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Produced by Huxiu Automobile Group

Author: Li Mingyang

Header image sourceNIOPress Conference

On July 27, after a technology conference of Weilai, Li Bin and Qin Lihong accepted a group interview with the media. When answering questions, the two mentioned this: How can the automotive industry avoid low-quality volumes? One important thing is not to publish weekly sales charts.

Qin Lihong also emphasized that NIO has never authorized other organizations to release weekly rankings. If other brands release weekly sales rankings, can they remove NIO's name?

On July 30, NIO’s public relations director Ma Lin also posted on Weibo @Ideal AutoFounder Li Xiang advised the latter to stop. For a while, the atmosphere was full of gunpowder. Several other car companies also followed up on Weibo.

Is it necessary to publish the weekly sales rankings? Is it a low-quality internal competition? The author would like to briefly analyze the source of the matter:

Rigorous sales data has been played with in various ways

First of all, can sales data prove that a company's core competitiveness is strong enough and its product strength is strong enough? The author and several friends who have worked in car companies have given affirmative answers. As a complex industrial product, automobiles have both hardware and software. How much technical content does each car, each technology, and each component have? What is the R&D background? Ordinary consumers simply do not have enough time to fully study thoroughly, not to mention that under the guidance of various information noises and public opinions, no consumer will combine a series of factors such as styling, power, space, energy consumption, value retention rate, configuration, quality control, etc., and finally make a real, sufficient and objective purchase decision. This is obviously unrealistic.

At this time, sales volume becomes the most important decision-making factor for potential consumers to place orders for cars. Because word of mouth is the easiest to bring trust, combined with the group's herd mentality, if the product is not good, there will not be so many people buying it. In fact, every mainstream car company will release sales data, but they will release the sales volume of their own models on a quarterly, annual or milestone basis.

Image source: Visual China

Benz、BMW、PorscheFinancial reports will be issued regularly.ToyotaWill commemorateCamryIf 2 million units are sold in the Chinese market, the cumulative sales of tens of millions of units will be used toCorollaTo provide endorsement. Most of the time, each car company implements its business strategy at its own pace.

However, sales volume, which was originally a rigorous matter, has been played with new tricks by various new Chinese car companies. It is not enough to just publish their own sales volume, but also to rank the sales volume of competitors to make a list. As long as there are enough adjectives, their own models can always be ranked first: medium and large SUVs, medium and large pure electric SUVs, and high-end luxury medium and large pure electric SUVs above 300,000 yuan. The list has been released from once a month to once a week.

The essence of the weekly volume list is to overdraw the future

Friends who are watching the Paris Olympics may hear such a term: Olympic preparation cycle. The result of 4 years of training is to show the best condition at the Olympics, strive for the best results, and win the gold medal. Most people pay attention to the athletes' Olympic results list, not the weekly training results list. If the Olympics become a weekly competition, not only athletes will not be able to bear it, but the audience will also be bored and boring, because the sports event will lose its original meaning.

But many car companies, especially new car manufacturers, are essentially doing what is mentioned above. Each company adds a series of adjectives and ranks first in the weekly sales list, but when the annual sales target is calculated, how many car companies have actually achieved their annual sales target?

According to what I have learned from frontline sales, some car companies, in order to impact the sales rankings, will give the vehicle license plates to the leasing companies, "borrow" from the sales pool in the second half of the year in advance, and after "inflating" the sales data, they intend to achieve an explosion in the second half of the year and then return the sales in the first half of the year. More than one car company has contributed to sales through parallel exports to overseas markets.

A person in charge of the finance department of a domestic brand told the author: The sales volume list is not only for users to see, but also for investors to see. The automotive industry can also achieve rapid profits like the Internet industry, but in fact the entire business chain has been completely deformed.

The world's first car: Mercedes-Benz I Image source: Visual China

The author has visited the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart many times. As the inventor of the car, the growth history of Mercedes-Benz also represents the development history of the automotive industry to a certain extent. World War I, World War II, trade war, Cold War, economic crisis, oil crisis, the division of East Germany and West Germany, not to mention the weekly sales list, even the annual sales list, Mercedes-Benz has too many adversities and even bottom moments. But if you look at the timeline long enough, Mercedes-Benz not only survived, but also eventually became the world's top auto giant. Porsche, BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota and other automakers have experienced similar stories to a greater or lesser extent.

If these auto giants were obsessed with weekly, daily, or even real-time sales rankings, we would not have seen 10 generations ofMercedes-Benz S-ClassAnd 8 generations of classicPorsche 911A truly great car company is not concerned with a weekly sales ranking, but whether it can survive through time and survive to the end.