Xia Zhibing resigned Hou Yan took the BYD transition

As the BYD auto business gradually came out of the low point since the second half of last year, Xia Zhibing, vice president of BYD and general manager of BYD Auto Sales Co., Ltd., suddenly left the company recently.

On August 6, BYD Co., Ltd. issued an announcement that the board of directors received a written resignation report of Xia Zhibing on August 5. He applied for the resignation of the company's vice president for personal reasons. After resigning, he will no longer hold any other position in the company. According to relevant regulations, Xia Zhibing’s resignation report will take effect when it is delivered to the company’s board of directors.

BYD's relevant person told the "First Financial Daily" that the general manager of BYD Auto Sales will be replaced by General Manager Hou Yan of BYD Motor Company's Planning Department.

The relevant personage stated that the departure of Xia Bingbing seems very sudden and actually it is still expected. With the listing of the S6, the most difficult time for BYD's auto business has passed, and it is also a good time to choose this moment to hand in.

Xia Zhibing's Ups and Downs Road to BYD, which entered the auto industry in 2003, began to “fly off” in 2005 and has experienced splendor and ups and downs. It has been linked to the name of Xia Zhibing.

Since entering BYD Auto in 1998, Xia Zhibing has worked as an accountant, financial section manager, financial manager, after-sales manager, and sales deputy general manager. In 2005, he became the general manager of the sales company and became a trader of BYD Auto. Xia Zhibing, born in 1974, has become a veritable "Marshal" in the Chinese auto industry.

In September of the same year, BYD officially launched its first self-developed product F3 after entering the automotive industry. With its competitive advantage in cost-effectiveness and its innovative sub-station approach, BYD opened the door for the auto industry and created its own brand sedan. Sales myths.

After this, under the leadership of Xia Bingbing, BYD Automotive initiated the sub-net sales model and the marketing strategy of “encircling the cities in rural areas”, becoming the fastest-growing company in its own brand and known as the “dark horse” that will never fade. From 2008 to 2010, BYD Auto achieved a compound sales growth rate of 36.41%.

In 2010, BYD proposed 800,000 sales targets. However, in the process of channel expansion, it was resisted by the terminal distributors and eventually evolved into a channel crisis. As many as 308 dealers withdrew from the network that year, and the proportion of total dealers withdrew from the network was as high as 22.63%.

The channel crisis caused by the withdrawal of the network has also become a turning point in the development of BYD Auto. Even if BYD Auto adjusted its annual sales target from 800,000 vehicles to 600,000 vehicles, this goal has still not been achieved. BYD Auto only achieved sales of 520,000 vehicles in 2010.

For this reason, Xiazhi Bing rethought: "The myth of smooth wind and no scenery has inflated me for some time."

At the same time, BYD has made adjustments in terms of strategy, goals, vehicle distribution, target mission assignment methods, and so on. After the adjustment, BYD began to move closer to the mainstream industry.

However, after the rapid growth of the auto market in the past two years, the auto market began to enter the adjustment cycle. This led to a series of adjustment measures for Xia Zhibing that did not show results in the first half of the year and failed to reverse the decline since the second half of last year. The industry believes that the continued sluggish sales of cars has become the trigger for his final resignation.

Switching to Jaguar is not true. Since the second half of last year, there have been rumours of the departure of Xia Zhibing, but it was only recently that Lightning left.

Relevant sources said that the departure of Xia Bingbing was indeed a sudden and he also heard about this matter a few days ago. However, he believes that the weak sales situation of BYD since last year is the trigger for its departure. Resignation is also an expected thing. It is nothing more than a matter of time.

In an internal farewell letter to BYD colleagues that he exposed during the summer, he said that the reason for leaving is “tired”, and the plan for the future is “refreshing the body; For the rumors of switching to Jaguar, he also deliberately clarified on Weibo: The news that I went to a foreign brand is not true.

The successor Hou Yan is also BYD's own talents. He had served as BYD's vice president of sales two years ago and led 80% of the company's sales.

In fact, the declining trend of BYD Auto since last year is a bottleneck that will inevitably be faced by the self-owned brand's "low-cost win" development model. This was reflected in the previous Geely and Chery. To break through this bottleneck is not just a change in marketing thinking, it needs the transformation of the entire development model.

Xia Zhibing once said on several occasions: "BYD will not be as quick as it used to be. It is time to calm down and do quality and management."

In this sense, although the decline in sales will gradually come out, but the departure of Xia Zhibing clearly interrupted the transformation that it is leading. However, Hou Yan, who is on the receiving end, is facing more pressure than Xia Zhibing. After Xia Zhibing led BYD to complete the accumulation of scale, the next great Hou Yan will explore is BYD's transformation.