Gasgoo.com (Shanghai Dec 29) Recently, NextEV is recruiting talents across the globe. Apart from Cisco’s former Chief Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior’s joining as Nextev’s Chief Growth Officer and CEO of its North American Department, Nextev also attracts Huang Chendong, former deputy general manager of SAIC’s Alternative Energy business unit as its Vice President, as well as Zhou Xin, Qoros’s former Purchasing Department’s Executive Manager.
Similar as Internet companies, NextEV is going to produce intelligent interconnected alternative energy vehicles, followingthe same light-capital model, by way of being OEM with the aim of changing auto ecology and entering NASDAQ stock market. This is an important way for Nextev to recruit talents and strengthen its competitive power.
However, is it possible for NextEV to reach its goal by way of recruiting talents? One professional who denied to be named believed, it would face many challenges despite of the existing advantages.
“Firstly, NextEV’s shareholders have no experience in producing automobiles. The complexity and huge demand for funds of vehicle projects is totally different from Internet companies. Secondly, it is hard to say whether the popular light-capital model can take effective in the automobile industry. Besides, there are huge uncertainties in OEM.”
It’s known that NextEV has experienced ups and downs in the way of being OEM. Previously, NextEV has discussed being OEM with Jianghuai Auto and PSA Peugeot Citroen respectively, with no definiteresults. NextEV wants to produce vehicles with ASF (Aluminum Space Frame). But only two domestic production lines, Shanghai General Motors Cadillac Factory and Chery Jaguar Land Rover factory, are able to produce such vehicles and they cannot agree NextEV to be OEM.
It needs at least one year to re-establish a production line. Besides, totally different from IT OEM, automobile has more than 20,000 parts and different models havedifferent sizes, making no cost or time advantages in auto industry.
NextEV’s products and LETV’s auto ecology all rely on the improvements of electric vehicles’ upstream and downstream industry chain and the breakthrough of battery technology. Currently, consumers are mainly promoted by encouraging polies to buy electric vehicles. Even for products like Tsela, it’s difficult to keep a long-term competitive power.
Besides, Internet companies’ production of automobiles is directly influenced by financing. Smooth finance makes it possible and financing failure may result in the bankruptcy. For example, Huang Xiuyuan, founder of the once bubbling Youxia Motors, previously claimed to produce an“intelligent, funny and subversive” cross-industrial Internet-technology tendency leader, a domestic high-level intelligent electric vehicle to challenge the global giant Tsela, but he kept silent afterwards.
Other news comes that Nextev is deciding to do businesses including vehicle designing, producing and sales across the entire industry chain, which means Nextev may change the previous production model. In fact, for any Internet automobile company, whether NextEV, LETV or other else, the production of competitive products is the first step in a long journey.
