"The competition in the NEV market takes place between big data and artificial intelligence chips. It is equivalent to the National Football League playoffs, consisting of a single-elimination tournament among different teams. Every NEV brand will choose their team and play against each other."
Li Auto's CEO, Li Xiang, published an internal letter to set the company's expectations until 2025 on Feb 22, 2021. His 2025 strategy explicitly entails an expectation that Li Auto will achieve a 20% of market share in a fast-growing NEV market over the next decade.
In this letter, Li addressed the underestimated value of global NEV sales from most financial institutes. He forecasted that by 2030, over 60% of traditional passenger cars will be replaced by new energy vehicles, aligning with rocketing sales in Chinese NEVs. In the next ten years, there will be a noticeable increase in NEV sales worldwide.
Overall, there will be a steady increase in NEV sales. However, because of the coronavirus pandemic and economic recession, the sales number of global passenger cars will tumble between 65 and 70 million without any substantial growth. It is estimated that global NEV passenger cars will reach a sales volume of 40 million while China will occupy approximately half of these sales by 2030.
By 2025, 8 million intelligent electric vehicles are expected to be sold worldwide. As the CEO proceeded more upbeat about the positive annual financial results in 2020, he has claimed his ambition to make Li Auto the number one NEV brand in China by 2025, accounting for over 20% market share of this industry. The gauge of expectation rose with certain conditions: enhanced technological supports, sufficient budget, and experienced staff.
Regarding technological advancement, Li Xiang considered that automated driving systems will develop following Moore's Law. For either computing power or sensor resolution, all techniques will achieve significant improvement by 2030. At that time, level 4 autonomous cars will be standardized as regular vehicles with the most promising technology to ensure the driving safety while remaining completely independent from manual operations. Consumers will prefer purchasing autonomous vehicles with self-driving mode. Electric vehicle rapid chargers can provide 300 to 500 miles of range in 10 mins, substituting gasoline and fuel with electric car batteries.
Speaking of marketization, Li Xiang mentioned that increased NEV consumption will escalate polarized consumer needs. On the one hand, some consumers prefer personal space within automated vehicles. The other people considered vehicles for only transportation purposes with optimized efficiency and budgeting.
Moreover, the NEV market's competition will be established upon a tournament between big data and artificial intelligent chips. Li Auto was founded as a NEV company in July 2015. It aims to provide pressure-free and advanced NEVs for consumers to satisfy their needs. Since Li Auto One officially operated on December 4, 2019, it had completed the first 30,000 deliveries in only 12 months and 14 days. The first 40,000 deals happened in only 14.5 months, setting a new record for the NEVs' fastest and largest deals.