
Radar Financial Products | edited by Li Yihui | Deep Sea
In the automobile circle, Li Xiang and Li Bin, the old rivals, are often compared together. Before building a car, both of them came from automobile content, and founded car home and Easy Car Network respectively.
The traces of the founders of these two websites located in the downstream of the automobile industry chain are fading away, but the competition between the two sides has not cooled down. As the former overlord of car Internet platform, car home has been completely overtaken by Easy Car in terms of monthly users and new users.
Behind car home, Easy Car is supported by Tencent resources. In addition, the car-savvy emperor who is backed by ByteDance has also become a key player.
Car home, facing the squeeze of "Easy Car" and "Know Car Emperor", saw its revenue and profit drop in the second quarter, and its main business shrank sharply, which caused the market to worry about its declining performance. Since July, several investment banks have downgraded car home.
In addition, since the company was listed on the Hong Kong stock market in March this year, its share price has fallen by more than 50%, and its market value of nearly HK$ 50 billion has evaporated.
Why is car home here?
The decline in performance was superimposed by changes in executives, and many investment banks downgraded their ratings.
The second listing in Hong Kong did not make car home’s development more smooth.
On March 15th this year, car home was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with an offering price of HK$ 176.3 per share and a net fundraising of over HK$ 3.4 billion.
The latest second quarterly report shows that the company’s net profit attributable to ordinary shareholders is 747 million yuan, down 9.43% year-on-year; Operating income was 1.938 billion yuan, down 16.22% year-on-year.
Among them, the largest business media service sector, which is the foundation of the company, fell by over 30% year-on-year, and its revenue scale was 330 million yuan less than that of the same period last year; The management explained that due to the global chip shortage, car companies adjusted their advertising budgets accordingly, resulting in a decline in the average income contributed by advertisers per car company.
Clue service is the second largest business in car home, which is mainly aimed at dealers to obtain customers. The quality of sales leads is high, and dealers have a strong willingness to spend money on advertising. Clue service is a key indicator to measure platform marketing and commercial value. In the second quarter, car home’s income from this business also declined a lot.
In terms of new business, car home’s online marketing and other income during the reporting period was 594 million yuan, up 10.0% year-on-year, which was the only part of the company’s three-part business.
Prior to the disclosure of interim results, CFO changes had just occurred in car home. On July 2, Zou Jun, the company’s chief financial officer, said that he resigned as CFO for personal reasons.
Before Zou Jun left the company, there had been many high-level adjustment events. In January, Lu Min, who had been at the helm of the automobile home for about four years, was "retired" from the position of chairman and CEO, and Longquan, an executive of Ping An Department, took over. In May, co-president Zhang Jingyu resigned for personal reasons.
Since July, several investment banks have downgraded car home.
Eddy Wang, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, downgraded car home’s rating from high to even, and lowered its target price from $106 to $50.
According to the report, "We expect car home’s core business income to achieve a low single-digit percentage growth, mainly due to intensified competition from major competitors such as Know Car Emperor and Easy Car. The profit forecasts for 2022 and 2023 are lowered by 12% and 19% respectively to reflect the lower income growth rate and gross profit forecast. "
The agency also said that it is expected that the departure of senior managers in the past two months will bring more uncertainty to the company’s strategy.
According to the analysis of Bank of America, car home has changed from a solid online vertical market leader to an increasingly weak market participant affected by the headwind and competition of the automobile industry.
The bank pointed out that the periodicity of the automobile market may mean a long-term headwind, and the competition in automobile consumption is intensifying, which will have a negative impact on car home. Therefore, car home was downgraded to "underperform the broader market" with a target price of $46, which was almost the same as the $45.34 before the US stock market opened on September 13th.
At the same time, Citigroup downgraded its rating to neutral, believing that there is still a big gap between car home and its competitors in terms of user scale, and that more intense competition, "lower car budget" and strategic change are all factors that affect car home’s rating.
Industry "boss" position is not guaranteed
At present, in addition to car home, there are "Tencent" Easy Car and ByteDance’s Car Master.
Easy Car was founded in 2000 by Li Bin, chairman of Weilai, and was once the "first stock of China automobile industry listed in the United States". After several years of losses, it was privatized and delisted in November 2020, and the buyer consortium headed by Tencent acquired and became the controlling shareholder for $1.1 billion.
At the same time, car home’s share price kept climbing, and by the end of January this year, it once reached the highest price of $146.82 in history, and once held the position of the industry leader.
At that time, Zhang Xuan, CEO of Easy Car, once said that Easy Car would remain relatively independent after privatization, and at the same time, through cooperation attempts with Tencent in different fields, we will strive to have a qualitative improvement and qualitative leap in efficiency and volume.
Facts have proved that Easy Car, which joined Tencent Eco, got continuous support in terms of traffic and content, and soon achieved the overtaking of car home in terms of the number of users.
According to the third-party data company Aurora’s Q2 Mobile Internet Industry Data Research Report in 2021, among the mainstream car information apps, the car-easy application is outstanding. In Q2 this year, the number of active users increased rapidly compared with the same period of last year, with an average MAU of 31.773 million, a year-on-year increase of 57.2%, ranking first in the industry since Q4 in 2020.

In addition, the incremental gap between Easy Car and car home is widening. In 2021, the number of new users of Easy Car in Q2 is more than double that of car home, with a gap of 13.672 million. On the other hand, in car home, the monthly users have been declining in the third quarter of 2020, and they are even infinitely close to the car owners in the latest quarter.
It is understood that with the support of bytes, the car owner pays more attention to the sharing of the owner’s real feelings and the output of fun and interesting content around the car. In the new media communication, knowing the car emperor is the "perfect fire" of marketing routines. Recently, the video of the collision between Beiqi Extreme Fox and BYD Han has exploded out of the car circle.
Some senior media people in the automotive industry said that no matter how innovative the new media communication mode is, people’s demand for high-quality content has not changed, only the consumption habits of users have changed, and the automotive media platform is the same. With the ability to continuously provide high-quality content, it is not afraid of any challenges.
At this point, thanks to the advantages of the superposition algorithm, I understand that Che Di abandoned the forums and pictures that car home still sticks to, tilted resources to video content, enabled users to prefer short video and live broadcast modes, and produced more targeted content, so the traffic accumulated faster.
Easy Car has also set up an "intelligent editorial department". The content and video produced by the machine are intelligently pushed for users through a personalized recommendation engine, and users are set up to retain and operate to AI marketing.
According to Aurora data, in 2020, the average number of new users of Easy Car Department will reach 170,000, ranking first; The number of new users who know the car is 153,000, and the number of new users in the car family is close to 150,000.
In addition to user data being overtaken, car home is not as good as its rivals in terms of the number of dealers and media revenue.
After being privatized, Easy Car has no new financial data to disclose. However, according to Zhang Xuan ‘an, the number of dealers cooperating with Easy Car ranks first in the industry. By the end of 2020, the number of contracted dealers was 22,000, with a renewal rate of 85%.
Car home is also not the preferred platform for the advertising of automobile brands. According to the data of "Inventory Report of Marketing Insights in Automobile Industry in 2020" released by QuestMobile, among the platforms including vertical platform, long video, short video and information flow, Easy Car will account for 22.2% of the advertising media for TOP10 new models in 2020, becoming the first choice platform for automobile manufacturers to advertise new cars, while car home’s share is only 17%.
By the close of September 14th, car home’s share price was HK$ 87.3, with a market value of HK$ 44.47 billion, which was over 50% lower than the first day of listing in March.
Who is to blame for car home’s "decline"?
From all aspects of performance, Easy Car seems to have taken the top spot in the industry and become a new head player. The industry structure has changed, and the position of car home’s "boss" has changed hands. Who is to blame?
Like Easy Car, car home has also experienced a change in equity. In 2005, car home website began to operate, and eight years later, Li wanted to bring the company to Nasdaq.
In June, 2015, Li Xiang left car home, stepped down as president, founded Chehejia, and devoted himself to new energy vehicles. After Li wants to leave, the management of the company led by car home CEO Qin Zhi, as well as Boyu, Gaoyou Capital and Sequoia China are going to privatize at the price of $31.50 per ADS.
Unexpectedly, Telstra, the largest shareholder, did not accept this privatization plan, but sold its 47.7% shares to China Ping An Insurance Group for US$ 1.6 billion, and the transaction price was valued at US$ 3.376 billion, which was lower than the management’s privatization offer.
On June 25th, 2016, Telstra and Ping An Trust officially completed the equity delivery. Ping An Trust became the largest shareholder in car home with 47.4% equity, and the shares of car home founder Li Xiang and CEO Qin Zhi were diluted to 2.6% and 2.9% respectively. At the same time, China Ping An made a big change in the senior management team of car home, CEO Qin Zhi and CFO Zhong Yiqi were replaced, and Ping An officially took over the company.
The new management made major adjustments at the strategic level, cutting off the main money-burning businesses at that time, such as automobile e-commerce and used cars; Reorganize the sales team, increase the efforts to realize cash, and inject Ping An Group’s wolf culture of focusing on efficiency and marketing into car home.
Since then, car home under the rule of Ping ‘an has also had moments of high light. For example, the company’s revenue in 2016 increased by 72.10% year-on-year to 5.96 billion yuan; In 2017, net profit increased by 63.01% year-on-year to 2 billion yuan.
On June 19th, 2018, the highest share price of car home was USD 119.18, and the company’s market value reached USD 13.982 billion. The corresponding market value of Ping An Group’s shareholding was about USD 6.6 billion, which means that its equity investment income in two years reached USD 5 billion, exceeding RMB 30 billion.
Lu Min, the head of car home, also won the first-class medal of Ping An Group.
On the other hand, under the profit-oriented atmosphere, car home failed to keep the purpose of taking users as the center, and the excessive commercialization of content caused users’ dissatisfaction.
Many users have found that car home’s once neutral content has become a "water draft", and the platform is no longer a credible third party, and it was once called "the home of car supports".
After the data such as content quality, word-of-mouth and users declined, it also affected the advertising willingness of the OEM. Moreover, when the automobile industry entered the cold winter in 2019, car home insisted on the price increase of membership fees, which triggered a large-scale collective protest by dealers, and several large dealer groups, such as Zhongsheng, Huge and Express, boycotted it.
Due to various unfavorable factors, car home’s revenue has slowed down. According to the financial report data, the company’s revenue growth rate is only 2.82% in 2020, which is the lowest since listing.
According to the analysis of insiders, at present, in addition to two equal rivals, Easy Car and Know Car Emperor, with the rise of short videos, cars have also diverted a batch of traffic from media people. Under this background, how to create high-quality content to attract users and regain their competitive advantage is a new proposition before car home.
Note: This article is original by Radar Finance (ID: leidacj). Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.