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yunjian insight exclusively learned that chen rui, cfo of nezha automobile, has recently resigned. pan deng, former managing director of goldman sachs (asia), replaced chen rui and is responsible for nezha's financial affairs.

pan deng worked at goldman sachs for 9 years, responsible for investment banking business, and left in august this year. before goldman sachs, he also worked at merrill lynch and bank of america, an american consulting company, qrm.

the last time chen rui appeared in public was in june this year, when nezha auto signed a contract with citic bank and citic securities on cooperation in supply chain finance.

nezha auto is a car brand launched by hozon new energy. in june this year, hozon submitted its prospectus to the hong kong stock exchange.

on august 3, the international department of the china securities regulatory commission required it to provide additional materials, including compliance statements on foreign investment access policies, compliance statements on insurance business, and shareholder and employee shareholding status.

in addition, yunjian insight learned that investors also asked hezhong to supplement its financial data for the first half of this year for reference.

nezha's data as of the end of 2023 does not attract investors. among them, the biggest controversy is the negative gross profit.according to the prospectus, the company has suffered a cumulative loss of 18.38 billion yuan in the past three years, with gross profit margins of -34.4%, -22.5% and -14.9% respectively.

in comparison, in 2023, the gross profit margins of nio, xpeng and li auto were 5.5%, 1.5% and 22.2% respectively.

negative gross profit means that nezha has been selling cars at a price lower than the cost of sales. in 2023, nezha sold a total of about 124,000 cars, with a gross loss of 2.01 billion yuan, equivalent to a loss of 16,000 yuan for each car sold, which does not include the operating expenses for the whole year. in 2023, nezha's total loss was 687,000 yuan.

nezha's shareholders have been paying for this. since 2017, nezha has completed 10 rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of approximately 22.84 billion yuan.

among the shareholders, fang yunzhou, the founder and chairman of nezha, and his persons acting in concert have the greatest say. fang yunzhou and entities controlled by him hold 11.8% of the shares; yichun entities and jiaxing entities, persons acting in concert, hold 20.28% of the shares; and zhou hongyi's 360 security holds 9.1% of the shares.

fang yunzhou founded hozon in 2014. prior to that, he worked at chery automobile for 16 years, starting from engine research and development and working his way up to vice president of chery new energy. hozon launched the nezha brand in 2018. the first model was the nezha n01, which was priced at about 60,000 to 70,000 yuan after subsidies and has now been discontinued.

after n01, nezha adjusted its positioning. on the one hand, it continued to use new models to consolidate the mass market within 100,000 yuan, and on the other hand, it gradually moved up to the 200,000 yuan range.

currently, nezha auto has five models on sale, namely nezha aya, nezha x, nezha l, nezha s and nezha gt, covering the market of 60,000-230,000 yuan. the two-door electric sports car nezha gt is currently the most expensive model, with a starting price of nearly 190,000 yuan.

nezha l, which was launched in april this year, is currently nezha's best-selling model, with a starting price of nearly 130,000 yuan. its terminal sales in june and july both exceeded 5,000 units.

in addition to local sales, nezha is also actively expanding overseas markets, entering thailand in 2022, and then gradually entering indonesia and malaysia. in 2023, nezha's overseas sales accounted for about 13.7%.

an investment banker believes that in the first eight months of this year, most ipos on hong kong stocks cannot be considered successful. many of them were funded by unknown institutions and ended up with a very small issuance scale.

when the company's financial data is not optimistic, the chief financial officer (cfo) bears tremendous pressure in the ipo and must work with the sponsor and underwriter to find a suitable buyer for the ipo. in the prospectus, nezha disclosed 6 core management members, but did not include the cfo.

"yunjian insight" confirmed the core information of this article with nezha, but no response was received as of press time.