On October 20th, 65438/KLOC-0, the epidemic situation in COVID-19 was serious, and it has been more than a month. In this month, the automobile industry experienced the process of offline sales from indifference to freezing. According to the association's data, in the first half of February, China's automobile sales fell by 92% year-on-year.
During the 30 days at home, we also want to know what impact this epidemic will have on car consumption in China. I have a copy of The Fourth Consumption Age by Japanese sociologist San Pu. The ideas in the book may give us some inspiration.
San Pu Exhibition believes that disasters are an important factor to promote intergenerational changes in consumption, and large-scale disasters will have a macro impact on a society's consumption psychology and economic foundation.
With the help of the framework vision of four consumer societies put forward by San Pu Exhibition and the unique "disaster psychology" and "disaster economics" behind it, the routing agency tries to analyze the automobile consumption after the epidemic.
But I want to remind you that today's China society is very different from Japanese society, which requires us to have a new understanding of the concrete performance of the four major consumer societies in China and the automobile market in China.
First, after the epidemic, will retaliatory consumption come again?
Obviously, the impact of the epidemic on automobile consumption in China is enormous. On June 5438+ 10 this year, the automobile sales in China decreased by 12% year-on-year, and in the first half of February, the automobile sales decreased by 92% year-on-year. The epidemic situation has caused the gears at all levels of the huge automobile industry to stagnate, and both suppliers, car companies and dealers are facing great pressure.
Usually, social consumption activities will be suppressed by disasters, and there will be a wave of consumption rebound after the disaster, which is also our expectation for China auto market.
To this end, many optimists take the performance of the automobile market during the SARS period in 2003 as an example. In that year, the car sales in China increased by 34. 12% compared with the previous year, and the car sales surged by 75.28%. They attributed this to the unprecedented promotion of private car consumption by the epidemic.
However, after consulting the monthly data of automobile production and sales in China in 2003, the routing agency found that it might be a beautiful mistake to regard correlation as causality.
In the first quarter of 2003 before the full-scale outbreak of SARS, the sales growth rate of domestic cars (private cars) had reached 100%, which was the highest in the whole year. In May, the worst epidemic, the national automobile production only decreased by 17 percentage points compared with last month, while the automobile sales only decreased by 6% compared with last month. From April to July, when the epidemic was concentrated, there was no phenomenon of "suppressing first and then retaliating consumption" in the sales of cars (private cars).
At the same time, other more important and direct factors that promoted automobile consumption in that year may have been ignored-in 2003, China's GDP growth rate reached 10%, which was the fifth fastest year in the past; In 2003, a large number of future main new models joined the China market, including mazda 6, Buick Excelle, Citroen Elysee, BMW 3 Series and even Chery QQ.
The rapid economic development and the dazzling array of new cars may be the main reasons for the outbreak of China auto market.
Today's China auto market is not what it was in 2003. If you compare the example of SARS, it's a bit tangled.
But it is not optimistic and deserves more attention. "The Fourth Consumption Era" Zhan said that after the "311earthquake" in Japan, there was a "divorced" consumer psychology-that is, advocating a minimalist life and reducing unnecessary material consumption. The social basis of this consumption psychology is the unemployment tide and the economy that was hit again after the "March 1 1 earthquake".
Compared with the triumph in 2003, the social reality after the disaster of 20 1 1 Japan is more similar to that of China, which is now affected by the COVID-19 epidemic. The economic activities temporarily frozen by the epidemic will make the recovery of automobile consumption not optimistic.
A few days ago, Huang, former vice chairman of the NPC Financial and Economic Committee and now vice chairman of China International Economic Exchange Center, said that the epidemic has caused trillions of losses to China's economy, and special attention should be paid to the impact of the epidemic on the private economy.
In this epidemic, the private economic components widely distributed in small and medium-sized industrial enterprises and service enterprises have been hit hard, and many enterprises are facing the risk of capital chain breakage.
Last year, Xu Changming, deputy director of the National Information Center, said in a statistical report that the contribution of the private sector to the new consumption of automobiles reached 70%. Therefore, the impact of the epidemic on the automobile market is not only the sharp drop in automobile sales in February caused by freezing offline consumption; The "income decline" caused by its contusion on the private economy will also affect the recovery of automobile consumption after the epidemic.
So the best result of car sales after the epidemic is actually to stabilize.
Second, the structural transformation opportunities of automobile consumption
Of course, the so-called crisis is organic in danger. After the disaster, people often seek a sense of security-for the Japanese who have spent 20 years in the economic downturn, this sense of security may be a carefree separation. Among the books exhibited in San Pu, this is an important feature of the fourth consumption era: * * hedonism and simplicity.
According to the classification of consumption era in San Pu Exhibition, the automobile market in China is undoubtedly complicated. The rapid development of China automobile market has folded the second, third and fourth consumer societies into a space-time. People's consumption orientation has the characteristics of three generations at the same time, that is, they pursue "big" and "family", "individual", "individuality" and "difference", and the influence of * * * enjoyment belonging to the fourth consumer society is also deepening.
The complicated social reality in China determines that people will seek a sense of security after the epidemic. For people who have car ownership conditions, the epidemic will play a catalytic role, leading to more demand for first-time purchases. People who have less ideal car conditions will actively seek alternative consumption.
On various social platforms, many netizens posted that the epidemic made people realize the importance of a private car and made up their minds to buy the first car in their lives. Originally, these groups who can buy or not buy cars were created by the epidemic. After the epidemic, they will become a new force in new car consumption. Buying a car is to avoid risks, and "security" is the bottom demand of this group.
How to guide and meet the safety needs of consumers caused by the epidemic is what many car companies are doing at present. Since two weeks ago, several independent car companies have chosen "cars with masks" in marketing caliber, which is aimed at this special demand.
In fact, the rising search popularity of air purification words such as "HEPA" also reflects the phenomenon that consumers pay more attention to automobile air purification. In the future, the concepts of "health" and "safety" will become the selling points of cars that consumers pay more attention to. This is of great benefit to some high-end models that have always paid attention to health and safety functions.
On the other hand, the firmer consumer demand of first-time buyers will increase their willingness to use financial instruments. How to further reduce the burden on first-time car buyers, so as to promote the purchase, will be the development opportunity of auto finance.
Last year 1 1 month, according to the forecast of China Automobile Finance Laboratory, the automobile finance penetration rate in China may reach 45% in 20 19, which is still far from the penetration rate of more than 70% in developed countries. The routing agency believes that the steady growth demand of the automobile industry after the epidemic is expected to bring greater development opportunities for domestic automobile finance. Of course, the premise is the further maturity of the risk control system and the further liberalization of relevant national policies.
The routing agency also found that luxury brands were more resistant to risks during the epidemic. In the comparison of popularity of six groups of search keywords: Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz, the decline of popularity of luxury brand BBA is lower than that of Volkswagen, Honda and Toyota.
This means that luxury brands can attract people's attention more than ordinary brands during the epidemic, which will be a favorable factor in the process of sales recovery after the epidemic. In other words, the luxury car market will continue to rise against the broader market.
In addition, people who do not have the conditions to own a new car (such as low-income groups and urban consumers with car restrictions) will turn more to alternative consumption-such as used cars or * * * travel services.
In 20 19, while the domestic sales of new cars continued to decline, the sales of used cars increased by nearly 8% year-on-year, reaching14.92 million. On the one hand, this year's epidemic has activated more demand for private cars, on the other hand, it will cause a temporary decline in income. To reconcile the contradiction between "want to drive" and "can't afford a new car", the best solution may be to buy a used car.
If you don't even have the conditions to own a used car, then people's last stubbornness will be reflected as much as possible in the "private" mode of travel-some people who used to travel by bus, subway, etc. Will turn to the consumption network to get a car, a taxi or even * * *, and electric vehicles will become an option.
The routing agency believes that after the epidemic, seeking a sense of security will become the underlying logic of people's travel activities for quite some time. Although this appeal will have different manifestations in different groups of people, it can not be ignored if we want to seize the opportunity of tourism recovery after the epidemic.
Third, promote supply-side reform.
Although the theme of this paper is automobile consumption after the epidemic, we should also point out that consumption is not only determined by consumer demand, but also by supply. The COVID-19 epidemic will promote the supply-side reform of the automobile industry in the form of force majeure.
1, sales supply reform-automobile sales from offline to online
Can cloud selling cars save the collapsed 2020 auto market? |? In the article "Observation", we discussed the prosperity of car sales during the epidemic. Although the final effect is still unclear, it is indeed a useful sales model attempt. Previously, only a small number of new car-making forces actively tried to sell cars online. Traditional automobile companies have only benefited from the existing benefits, such as resource allocation and 4S distribution system.
However, the epidemic forced 4S stores to actively change and sell cars through online live broadcast, creating more channels for the car sales system to directly contact consumers. Although it is difficult for mass consumer goods such as automobiles to sell cars on a large scale, it creates more imagination for the combination of online and offline.
2. Technology supply reform-low-speed unmanned vehicles landed ahead of schedule.
In this epidemic, unmanned driving has become an active force. The routing agency learned that self-driving start-ups such as Neolithic, Zhixing and White Rhino all sent unmanned vehicles to the epidemic area to be responsible for delivery and disinfection.
In epidemic areas where driving scenes are relatively simple but human drivers are at high risk, low-speed unmanned vehicles can effectively replace humans. In fact, this also points out a road for the commercialization of driverless driving-a scene with high security risks and simple driving tasks, which is most likely where driverless driving will play a role first.
The routing agency learned that Baidu had considered sending Robotaxi to the epidemic area, but after assessing the risks, it decided to open the autopilot support kit and cloud service for low-speed unmanned vehicles for free. It is understood that the unmanned vehicles of Neolithic enterprises have been supported by Baidu.
Investors in the autonomous driving industry said that the demonstration role of unmanned vehicles in the COVID-19 epidemic is expected to advance the commercialization time of unmanned vehicles in low-speed scenarios by 2-3 years.
3. Production and supply reform-accelerating industrial integration
Encouraging domestic automobile enterprises to become bigger and stronger is a high-frequency word in China automobile industry in the past few years. However, after the government relaxed industry access and promoted the transformation of the automobile industry, there were more and more strange phenomena in automobile enterprises. The fundamental reason is that it is the local governments eager to find investment achievements in the automobile industry and the excess capital eager to find investment places that have created many new car companies that are not competitive in the market. At the same time, many old car companies that have long fallen behind the times have also survived under the protection of the access system.
Therefore, the China municipal government has successively issued policies to promote the elimination or strong alliance of automobile enterprises, but due to the complicated interests of all parties, this process is progressing slowly. Nowadays, the COVID-19 epidemic has hit the industry indiscriminately and put forward a severe test for all enterprises. However, after the low tide, you will know who is swimming naked.
During the epidemic, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Revised Decision (Draft for Comment), which deleted the requirements of the original version on the design and research capabilities of car companies and changed it to "technical support capabilities". This revision is intended to pave the way for OEM mode and promote the integration of old and new.
Despite the cruel situation, the epidemic did play the role of a filter at this time, screening out car companies with weak anti-risk ability, or integrating or withdrawing. At the same time, it also sounded the alarm for enterprises that have been striding forward but are short-sighted in strategy. After the tempering of the Black Swan incident, the remaining car companies need to be prepared for a more intense killing in the stock market.
What is clear is that although the epidemic will have a negative impact on China's automobile industry in the short term, it will also destroy some outdated structures. When external factors leave some loopholes in the form of force majeure, positive factors within the automobile industry can have the opportunity to repair and occupy these positions, prompting the industry to take a step forward.
Finally, back to the topic of consumption age.
In the book The Fourth Consumption Era, San Pu tries to avoid depicting the fourth consumption era that Japan is heading for as a negative era. However, as we all know, the reason why Japan entered a low-desire society of "material consumption" after long-term development still lies in the "lost twenty years" when Japan's economy was in a downturn.
Many times, we take Japan as a reference because there are too many similarities in history and culture between the two countries. But in the stage of economic development, China and Japan are completely different, and for a long time, China's economy will still be in the upward cycle.
Japan entered the fourth consumption era. In fact, after a long period of stagnant economic growth, the Japanese chose to reach a certain degree of reconciliation with themselves and society. It is absolutely impossible for China, which is still in an economic upswing, to have such a "resigned" mentality. Therefore, it is not difficult to see that in China, although people (especially young people) often preach Buddhism, in fact, they have been redoubling their efforts to seek class progress.
This universal social psychology has undoubtedly penetrated into the thoughts and behaviors of autobots in China, especially the influence of the Black Swan incident in COVID-19, which has deepened and mapped out a contradictory and real face-full of difficulties in mouth, but thinking of becoming bigger and stronger in heart.
This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.