Leading the Automotive Industry Out of the Mire and Into High-Quality Development
程风雨
Recently, a price-cutting wave triggered by BYD, a leading automaker, has caused a chain reaction in the new energy vehicle industry, forcing multiple brands to engage in a "price war" vortex. Amidst market turmoil, capital markets have been first affected, with leading carmakers' stock values evaporating over 1 trillion yuan and overall auto stocks plummeting deeply.
Delving into the root causes of the industry's woes, institutional distortions are found to be the underlying driving force. Local governments' "GDP championship" driven policies have created policy pitfalls: extreme tax exemptions for a decade have spawned an overproduction of solar power, leading to price cuts; multiple regions' "car purchase subsidies" have become a vicious cycle of "subsidy-driven sales." Such local policies have severed the nationwide unified market and led to severe distortions in resource allocation. Meanwhile, the rampant phenomenon of "zero-kilometer second-hand cars" has become another manifestation of industry entrapment – a product of digesting inventory and fudging sales data, which provides short-term benefits to industry participants but seriously disrupts the pricing system, undermines brand reputation, and exposes the behavior disorientation of industry players under high-pressure evaluation and survival anxiety.
Companies' "survival anxiety" directly triggers innovation lethargy. In the face of rising costs and shareholder pressure for short-term returns, R&D is first to be compressed: originally planned investments in intelligent driving iteration funds are diverted to subsidize terminal marketing, as exemplified by some carmakers reducing their smart connected technology R&D budgets in 2024 under price war pressure; tier-1 suppliers also had to reduce costs and simplify processes to cope with the procurement pressures from automakers. The decline of autonomous innovation dynamics has led the automotive industry into a "same-as-one" quagmire, making the "price war" a desperate choice.
The way out is to create an "innovation-friendly ecosystem" and drive a revolution in competitive logic. Firstly, it's essential to optimize existing institutional systems, issue effective policy frameworks, break down local protectionism, promote cross-regional fair competition reviews, and ensure reasonable resource allocation; simultaneously, we need to reform the performance evaluation mechanism, making innovation contributions and green transformation outcomes core indicators, reducing reliance on GDP growth single metrics, encouraging local governments to prioritize innovation and sustainable development. Furthermore, it's crucial to strengthen antimonopoly regulation and severely punish market-dominating behavior, ensuring fair competition and preventing excessive concentration from stifling innovative companies.
On the company level, a triple transformation is needed: Firstly, enterprises must focus on core technology innovation breakthroughs, increasing R&D investments, especially in frontier technologies. For instance, Huawei invests around 20.8% of its revenue annually in R&D, with cumulative R&D investment exceeding 1.2 trillion yuan. This consistent innovation investment significantly enhances the company's core competitiveness; Secondly, promote industry chain ecosystem cooperation, strengthen upstream and downstream collaboration, avoid redundant construction, and improve overall efficiency and coordination effects. Automakers can learn from BYD's example of building charging stations with partners, integrating industry chain resources to avoid ineffective competition and optimize resource utilization; Finally, accelerate globalization strategy deployment, particularly localizing R&D, breaking through international trade barriers, and enhancing global competitiveness. Enterprises should fully leverage domestic and foreign market differences, optimizing product positioning, strengthening antirisk capabilities.
At the macro policy level, it's necessary to guide social resources towards high-tech fields, plan the establishment of "hard tech ETFs" to direct capital flows toward industries with long-term potential and high technology content, avoiding excessive pursuit of short-term profits. Simultaneously, encourage consumers to pay a premium for technological innovation, especially in emerging industries like new energy vehicles, driving overall societal recognition of innovation value.
Looking back at the global industrial evolution process, crossing the "middle-tech trap" requires building a unique path based on domestic advantages. Japan's "kaizen" revolution through process reengineering improved efficiency; Germany leveraged its "hidden champions" to build technical barriers in niche fields; and the US Silicon Valley refined the "venture capital-high school incubation-industry conversion" innovation ecosystem chain. These experiences remind China to shift from scale-driven development to efficiency-driven, from "big and comprehensive" to "specialized and innovative," and from short-term gains to long-term investments.
Breaking the entrapment is a deep-seated transformation that reshapes the development logic – making innovation the ultimate "currency," and entrepreneurship a rare resource. Only through institutional, enterprise, and social coordination can we truly eliminate "lazy" players, encourage "breakthrough" players, and ultimately drive China's automotive industry and entire manufacturing sector to make the historic leap from the "sweat-based economy" to the "intelligent economy," injecting perpetual dynamism into high-quality development.
This column article represents only the author's personal views