Sales stagnant? In fact, there are huge opportunities hidden there! This is how commercial vehicles should be sold in 2020

It’s finally 2020. This year, besides being concerned about how bad Yang Mi’s Wild Wolf disco is, I’m paying more attention to the annual meetings of domestic commercial companies.

From FAW Liberation's "Intelligence era? Bravely embark on a new journey? Concentric control of the situation? Work hard to tackle difficulties", Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle's "Full trust? Start from the heart", to Shaanxi Automobile Commercial Vehicle's " Gathering momentum to create the future", SINOTRUK's "New era? New SINOTRUK? New leap forward", and finally Foton Motor's "Focus on commercial vehicles? Achieve customer value? Lead marketing innovation"...

It is not difficult to see that various commercial vehicle companies have tacitly adopted a unified front in choosing the theme of the annual meeting - 2020 is a year worth fighting for. So, what are the challenges and opportunities for China’s commercial vehicle market in 2020?

The commercial vehicle market has stabilized and is moving towards the stock market as a whole.

Let’s start with the most intuitive sales volume.

According to relevant data, the commercial vehicle market in 2018 can be regarded as ushering in a bumper year. Affected by the general environment, commercial vehicle production and sales also reached a record high. Although 4.28 million units were built, 4.371 million units were sold, an increase of 1.7 and 5.1 respectively over the same period last year.

There is no doubt that the automobile industry, as one of the pillars of domestic industrial industries, plays an important role in promoting the domestic economy to a certain extent. Even though the automobile market has suffered from successive years of cold winters and the overall automobile consumer market is in recession, it is not difficult for the commercial vehicle market, which is closely related to national development and construction, to maintain a unique and steady development posture.

But the good luck in 2018 does not seem to extend to 2019.

According to data from China Automotive Research Institute, from January to November 2019, China's commercial vehicle production and sales were 3.863 million units and 3.879 million units respectively. The output increased by 0.3% year-on-year, and the sales volume decreased by 1.6% year-on-year.

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Although the December data has not yet come out, a simple prediction can still find that the production and sales data for the whole year of 2019 should not be different from that of 2018 How much, the whole should be equal to the latter.

Leaving aside the specific reasons for the emergence of such book data, what are the reasons? Or, what does it mean?

Don’t scratch your head in a hurry. Just imagine, what are the criteria for northerners to stock up on cabbage in winter? That must be on the premise that there is enough food for the whole family. Only by ensuring that the portion is enough, mothers in each family will wonder whether today is cabbage stewed with vermicelli or cabbage stewed with tofu.

Similarly, in the commercial vehicle market, the "cabbage hoarding phenomenon" also applies. Regarding the above production and sales data, as long as you take a closer look, you will find that my country's current new car market is slowly changing from an incremental market to an incremental market. Moving towards the stock market, it has gradually entered a period of maturity and stagnation.

This phenomenon may be a hint that the future commercial vehicle market will enter a new development cycle of "stock upgrade", and there may be more profit points in the aftermarket for companies to share. Only when the consumer market is saturated can companies be forced to complete technological upgrades and stimulate the development of the aftermarket.

Can healthy infrastructure development help the engineering vehicle market grow?

As we all know, the increase or decrease in the commercial vehicle market is inseparable from its living environment. Therefore, when we analyze commercial vehicles When the market conditions change in the future, we might as well step out of the industry itself and see what the development trends are in its application markets and how much impact it will have on commercial vehicles.

First of all, our country’s reputation as an infrastructure madman is by no means undeserved, especially in recent years, from the completion of various world-wide projects in our country, such as the first cross-sea bridge, the world’s tallest bridge, etc. Etc., we can get a glimpse of China’s strength in infrastructure.

Of course, China is not built out of pure love. It is actually because of its large land area and there are too many places that need to be built to maintain people's normal lives. It is basically built for the sake of construction.

Early media reports said, “2019 is not over yet, and the application for early approval of local special bonds in 2020 has been completed, and the scale is expected to reach 1.29 trillion.”

It is also worth noting that 2020 is also the first year to achieve a moderately prosperous society in all respects. Standing at such a time point, I believe that functional departments are fully prepared to identify and fill gaps by strengthening infrastructure construction and continuously narrow the gap between urban and rural areas. .

If you want to improve infrastructure projects such as commercial buildings, oil and gas transportation, water conservancy projects, and transportation facilities, you naturally cannot avoid our commercial vehicles. Otherwise, you would still expect to use cars or trolleys one by one. Pulling building materials to the construction site? Under this premise, engineering vehicles and dump trucks may be able to experience explosive growth.

Six major trends guide the transformation of the industry structure, and the logistics vehicle market is expected to grow

Secondly, let’s look at another major application field of commercial vehicles - logistics.

On December 9th and 10th, 2019, the Fifth National Freight Logistics Industry Annual Conference was held in Beijing. The "2019 Freight Logistics Industry Report" released at the meeting pointed out for everyone that in 2020, the logistics industry Six major trends:

1) The growth rate of supply in the road freight market is slowing down and demand is upgrading; 2) The freight market is developing towards market organization and intensification; 3) Freight companies are becoming more efficient and sophisticated 4) The freight industry is becoming more digital, platform-based, and collaboratively innovative; 5) Freight stations and road-rail intermodal transport are expanding; 6) The industry policy environment is increasingly improving.

In addition, according to this report, with the adjustment of relevant national policies, the road freight structure will also be significantly optimized. Due to changes in consumer demand, the supply structure will also transform from "large batches, small batches" to "small batches, multiple batches". The traditional vehicle business is cannibalized by the LTL business, and the dedicated line large-ticket LTL business is separated from the small-ticket express LTL business. The market structure is changing at an accelerated pace.

As for the "last mile" terminal distribution in the express delivery industry, if domestic OEMs want a share of the pie, I think they should enrich their product lineup as soon as possible for this market segment. After all, they want to To solve the many problems faced by the last mile, logistics vehicles are the breakthrough.

Quietly: When smart people see this, they must already know where they will work hard in the future~

Commercial vehicle products are ushering in a new round of technological upgrades

2020 is also the first year that highway tolls have been changed from weight-based tolls to axis-based tolls. Although it is not yet known what the actual impact of the new toll standards will be on different industries, just from the past few years It is not difficult to find out when the "sky-high tolls" broke out: the relevant departments did not do a good job.

After the implementation of the new version of the "Classification of Vehicle Toll Vehicles on Toll Roads" standard, various types of vehicles will surely develop towards larger tonnages: two-axle yellow plates will be made with a total mass of 18 tons, and three-axles will be made with a total mass of 18 tons. Weighs 25 tons.

The lighter the vehicle of the same model, the greater the load. At this time, a new balance of interests can be obtained from the relationship between freight price and vehicle cost. To put it bluntly, it will be more cost-effective.

In addition, from the perspective of vehicle structure, as the economic structure develops and changes, the supply of goods should also change accordingly. In the past, the goods were low-industry raw materials, but now more goods are consumer goods and electronic products. This will put forward higher requirements for the structure and performance of future commercial vehicle products.

Various types of vehicle models meet the challenge, and the overall trend is towards standardization and intensification

For light trucks, which are inherently likely to be overloaded, they are now in an embarrassing situation, especially After "5·21", if the problem of "large tonnage and small standard" is not completely solved, the room left for it to survive in the future will become smaller and smaller.

So I think that the future development direction of the 4.2-meter blue brand light truck should focus on lightweighting and new energy, so it will be a matter of time before it is replaced by a micro truck.

For medium and heavy trucks, models with multiple axles such as 6x2 and 6x4 may gradually disappear in the express delivery industry. After all, express delivery trucks do not need to pull particularly heavy things. It would not be better to replace them with high-horsepower 4x2 models. Does it smell good?

Looking at retail investors with unstable supply of goods, at a time when National III vehicles are about to withdraw from the stage of history, switching from semi-trailers to 8x4 trucks may be a good choice. After all, in the case of poor market conditions, Saving tolls equals increased revenue and reduces the risk of owning a car.

As for new energy vehicles, the darling of the National VI standards, they have not brought any good news, and their market performance has dropped significantly in recent years. (In November 2019, the production and sales of new energy vehicles were 110,000 and 95,000 respectively, a year-on-year decrease of 36.9 and 43.7 respectively.)

The reasons are also somewhat intriguing. On the one hand, new energy technology barriers continue to increase With the increase, it is difficult for manufacturers to keep up with technological upgrades; on the other hand, subsidies continue to decline, and the industry is generally worried that the number and proportion of subsidized models will shrink.

A brief summary is that with the implementation of a series of government measures such as the upgrading of National VI standards (OBD monitoring), standardized configuration requirements (GB7258-2017), and the installation of ETC on trucks without stopping at high speeds, perhaps all It implies that the future commercial vehicle market will gradually embark on a standardized and intensive development model in order to maximize logistics efficiency.

Inventory upgrades have led to the rise of the commercial vehicle aftermarket

After reading this, I believe careful friends will find an interesting phenomenon: the current commercial vehicle market is the same as the home appliances and mobile phone industries. It no longer has the foundation for rapid growth, but it has the foundation for high-quality development.

As we mentioned earlier, the commercial vehicle market has entered a new development cycle of "increase stagnation and inventory upgrading", which means that the aftermarket will lead to greater development space, driving the growth of products such as used cars. The development of industries such as transactions, commercial vehicle telematics, and driver homes.

Why is used car trading included?

It’s very simple. Since the entire industry implements standardized operations, the loss of vehicles should be controllable, and it is possible to increase the residual value rate when trading second-hand vehicles.

If you dig deeper, you will find that this is one of the reasons why compared with developed countries, the potential of my country's second-hand car market is far from being tapped.

Some experts on commercial vehicle Internet of Vehicles have previously published a white paper on the content. Interested friends can check it out. Due to space reasons, I will not go into details here.

Written at the end

2020 is the final year of the “Thirteenth Five-Year Plan”. Whether the development goals previously set by commercial vehicle companies can be achieved will also be announced at the end of this year. . Facing the future, how to set the goals for 2021 and how to plan the development direction of the "14th Five-Year Plan" will determine the beginning of future development. Everything remains to be tested by the market.

2020 is a different kind of opening year. Whether the goals set by commercial vehicle brands can be achieved will only be revealed at the end of this year.

Finally, I would like to end by borrowing the leaders’ New Year’s message: Let us seize the day and live up to our time! In the new year, while we are full of hope for the future, we should also be cautious about our plans to avoid standing in the wrong team.

This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.