Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1728
Audi’s change of CEO, this position is not as difficult as the parent company
Volkswagen Group, which has not changed its CEO for less than a year, appointed a new CEO of its luxury brand Audi this week, trying to save Audi from falling behind its peers in both the electric vehicle and fuel vehicle markets. Gernot Döllner, who joined Volkswagen in 1993, will take on this responsibility.
Döllner started his career at Volkswagen and later held various management positions at Porsche AG, including Head of Concept Development and Head of the luxury executive coupe Panamera range. He will return to the Volkswagen Group in 2021 and will be responsible for products, group strategy and the secretariat.
Volkswagen Group, Audi Group and Dorner thanked former CEO Markus Duesmann for his dedication in press releases as usual.
But VW CEO Oliver Blume singled out Audi’s potential in the Chinese market when outlining the group’s improvement measures – in other words, it hasn’t done well enough before – and in fact from Europe to China, Audi Both underperformed.
In the first quarter of this year, Audi sold less than Tesla. In China, one of its most important markets, Audi sold about 630,000 vehicles in China last year, more than 100,000 less than the more expensive Mercedes-Benz and BMW. The reasons are complex. The adjustment of the government’s car strategy, the lack of comfort of the models compared to competing products, the loss of business customers due to the younger design, and product compromises made to balance the interests of SAIC and FAW are all possible reasons.
If Audi’s sales in China fail to sell to BMW and Mercedes-Benz, it is due to the reduction of its fuel vehicle product power and market appeal, while the reason for poor global sales is similar to that of other traditional car companies-slow progress in electrification. Last year, Audi delivered 118,000 pure electric vehicles worldwide, less than one-tenth of Tesla. During the same period, BMW sold 215,000 vehicles and Mercedes-Benz 149,000.
In May of this year, the Volkswagen Group fired almost all executives of the software development company CARIAD. One of the reasons was that the Audi pure electric A6, pure electric Q6 and Porsche electric Macan were all delayed due to difficulties in the development of CARIAD. At the performance meeting that month, Volkswagen executives said that these delayed new cars are expected to be on the road by the end of the year. (Gong Fangyi)
Delayed gratification for OpenAI engineers
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has recently appeared frequently in various public occasions, preached, and communicated with officials from all over the world. In the past few weeks, he has visited 22 countries around the world. In contrast, OpenAI’s internal structure and operations are notoriously opaque.
However, Levels.fyi, an organization specializing in the study of technology company salaries, recently revealed OpenAI’s employee salaries. According to Levels.fyi data (mainly from offers submitted by OpenAI employees in the past year), the median salary offered by OpenAI to software engineers is about $925,000, far exceeding the average salary of $300,000 for AI software engineers in Silicon Valley. According to public reports, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, was paid more than $1.9 million in 2016.
OpenAI employee compensation mainly includes two parts. Taking the median salary package of $925,000 as an example, it includes a basic salary of $300,000 and a profit distribution forward equity “PPU” (Profit Participation Units) worth $625,000, of which PPUs are only issued for four years.
Few other big-name companies do what OpenAI does, and most tech companies incentivize employees with stock options or restricted stock. Stock options allow incentive objects to purchase a certain number of company stocks (or not) at a pre-agreed price within a specified period of time, while restricted stocks are directly donated to employees a certain number of company stocks, but generally need to achieve certain goals before they can be sold. In the era of mobile Internet, these equity incentives have helped a group of early employees of technology companies to quickly accumulate a large amount of wealth and realize it.
PPU is somewhat similar to options. Stock options are only valuable when the stock price rises, while PPU is only valuable when the company’s profit exceeds a certain amount. The advantage of PPU is that it will not expire and only needs to be realized or sold. Taxes need to be paid, but it is not transparent, and the value is zero risk.
The reason why OpenAI designed the PPU is directly related to its current equity structure and profit distribution plan. In order not to let the interests of shareholders affect the development of the company, and at the same time ensure that investors get a reasonable return, OpenAI has planned a “four-stage” profit distribution plan:
- The first stage: Founding team investors have priority in obtaining income distribution rights to ensure that the founding team recovers the principal;
- The second stage: After the revenue-generating team recovers the principal, Microsoft begins to obtain 75% of OpenAI’s profits until it recovers its $13 billion investment;
- The third stage: When OpenAI’s profit reaches 92 billion US dollars, Microsoft’s profit distribution ratio drops from 75% to 49%;
- The fourth stage: When OpenAI’s profit reaches 150 billion US dollars, all investors’ shares will be transferred to OpenAI’s non-profit fund without compensation.
Such a plan makes the return on investment of all OpenAI investors have an upper limit (100 times for the founder team, 10 times for Microsoft, and 20 times for other investors), which also means that OpenAI cannot be listed, issued stocks or options. big. At the same time, OpenAI has a “profit ceiling”, which means that all employees’ PPU returns are also capped, generally 10 times the original price, and must be kept for two years before they can be sold (when OpenAI is financing, employees can choose to sell their PPU to participating institutions). (Qiu Hao)
The official manufacturing PMI rebounded from the previous month, and the small business index fell
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the manufacturing PMI in June was below the dry-boom line, and about 49% of respondents believed that the economy was expanding compared to May. It was 48.8% last month.
Among the five weighted indicators that make up the PMI index, the production and new order indexes were better than in May, while raw material inventories and employees contracted month-on-month.
The last weight indicator “delivery time” is not as high as in May. However, because it is generally believed that fast delivery is due to fewer orders and insufficient demand, a lower index means that the economic climate is improving.
Looking at large, medium and small enterprises, large enterprises are in the expansion range, while medium-sized enterprises are in the contraction range, but the chain is improving. Small businesses contracted further month-on-month. (Gong Fangyi)
Tech Weekly丨The wave of large models, Nvidia is completely on board
Nvidia is the undisputed beneficiary of the artificial intelligence megamodel boom, with big tech companies and startups alike scrambling to snap up its advanced GPU for the past six months, propelling it into the world’s first trillion-dollar chip company.
But Nvidia doesn’t want to just make money selling GPUs. It is also building close ties with emerging artificial intelligence big model companies through investment, hoping to benefit from the rise of these companies. This week alone, two investments involving Nvidia were disclosed.
The first is Inflection AI, a new round of financing of 1.3 billion US dollars, with Nvidia participating in the lead.
- Inflection AI was founded in 2022 by the co-founders of DeepMind, with the goal of developing an artificial intelligence assistant for everyone, with a valuation of $4 billion.
- The two parties cooperated to build a data center with 22,000 H100 GPUs (worth about US$1 billion), which is expected to rank second in the global supercomputing.
- Investors include Microsoft, Reid Hoffman and other OpenAI investors, as well as Silicon Valley celebrities such as Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt.
Followed by Runway AI, a new round of financing of 141 million US dollars, Nvidia participated in the investment.
- Runway AI was established in 2018. Its early business was to develop artificial intelligence tools for filmmakers, photographers, etc. After generating artificial intelligence, it increased the model research of text generation video, and its current valuation is 1.5 billion US dollars.
- The two sides cooperate to further study the technology of text generation video.
- Investors include Google, Salesforce, etc.
This year, Nvidia also invested in artificial intelligence startups such as Cohere, Adept, and Synthesia. According to PitchBook statistics, Nvidia’s investment in the past six months has been more aggressive than before – the number of investments in the first half of the year is close to the sum of the two years of 2021 and 2022, and the sum of the valuations of investment companies is higher than the sum of companies invested in the past five years. (He Qianming)
CHART OF THE DAY | Chinese car companies have planned an annual production capacity of at least 1.7 million vehicles
- This week, Li Ke, executive vice president of BYD Group, accepted a meeting with Brazilian President Lula. BYD reiterated its plan to set up a factory in Brazil, with an estimated annual production capacity of about 150,000 vehicles.
- If you take into account BYD’s previous plans to build a factory in Thailand in recent years, as well as the overseas production capacity (including planned production capacity) of other Chinese counterparts such as Great Wall and SAIC, Chinese car companies can manufacture at least 1.7 million vehicles overseas each year. (Intern Fu Xiaoyu)
OTHER NEWS
Profits at state-owned enterprises rose 10.9 percent year-on-year in the first five months of this year.
According to the Ministry of Finance, from January to May this year, the total operating income of state-owned enterprises was 32.91 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.2%, and the previous value was 7.1%; the total profit was 1,783.81 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 10.9%, and the previous value was 15.1%. As of the end of May, the asset-liability ratio of state-owned enterprises was 64.8%, an increase of 0.3 percentage points year-on-year, and the same as the previous month.
Ctrip encourages employees to have children, giving each child 50,000 yuan.
On June 30, Ctrip Group announced the launch of a maternity subsidy policy. Starting from July 1, global employees who have been employed for three years, regardless of gender, will receive a cash subsidy of 10,000 yuan per year for each new child born. At least 5 years old. According to preliminary estimates, Ctrip will invest 1 billion yuan in this policy. Prior to this, Liang Jianzhang, the founder of Ctrip and a demographic economist, had repeatedly suggested maternity subsidies as a first measure to increase the fertility rate.
The initial response of Xiaopeng’s new car G6 in the capital market is good.
On June 29, Xiaopeng released the new SUV G6, with a starting price of 209,900 yuan. Today, the capital market seems to be full of enthusiasm for this car. The company’s share price rose 7.19% before the market, and once rose to more than 10% after the market opened.
The G6 pricing strategy has absorbed the losses suffered by the G9, streamlined the SKU and configuration list, and set three starting prices for three versions with three levels of cruising range, 209,900 yuan (580 kilometers), 234,900 yuan (755 kilometers), 254,900 yuan ( 700 kilometers), each gear plus 20,000 yuan to get the intelligent assisted driving system.
Taking the entry-level model as an example, adding 229,900 yuan to get 580 kilometers of battery life and assisted driving functions with lidar, compared with the most popular models at the same price such as Model Y or BYD Song Plus, at least some competition has been restored in terms of parameters and pricing force. Coupled with chairman He Xiaopeng’s optimistic expectations for the third and fourth quarters at the performance meeting, it may be the reason why the market favors Xiaopeng again.
- The starting price of Tesla Model Y is 263,900 yuan, with a range of 545 kilometers, +32,000 yuan with an enhanced version of automatic assisted driving function, without lidar;
- The price range of BYD Song Plus is between 150,000 yuan and 220,000 yuan. The plug-in hybrid has a maximum battery life of 150 kilometers, and the pure electric vehicle has a maximum battery life of 520 kilometers. There is no lidar.
SHEIN once again denied submitting an application for listing in the United States.
According to media reports, SHEIN has secretly submitted IPO registration documents to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and may be listed before the end of the year, with a latest valuation of more than $60 billion. However, a SHEIN spokesperson responded by “denying these rumors.” Since 2021, news of SHEIN’s listing has been reported many times. A few days ago, there were media reports that SHEIN submitted listing materials, which were all denied by the company.
The chairman of YMTC called on suppliers to repurchase equipment that cannot be activated due to special reasons.
According to the industry media “Voice”, Chen Nanxiang, chairman of YMTC, said in a speech at an industry event that he agreed with TSMC founder Zhang Zhongmou’s statement that globalization is important to promote the development of the semiconductor industry, but globalization is indeed “dead” “. He said that in the past, the main driving force of semiconductor globalization was market and business, and global cooperation brought about business maximization. But now more consideration is given to geopolitics, security, de-risking, restraining the development of others, and breaking all the elements of harmony in the past. He also called on suppliers to abide by integrity and fairness. If the equipment purchased by YMTC in accordance with the law cannot be obtained or cannot be used, the supplier should repurchase these equipment.
The ban on lithography machines was officially introduced.
The Dutch lithography giant ASML announced today that the Dutch government has officially announced new regulations on the export control of semiconductor equipment. The specific terms are consistent with those discussed in early March and will be officially implemented on September 1. According to the new regulations, ASML needs to apply for a license to export the most advanced immersion DUV lithography equipment (TWINSCAN NXT:2000i and subsequent models) to China.
Nike’s revenue in China has increased by 4% year-on-year in the past year, and the executives are full of confidence in the Chinese market.
In the past year as of the end of May this year, Nike’s revenue in Greater China was US$7.248 billion, a year-on-year increase of 4%. Nike said it would continue to invest in China and was confident in its business in China. In the past three months as of the end of May this year, Nike’s revenue in Greater China was US$1.81 billion, a year-on-year increase of 25% over the same period last year when the new crown epidemic was severely affected. Nike’s confidence in the Chinese market mainly comes from “618”, inventory management and consumer recognition. This year’s “618”, Nike’s sales on Tmall ranked first. Compared with the three months to the end of May last year, its inventory fell by more than 5%, and the full-price sales rate of its products hit a two-year high.
Keep will be listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July, with a total fundraising of up to 618 million yuan.
Sports technology company Keep is expected to be listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on July 12. According to the pricing range and the number of shares to be issued, the total fundraising will be between 291 million and 618 million yuan. The funds raised will be used for research and development, Fitness content development and diversification, brand promotion and promotion, etc. In addition, Keep has entered into a cornerstone investment agreement with Fenda Technology, Fuqing Shengde, and Qunxin Machinery. These three investors have confirmed that they will subscribe for approximately RMB 71.0449 million in shares.
The valuation gap is too large, and start-up technology companies delay listing.
Tech startups haven’t benefited much from the AI boom. Although the Nasdaq index has risen by more than 30% this year and is only 15% lower than its 2021 high, Nvidia and Apple are mainly leading the gains. The seven major technology companies listed on US stocks in 2021 have lost more than 40% of their market value so far. Many start-up technology companies have delayed going public due to the large valuation gap. According to FactSet data, in the first half of this year, only 10 companies in the industry raised US$100 million or more through US stock IPOs, compared with 517 in the same period in 2021.
It is reported that the FTC is about to sue Amazon for favoring merchants who use its own logistics services.
According to media reports, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plans to file an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon’s e-commerce business in the next few weeks, mainly accusing it of using platform rights and favoring merchants who use platform logistics services. The FTC has finalized key details such as where to prosecute, according to people familiar with the matter. The market believes that the FTC may require Amazon to reorganize. Amazon previously produced and sold goods on its own based on the platform’s best-selling data, and was therefore subject to antitrust investigations.
In the first half of the year, the global M&A transaction volume fell by 40%, and JPMorgan Chase became the number one M&A consultant.
In the first half of this year, the global M&A transaction volume was 1.3 trillion US dollars, a year-on-year decrease of 40%, which was one of the worst periods of M&A in the past decade. The scale of M&A transactions in charge of JP Morgan Chase was US$284 billion, becoming the world’s largest M&A advisory firm in the first half of the year with a market share of more than 20%, while Goldman Sachs fell to the second place for the first time in the past five years. Previously, Goldman Sachs had axed 125 managing directors due to low trading volume.
This article is transferred from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1728
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.