Zeekr CFO: There's an opening in the crowded EV market for premium cars in China

Joining us here at Post 9 is Zeker, CFO, Jing Yuan. Nice to have you here and Congrats on the initial public offering. We heard from our reporter in Beijing earlier. The domestic market certainly in China is a very crowded one from EV makers, many different models from many different companies. How do you distinguish Zeker from your competitors? Sure. Of course if you look at the big picture, you know there’s the market over there is very, very crowded. But if you zoomed in a little bit and you look at each of markets, brackets, price brackets, you know there’s there’s definitely an opening in the premium market segment. Say for example, Zika will be selling you know cars mostly priced between RMB300K to 500K. So we’ve been competing with the likes of Mercedes, Audi and and and and and Lexus. If you think about their offering, if you think about the competitiveness, if you think about the product, whether it combines both the smart functionality as well as the EV drive experience, that’s what was attacked. Yeah. And you talk about the car of the future, at least your company has as well-being not just a simple transportation tool but a Center for the smart mobility experience. What does that mean? Yeah. So if you think about say for example your phone, like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you used it to make calls and you think about your your first car, you know the hand used on Civic, you know you use it to move you from A to B. But nowadays you can do much more on the car. You can listen to music, watch your videos and if you’re lucky you have L3 equipped ADA system. You can sleep in the car and the car can drive it yourselves, right? If you think about the robotaxis, so the the, the future, it’s going to be defined by the smart part of the vehicle, not the transportation part. How important is that autonomous capability longer term to, you know, the size of the market and what people are going to be willing to pay? Yeah. So if you think about of course longer terms, you know, it’s like it’s like a rising, right, you, you know, sometime 10 years, 30 years, 20 years later, people going to be able to sit in the car and the car are going to drive themselves. Of course the road, the pathway is quite long, windy to a certain extent, but the future is there. Once you got there, there will be no needs for you to buy a car. You know at this moment if it’s an Uber, if I Lyft, you know the capacity is constrained by the number of drivers you have. But in the future if car can drive it by yourselves, you know you can just store store them right in the car park and when there’s a need, when there’s Taylor Taylor Swift, show something and they turn it by themselves and they go back and try it the best. So. So the future is Infinity, although this is an interesting discussion especially for the US consumer who historically has loved car ownership, right. It’s sort of how you express yourself. Do you see that going away at least in the China market If you think about again that’s analogy your your wash, right. You know the the cross crisis, you know people stopped buying, you know Swiss maze mechanical watch but then you got what you still got you know all the adventures and techs and Rolex in the world. So, so 10 years later, 20 years later the car would be like a status symbol, you know that’s very top hands there still be Ferraris, Lambos etcetera etcetera. But you know you’re wrong of the me. You’re day-to-day transportation needs going to be met by something drive by self. How soon? You know, we follow it pretty closely here as well, especially given Tesla, how soon, especially given the recent moves in the Chinese market, do you believe robo taxis actually will be significant in terms of their numbers in China? Yes. If you look at see the Chinese markets, obviously it’s quite different from from the US right. In China general general customers need and wants autonomous driving or the ADA system seems to be a little bit ahead for the rest of the world. That’s why I look at my own you 11, we just launched the vehicle on the 27th of 8th, 27th of February. It is you know standardized, equipped with Lyda, you know, which gives my, my my customers a very, very good ADA experiences and sells like hot cake. So the customers over there do believes in the future.