Chapter 863 Nanjing Qilin

First of all, Tianhe Capital wholly owns shares of Nanjing Automobile Group, and Nanjing Automobile Group also has a joint venture with British Automobile Group in China, Tianhe British Automobile.

And British Automobile Group is a major shareholder of Tesla, a well-known electric car company...

Before Li Lu acquired ATL's shares in CATL, she promised Zeng Yuqun when she met with Zeng Yuqun:

If CATL's power battery meets the requirements, she can help to matchmake and let Tesla try to use CATL's battery.

In the original time and space, CATL became a supplier of Tesla in 2020.

Tesla's battery supplier at this time was Panasonic, and later Tesla and Panasonic also jointly invested in the construction of a battery factory in the United States.

The cooperation with Tesla also made Panasonic quickly become the world's leading battery company.

However, Panasonic is not doing well, and its battery production capacity cannot keep up with Tesla's pace.

In 2019, Musk said on Twitter that the production capacity of the above-mentioned battery factory restricted the growth of Tesla Model 3 production.

In addition to the strained relationship with Panasonic, cost demands also made Tesla consider adding new suppliers in China, which led to the cooperation between Tesla and CATL.

Although the British Motor Group also has a battery production plant, Barron understands that in the end, if it comes to cost, it will definitely not be able to beat CATL in building a factory in Britain or Europe and the United States.

Therefore, the British battery factory is not prepared to expand its scale, but only as a production plant for high-end batteries developed and provided to the British Motor Group's high-end brand electric vehicles, such as Aston Martin, McLaren or Bentley's electric models.

As for other electric models, they will also consider cooperating with CATL, or even jointly establishing a battery factory.

This is also the reason why he instructed Tianhe Capital to hold shares in CATL.

In this case, it is better to intercept Panasonic in advance and promote CATL to cooperate with Tesla in advance to jointly build a factory in North America - then the British Motor Group will not mind participating in it.

As for BYD, in which Barron holds shares, it entered the power battery field earlier than CATL and seems to be a better partner...

But the problem is that BYD is not only a battery supplier, but also manufactures electric vehicles, and its scale in the future will be comparable to Tesla.

Barron knew that in his previous life in 2014, BYD would announce that the power batteries it produced would not be sold to the outside world!

At that time, BYD tried to use this move to block other electric vehicle competitors...

This can be said to have given CATL an assist - CATL at that time took advantage of the strategic mistakes made by its competitors, coupled with policy support, and for a time, it attracted a number of customers such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz, BAIC, Great Wall, Geely, and Hyundai, and its production capacity soared. Finally, in 2017, it became the world's largest battery supplier!

Even if Barron holds shares in BYD, it is inevitable that BYD will no longer provide power batteries to British Motor Group after it has entered the electric vehicle field...

This is also the reason why he needs British Motor Group to have its own battery production capacity and now starts to invest in CATL.

In addition, the acquisition of shares of CATL by Tianhe Capital is also the need of Nanjing Automobile Group, which is wholly owned by them.

From this time on, China has also vigorously supported the production of its own brands of automobiles.

For example, automobile groups with joint ventures such as SAIC, FAW, and GAC have also begun to launch their own brands - the more familiar brands include SAIC MG, FAW Bestune, and GAC Trumpchi...

The same is true for Nanjing Automobile Group. In addition to joint ventures with foreign companies such as British Automobile Group and Iveco, they also launched a new brand independently developed by Nanjing Automobile Group this year - Kirin.

Of course, like many Chinese automobile companies at the beginning, the first model launched by Nanjing Kirin, BX1, is 70% similar to the Land Rover Shanhai launched by its joint venture...

This is normal. After all, the automobile industry in the United States, Japan and South Korea all started with "plagiarism" in the early days, and went through the process from plagiarism to absorption, and then to independent research and development.

Because China's automobile industry started later and is subject to many restrictions, it has just reached the stage of "paying tribute to the classics", but it will definitely go through these processes later.

As a tough SUV model, the BX1 of Nanjing Qilin uses an engine produced by Cosworth, a subsidiary of the British Automobile Group, in the Chinese factory. The overall performance is still very good among home SUVs, and the price is between 138,800 and 198,800, which can be said to be very cost-effective. In the second quarter of this year, this car became the top three in sales of domestic SUVs, which can be said to be a great success.

After the successful launch of the Qilin Automobile SUV model of Nanjing Automobile Group, they will also launch a sedan model next year. This sedan will be a compact electric car, which will use the power battery provided by CATL.

It is also because of the resources that Tianhe Capital can have that CATL will not have any objection to them buying 15% of their shares from ATL, but will welcome Tianhe Capital, a Chinese capital, to become their shareholder.

Of course, the investment in CATL is one aspect of Tianhe Capital's layout in the field of electric vehicles.

Immediately afterwards, Tianhe Capital announced that it would cooperate with Baidu to invest 50 million yuan to set up an intelligent driving research laboratory and launched the "Apollo" project to study intelligent driving solutions.

In the original time and space, Baidu began to form an unmanned driving team in 2013, established an autonomous driving department in 2015, and began to cooperate with BMW to conduct unmanned vehicle road experiments.

The addition of Tianhe Capital has brought Baidu's process a little earlier and started the development of related fields in China.

The British Automobile Group itself has an intelligent driving research project in London with the artificial intelligence laboratory invested by Barron, and has already achieved some research results, but research in this cutting-edge field naturally requires multi-party investment to ensure that there is a greater chance of success in the end.

And Barron knew that in his previous life, the results of Baidu's intelligent driving project were still very good.

...

Before the closing of the London Olympics, Barron returned to London from Colo.

Shortly after returning to England, Barron came to Chatsworth House again. During the time Barron went to Colo, Fan Bingbing brought their children Andy and Belle to London to watch the Olympics.

At this time, Andy and Belle were almost five and a half years old. They perfectly inherited the beauty of Fan Bingbing and Barron, and looked like a pair of jade beauties, very lovable.

At this time, Fan Bingbing's status and position did not care that her children would be made public. After all, she was now responsible for the decision-making of Tianhe Film and Television Investment. She had not appeared in film and television dramas for a long time and was basically in a state of retirement.

Of course, for her, there was no need to push her son and daughter to the front. There would naturally be many broadcast shots of the London Olympics, but she would not deliberately avoid it.

As for who the father of the child was...

I believe that even if the media had speculations and doubts, they would not report it. This is her confidence now.