Even though market performance has been declining year after year, founder Wei Jianjun has clearly stated that he will not abandon the Wey brand.
On August 22, the all-new flagship SUV model, the Lanshan Intelligent Driving Edition, was launched. One of the biggest highlights is that Wei Jianjun hosted the new car launch event again after six years.
At the launch, Wei Jianjun stated that Wey is a brand that has staked the founder's surname on it. While the initial launch went well, the market is far more complicated than expected, and over the past few years, the brand has indeed faced numerous challenges, experiencing a decline in sales with some position fluctuation, all while contending with extreme competition. In this unstable scenario, they have indeed taken some wrong turns. However, he explicitly declared: the Wey brand will continue to move forward.
August 15, 2024, Changzhou, Jiangsu: The all-new Lanshan Intelligent Driving Edition by Great Wall Motors' Wey brand.
From the perspective of the new car's product strength, it is difficult for outsiders to pinpoint the reasons for Wey's recent downturn, since its configurations, even if not top-tier, definitely qualify within the first rank.
The all-new Lanshan is equipped with the Hi4 performance version of electric four-wheel drive, specifically designed as an intelligent electric hybrid system for family vehicles. It is the flagship powertrain tailored for urban products within Great Wall's Hi4 series, representing a more advanced hybrid setup than range extension.
In terms of range, the Lanshan features an upgraded 52.3-kilowatt hour battery, achieving a WLTC comprehensive range of 1,343 kilometers and a combined fuel consumption of 6.5L per 100 kilometers. It employs dual motors and dual axles with iTVC intelligent torque vector control.
Regarding intelligent driving, the new vehicle boasts the third-generation advanced intelligent driving system, Coffee Pilot Ultra, based on the high-performance Orin-X platform, equipped with 27 intelligent sensors including lidar. It adopts a fusion scheme of visual cameras and lidar, providing leading perception capabilities in its class. Built on this hardware foundation, it utilizes an end-to-end intelligent driving model, SEE, enhancing its ability to navigate complex road conditions.
In the smart cabin domain, the all-new Lanshan features Coffee OS 3, elevating its smart space quality and significantly boosting in-car computing power.
In fact, compared to the current popular new forces in the industry, Great Wall Motors has been ahead in its transition to smart technology, with greater investments as well. Public data shows that Great Wall has maintained substantial annual R&D spending, exceeding 11 billion yuan in 2023, with a research team of over 24,000 people and over 1,131 public patents in the field of intelligence.
However, Wey's market performance seems discordant with its product strength.
Looking at the latest sales in July, Lanshan sold just 1,967 units, ranking 29th in the "plug-in hybrid" category on platforms like Dongchedi; its MPV model, the Wey Gaoshan, ranked 56th in the same category with only 328 units sold. The Mocha from its coffee series sold merely 154 units.
While leading players like BYD, AITO, and Li Auto continue to thrive, Wey has seemingly missed the wave of market enthusiasm for plug-in hybrid models. The reasons behind this might be clear to Wei Jianjun, yet he remains firmly committed to his unyielding approach.
For instance, when a reporter interviewed Wei Jianjun after the Lanshan launch and asked, “Our new car has such great sound, shouldn’t we invite Mr. Zhou (Zhou Hongyi) for a test drive?” he replied, “We don’t need him to test drive; it’s the broad recognition from our users that counts. You can't use traffic to represent a product’s value.”
“Red-clothed Uncle” Zhou Hongyi has essentially become today’s top car reviewer. In an industry where leadership, communication departments, and agencies are almost solely focused on traffic as their KPI, Wei Jianjun's approach commands respect. However, it remains unclear what measures he will implement to improve Wey's market performance.
Moreover, regarding the pricing of the all-new Lanshan, the two versions are priced at 299,800 yuan and 326,800 yuan, with the top configuration retaining the same price as the previous model while discontinuing the former entry version at 279,800 yuan.
One might ask, for more than 300,000 yuan, wouldn't a Li Auto L7 or an AITO M7 be more appealing? After all, consumers want their vehicles to be more impressive in front of friends and to feel "far ahead" among fellow car enthusiasts. Wey shows little aptitude in employing strategies to tap into the emotional value of consumers.
In fact, when Wey was first established, it did carry a hint of a luxury brand tone. Both the interior and exterior designs and the driving experience were seen as typical examples of domestic brands moving upmarket.
In June 2017, Wey launched its first compact SUV, the VV6, followed by the VV7, VV5, and the hybrid model P8. The zenith of Wey’s success came in December 2017, with monthly sales reaching 21,349 units.
However, that high point lasted only a year, and Wey quickly fell from grace. Compared to 2017, Wey’s average monthly sales dropped below 10,000 units in 2018, totaling only 100,000 units that year, a far cry from the expected 250,000. Reasons include decreased brand trust among consumers and ineffective marketing strategies. To this day, Wey's monthly sales have shrunk to around 2,000 vehicles.
Fluctuating product planning and frequent leadership changes are viewed as core factors in Wey's failure. After the VV series peaked and declined, it was promptly scrapped, leading to the introduction of various "coffee" series models, including the Macchiato, Mocha, and Latte. The strong national sentiment of Wey combined with the trendy coffee series created a clear cultural dissonance, leaving consumers perplexed.
Moving from the VV series's 150,000 to 200,000 yuan range to the later Lanshan and Gaoshan models targeting the 300,000 yuan bracket, and then attempting to reclaim the positioning of the former VV series through the "coffee" series, the strategy appears quite chaotic.
Moreover, changing brand heads seven times in seven years has caused Wey's marketing strategies to lack continuity, leading to internal resource inefficiency. Prominent figures in the industry like Liu Yan, Li Ruifeng, and Chen Siying, all known for their marketing prowess, seem powerless against Wey, potentially also due to the constraints of Wei Jianjun's mindset.
Aside from Wey, several product lines under Great Wall have also faced the struggle of “waking up early but arriving late” in the market. The Ora series, which targeted female users, was a hit for a time but suffered from its reputation due to the “chip crisis”; attention towards traditional SUVs like Haval and Tank also seems to be diminishing in a market that is becoming a blue ocean.
In a recent interview, Wei Jianjun stated, “There is still a gap in quality control between domestic cars and established foreign manufacturers.” This statement is inherently reasonable, as he is not the first to express such sentiments.
For example, in a 2019 episode of the "Dialogue" program, Gree's Dong Mingzhu also noted that “domestic cars are somewhat poorly made and do not match the quality of joint venture cars.”
However, the irony is that Wei Jianjun was the first to publicly refute Dong Mingzhu and invited her to visit the Great Wall manufacturing plant.
The contest of whose quality is better between domestic and joint venture cars will surely continue. Yet, neighboring competitors are on the verge of becoming "China's largest car company," leaving Wey with diminishing time to navigate its current challenges.
