With the release of Smart World S7 and the renaming of Smart Car Selection Mode, Huawei needs a balance of channel resources.

With the listing of Zhijie S7, how to allocate offline sales channels to different smart models is a problem that Huawei needs to consider now.

Author | Li Donghui

Editor | Li Yuchen

The name of the smart car selection business has been decided.

On the evening of November 9, Huawei officially launched Zhijie S7 at the smart travel conference. Zhijie S7 is the first smart electric car and the first smart choice model after Wenjie.

In addition, HarmonyOS Zhixing Ecological Model was officially unveiled.

Yu Chengdong said that Huawei’s smart travel solution is a strategic upgrade of Huawei’s smart car selection model. It aims to make use of Huawei’s incremental parts products and technical solutions for smart cars in the ICT field over the past 30 years, as well as Huawei’s experience in quality control, sales service and brand marketing accumulated in consumer business over the past 10 years, and carry out in-depth cooperation with automobile brands.

Previously, there were three modes of cooperation between Huawei and automobile companies: parts supply mode, HI mode (solution mode) and intelligent car selection mode. Among the three modes, the supplier mode mainly provides ICT (information and communication technology) components, and the HI mode is upgraded to provide a complete set of solutions for intelligent parts of vehicles.

Since it is an "upgrade", it is not as simple as changing a name from Smart Car Selection to HarmonyOS Zhixing. The biggest difference between Smart Car Selection and the other two models is that Huawei is deeply involved in automobile R&D, manufacturing and sales.

With the addition of Zhijie S7, Huawei is bound to re-allocate resources for various smart models.

In the past, there was only one question. Now, with the release of Intellectual S7, how to balance the relationship between them is a matter that Huawei must consider.

User center "flop" HarmonyOS Zhixing

At present, HarmonyOS Zhixing Model has four partners, namely Cyrus, Chery, BAIC and JAC, and Huawei has different cooperation emphases with these car companies.

Among them, Huawei and Cyrus jointly built the AITO brand, which currently includes M5, M7 and M9 to be launched soon, covering new energy SUV models; Huawei and Chery are aiming at pure electric coupes and SUV models.

In addition to the Zhijie S7 released this time, Huawei will also cooperate with Chery for another smart selection model, EHY (or named Zhijie S9), which is expected to be launched in Q1, 2024 and defined as a pure electric medium and large SUV.

Huawei and Beiqi Blue Valley will launch high-end intelligent pure electric cars in sub-sectors, while Huawei and Jianghuai Automobile may jointly develop larger new energy MPV models.

With the increase of HarmonyOS Zhixing model partners, Huawei will obviously face more challenges.

In terms of channels, according to Huawei’s official statistics, Huawei currently has more than 5,000 high-end experience stores and more than 60,000 retail and service outlets across the country, but not all Huawei offline stores can sell cars, and not all stores can place multiple cars.

The offline shop owners are divided into the customer center and the experience center. The customer center mainly focuses on the drainage, delivery and after-sales of automobiles, which are mainly built in the automobile business circle. Similar to the traditional 4S stores, these stores are mainly recruited and managed by Cyrus.

The other is the experience center, which is the most common Huawei flagship store and experience store in all shopping malls. It is mainly responsible for selling and providing product consultation. The experience store agent is composed of mobile phone agents and local traditional 4S shop agents. At present, there are 206 customer centers and 903 experience centers in Huawei.

Huawei’s agency model does bring some troubles to sales. First of all, because the user center and the experience center belong to different bosses, they belong to different links. When selling a car, most of the profits are usually in after-sales and insurance business, and the uneven distribution of profits makes the two sides often have internal friction. When the sales in the early days were not good, there were also phenomena that the user center privately grabbed orders and dumped inventory.

As far as the experience store is concerned, due to the rough expansion in the early days, there are more than three agents in the same city. When the models are not easy to sell, there will be mutual bargaining.

With the listing of Zhijie S7, how to allocate offline sales channels to different car companies is a problem that Huawei needs to consider now.

In fact, Huawei has made some moves. In early October, Huawei turned over the brand "HarmonyOS Zhixing Eco-brand" for the first batch of 50 "customer centers" and started to clear a number of stores.

A Huawei mobile phone dealer in a southwest city told Leifeng. com: "My experience store is not big, but I will go to Zhijie S7 later. Huawei’s channels are really being rectified, mainly to optimize the scale of delivery centers and stores. In our city alone, three delivery centers will be closed in the future, all of which are traditional 4S shop owners."

According to Huawei’s current channel strategy, Huawei pays more attention to the business development of 1+8+N, and mateX5 delivery in many places is directly linked to cars, which means that Huawei’s adjustment of terminal car sales channels will still focus on its own entire ecological products. Compared with the new traditional 4S channels, the original mobile phone dealer system is familiar to Huawei and has a deeper interest binding. Agents who can sell both mobile phones and cars are naturally their first choice.

Just from the name, HarmonyOS Zhixing includes the definition of the whole car and ecological hardware, which can better balance the relationship between the car and the mobile phone business and other unpublished smart-selected models. If you want to see how to allocate the intellectual and intellectual circles, you will have to wait until the new car goes on the market.

Intellectual S7 is very Chery and Huawei.

This time, Huawei and Chery joined hands to show full sincerity. There are four versions of Zhijie S7 (standard version of Zhijie S7 Pro, long-haul version of Zhijie S7 Max, super-navigation version of Zhijie S7 Max+, and four-wheel drive flagship version of Zhijie S7 Max RS). The pre-sale price starts from 258,000 yuan. Under the pre-sale period of Zhijie S7, you can also enjoy the rights and interests worth 40,000 yuan, which is valid until November 28th.

Throughout the press conference, Zhijie S7 has been benchmarking Tesla everywhere in terms of product positioning and price. Yu Chengdong said that the specifications of Zhijie S7 are higher than those of Tesla Model S and Mercedes-Benz EQE, but the price is the same as that of Tesla Model 3.

Yu Chengdong revealed that before the press conference, "we had a terrible internal quarrel" about the price of the intellectual S7. He said that after several rounds of cost calculation, the four versions of Zhijie S7 "we are all losing money" and need to increase production capacity in the later stage to pull back profits.

From the price point of view, Zhijie S7 mainly covers the pure electric medium and large car market in the range of 200,000-300,000. At present, the market is mainly dominated by BYD, North and South Volkswagen, Tesla and two Toyota. In the field of electric vehicles, the competitors of Zhijie S7 include Tucki P7, BYD Han EV/ SEAL and Tesla Model 3.

The dimensions of Zhijie S7 are 4971mm in length, 2950mm in wheelbase and 1963mm in width. "The profit rate of space in the warehouse has reached 88%. Mercedes-Benz E is 73.8%. Compared with the above models, Zhijie S7 obviously shows its advantages. Yu Chengdong pointed out Tesla: "We are bigger than Tesla Modle3, and we are far ahead in space utilization again".

In terms of function, Zhijie S7 is equipped with a new generation of DriveONE 800V silicon carbide gold power platform. The front motor adopts 150kW AC asynchronous motor, and the rear drive motor adopts 215kW permanent magnet synchronous motor. The total power of the four-wheel drive version is 365kW, the torque is 679 N m, the acceleration of 100 kilometers takes only 3.3 seconds, the comprehensive power consumption is only 12.4 kW h, and its CLTC cruising range can exceed 800+km.

At the same time, Zhijie S7 is equipped with the brand-new Whale 800V high-voltage battery platform and 800V high-voltage fast charging platform, and Huawei’s high-voltage fast charging technology is introduced for the first time, which is compatible with the mainstream charging protocols in the industry. After charging for 5 minutes, the cruising range of 200+km can be increased, and after charging for 15 minutes, the cruising range of 400+km can be increased.

In the same segment, Chery can do more space and functions than Youshang, which is what Chery is good at, which also makes Zhijie S7 look "Chery" in product strategy.

However, the "soul" of this car comes from Huawei, and Zhijie S7 is the first model equipped with HarmonyOS 4 intelligent cockpit. At the same time, Zhijie S7 is equipped with HUAWEI ADS 2.0 advanced intelligent driving system, which can realize the functions of unmanned AVP parking service, tracking and reversing, intelligent car search and so on.

Yu Chengdong said that buying Smart S7 "is equivalent to buying a limousine with higher specifications and higher intelligence than Model S at the price of Model 3".

Looking back, Chery cooperated with Huawei to launch the Smart World S7, which is of great significance to both sides. Earlier, Chery Automobile said that it would launch a total of 39 new energy vehicles including 24 super hybrid vehicles and 15 E0X platform high-end electric vehicles within two years. Chery is playing "car-sea tactics" in the market, but it is difficult to produce products that explode and take responsibility.

Huawei’s huge brand pull and channel network have made the intellectual community a great success, making the intellectual community, also empowered by Huawei, more expected by the market. Since the launch of the new M7 in September this year, the world has changed the sales decline since this year, and achieved a rebound in sales with the help of the popularity of Huawei Mate60.

In the past October, 12,700 vehicles were delivered for all models in the world, of which the delivery volume of the new M7 has exceeded 10,000. At present, the order for the new M7 in the world has exceeded 86,000 units, and the blind order for the M9 in the world that will be listed next month has exceeded 25,000 units. The S7 in the world of intelligence has indeed made a good start, with the scheduled sales volume exceeding 5,000 units a day.

Looking back, did Huawei "show off its muscles" in Zhijie S7? Zhijie S7 will be the first new car equipped with Huawei HarmonyOS Intelligent Cockpit 4.0, and the lidar version will also have Huawei ADS 2.0 high-order intelligent driving system, which can realize high-speed and intelligent NCA driving in urban areas. However, the whole conference did not pay much attention to HarmonyOS Intelligent Cockpit 4.0 and self-developed lidar.

Huawei started the laser radar pre-research work as early as 2016. The last time it publicly talked about laser radar was in 2019. Because of the technical route, it was not widely used, including Huawei’s full-stack integration solution for software and hardware. Some models used sagitar laser radar.

Judging from the information disclosed so far, Huawei released the M9 at the end of the year. This model is confirmed to be equipped with the lidar 2.0 developed by Huawei, which will be greatly improved compared with the previous generation. At present, the outside world can only see the specific performance of lidar 2.0 when the M9 is released.

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