On March 17, XPeng Motors disclosed its unaudited financial data for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2022. From the full-year data, Xpeng Motors’ total revenue in 2022 was 26.86 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 28.0%, while the net loss reached 9.14 billion yuan, a record high.
Why are XPeng’s losses increasing? Zhang Xiang, a special expert at the Zhongxin Jingwei Research Institute and president of the New Energy Vehicle Technology Research Institute of Jiangxi New Energy Science and Technology Vocational College, told Otaku Finance that the main reason for Xiaopeng’s loss is that the company has not achieved economies of scale at present. Tesla achieved a turnaround in 2020, its global sales had reached 500,000 vehicles, compared with 120,000 last year. Generally speaking, the annual production and sales of traditional car companies must be 200,000 vehicles to reach the level of economies of scale.
Zhang Xiang pointed out that Xiaopeng has also encountered a bottleneck in core technology. Xpeng’s core competitiveness is autonomous driving technology, and many car owners will buy it in the early days, but after several years of development, whether it is urban NGP automatic driving launched by Xpeng or LiDAR on production vehicles, L3 level automatic driving technology has not arrived. Without self-driving technology, Xpeng’s products become decent, and it is difficult to differentiate itself from other brands, resulting in a slowdown in its sales growth.
“In the future, if Xpeng wants to get out of the dilemma of sales and revenue and achieve breakeven, it must innovate and actively apply new technologies in the industry to achieve breakthroughs in the field of autonomous driving, which is the best way for Xpeng to break the game.” Zhang Xiang said.
