Gamingdeputy reported on April 14 that Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of NIO, delivered a speech at the 27th Harvard China Forum at Harvard University this Saturday. He talked about his current views on the fiercely competitive global auto market: Although competition will lead to greater investment and less room for error,However, in the face of competition, we should not expect closed policies to protect local companies. Only openness and competition can ultimately benefit consumers, industry and society.. “Excellent automotive products from all over the world can be sold in China, and they will not be targeted because of which country they come from.”
Li Bin said that in the face of a more confrontational and fragmented world, efforts should still be made to promote exchanges. “Today's world has become more antagonistic and divided. But we can still make choices, take actions, and strive to build connections, promote communication and mutual understanding.”
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Gamingdeputy attaches the full text:
Dear guests and classmates, hello everyone, I am Li Bin from NIO.
Thank you very much to the organizer for the invitation. The Harvard China Forum is an important platform for exchanges between the United States and China. I am very happy to be able to communicate with you here today. Harvard is a university that I admire very much and I visited the Harvard campus 18 years ago. Qin Lihong, the co-founder of NIO, received his master's degree from Harvard in 2001. He often told me about the interesting experience of studying at Harvard. Professor William Kirby of Harvard Business School once wrote about the case of NIO’s internationalization. For these reasons, I accepted the invitation without hesitation.
Recently, I watched the documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop.” This film tells the story behind the creation and singing of “We are the World” by 45 top American singers.
“We are the World” was created in 1985. That year, I was 11 years old and went to primary school in a mountain village in central China. After school, I had to help my family with various farm work. I did my homework at night and used kerosene lamps for lighting. As a happy, naughty boy, I had all kinds of visions for the future. However, considering that my hometown had just had a dirt road and electric lights would be available a few years later, my youthful ideals at that time certainly did not include starting a smart electric car company.
As a reward for my hard work on the farm, my father gave me a radio as a New Year's gift. This little radio greatly stimulated my curiosity and imagination. Every evening, I would look at the stacks of mountains in a daze, hoping to see the wider world beyond the mountains. When I was in junior high school, I started learning ABC. My English teacher only had one or two years of English training, so please forgive my English accent. I was lucky enough to be admitted to Peking University, the best university in China. When I was in college, I heard “We are the World” for the first time. The belief conveyed in this song about working together for the common benefit of all mankind influenced and inspired many of us.
In 1996, I founded my first company, Nanji Technology, while I was in college. It was one of the earliest Internet Web Hosting companies in China. Later I founded several Internet companies.
In 2012, faced with severe air pollution, I urged myself to take action. At the end of 2014, I founded NIO. NIO has the same pronunciation as Future in Chinese, and the Chinese meaning is Blue Sky Coming. We hope that through innovation in technology and services, more and more users will choose smart electric vehicle products and contribute to solving global climate change. Realizing such a vision requires pooling global resources. NIO chose to become a global start-up when it was founded. In 2015, when we were first founded in Shanghai, we set up R&D centers in Silicon Valley, Munich, and Oxford. Currently, we are listed in New York, Singapore and Hong Kong, with investors from all over the world and employees from more than 40 countries. We have served users in 6 countries and will soon enter more markets.
From the delivery of the first vehicle in June 2018 to now, NIO has delivered nearly 500,000 high-end smart electric vehicles. Last year, we delivered more than 160,000 vehicles, and our market share of high-end smart electric vehicles above RMB 300,000 in China exceeded 40%. Over the next year, we will launch and deliver mass-market and entry-market brands and models.
In the Chinese market, we have faced fierce competition from the first day of our establishment. China is the world's largest automobile market and the most open automobile market in the world. As a young automobile company, we have to compete with more than a dozen of the world's largest multinational groups, we have to compete with a dozen of China's mature auto companies, and we have to compete with a dozen of outstanding start-up companies. As a company, we certainly know that competition will lead to greater investment, longer time to profit, less room for mistakes, and lower chances of success. Despite this, we still do not expect China to adopt a closed policy in order to protect local enterprises, because I also understand the other side of the matter. Opening up will ultimately benefit the industry and society, and will also make us better in the end.
In March this year, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in China exceeded 41%, compared with only 10% three years ago. Openness is one of the important reasons for the rapid increase in the penetration rate of smart electric vehicles in China. Excellent automotive products from all over the world can be sold in China and will not be targeted based on which country they come from. In 2018, Tesla came to China to build a factory. In the past three years, Tesla's sales in the Chinese market have totaled 1.364 million vehicles. Last year, Model Y sold 456,000 vehicles in the Chinese market, becoming the annual sales champion of all models in the Chinese market. Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory is undoubtedly of great significance to Tesla's commercial success. While it has made Tesla a success, it has also influenced the minds of consumers, promoted the popularization of smart electric vehicles in China, and stimulated the vitality of China's smart electric vehicle industry. , so that every manufacturer must go all out to provide better products and services. Such openness and competition will undoubtedly benefit consumers, industry and society.
In the process of automobile technological change, various automobile companies are competitors; in the journey to solve climate change, they are competitive teammates. Competing teammates, this term is not original to me. One time, I was on the phone at home and talking about our rivals, and my oldest son chimed in and said, Dad, rivalry teammates. He was still in kindergarten at the time, and I’m not sure whether it was because his pronunciation was inaccurate, because his opponents and teammates had similar pronunciations in Chinese, or whether he really understood the essence. As a dad, I certainly hope it’s the latter.
NIO has been opening up and cooperating with its peers on technology and infrastructure. We have established the largest charging network for automobile manufacturers in China, deploying more than 20,000 (21,854) charging piles. They were opened to the public on the first day, and 80% of the charging services serve users of other brands. NIO's unique three-minute battery swap technology has more than 1,600 patents. We have established more than 2,400 battery swap stations in China and Europe and provided more than 41 million battery swap services. Last November, we opened up our battery swapping technology and network layout. Four automobile groups have already signed agreements with us, and more automobile companies are considering joining.
The spirit of openness is not only reflected in our technology and infrastructure, but also in NIO’s community. From the beginning, we have hoped to build a community where cars are the starting point so that users around the world can share joy and grow together. On September 30, 2022, I attended the first anniversary of the opening of NIO Cow House in Oslo, Norway. After the official celebration ended at 9:30 pm, the 160 car enthusiasts who participated in the event did not disperse. Everyone sang together on the street. Dance. At that moment, I was completely infected by everyone's emotions and danced a street dance that was even worse than my English skills. Although we come from different countries and have different cultural backgrounds, sincerity, care, respect, and tolerance for each other are a common language.
The theme of today's conference is “Singing to its friends,” which comes from “The Book of Songs”, China's first collection of poems 2,600 years ago. It means that birds coming out of deep valleys fly to high trees and sing with their chirping voices. Seek like-minded partners. We need to face the reality. Compared with ten years ago, the world today has become more antagonistic and divided, and differences are increasingly difficult to bridge. But we can still make choices, take actions, and strive to build connections, promote communication and mutual understanding, just like the Chinese poems inspired by 2,500 years ago, just like the artists dedicated 39 years ago, It is also like what the Harvard China Forum has been working hard to promote today. In the final analysis, we should have basic wisdom and judgment:
Cooperation is always the better option.
thank you all.