XPeng Inc. (NYSE:XPEV) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Xiaopeng He: [Foreign Language] [interrupted] Thank you very much for your question with respect to the new brand. And for the new brand, we will be launching them into our existing stores and we will have independent exhibition halls for the new brand. And in the future, we are also looking at building more dealerships and more independent stores dedicated to these new brands and we hope that there will be 100 of these new independent stores for the new brands dedicated to them. And with respect to your other question, I will invite our Finance VP Mr. James Wu to take your question.

James Wu: Yes. On the margin front for MONA, typically, we won’t give specific margin for a particular car line. As Brian and Xiaopeng mentioned, MONA will be focusing on the A Class segment. Obviously, we won’t imagine that A segment product to make the highest profit in our portfolio. But overall, our expectation is MONA will achieve healthy positive margin for this brand overall. And as Brian mentioned, MONA, that will be launched in the Beijing Auto Show, will just be the first model. There will be additional models that’s coming through the platform. The other thing that over the long term we might be thinking about is a different commercialization strategy in terms of our software, and we’ll give more guidance and information in the next couple of quarters.

And the other thing I want to mention is, in terms of MONA, because it’s large scale, the target customer base and our partnership with DiDi. So they will help us to market the product. Eventually, we expect relatively lower sales — associated sales cost for MONA compared to XPeng brand overall.

Tina Hou: [Foreign Language] So my second question is regarding, I think in the February delivery report, we mentioned that there were some supply chain bottleneck regarding to X9 before the Chinese New Year. And the company expects after Chinese New Year, these bottlenecks would be resolved and delivery volume of X9 should increase. So just wondering what kind of bottleneck were we facing? And also going forward, how shall we — how do we plan to prevent these similar situations from happening again? Thanks.

Xiaopeng He: [Foreign Language] [interrupted] That is an excellent question, and thank you for putting this forward. So in terms of the supply chain issue that you had mentioned encountered by X9 end of February after Chinese New Year, this problem has already been resolved. And yes indeed in the past we have also encountered similar issues. Internally we have also been reflecting how to resolve this problem. And since taking over the supply chain myself personally last October and we have combed through a new management system, and we are now reducing the number of suppliers, and we mainly focus on these high quality, privately — private Chinese companies, which are listed, and those are the ones who can also provide us with certain flexibilities.

And so in the future, I don’t think that we need to worry about this issue because we do now have long term strategic partners in place. And second, in terms of our [indiscernible] products and we now have standardized modules, generally speaking and we have about one to two partners who provide us with these modules that can be used in quite a broad spectrum of different models of cars, and this will improve the efficiency and bring down the cost as well as ensure the quality. And they are very flexible partners to work with. And thirdly, in terms of supply chain management team, we have also done work to adjust our existing supply chain management team and in terms of the organizational structure and we now have a new system in place. And internally, our company has the determination that we are ready and for all of these products to be launched for the first 3 months and we want to make sure that we will achieve a very good scale of sales.

Tina Hou: [Foreign Language]

Operator: Your next question comes from Xinchi Yin with CITIC Securities. Please go ahead.

Xinchi Yin: [Foreign Language] On last year you mentioned that 2027 will be a critical year for autonomous driving in China, where we will probably witness 30% of car in China will adopt for the autonomous driving. I was wondering what is your latest view on that? And could you possibly share the theory behind your estimation? Thank you.

Xiaopeng He: [Foreign Language] [interrupted] Thank you very much for your question. And yes, indeed for this year and I do believe that we would be able to complete the task a little bit ahead of time ahead of schedule as what I have mentioned the last year. And first of all in terms of the large model and being adopted in ADAS system and through our testing we had already been able to discover that the large model could really help with the speeding up and the realization of the generic intelligence and smart autonomous driving. So it is definitely an advantage and we have already done the testing and it has already approved this. Secondly, we know that in terms of hardware cost and for XPeng, obviously, we would like to bring it down and we also would like to see that providing support to our systems by a large scale and not only just that for ADAS, XPeng believes that and we’d like to see the cost to come down.