Written by?/?Zhu Han

Editor?/?Niu Monkey Shang

Designed by?/?Zhao Haoran

Title and picture? /?Li

The net profit in the interim report was only 260 million yuan, but the floating profit from investing in Li Auto stock exceeded 9 billion yuan. Leo Shares, whose main businesses are machinery manufacturing and digital marketing, has been able to "make money while lying down" in the secondary market with its "pure financial investment".

Another joke is that Meituan’s Q3 net profit increased by 374.1%, mainly due to the surge in the original shares of Li Auto held by the company.

How sharp is the rise? November 25th coincides with the 6th anniversary of the founding of NIO. On this day, NIO has become the most valuable car company in China with a total market value of US$73.14 billion. In the global market, NIO is second only to Tesla and Toyota. and Volkswagen, in fourth place.

On the previous day (November 24), Weilai also reached the highest point of its stock price and total market value. On that day, Weilai's intraday share price reached US$57.20 per share, with a total market value of more than US$77.9 billion. On the same day, the stock prices of Xpeng and Ideal also reached all-time highs. Among them, Xpeng's intraday maximum was $74.49 per share, with a total market value of more than $53.6 billion; Ideal's intraday maximum was $47.70 per share, with a total market value of more than $39.8 billion.

However, on November 25, the stock prices of three new car-making forces began to correct to varying degrees. What's bad is that in the next few trading days, the stock price never returned to the highest point on the 24th. Data shows that from the market value peak on November 24 to the stock price falling all the way on December 1, in only 5 trading days, the stock prices of three new car-making forces, Weilai, Ideal and Xpeng, fell by 16.12% and 24.82% respectively. and 27.15%, the market value fell by nearly 200 billion yuan.

This number is still expanding. Entering December, the stock prices of three new car-making forces continued to decline. On December 3, Eastern Time, U.S. stocks opened higher across the board, but the stock prices of three new car-making forces still did not rise. As of the last trading day before press time (December 4, US Eastern Time), NIO closed at US$43.04 after-hours, down 5.09%; Li Auto closed at US$30.53 after-hours, down 5.51%; Xpeng Motors closed at US$30.53 after-hours, down 5.51%; It closed at US$49.34, down 4.79%; Tesla closed at US$599.04 after hours, up slightly by 0.95%.

“The valuation of some companies has overdrawn their performance in the next few years.” An investment bank analyst told Automotive Business Review, "The stock price increase in the short term is surprising, but the trend is right. After the bubble is squeezed out after the decline, we will continue to be bullish. After all, electric vehicles are still an incremental market."< /p>

Despite the ups and downs of stock prices, judging from the performance of the capital market, new forces are indeed accelerating to surpass the vast majority of traditional car companies, and their high market value is by no means just brought about by the electric vehicle market. Dividends, after all, traditional car companies are also actively deploying new energy vehicles, and their product iterations are not inferior to those of new forces, but their stock price and market value growth trends are far inferior to those of latecomers to these new forces.

We are also building cars. What is the difference between "new forces" and traditional car companies? What is the logic behind its such high market value?

What is a new force?

Is Tesla a company that makes cars? The answer given by investors who are optimistic about Tesla's stock price must be no.

“Companies with new car-making forces are not only automobile companies, but also technology companies. Traditional cars are a stock market, and there is not much room for imagination. New car-making forces are in the incremental market, and there is more room for imagination in the future. "Big." Luo Chao, founder of Lei Technology, told Automotive Business Review that the new car-making forces represented by Tesla have brought disruptive changes to the automotive industry, including the underlying architecture revolution of smart electric vehicles; products and services. The "soft power" barriers formed by ecological synergy; more importantly, the long-term imagination space brought about by the ultimate value of autonomous driving.

The first is the subversion of the architecture. There is an interesting story. Last year, the German Volkswagen Group formed a research and development team of nearly 10,000 people to conduct "closed development" day and night in Hall 74 of the Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg, with the goal of building its own smart car. The software operating system vw.OS ensures that ID.3 will be successfully delivered to the market in August this year. However, BUGs appear more than 300 times a day, but solutions have not yet been proposed.

In the end, ID.3 was not delivered as scheduled. Germany's "Manager" magazine quoted an interview with an unnamed engineer, saying that the early construction of vw.OS's architecture was too hasty and there were communication problems with many modules in ID.3.

In essence, it is still necessary to completely reconstruct the electronic and electrical architecture of the entire vehicle. But this is not easy in the world of traditional fuel vehicles. I still remember that a traditional car brand once emphasized "craftsman spirit" in its brand positioning, revealing the "manufacturing" attribute of cars as hardware products, which has little to do with the Internet and intelligence.

The birth of new car-making forces represented by Tesla has broken the traditional car-making logic. What they have considered from the beginning is "comprehensive intelligence", modularization, centralization, and "domain intelligence". "The concept was born. Cars have transformed from a means of transportation into an intelligent mobile space.

“It turns out that the automobile industry produced industrial content based on large-scale manufacturing, and now it has transformed into intelligent electronic products.” At the 2020 Internet Automobile Wuzhen Night Talk that just passed, the co-founder of AIWAYS Fu Qiang, president and CEO, proposed that new car-making forces will integrate digitalization into products and user services. This is different from the one-stop transactions of traditional car companies in the past. New car-making forces will continue to operate for users, forming a closed loop of ecological services. Therefore, the value judgments of new external forces must be different from those of traditional car companies.

NIO Capital Management Partner Yu Ning believes that in the long run, the stock prices of new forces can still rise, because the market does not include new car manufacturers in the evaluation of car companies, but as a smart terminal. its value.

From this point of view, except that the vehicle carrier seems to be the same, in fact, the car-making logic and sales and service system of the new forces are very different from traditional cars.

The market value logic behind high stock prices

We have to admit that the new car-making forces represented by Tesla have brought huge disruptive changes to the industry. In addition to a number of century-old car brands that have begun to try to "turn around" and innovate themselves, they have also initiated an unprecedented change in the capital market.

In the capital market, the stock ratings of the new car-making forces with Tesla as the core have been changed again and again. Are they short or bullish? Even Wall Street investors are confused.

For example, Goldman Sachs, which was still recommending "buy" NIO in June this year, downgraded its rating to "sell" a month later. Recently, Goldman Sachs re-adjusted its rating on NIO from "sell" to "neutral" and raised its target share price from US$7.70 to US$59. Its analysts even admitted that they underestimated the driving role of NIO’s breakthroughs in power systems, BaaS battery rental services, and regulatory incentives.

Matrix Partners also wrote in its research report, “The enthusiastic atmosphere of electric vehicles has caused great difficulties for investment bank analysts. They continue to find various reasons to increase their target prices. In the end, there is really no reason. So I had to write, 'Tesla's stock price is getting higher and higher, and the rise itself will make it continue to rise.'"

Overvalued or undervalued? For a moment, no one could tell clearly. "The stock price increase in the short term is too surprising. Although the trend is right, there will be bubbles and false fire if it goes too fast." An analyst from an investment bank in the automobile industry told reporters. In his view, there have been many market benefits recently, including the support of new energy by the next US President Biden, the promotion of electric vehicles in the Chinese and European markets, etc., coupled with the impact of the Tesla effect, the new energy sector continues to The rise is not unexpected, but the current overall valuation of companies in the industry is relatively expensive. He analyzed, "The valuations of some companies have already appeared bubbles, and the valuations of some companies are overdrawing their performance in the next few years."

In the view of Zhang Ying, founding managing partner of Matrix Partners China, this is "the market's judgment of the company's value is being very exaggerated." He believes that traditional valuation methods are failing to a certain extent. For start-up unprofitable companies, since many of the net profits, revenue, etc. are negative, conventional ratio analysis is not enough to support the valuation model. At the same time, indicators such as revenue and profit are mostly backward-looking, while valuation is more forward-looking, and cash flow and interest rates must be considered from a future perspective.

Zhang Ying's article "How to be a valuation friend after the surge in electric vehicles?" "It is mentioned in the article that now the "secondary market level" is greatly improved, and investment judgments are becoming more and more forward-looking. This is much more exaggerated than 2-3 years ago. The biggest manifestation of this new change in valuation is "growth" rather than "value."

Looking back, growth has indeed continued.

The first is sales. In the past few days, Weilai, Xiaopeng, and Ideal have announced their sales in November. Continued growth is still the key word. Sustained sales mean the market’s acceptance and recognition of new car-making brands. A previous Auto Business Review article on Xuanyuan Award voting attracted a large number of enthusiastic messages from NIO users, which indeed confirmed it to a certain extent. The success of new forces in user operations is also creating imagination for their continued growth.

The second is the improvement in hard indicators such as revenue and gross profit. The three new car-making forces have all achieved positive gross profit margins, and NIO's gross profit margin is gradually approaching Tesla's. From a fundamental perspective, this is a sign of the overall stabilization of new forces.

What is more critical is the longer-term future expectations represented by autonomous driving. There are reports that NIO has restarted L4 autonomous driving, and Xpeng Motors also announced at the Guangzhou Auto Show that in 2021, Xpeng Motors will be the first to launch the world's first mass-produced smart car equipped with lidar.

“The imagination space that intelligence brings to driverless driving is even greater. Judging from the current growth rate of new domestic car-making forces, it took NIO five years (Q2 2019 sales revenue (US$460 million) completed Tesla’s nine-year sales revenue (sales revenue in 2012 was US$410 million). If compared with this, it is not surprising to obtain the current stock price,” the above-mentioned analyst told reporters.

In Luo Chao's view, market value and stock price are directly determined by investors' buying and selling. They are voting machines in the short term and weighing machines in the long term.

The current market value of the three new car-making forces may be relatively high, but if we see that in three to five years, as the replacement of new energy vehicles accelerates, smart cars are accepted by more people, and autonomous driving technology becomes increasingly mature, "I think , these new car-making forces will develop even more, and they will definitely be much bigger than they are today."

In addition to the three new car-making forces that have already landed, this year, they will continue to do so. New forces with new car deliveries have released IPO plans one after another, targeting more of the Science and Technology Innovation Board. Previously, most of the companies listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board have been recognized by the capital market for their value, and their stock prices have also been rising.

However, according to Auto Business Review, the market value myth of the three new car-making forces may not necessarily be copied by other new forces. Although the overall operations, production capacity and sales of the top three new car-making forces are steadily increasing, and their losses are also narrowing, most of the new car-making forces are still faltering. What is more important is the accumulation and breakthrough of technology. .

Not long ago, Weimar announced that it would voluntarily recall 1,282 vehicles that may have battery safety hazards; Ideal also recalled 10,469 vehicles due to the design of the lower ball pin of the front suspension. The quality of the new car-making forces has yet to be solidly tested through sales.

At the product level, what the US market is currently pursuing are actually high-end smart electric models that are more like Tesla. This is true for Weilai, Ideal, and Xpeng. On the other hand, looking at the products of domestic second-tier new car-making forces such as WM Motor, Nezha, and Leapmotor, there is a question mark as to whether the small car route can sustain high stock prices. In addition, in terms of self-developed technology, new car-making forces other than Weilai, Ideal, and Xpeng have made limited breakthroughs.

The high stock prices and high market values ??of Weilai, Ideal and Xpeng have given a boost to other domestic new car-making forces to a certain extent. It also reflects the urgency of new forces to go public to supplement funds and continue to The anxiety of having a blood transfusion to build a car. After all, for the new domestic car-making forces, survival is the most important thing at hand.

This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.