Making a car is like a bottomless pit, sucking gold hard, you never know when it is a head. This has made the Internet car companies that used to change the traditional automobile industry drive to a "steep slope" that does not advance and retreat.
LeTV spent a lot of money on the car project, maybe only Jia Yueting knew. However, the huge investment in the car has indeed caused tension in LeEco’s capital chain. According to the LeTV auto business plan rumored before, the total investment of LeTV is expected to reach 7.9 billion US dollars from 2016 to 2022. This means that in the next six years, LeTV will invest nearly 40 billion yuan.
But many things are once the bow is opened, there is no turning back, such as the Internet to build a car.
Open bow without turning back
In November, in a well-known jazz-style restaurant built on the former site of the US Embassy in Beijing's Qianmen, Singular Auto CEO Shen Haijun held his second grand conference in his life. He announced that his two-year-old Internet car company, Singular Auto, has reached 600 million US dollars and is preparing to build an intelligent new energy vehicle industrial park with a total investment of 8 billion yuan in Tongling, Anhui.
Shen Haijun is one of the earliest entrepreneurs in China, witnessing the entire process of change in the Internet age. He has worked and worked in Japan for 13 years and has served as Jinshan Group and 360 Vice President. I finally chose to go back to China to start a business, and I chose the Internet car because he believed that the next slogan of the Internet must be in China.
In the past two or three years, Internet carmakers such as Singular Auto, LeTV, Harmony Futeng, Weilai Auto, and Xiaopeng Automobile have sprung up, holding high the capital banner and trying to change the entire industry. According to the plan, LeTV will launch FF ZERO1 and Rapide S next year, and will launch large, medium and urban models from 2018; Weilai Automobile will launch the first electric supercar as planned this month; It is said that the first batch of prototypes can be manufactured by the end of this year, and the product announcement will be completed next year for small batch production.
However, it is not as simple as building a mobile phone. It is not that after having software and design, as long as it is taken to the factory for production, it will be used in all likelihood. The process and verification of making a car is more complicated, and the "burning mode" is a part that cannot be avoided - like the music of Jia Yueting, this is a problem that all Internet car manufacturers need to face.
Shen Haijun bought l1000 mu of land in Tongling, Anhui Province, and plans to establish a assembly line, a three-electric R&D center and a carbon fiber R&D and manufacturing center, and will build R&D bases including intelligent system production centers, intelligent driving tests and driverless experience parks. Behind it is a huge funding gap.
However, for the source of the follow-up funds of the Tongling Industrial Park with a total investment of 8 billion yuan, Shen Haijun said that he can rely on creditor's rights and equity, and he prefers creditor's rights, that is, loans to banks. According to Shen Haijun's estimate, 100 million US dollars is enough to build an electric car. Now the company has raised 600 million US dollars, enough to support the initial investment in the plant.
Unlike Jia Yueting, which spent 20 billion yuan to build a factory in Deqing, Shen Haijun’s plan seems to be more practical. He told reporters: "Internet companies don't have the money to build production lines. We can only use some idle car production lines by cooperating with the OEMs. We will use more of the money saved. R&D and design."
Shen Haiyan admits that for Internet companies, behind the vigorous "enthusiasm" of building a car, it is not a wonderful capital market story, nor is it a successful completion of a prototype, but a face of capital, technology, talents, etc. Persistence test.
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