Geely wants to ＂fly＂
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When new powers continue to rise in car manufacturing, the outside world is criticizing Li Bin, Li Xiang, He Xiaopeng and other Musks as competing to become China’s Musk. However, compared with these young descendants, Li Shufu, 57, may be more like the most devout "Musk disciple".
Some people say that Musk is a real-life version of Iron Man, and some people say that he is a Silicon Valley madman. But no matter what you call it, it reflects his bold and crazy business initiatives. Electric supercars, commercial rockets, satellites, solar roofs and underground high-speed trains, and even he will regularly sell flamethrowers… Many things that you can only see in science fiction movies, Musk is attacking everywhere. Especially on April 22, the media reported that the seventh batch of 60 "Starlink" satellites was launched, and the Falcon 9 rocket that carried out the launch mission was the fifth reused "five-handed" rocket.
Don’t be afraid to take September alone, and now Geely is also in the cloud? After Geely built a car with full wings, Li Shufu, who is nearly 60 years old, also began to think about "flying".
On April 26, a "rocket chief engineer" recruitment information from Geely Holding Group’s Time and Space Dao Yu Technology Co., Ltd., attracted great attention from the outside world: the job requirements column showed that the overall work plan of the rocket was looking for.
In fact, Geely wants to fly is not a recent thing.
"A car is just a few sofas and four wheels." This was Li Shufu’s "definition" of a car product twenty years ago. Perhaps in his opinion, a flying car should be able to take off with a pair of wings.
Geely acquired the world’s first flying car company, Terrafugia, in 2017. The company’s product is called Transition. From the perspective of appearance alone, it is more appropriate to call it a small folding-wing aircraft. According to official data, the power combination of the car (or the aircraft?) is a gas-electric hybrid system, which can take two people and can fly at a speed of 322 kilometers per hour in the air. The maximum flight altitude is about 3.048 kilometers, and the maximum endurance in the air can reach 800 kilometers.
According to Geely’s previous plan, this flying car will be mass-produced in the United States in 2019, and will gradually realize mass production of flying cars in China in the future. At the same time, Terrafugia is also in the commercial layout of vertical takeoff and landing flying cars.
However, it is now the end of April 2020, and the outside world has not seen any news of the mass production of this flying car. For this "science fiction" product, it may have been commonplace to skip the ticket. Even if the "flying car" does not arrive on time, Geely still wants to fly higher.
In March this year, the Taizhou Geely satellite project was officially launched. According to Geely’s official announcement, the first two low-orbit satellites independently designed by Spacetime Daoyu Technology Co., Ltd. have passed various appraisal tests and tests, and are expected to be launched within 2020. Therefore, this is the message forwarded by Yang Xueliang, vice president of Geely Automobile, "Recruiting rocket chief, welcome to sign up, and send your resume to @Geely Recruitment."
In this regard, Geely’s idea is to deploy low-orbit satellites to provide high-precision positioning services for high-level intelligent driving, in order to comprehensively enhance the user’s intelligent travel experience.
Of course, as people who eat melons, we don’t know if Geely’s satellites can successfully go to the sky within the year. However, from flying cars 3 kilometers in the sky to low-orbit satellites 200 to 2000 kilometers, in the popular words of the moment – Geely and Li Shufu’s goal is the sea of stars. Maybe in the future we will see Geely use its own "heavy rocket" to send its Geely sports car to the sky like Tesla.
If building a car can be highly summarized as "putting wheels on a sofa," then whether building rockets and satellites is to install rocket boosters on communication devices and send them to the sky? It’s definitely not that simple.
First of all, in terms of investment, the two are not on the same level at all.
Regarding the cost of building a car, relevant auto industry observers told Understanding Notes: "For general car companies, not counting those products that use the old platform to counterfeit products of other models, the cost of developing a new model is completely positive, which is about a few hundred million to one billion yuan. In addition, this cost will reduce the marginal cost with the increase of mass production of later models and the increase of" brother "models of the same platform."
Hundreds of millions to billions of yuan, which is already astronomical in the eyes of ordinary people, but when it comes to building rockets and launching satellites, it should not be enough.
Let’s take the Starlink project of Musk’s company Space X as an example. As the infrastructure of Musk’s global satellite Internet vision, on April 22, Space X sent the seventh batch of 60 satellites of the "Starlink" project into space with a Falcon 9 rocket. So far, the total number of satellites launched by SpaceX has reached 422.
According to Musk, "Starlink" will consist of at least 12,000 small satellites.
The technical prowess and billions of dollars spent to send such a large number of satellites into space are behind it. Because SpaceX is still not a publicly traded company, its financial data is not known to the outside world. But according to the company’s early estimates, the cost of building and launching satellites could be as high as $10 billion. From now on, the overall investment may only be much more.
"From the perspective of corporate purposes and the functionality of satellites, Geely’s satellites and Musk’s Starlink are completely different. Geely is mainly laying out for future vehicles to everything and autonomous driving, while Musk is betting on his own global Internet plan." In this regard, the above-mentioned automotive industry observers emphasized to Understanding Notes that Geely’s future demand for satellites will not be as high as Starlink plans, and Geely is not as big as Space X from rockets to satellites, and the future cost should be lower than Space X. "But even so, the cost of a single launch will be tens of millions of yuan, which is a lot of pressure for a car company."
The huge investment required behind "Heaven" is not unclear to Li Shufu, a veteran of the car industry. Under such circumstances, the reason why Geely still chooses the road of "Flying Heaven" is also very simple: the construction of the future intelligent travel network will not simply stay in the construction of the road network. In the highly integrated intelligent space, Geely’s low-orbit satellites will play a very important role.
In this regard, relevant auto industry observers told Understanding Notes: "First of all, Geely is doing this in the context of policies that are encouraging private capital to develop and launch commercial satellites; secondly, as Geely officials said – to a large extent, it is to prepare for high-level intelligent driving in the future." The person analyzed that mature autonomous driving requires the deep integration of high-precision navigation and high-speed communication networks, and the integration of communication is the development trend of the entire industry. "Geely has not only been tossing in the field of car manufacturing, but building an intelligent transportation ecosystem based on vehicle production is its ultimate appeal, so it needs to improve its own layout in the travel industry chain."
According to the "2018-2022 China Commercial Aerospace Industry Deep Research and Investment Prospect Forecast Report" released by CIC Consulting, the global aerospace industry is growing rapidly at a rate of 6% to 7% every year, and the size of our country’s aerospace market will reach 800 billion yuan in 2020.
Policy support, rapid market growth, strategic layout needs, from the perspective of strategic choice, Geely’s plan is logical. However, the wish is perfect if it can be realized, and the process of realizing the wish is "painful", especially at the current stage when Geely’s main business is under pressure.
We have heard the word cold winter in the car market countless times in the past year. Now affected by the pandemic, the market still sees no signs of recovery. In this situation, all car companies are under pressure, and Geely, a leading domestic car company, is also not feeling well.
According to the 2019 financial report released by Geely Automobile Holdings Co., Ltd., Geely Automobile sold 1.3616 million vehicles (including Lynk & Co) last year, and 1.5008 million vehicles in 2018, down 9% year-on-year; total revenue in 2019 was 97.71 billion yuan, down 8.6% year-on-year, and net profit was 8.19 billion yuan, down 35% year-on-year.
In addition, in the field of new energy vehicles, which has received the most attention, although Geely has been very aggressive, it has not achieved the expected effect. As early as 2018, when the "Blue Geely Action" was released, Li Shufu said, "By 2020, more than 90% of Geely cars will be new energy vehicles."
But the latest data shows that Geely Automobile sold only 113,067 new energy vehicles in 2019. Although the year-on-year growth rate was as high as 66.5%, it accounted for only 8.3% of the total sales. Obviously, the "prediction" failed.
"Geely is indeed very determined to turn to new energy, but from the perspective of product strength, Geely’s new energy series is obviously not the best (but not bad), and the reason why it does not perform better in the field of new energy than domestic competitors such as BYD and BAIC is that Geely has to take into account its own basic market." A senior industry insider told Zhonghe Notes that although new energy vehicles are very popular, in recent years the market is still dominated by fuel vehicles, "so at least for now, fuel vehicles are still Geely’s guarantee, so it will not be as aggressive as BYD and BAIC."
The current downturn in the domestic auto market is due to the fact that the entire auto market is caught in the dilemma of slowing demand, but this also highlights that, despite being a leading domestic car brand, Geely is still unable to escape the impact of the industry cycle in the competition in the stock market.
No one can anticipate when the recovery of the car market will occur. Investing heavily in "heaven" under such circumstances is definitely a pressure for Geely. Regarding Geely’s choice, relevant auto industry observers pointed out: "To achieve the integration of communication and navigation, it is definitely not enough to be close to two satellites. The entire intelligent travel network needs at least dozens of satellites to basically cover, which will be a long process."
Geely seems to be thinking further than BAIC and BYD to take a step ahead of its competitors. But at the same time, it is also very clear that selling cars is its basic game. As for the rocket chief and "God", Geely can’t be in a hurry.