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Text | Deng Simiao
Source: Smart Car Reference
A test car burns down and the CEO is ousted.
This is too strict. After all, looking at the world, whether it is a giant car company or a new car company, it is normal for the test car to have some problems.
But this precious test car that was burned came from Faraday Future FF, Jia Yueting’s car manufacturing company.
Foreign media broke the news that the burning accident of the test vehicle became the direct trigger for the global CEO Breitfeld to be kicked out.
The former partner of Byton Motors was recruited by Lao Jia after Byton’s bankruptcy three years ago, and became the global CEO of FF. The delivery of mass-produced cars is always “one step away”.
But now, with the test car worth 1.4 million reduced to ashes, Breitfeld was ruthlessly dismissed.
The global CEO of FF is Chen Xuefeng, who graduated from Wuhan University of Technology and has worked in the automotive industry for 20 years. At the age of 39, he became the vice president of Chery Jaguar Land Rover. He is known as the youngest head of a joint venture company in China. He joined FF in March 2021, but he is mainly responsible for the Chinese business-yes, FF actually has Chinese business.
After Chen Xuefeng took over, Jia Yueting once again called on everyone to suffocate the dream of mass production. He also revealed the “progress of mass production” on Weibo again:
After Xuefeng became the global CEO, there is only one step away from the delivery of FF91.
Breitfeld leaves
Breitfeld’s global CEO position was dismissed by the Faraday Future (FF) board of directors.
In the official announcement document, it is mainly based on “a comprehensive evaluation of the company’s performance since its listing in July last year.”
The general meaning is that during his tenure, Bi Fukang failed to deliver results that satisfied the board of directors.
Breitfeld’s position on the board of directors was also dismissed, which can be regarded as complete.
Carsten Breitfeld joined Faraday Future in September 2019, and it has been more than three years since then.
In previous interviews, Bi Fukang revealed that he has known Jia Yueting for many years, and Jia Yueting persuaded him to join FF as early as 2015.
When he first joined, Breitfeld commented that FF is a “company with excellent technology and products. Maybe sometimes the execution of the company is lacking, but it still has great potential.”
And in his eyes, Jia Yueting is extremely dazzling:
Jia Yueting is a very good guy, he started a very successful business and built LeEco which is worth billions of dollars. He has a dream, a passion, and a great enthusiasm for the product. I’m also an engineer who loves products, so we have common characteristics. Jia Yueting has a lot of fans in China, and I know that people are very polarized about him, and a lot of people don’t like him, but he still has a lot of fans, and I’ve been in China for three years, and I know that. He’s had a lot of setbacks, but I feel like he’s a responsible person and he’s working on things like paying off debts.
Regarding his previous work experience, Breitfeld worked at BMW for more than 10 years and personally participated in the creation of the BMW i8 electric car.
What is not well known to outsiders is that Breitfeld was once the co-founder and CEO of Byton Motors. Later, Byton failed and fled to the United States, and then joined forces with Lao Jia Shengli who “returned to China next week”.
Of course, during the Byton crisis earlier, Bi Fukang also had the expectation of “returning to China next week”.
Now Bi Fukang did not look forward to the mass production and delivery of the new FF91 car, but was unexpectedly persuaded to leave… Moreover, in Jia Yueting’s latest Weibo, there was no mention of Bi Fukang’s resignation.
Moreover, regarding Bi Fukang’s departure, foreign media murdered people, revealing that Lao Jia and FF had long been dissatisfied with Bi Fukang, not to mention losing a precious test car under his rule.
You must know that Lao Jia and FF have been building cars for 8 years, and the most humiliation they bear is “no car”-always stay on the PPT.
Now it’s hard to knock out a few precious cars by hand, and they are burned…
Is it tolerable or unbearable?
Chen Xuefeng promoted to FF Global CEO
It was Chen Xuefeng who succeeded Bi Fukang.
Chen Xuefeng is in the top position this time.
In March last year, Chen Xuefeng joined Faraday Future as CEO of China. At that time, he reported to Breitfeld and was mainly responsible for all FF business in China, including project implementation, production strategy, localized product development and user ecosystem construction.
The reason why he chose to join FF is:
I’ve been thinking about this decision for three years. He joined the automotive industry in 2002 and became the vice president of Chery Jaguar Land Rover in 2015. In the past 20 years, I have experienced rank promotion every three years in a Sino-foreign joint venture company. In 2017, I asked myself, if my career is a three-year unit, what should I do in the next three years? In fact, in 2018, Jia Yueting invited me to FF. At that time, I also came to Beijing to see the FF91 car.
During his tenure as CEO of FF China, the projects he handled included the promotion of cooperation with Geely and the Zhuhai local government. For example, in September last year, he said that the technical teams of FF and Geely are closely connecting with each other to conduct platform technology acceptance and development preparations.
At the same time, Chen Xuefeng also helped promote the construction of FF China’s offline sales channels, “I hope to create standardized services through FF91, and then promote a high-end lifestyle to economical users when FF81 and FF71 are launched on the market.”
This time he was promoted to the global CEO, FF paid Chen Xuefeng a lot of salary.
The basic salary is 900,000 US dollars, which also includes a year-end bonus of up to 600,000 US dollars, and a cash signing and retention bonus of 500,000 US dollars, which adds up to a total of 2 million US dollars (equivalent to approximately 13.92 million yuan in RMB).
However, it is not as good as Bi Fukang’s annual salary in 2020-a total of about 2.73 million US dollars, equivalent to about 19 million yuan in RMB.
In fact, before joining FF, Chen Xuefeng had already been successful in the auto industry.
Aged 46, graduated from Wuhan University of Technology in 1999, majoring in automobile design and manufacturing, and obtained a master’s degree in automotive engineering in 2016. He is currently studying for a master’s degree in business administration at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.
He first joined Chongqing Changan Ford in 2002 as an electrical product development engineer; later served as an electrical design engineer for Ford Australia, senior manager of Ford Mazda B2e (economy car platform) project, and director of Changan Ford Mazda project department.
From 2013 to 2015, Chen Xuefeng served as the executive vice president of the manufacturing department of Chery Jaguar Land Rover. He led the team to establish the Chery Jaguar Land Rover production base in China within 18 months, and delivered the first Land Rover model made in China 3 months ahead of schedule.
Since 2015, he has been promoted to executive vice president of Chery Jaguar Land Rover. At the age of 39, he became the youngest head of a joint venture company in China.
Boss Jia’s car manufacturing company is full of chaos
Chen Xuefeng can be regarded as “accepting orders in the face of danger”, because the current FF is “at the time of life and death”.
Before that, that is, in the last stage, how was FF doing when Breitfeld was the global CEO?
Chaos, or, still very messy.
The first is the financial crisis.
Not long ago, Faraday Future disclosed its financial report. The financial report shows that in the third quarter of this year, FF had a net loss of US$103 million, which was significantly narrower than the net loss of US$304 million in the same period last year; in the first three quarters of this year, FF had a net loss of US$398 million, which was slightly lower than the net loss of US$432 million in the same period last year. decline.
As of September 30 this year, FF’s book cash balance was only 31.77 million US dollars, the total assets on the account were about 540 million US dollars, and the total liabilities reached 253 million US dollars.
Faraday’s latest announcement is even pessimistic:
There are major doubts about FF’s ability to continue operating for another year.
Previous financing records include Evergrande Health’s acquisition of FF with HK$6.7467 billion in 2018, and Evergrande then paid FF a total of US$2 billion in three installments in 2018, 2019, and 2020; The listing raised about US$1 billion; in September this year, FF received US$100 million in financing…
However, despite financing everywhere, FF91 has not been mass-produced and delivered so far, and it has been pigeon-to-pipe.
This is also the second “chaos” of Faraday Future.
From the initial promise to deliver FF91 in July this year, it was later postponed to the third quarter of this year, and then changed to the third or fourth quarter of this year.
△From the Faraday Future APP, “sold out” is written as “sold out”The latest announcement has become “FF 91’s first mass production delivery time is uncertain, and it is not expected to happen in 2022”.
According to Faraday Future’s product plan, “After FF91, FF81 and FF71 will continue to be launched. FF81 will be mass-produced and launched next year, and FF71 is expected to meet users in 2024.”
From this point of view, it is a mystery whether FF91 can be made, let alone FF81 and FF71?
In addition to mass production time, Faraday Future is not keeping promises in terms of order quantity and financial report release time.
For example, it was claimed in the IPO application that FF91 had received more than 14,000 orders. In fact, according to the latest official data, as of November 17 this year, a total of 369 orders have been received worldwide.
Including last November, FF was sent a warning letter by the US Securities Regulatory Commission because it failed to submit financial reports in time, and faced the risk of being delisted.
The third chaos in Faraday Future is internal high-level turmoil.
First, in February this year, Jia Yueting was investigated by the board of directors of FF Company. After the investigation, his salary was cut by 25%. Jia Yueting then reported to the newly appointed chairman Susan Swenson.
In the following April, Jia Yueting’s nephew Wang Jiawei, who was originally the vice president of the capital department at FF, was also forced to resign from FF.
Behind Wang Jiawei’s departure, it is also seen as the worsening conflict between the FF board of directors and the management team dominated by Jia Yueting.
Until June this year, Faraday Future was exposed to “internal fighting” disputes. It is said that the “Jia Yueting faction” made an effort to replace Brian Krolicki, the chairman of the board of directors appointed last year, because “they don’t want people with investor backgrounds to supervise and manage Floor”.
Later, the “infighting” further escalated, and six employees within FF jointly submitted a letter requesting the board of directors to remove Susan Swenson from the two positions of executive chairman and chairman of the board.
Then in September this year, Susan Swenson and Brian Krolicki were kicked out of the FF board of directors, and Jia Yueting and his partner team regained control of FF.
At that time, Jia Yueting also tweeted:
The fourth chaos of Faraday Future is being shorted.
The short-selling agency J Capital Research (translated into Chinese as Meiqijin Investment) issued a short-selling report in October last year.
In the 27-page report, the opening paragraph reads:
FF is just a bucket that collects money from US investors and pours it into a debt black hole created by its founder, Jia Yueting, China’s most famous securities fraudster.
Meiqijin Investment also detailed FF’s many crimes, including not having the ability to mass-produce cars; the financial situation is worrying, and there is no end to financing; Lao Jia is unreliable…
But Jia Yueting denied this at the time, saying that this was “nonsense.”
In a sense, these four major chaos also collectively caused Faraday Future’s stock price to plummet.
FF, which went public in July last year, closed at $13.98 on the day of its release, with a market value of about $4.5 billion.
Now that more than a year has passed, Faraday’s stock price has fallen to US$0.299, and its market value has directly evaporated US$4.365 billion.
When Chen Xuefeng was the CEO of China, he said bluntly that FF is facing five major challenges at this stage, including capital financing, product power, brand power and marketing, China’s development strategy, and user ecological development.
Perhaps a more important issue now is: raise money, survive, and then mass-produce and deliver F91.
Jia Yueting still firmly believes that FF91 can “realize the subversion of Maybach, Ferrari and Bentley”.
But the time left for Lao Jia is indeed running out.
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