The historian Hobsbawm described the Industrial Revolution in his “Era Quartet” and mentioned that “Railways rarely bring investors higher profits than other enterprises. Construction has happened, most of the railroads are very marginally profitable, and many more are completely unprofitable.”
It is said that investing is gambling on the fortunes of the country. Railways are undoubtedly a symbolic achievement of the industrial revolution and even modern civilization. Two hundred years after its birth, there is still huge room for investment. If an ordinary person can travel back to modern times, railway construction should be in his eyes. The rising sun can no longer be an emerging industry in the rising sun.
Investors brought a torrent of investment to the British railway construction in the 1840s, but keeping up with the historical trend does not mean that your investment will follow suit. Hobsbawm’s answer is that “the well-to-do and wealthy classes are accumulating income so rapidly and in such large quantities that they far exceed the opportunities they can find to spend and invest.”
This meaning can have many more financial interpretations, such as asset shortages and asset bubbles caused by excess funds chasing, for example, even the best investment targets will turn into a failed investment under the influence of high valuations. From the perspective of investment alone, China’s new energy vehicles in the 21st century may learn a lot from the British railways in the 18th century. The certainty of the development of new energy vehicles is extremely high, but in the initial stage when chickens and dogs rise to the sky and the rain and dew are uniform After the end, huge amounts of funds are chasing a few reliable chips, so buying “expensive” is a normal state, and investment failure to meet expectations is a high probability event.
According to the retail sales statistics of the Passenger Federation, my country’s passenger car market will retail 20.543 million units in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 1.9%, of which 5.674 million new energy passenger vehicles will be retailed, a year-on-year increase of 90.0%. Superficially speaking, this is appropriate The sky is vast, the water is big and the fish are big. But it can also be seen that even under the stimulus of various preferential policies of halving the purchase tax, my country’s auto market is already in a low-growth state, and the overall incremental cake is very small. The rapid development of new energy vehicles is mainly reflected in the encroachment of the share of fuel vehicles. , which basically frames the bottleneck of the phased demand for new energy vehicles – it has not yet created an obvious blue ocean market for the product itself.
It will not rush up at a pace of 5 million this year, 10 million next year, and 20 million the year after… In other words, the balance of new energy vehicles during the high-growth period is no longer sufficient. The base continues to expand, and the later the customer base is infiltrated and transformed by new energy, the higher the probability is that they are diehards of traditional brand fuel vehicles, and the marginal effect can be expected. The Passenger Federation currently predicts that the wholesale sales of new energy passenger vehicles will increase year-on-year in 2023 31%, the forecast given by UBS China is 37%, and the forecasts of other authoritative sources basically fall in the range of 30%-40%.
Among the 90% of new sales in 2022, the distribution of the cake share is uneven, and the new forces who were still full of ambitions at this time last year are unsatisfactory. As the world’s leading new force, Tesla’s stock price will drop by almost 70% in 2022. It will take half a year from hard to find a car to price reduction and promotion. The performance of the domestic followers is even lower than expected. Take the research report released by Huatai Securities in the financial report season in March 2022 as an example. It predicts that Xiaopeng Motors will achieve sales of about 180,000 in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 56%. An increase of 23%; NIO is expected to sell 150,000 vehicles, an increase of 61%, but the actual sales are 120,000 and 34%; ideal car sales are expected to be 170,000, an increase of 83%, and the actual sales are 130,000 and 47%.
The “old face” BYD, who has begun to get used to “selling 200,000 vehicles per month”, is the biggest winner. In 2022, the cumulative sales of new energy vehicles will reach 1.86 million, achieving a super-speed growth of more than 200%. Looks like it’s coming. If a stalwart like BYD, who already has a large stock base, continues to achieve growth that beats the industry’s average growth rate of 30%-40%, it means that there are not many pieces of new cakes on paper left to share. the ones. Perhaps for the “Wei Xiaoli”, being acquired by state-owned manufacturers that still rely on joint venture brands is also a decent destination?
Compared with Britain in the 19th century, China in the 21st century may be more prone to capital accumulation and excess production capacity. There are tens of trillions of “profit-seeking” residents’ deposits that have nowhere to put them, and they are determined to serve the real economy. High-end manufacturing state-owned institutions, so the value of the track will be squeezed out more quickly. As the penetration rate breaks through the threshold, the new energy vehicle track is infinitely approaching the conventional auto industry sector, and the excess premium of the track based on imagination will continue to approach zero.
Remain true to our original aspirations and always achieve success. For China’s auto sector, the original aspirations of the energy revolution are of course environmental protection and resource conservation. One BYD and Geely means that the Chinese people bought one less Volkswagen and Toyota. For the new energy vehicle track, there must be an end-game thinking. The list of promising investment targets has begun to shrink significantly. The next performance differentiation will mainly depend on which independent brand can really compete. (Fortune Chinese website)
The author Zhu Xiao is a columnist for Fortune Chinese Network and works in the financial derivatives department of a securities company
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