department, different teams must compete with each other and catch up with the progress.
The setting of BYD Planning Institute and Engineering Institute itself is a horse race. The latter was established in 2015 and has a lot of overlap with the research and development of the Academy of Engineering.
On the surface, family culture and competition culture are contradictory, but they are highly unified in essence. They are both means for BYD to realize its corporate strategy at different stages and in different competitive environments.
In order to ensure growth, within a year, BYD recruited 280,000 employees. With just over 200,000 employees, some inefficiencies can be tolerated. When the number of people grows to more than 500,000, or even 700,000, efficiency will threaten the realization of growth.
The tipping point is here, the past and the future
Compared with how BYD became the leading force in this industry, what people are more willing to discuss today is how long BYD’s growth momentum can continue. It will first draw a beautiful upward curve like it experienced ten years ago. , Slow down again?
Under a highly vertically integrated and low-automation production method, BYD’s car production capacity has skyrocketed from about 900,000 to more than 3 million within one and a half years, which can be said to be a production miracle.
Because it not only needs to expand the factory’s production and continuously recruit workers, but also needs to coordinate internal and external supply chains, complete the simultaneous expansion of vertically integrated businesses, and control the impact of the epidemic on production. At the same time, a crazy price war came, and BYD had to strengthen cost control and cut prices of many popular models to fight.
This mode of expansion introduces a certain level of disarray and breeds quality problems. In April 2022, BYD announced the recall of some Tang DMIs with potential safety hazards; in November, some dolphin models sprayed aluminum hydroxide (commonly used in stomach medicine) on the air outlet of the air conditioner. BYD later apologized and stated that “aluminum hydroxide will not harm the human body.” cause harm”; in February this year, BYD confirmed that 5 electric buses sold in Japan used hexavalent chromium (a first-class carcinogen, which can cause allergies to human skin contact).
A number of BYD engineers and people in the automotive industry believe that the above problems reflect the challenges to BYD’s production capacity and quality management system during the rapid expansion of production capacity.
Due to intensified competition, car companies are transmitting pressure to the supply chain, demanding technology and prices from the supply chain. For BYD, more pressure can only be transmitted inward.
A person close to Fudi Battery said that the price BYD purchased Fudi Battery last year was about 10% lower than the market price.他说，弗迪作为比亚迪全资子公司，即使高定价，钱也还是自己挣，但比亚迪认为只有从自己做起，才能让整个集团无条件地完成降本的指标。
弗迪电池已是全球第二动力电池公司，但其在很多方面依然落后第一名宁德时代。举例来说，弗迪在长沙的动力电池工厂单条产线每天生产1.3 万-1.4 万个电池，而宁德时代单条产线每天能生产2.4 万个电池。
这反映了垂直整合模式最大的挑战——即自研自产能否让产品在技术、成本上持续优于供应商。
而解决这个问题的唯一办法，就是自己押注最难的技术，掌握技术路线的定义权。而只有定义技术路线，才能真正定义商业世界的游戏规则。
马斯克曾说，特斯拉真正的核心竞争力是制造能力。“其余任何特斯拉能提供的技术，其他汽车公司也会攻克，只有生产汽车的工厂不会。” 2025 年投产的墨西哥工厂，特斯拉将应用下一代车型平台，马斯克称下一代车型的生产成本只有Model Y （最低售价26 万元）的一半。而这个价位车型的量产，将会冲击比亚迪的基本盘——去年，比亚迪有70% 的订单来自20 万元以下车型。
这是过去实用主义理念的比亚迪做得不够的，它在技术研发上倾向选择经过理论验证、在部分高校和实验室已成熟的技术，去做工程化落地，而非直接研究底层技术，如比亚迪的易四方技术。这源于王传福早期的理念，他认为一款产品的开发，60% 来自公开文献，30% 来自现成样品，真正的创新实际上只有5%，比亚迪要做的是避开专利，用非专利技术做组合创新。
整合汽车芯片时，特斯拉自研对技术突破更重要的自动驾驶芯片，而比亚迪则从IGBT（功率半导体）入手，IGBT 技术门槛低但占电驱系统成本近50%，对成本控制帮助更大。特斯拉在2012 年model S 交付时就开始自研自动驾驶技术，比亚迪去年下半年才加快脚步，它正激进追赶，并认为可以通过BEV（bird’s-eye-view）的大模型算法弯道超车。
比亚迪需要警惕，其在尚未对市场竞争起到决定性影响、但会决定长期竞争的智能化技术上是否会迎头赶上，还是持续落后？
比亚迪的另一个挑战来自国际化。
如今每10 辆产自中国的新能源汽车就有4 辆来自比亚迪。比亚迪在全球最大的汽车市场拿走了40% 的份额，但它的市占率在未来将触达天花板，它需要开拓新的市场。
目前比亚迪已进入日本、德国、澳大利亚、新加坡等53 个国家和地区。2023 年上半年，比亚迪汽车海外销量为7.43 万辆，超出去年全年。比亚迪已经是以色列、新加坡、新西兰的纯电动车销量冠军，ATTO 3（元PLUS）成为泰国新能源车销量冠军。
为了获得和在当地生产的企业相同的补贴优惠，维持低价战略，比亚迪希望本土生产、本土销售，而不是把汽车在中国生产，装上8 艘滚装船——每艘可装载7700 辆汽车，比亚迪在2022 年耗资50 亿元购得——运往全球。
比亚迪的制造系统依赖便宜的人力，产能复制的难度远高于高自动化生产的竞争对手。欧洲和美国汽车工人的时薪分别为17 欧元（约合人民币136 元）和28 美元（约合人民币200 元），中国为4.5 美元（约合人民币32 元）。
同时，作为中国冠军，比亚迪面临比其他自主品牌更大的压力和更艰难的处境。
去年8 月，伯克希尔哈撒韦公司十四年来首次减持比亚迪股份，此后持续12 次减持，有分析师指出，此举与伯克希尔在东亚问题上明显的避险情绪一致。
比亚迪可能面临错失美国市场的风险。受中美关系影响，比亚迪乘用车还没能进入这个全球第二大汽车市场。而中国激烈的电动车竞争已导致许多实力较弱的中国竞争对手在国内市场受到挤压，迫使他们积极转向出口市场以提高销量。比如凭借超级碗广告引起轰动的吉利旗下Polestar 去年在美国销售了近一万辆中国制造的汽车，尽管进口关税高达27.5%。从明年开始，Polestar 将在沃尔沃查尔斯顿工厂生产。
这将是比亚迪成为世界第一的愿景的阻碍之一。
这家公司从不掩饰自己的雄心。2007 年王传福就宣布他要带领比亚迪在2015 年成为中国第一， 2025 年成为世界第一。
前一个目标已经实现，但从中国第一到世界第一，它需要跨越智能化、国际化、高端化三个战役，路途还很漫长。2022 年，销量第一的丰田卖出了1050 万辆车，是比亚迪的5.6 倍。
中间的距离不只是销量。福特、丰田、大众等汽车业过往的伟大公司，都改进了汽车制造技术本身，这是它们成功的根源，它们让人们能花更少的钱买到更好的汽车，在这个过程中工人们也过上了更好的生活。福特发明了流水线、丰田带来了精益生产，但将比亚迪带到第一名位置的并非更先进的制造方式，而是中国勤奋且便宜的工人和大学生，以及创始人的战略定力。
要成为世界第一，比亚迪要在所有细分市场、所有国家和所有对手短兵相接，它的对手不仅是新老汽车公司，电池、电机甚至芯片公司，还有过去的自己。
题图来源：比亚迪官网
本文转自： https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1755
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