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Text / Li Xia
Source: Bohu Finance (ID:bohuFN)
In early July, some media reported that Singularity, a new energy vehicle company, was bombed and owed wages to its employees, and the longest period has been one and a half years. There are more than 150 employees performing arbitration.
At the same time, at the end of last month, the Beijing Court Trial Information Network published a civil judgment ordering Singularity to pay the plaintiff, China Automotive Research Institute, a test and development fee, which is not much, 649,000, compared with the financing that Singularity has obtained over the years. For example, Fengmao water chestnut, but the arrears have been delayed from August 2020 to the present.
Another company, Diwei Automotive Engineering Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., may directly apply to the court for compulsory bankruptcy and reorganization of Singularity Automobile Beijing Branch in order to recover the arrears.
As the first wave of new car-making forces in China, Singularity Automobile was as ambitious as “Wei Xiaoli”, saying that it would become the Chinese version of Tesla. But 8 years later, the monthly deliveries of several leading new power auto companies have exceeded 10,000, and Singularity’s first mass-produced car is still in continuous “mass production at the end of the year”.
Tesla under Xiaomi
Many people may not know Singularity, which is not surprising, because it has not yet had a car of its own that can run on the street. In terms of bounced tickets, it is even worse than Evergrande.
In December 2014, the company behind Singularity Auto, “Smart Car Uxing”, was registered and established. As far as the establishment time is concerned, it was in the same year as Xiaopeng and Weilai, 4 months earlier than the ideal, and belongs to the first wave of new car-making forces.
(Shen Haiyin is in the middle of the Zhiche Youxing car-making team. Source: Internet)The CEO of Zhiche Youxing is Shen Haiyin. He graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1993 and has a lot of entrepreneurial experience. One of the two important people who became connected is Zhou Hongyi and the other is Lei Jun.
Shen Haiyin went to Japan in 1998, met Zhou Hongyi in 1999, founded JWord in Japan in 2000, and cooperated with Zhou Hongyi to make the Japanese version of “3721”. The version of “3721” was sold to Yahoo Japan.
In the same year, Shen Haiyin and Kingsoft jointly established Kingsoft Japan, and began to make free antivirus software in Japan. Because of what he did well, Lei Jun later asked him to return to China as the vice president of Jinshan Group.
In 2011, Shen Haiyin started a new business of intelligent hardware: tablet computer. However, due to problems with the supplier, the delivery time was delayed for half a year, resulting in a large number of customer returns. After the delivery, there were software and hardware bugs on the tablet, and it suddenly lost millions of dollars.
As the director and founder of Kingsoft Japan, Shen Haiyin took the blame and resigned, and later came to Zhou Hongyi’s 360 vice president, responsible for 360 mobile phone guards and cloud disks, as well as child guards, routers, cameras and other new hardware businesses, and later formed a A smart hardware investment team.
In 2014, Musk brought more than a dozen Model S to China, and Shen Haiyin, who had experienced it, was full of emotions, “The auto industry will definitely change.” In March of that year, a friend took him out for drinks and asked him what he wanted to do in the future. Half a year later, Zhiche Youxing was established, and Shen Haiyin shouted his slogan: Use Xiaomi’s model to build China’s Tesla.
This slogan seems wild and unruly, but it’s actually well thought out, at least logically. The reason for the “Xiaomi model” is that in Shen Haiyin’s vision, his car will be sold on the Internet.
By the way, at that time, auto e-commerce was in full swing, and because there was no need for dealers, the cost would be much lower, so before the car came out, Shen Haiyin said that our car will be sold at cost price.
How is it profitable?
Shen Haiyin focused on car intelligence from the beginning, “Others will build cars first, we will build systems first.” This should be inspired by Tesla Model S. Shen Haiyin once told the media: “Take off Tesla’s in-vehicle system, it’s just a piece of scrap metal.”
“Our team has people from the Internet, people from car companies, and the genes for integrating door-to-door services.” In the future, services around cars such as parking, car wash, taxi, and chauffeur will be integrated into the car as an app.
All in all, a whole set of business logic has been established, and Shen Haiyin’s road to building a car has begun.
Intelligence, Base and R&D Center
Just like the name of the company, at the beginning of its establishment, Zhiche Uxing focused its energy on “intelligence”, including cooperating with Horizon Robot to develop ADAS systems, cooperating with SHARP and other companies in human-computer interaction design, and cooperating with Spirit Technology. Develop a voice interaction system.
In March 2016, Singularity Motors released its own functional styling prototypes in Beijing and Shanghai, and the preparatory brand name is “Singularity Motors”. At that time, Shen Haiyin said that Zhiche Youxing has developed a set of active safety systems, including an ADAS system, an anti-fatigue driving system, and a night vision system.
(Source of the functional modelling prototype at the Beijing press conference: Internet)Shen Haiyin said that the prototype will be mass-produced in small batches in 2017. After that is the history of the mass production of Singularity.
In 2017, Singularity Motor’s first mass-produced model was unveiled, named Singularity iS6. “i” is the same as “I” in AI, representing intelligence (intelligence), with a price range of 200,000 to 300,000. At that time, it was announced that it will achieve small batches by the end of the year. Production.
Since then, according to incomplete statistics, Singularity iS6 has successively announced that it will be mass-produced and delivered at the end of 2018, the Spring Festival of 2019, and the end of 2019, but the tickets have all been delayed. That is 2020, Zhao Qiang, vice president of Singularity Automobile’s strategic brand, said: “The progress of mass production vehicles is indeed affected by the epidemic.”
Coincidentally, in the early stage of Singularity’s mass production car bounce, that is, in the second half of 2018, Singularity was first owed wages. At that time, it was at the stage of reshuffle of new car-making forces, and the market also began to question the capital chain of Singularity. question.
But Singularity is not wrong at all. Although there is no mass-produced car, at the 2019 Shanghai Auto Show, Singularity launched its own iC3 concept car. In July of the same year, Zhao Qiang announced the plan of Singularity to be listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board. There is no sign of decline, but there is an impetus to become bigger and stronger.
In the end, although Singularity Automobile was unsuccessful in its listing, it successfully survived the shuffle in 2019 and the epidemic in 2020. When many people say that Singularity is a PPT car, there should be envy of new forces that have turned into ashes, and Singularity can continue to announce its mass production plan.
This time, the bad luck turned into good, mainly because the nobles helped. Take the shuffle in 2019 as an example, Shen Haiyin found a Japanese company “ITOCHU Corporation”. During 2018 and 2019, the company injected capital twice in a row, with a total investment of 350 million.
According to Shen Haiyin’s self-reported, Singularity Motors has raised 600 million US dollars in Series B financing, 3 billion in C round financing and 10 billion in Singularity Fund, with a total financing of about 17 billion. In addition to local state-owned assets, there are well-known companies such as Intel Capital and 360 that give Singularity money.
In those bright days, Singularity invested in three production bases. Tongling Industrial Base, which started construction in 2016 with a total investment of 8 billion yuan, was discontinued later; Suzhou Xiangcheng Industrial Base, which started construction in 2018 with an estimated total investment of 15 billion yuan (including the R&D center), was basically stranded; Singularity Automobile Zhuzhou Base, with a total investment of 5 billion.
According to Yicai, before 2018, Singularity had completed the construction of R&D centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Tongling, Anhui, Silicon Valley in the United States, and Utsunomiya in Japan. The R&D layout of “Three Kingdoms and Six Regions”.
After one operation, Singularity’s mass-produced car still stopped at the “PPT” stage 8 years later.
Finally: Was it wrong to begin with?
Recently, I went to several mainstream recruitment websites in China to look through the recruitment positions of Zhiche Youxing, and found that Zhiche Youxing has no open positions in Zhaopin. A: One of them is a product manager and the other is also a product manager.
(BOSS direct recruitment screenshot time: July 14)As an Internet entrepreneur who is keen to do hardware, Shen Haiyin’s Singularity Automobile also attracted much attention in the early days. According to the former employees of Singularity Automobile, Singularity Automobile had more than 1,500 employees in its heyday. But the singularity is obviously high and low, and it is too outrageous to build a car in 8 years.
This is the weakest part of Internet car building. The business logic is self-consistent, but it is difficult to implement.
After Shen Haiyin experienced the Model S in the past, he has been working in the Internet for many years, and he knows that intelligence is the real future of new energy vehicles, so Singularity Automobile focused on the in-vehicle system from the very beginning, and developed Singularity Automobile’s Xiaomi Mode: Selling at cost price, profiting from car peripheral services.
In terms of logical self-consistency, this is no problem, but in the later stage, the problem of this Internet car company was exposed: the car could not be built. Singularity Motor once responded that it was a problem with the foundry, and threw the pot away, but a horizontal and vertical comparison shows that the problem occurs more inside the Singularity. intelligently.
From the perspective of Zhuge Liang in hindsight, intelligence is indeed the most subversive part of electric vehicles, but what is biased with Shen Haiyin’s expectations is that intelligence may not be a few electronic screens installed in the car, and a few voice systems will be developed. The most disruptive and competitive intelligence is actually autonomous driving.
In addition, before the remote intelligent technology of automobiles is implemented, whether in the past or the next few years, electric vehicles still need to solve the most basic problem of endurance anxiety. Last month, Evergrande, which built cars several years later than Singularity, also put on its own Hengchi 5, which was much more pragmatic, and advertised that it was “the best pure electric SUV within 300,000 yuan”.
Intelligence is right, but if you focus on this one, it will definitely fall behind other aspects of car building, such as Sanden, model platform, etc., which is the basis of car building.
With no car coming out, no cash flow, and the high investment in bases and R&D centers, Singularity Auto owes wages and is on the verge of bankruptcy. After the capital market has been shrinking, will anyone save Singularity this time?
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