NEXTEV Complete $600M Equity Trading Leading by Tencent and Baidu

SHANGHAI March 17th, 2017 Gasgoo – NEXTEV, the newly-developing automaker, has completed an equity trading of $600 million leading by Tencent and Baidu and followed by other companies. After the investment, the market value of NEXTEV is about RMB20 billion yuan.

This time, NEXTEV has over $1 billion investment actually, but the automaker decided only to have $600 million equity traded.

New shareholders are confirmed already, and the enterprises are signing an agreement now. At present, Tencent and Baidu have completed the agreement already while agreements of other companies are still ongoing. The investment department of Baidu is its strategic investment department.

Tencent has invested for NEXTEV before, while Baidu is the newly investor. According to resources that, Mr. Libin, the founder of NEXTEV, has a good relationship with founders of Tencent, Baidu and Jingdong, that’s why the latter three companies invested for Bitauto founded by Li Bin, and then invested for Bitauto’s financial platform Yixing Finance and now for NEXTEV.

Baidu has also enlarged investment in artificial intelligence and automatic driving since last year. Mr. Li Hongji, the founder of Baidu, even had Mr. Lu Qi, the executive vice-president of headquarter of Microsoft in America, to be Baidu’s president & COO. On March 1st, Baidu established a new business group named Intelligent Driving Group (IDG), and Lu Qi will be the general manager. The group will consist of Automatic Driving Department (L4), Intelligent Car Department (L3), Car Life etc.

However, Baidu will not build a car by itself, while NEXTEV is going to create a car by itself, the two companies make up for each other, it is possible for the two companies to cooperate further.

It is known that, NEXTEV is to list the first volume-produced car in China, which is expected to come into the market in the second half year of next year. The car will be sold by NEXTEV itself starting from first-and-second-tier cities and then expand to more cities.

In order to prove that NEXTEV has the ability to build a car by itself, the company listed EP9, an electric supercar, in London last November, which was proved to be the fastest electric car in the world.