Extreme Vietnam issued an internal letter saying that the company is currently facing cash flow challenges and is fully communicating with shareholders to find ways to tide over the difficulties; Last month, the employee social security was temporarily unable to be paid in time, and I am sorry for this.
Text |Chen Liang Li Xiyin Pan Zhenzhen
Editor | Wang Jingyi Li Xiyin
On the afternoon of December 11th, a special internal meeting was held by the new power enterprise of car making. Caijing learned from the headquarters in Jiading, Shanghai, that Xia Yiping, CEO of Extreme Vietnam, said that the company is facing cash flow challenges and is fully communicating with shareholders to find ways to tide over the difficulties. Last month, the employee social security was temporarily unable to be paid in time, and I am sorry for this. As a car-making enterprise jointly built by Baidu and Geely Holding Group, it is the latest new force to encounter cash flow difficulties, and it is caught in a series of disputes over employees’ arrears and suppliers’ arrears. Caijing learned that,The internal supermarket, which could have been settled by Extreme Yue Points, said on Monday that it would not accept shopping by Extreme Yue Points due to system failure. According to employees, outsourcing employees such as cleaning will complete their services at the end of this month and will not renew their contracts next year.A number of related suppliers of Extreme Yue Automobile told Caijing.The payment of the car has been postponed, and the book of the car payment has been empty, and the existing service has been suspended.However, on the afternoon of the meeting, Caijing saw at the scene that the employees were still at work and people kept visiting. The sales volume of Extreme Yue is not optimistic. At present, there are two models, Extreme Yue 01 and Extreme Yue 07. In the first 11 months of 2024, the cumulative delivery exceeded 14,000 vehicles, with an average of about 1,300 vehicles per month. The annual sales volume is not as good as the monthly sales volume of the new head enterprises. Xia Yiping said at the meeting that the next stage of entrepreneurship 2.0 has four tasks: insisting on long-term investment in core technologies, strengthening sales and service capacity building, merging redundant functional departments and positions, and cutting projects that cannot improve financial performance in the short term.
Extremely open letter to employees
01 Sales are sluggish and encounter dunning.
Caijing noted that as of December 11th, Xia Yiping’s account had been completely emptied, and Weibo also set a comment limit. And Weibo’s last content stayed on December 9th, when he talked about anti-human design, saying that all future super-runs will have the shadow of extreme leap. However, in the comment area, some suppliers, consumers and employees raised questions about delivery, refund and provident fund payment.
Science and technology directly called Xia Yiping from the media "Tech Planet" in Weibo, demanding that he pay the 360,000 yuan owed to the communication provider, and pointed out that he still refused to pay after sending reminders for many times.
On the official website, Jiyue Auto claims to be a high-end smart car robot brand, which creates a benchmark intelligent technology travel experience for users based on leading Baidu AI capabilities and Geely SEA’s vast architecture ecological empowerment.
Since its birth, Polar has focused its intelligence on human-computer interaction, more specifically, the ability of vehicle speech recognition. This in itself is also the technology of Baidu, which has invested a lot of resources in this respect. But the problem is that today, consumers’ driving habits are still keen on mobile phone stands. It’s hard to convince consumers to buy a car with real money only by the experience of human-computer interaction. At the same time, the concept of "automobile robot" is really novel and forward-looking, but it is difficult to explain it clearly for consumers, which leads to the lack of cognition of consumers in the early stage of vehicle listing, and it is more difficult to convert it into sales.
According to the data released by Extreme Yue Automobile, in the first 11 months of 2024, the cumulative delivery exceeded 14,000 vehicles, with an average of only about 1,300 vehicles per month. This means that the production and sales of enterprises are under great pressure and far from the breakeven point.
According to public data, the sales volume of Jiyue Automobile was as low as 147 in February 2024. Later, it improved. From July to October, 1,019 vehicles, 2,117 vehicles, 2,605 vehicles and 3,107 vehicles were delivered. However, after the delivery volume just exceeded 3,000 vehicles, the delivery volume of Extreme Vietnam Automobile dropped to 2,485 vehicles in November, a decrease of 20% from the previous month.
During this period, Xia Yiping chose to go out personally to start all-staff marketing. He opened accounts on major social media and released dozens of videos in a month through short videos and live broadcasts, trying to convey the advantages of products to consumers.
Earlier, in a media communication meeting including Caijing, Xia Yiping cried on the spot when talking about the climbing sales of Extreme Yue cars. He bluntly said that it was very difficult to get things done, and he was always compared with mature car companies or Xiaomi, which was really not easy.
Ji Yue did not give up his efforts. At the Guangzhou Auto Show in November 2024, the first super-running model Ji Yue was also released.
According to public information, Jidu Automobile, the predecessor of Jiyue Automobile, received 300 million US dollars (about 2 billion yuan) in March 2021; In January 2022, Jidu Automobile announced that it had completed the Series A financing of nearly 400 million US dollars (over 2.5 billion yuan), which was jointly invested by Baidu and Geely. There has been no public financing since then.
Extreme Yue Shanghai Jiading Headquarters Photo/Chen Liang
02 Whose extreme is it?
The original name of Jiyue was Jidu, and Caijing was seen at the headquarters in Jiading, Shanghai. Up to now, the logo of Jidu is still hanging at the door. The change of the name reflects the change of the company’s equity. The latest business information shows that,At present, Jiyue Automobile is 65% owned by Zhejiang Geely Investment Holding Co., Ltd. and 35% owned by Shanghai Mihang Automobile Co., Ltd. (formerly known as Jidu Automobile Co., Ltd.). The two companies are subsidiaries of Geely and Baidu respectively.Whose company is Extreme Yue? Back to January 11th, 2021, Baidu (09888.HK) suddenly announced that it would formally set up a smart car company to enter the automobile industry as a vehicle manufacturer. Geely Holding Group (00175.HK) became the strategic partner of the new company. On March 2 of the same year, Baidu and Geely formally registered and established "Jidu Automobile Co., Ltd." with a registered capital of 2 billion.The shareholding structures of Baidu and Geely are 55% and 45% respectively, and the primary and secondary relationships are clear at a glance.At that time, Li Yanhong was interested in building cars. A person close to Baidu told Caijing that Baidu hopes to open the market on the car side after the business on the computer side and the mobile phone side has fallen into a growth bottleneck-creating an intelligent mobile travel space. Prior to this, Baidu had already laid out the layout of autonomous driving and car networking, and built its own car, instead of being controlled by others and only being a supplier. This idea was put on the agenda. As it happens, Geely Automobile has newly launched the S.E.A． vast car-making platform, and publicly shouted to the whole industry, willing to share this technology with companies in the industry. In this context, the two sides hit it off.
Photo taken at the entrance of the factory/Chen Liang
All this changed in August 2023."Due to the requirements of relevant authorities, it is difficult for Internet companies to apply for the qualification of automobile manufacturing, and it is naturally difficult for vehicles to be mass-produced. In this context, we changed the main body of the company. It is to’ borrow’ Geely’s qualification to build a car and use the factory production of extremely awkward cars. Geely is not our real major shareholder. "A person close to Jidu once told Caijing. On August 9, 2023, Geely and Baidu joined hands in a joint venture to jointly establish Hangzhou Jiyue Automobile Technology Co., Ltd.. The shares were changed to Geely 65% and Baidu 35%. Then, it launched its brand-new automobile robot brand "Extreme Yue" and announced that its first model was named "Extreme Yue 01". The relevant person of the above-mentioned automobile gathering once told Caijing that the future gathering will focus on car-making machines and automobile intelligent service providers, and the more responsible it is to build cars, it is similar to the logic of Huawei’s car-making. The former is an intelligent technology integrator, and the latter is an incubating cooperative car-making company. At that time, Xia Yiping told Caijing that "the goal of Extreme Vietnam is to fight with it". Looking back now, expectations have almost failed.