"Sony Dafa" spread to the hoop.

Text/Leju Finance Li Shanshan

"If a digital product doesn't know

Text/Leju Finance Li Shanshan

"If a digital product doesn't know which one to choose, choose Sony." This sentence is a famous saying that has been popular in the digital circle for many years, which shows Sony's position in it. What is the effect of "Sony Dafa" when Sony entered the new energy car track?

/kloc-in June, 2006, Sony Group and Honda Motor announced the formal signing of an agreement to establish a joint venture company, Sony Honda Mobility, which is located in Tokyo, Japan, with a registered capital of/kloc-0.00 billion yen. Sony and Honda * * * jointly hold shares, each holding 50% of the shares. Mizuno Taixiu, former minister of Honda China, is the chairman and CEO of the joint venture company, and Chuan Xiquan, president and CEO of Sony Mobile, is the president and chief operating officer of the joint venture company.

The company plans to officially operate in 2022, and it is expected to start selling pure electric vehicles (EVs) and provide mobile travel services in 2025. It is said that in the cooperation and division of labor between the two parties, Sony will develop entertainment content such as in-vehicle software and movie music, and Honda will provide the hardware and safety functions of the vehicle itself and be responsible for the production of the first model.

It is understood that the first Sony car may be a high-end model with entertainment functions such as movies and games, and the owner will pay extra for it.

Prior to this, Sony and Honda signed a basic agreement on March 4 this year to establish a strategic cooperative relationship in the field of mobile travel and mobile services. However, the basic agreement has not been signed for a hundred days, and now the two sides have advanced the substantive process of the agreement and intend to form a joint venture company. It can be seen that behind accelerating cooperation, there are reasons for anxiety on both sides.

Honda's "urgency" comes from the lack of pure electricity market; Sony's "urgency" is more about performance pressure, and it is urgent to find new performance growth points. In today's era of "all people build cars", the industry competition is extremely fierce, while Sony is late and Honda's transformation is slow. It's hard to say that they want a piece of the new energy market.

Sony changed the track "making a living"

According to public information, Sony is one of the largest manufacturers of electronic products in the world, and its main businesses include games and network services, music, movies, sip (image-related), CMOS processors and semiconductors.

Sony, which has countless fans around the world, has not relaxed in recent years. The huge impact brought by the "image winter" has never slowed it down, and the company's largest business game service has gradually entered the bottleneck of development.

In the field of games, Sony has already felt the pressure from Microsoft, and Microsoft has gradually narrowed the gap with Sony by virtue of the "buy in buy" model. In June of this year, 5438+ 10, Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, and Sony's share price plummeted 9.6% that day, the biggest drop in the past two years.

According to reports, in addition to Germany and Britain, the monthly sales of Xbox series X/S game consoles developed by Microsoft surpassed Sony's PS5 for the first time in February.

According to the financial report, in fiscal year 20021(20021-March 2022), Sony's net profit returned to its mother decreased by 14% year-on-year to 882.2 billion yen, with a slight increase of 10% year-on-year. At the same time, even in the favorable context of the depreciation of the yen, Sony's guidance on the net profit for fiscal year 2022 is only 830 billion yen, which will continue to decline by 6% year-on-year.

Facing the bottleneck period of development, Sony urgently needs to find new growth points of performance, so it began to seek opportunities for cross-border profit. Like Apple and Microsoft, it also focuses on the fat of "pure electric vehicles".

Some industry analysts believe that the significance of Sony's car-making is more concentrated on the strategic level. Sony has always wanted to integrate music, games and movies. Previously, smart phones were considered as the most suitable carriers, but the global market share of Sony mobile phones was less than 65,438+0%, and it suffered huge losses year after year. At present, the integration technology and user experience of new energy vehicles are more perfect and rich, which can better undertake Sony's integration strategy.

At CES (International Consumer Electronics Show) in 2020, Sony released the VISION-S series prototype and made its debut in its first car, Vision-S0 1. In 65438+February of the same year, Sony began to open the road in Europe to verify and test the safety of image and sensing technology installed inside and outside the car and the user experience of human-machine interface (HMI) system.

This move has triggered many speculations in the automotive industry about Sony's automobile manufacturing. In the face of outside doubts, Sony denied it: "The company is committed to the research and development of autonomous driving technology, and VISION-S is only used to display technology and has no intention of manufacturing cars." Izumi Kawanishi, the senior general manager in charge of Sony's electric vehicle business at that time, said in an interview that Sony would not become an automobile manufacturer, but was committed to becoming a promoter of changes in the automobile industry.

In the following April of 20021year, Sony started the driving test in the 5G environment, which further promoted its step into the field of mobile travel.

Until the CES show in June 5438+10, Sony brought a brand-new concept SUV, named VISION-S 02, and announced the establishment of Sony Mobile Appearance Company to take charge of its automobile business. This also marks its official involvement in automobile manufacturing, and officially announced its cooperation with Honda in the following March. The two sides basically reached an agreement on the cooperation of pure electric vehicles.

Less than 100 days before the official announcement, Sony and Honda have advanced the substantive process of the agreement and plan to form a joint venture company, which shows the urgency of their eagerness to change the status quo of performance pressure.

It is reported that after the cooperation between the two parties, Sony is mainly responsible for developing in-vehicle software and in-vehicle entertainment systems and providing travel service platforms, while Honda focuses on production and sales. President Sony once said that the fields of sensors, communication and entertainment systems needed for pure electric vehicles are Sony's strengths. For Sony, this is a good opportunity to redefine the car.

Honda's Electrification Transformation Anxiety

In fact, Honda took the initiative to throw an olive branch in the matter of cooperation between the two sides in building a car.

According to Hong Min, CEO of Honda Motor Company, Honda approached Sony for cooperation in the summer of 20021.He personally met with Kenichiro Yoshida at the end of the year and suggested that the two companies send special teams composed of young backbones. Since the end of last year, we decided to establish a deeper cooperative relationship. Honda and Sony had had more than five in-depth discussions before they officially announced their joint efforts in March. In less than half a year, the dust settled.

Behind Honda's initiative to seek cooperation is the anxiety about its "slow" electrification progress.

At present, there are many players on the new energy car track, including traditional car companies with solid family background, formidable new car-making forces, and cross-border companies from Internet, real estate, science and technology, home appliances and other fields. The competition is fierce. In this context, Honda, which has not improved in the field of new energy vehicles, has obviously fallen behind, especially in the pure electric market, and it has no advantage.

Take the China market as an example. So far, Honda has only listed a pure electric vehicle model Honda e:N (Dongfeng Honda e:NS 1, Guangqi Honda e:NP 1), but the sales of this new car with high hopes are bleak. The data shows that since the model was launched in April this year, the cumulative sales volume has been less than 300 units.

In addition, the price of the car is175,000 yuan-205,000 yuan. In the price range of 200,000 yuan, domestic manufacturers such as BYD, Geely, Great Wall, BAIC, SAIC Roewe, Chang 'an, etc. have launched a number of models, and the market participation has been extremely high. It is conceivable that Honda wants a piece of the action.

Honda also realized the slow process of electrification, accelerated the catch-up, and even gave a time node for full electrification. In April this year, Sanbu Hong Min announced that electric vehicles EV and fuel cell vehicles FCV will account for 65,438+000% of sales in 2040, which means that Honda will completely stop selling traditional fuel vehicles in 2040.

Honda plans to invest 8 trillion yen (RMB 40,665,438+0 billion per month) in research and development in the next 65,438+00 years, including 5 trillion yen (about RMB 254 billion) in electrification and software. In addition, Honda said that it will invest about 43 billion yen (about 2.2 billion yuan) to develop an all-solid-state battery demonstration production line, which is scheduled to start in the spring of 2024.

According to the plan, by 2027, Honda will launch 10 pure electric vehicles in China market, and build special electric vehicle factories in Wuhan and Guangzhou. By 2030, 30 pure electric vehicles will be put into the global market, with a planned annual output of more than 2 million vehicles.

However, for Honda, which had previously bet on the hybrid track, it is uncertain whether these goals can be achieved as scheduled. It is worth mentioning that Hong Min has repeatedly emphasized the importance of "alliance". In his view, Honda should not complete the electrification transformation task alone, but should actively embrace its partners, reduce costs through mass production and ensure more feasibility of its business.

In this case, Honda actively seeks cooperation with Sony. In a sense, this is a new attempt by traditional car companies to cope with the great changes in the industry, and Sony may be able to help them.

However, according to the details of this disclosure, the first car will not be introduced to the market until 2025. For the ever-changing and highly competitive electric vehicle field, it may not have an advantage at that time.