AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)03/23 Report--

Today, Hyundai officially announced a personnel change, appointing Xiang Dongping, former chief marketing officer of Skyline Motor, as Vice President of Hyundai Motor Group (China), deputy general manager and sales minister of Hyundai in Beijing. According to Beijing Hyundai, Xiang Dongping will be in charge of the brand's marketing and marketing network, and will take office on March 23.

In fact, as early as the end of February this year, Skyline issued a personnel change announcement, announcing that the former director and chief marketing officer (CMO) of Skyline will leave Skyline for personal reasons and appoint Chen Min as the new CMO of Skyline, and the two have completed the handover.

As for the reasons for Xiang Dongping's departure from Skyline Motor, it was thought that he would join Beijing Hyundai or WEY brand, because both of them are in the transformation of brand marketing, but the details have not been announced. Hyundai Motor officially announced today, which also means that Dongping finally chose Hyundai Automobile.

According to public data, Xiang Dongping has held important positions in Volkswagen, Skoda, Volvo and Skyline Automobile, a new force in car building, since 1998. And served as the senior director of SAIC Volkswagen and Shanghai Volkswagen Skoda brand from 2010 to 2015, promoting the annual sales growth of Volkswagen brand to 1.5 million. After that, he joined Skyline Motor for a year, helping to build the Skyline brand from 0 to 1. It can be seen that Xiang Dongping has rich experience in marketing in the automotive industry.

However, as soon as the news of the departure of the first chief marketing officer of Skyline Motors came out, the smooth listing and delivery of Skyline ME7 has become the focus of attention of the outside world. Due to the first medium-and large-scale SUV originally scheduled to be delivered in the first quarter of this year, the new car has not yet been delivered due to the epidemic. While this is at the critical moment of listing, Skyline Motor has been exposed the news of personnel transfer, which is undoubtedly disadvantageous to Skyline Motor.

Moreover, Skyline is currently entering the B round of financing, although it will not have much impact on enterprise development in the long run, but in the short term, it is unlikely that it will not have any impact on Skyline auto financing. It is understood that in April last year, Skyline announced the completion of a total of more than 2 billion yuan of A-round financing, so far, Skyline has raised a total of more than 6.5 billion yuan.

Skyline, which was officially established in 2015, currently only owns the ME7, a medium-and large-scale luxury electric SUV. The new car has started pre-sale at the 2019 Shanghai Auto Show and was originally scheduled to launch in September and December of the same year, but it was not until December last year that ME7 went offline at the Skyline Automobile Intelligence Factory.

Tianji ME7 is its first medium-and large-scale SUV, with a pre-price of 366800-381800 yuan, equipped with a permanent magnet synchronous motor provided by Bosch, maximum power 170kW, maximum torque 330N ·m. In terms of batteries, ME7 uses 77kWh soft package cells from Wanxiang Group with a range of 530km.

As for Beijing Hyundai, which has been in the doldrums for many years in China, it really needs more advantageous product planning, brand communication strategy and marketing network.

After all, Beijing Hyundai has seen a sharp decline in sales since 2017. Until 2019, Hyundai's sales in China were still falling sharply to 716000 vehicles, down 9.4% from a year earlier, well below the official annual sales target of 900000 vehicles set at the beginning of 2019, or even expanding.

Some analysts believe that since the domestic independent brands rely on the continuous rise of the SUV market, the prices of luxury brands have fallen, and Korean brands have completely lost their cost-effective advantage. As for the addition of Dongping, I do not know whether it can help Beijing realize the transformation of modern times and spread it again.

It is worth mentioning that joining Beijing Hyundai to Dongping is the second non-national personnel of Hyundai to hold an important position after Li Feng became vice president of Hyundai Motor Group (China) and general manager of Dongfeng Yueda Kia.

Personnel change must be one of the plans made by enterprises to achieve change, but for the current uncertain trend of the overall automobile industry, it is even more difficult to realize the transformation of car companies that were originally at a disadvantage. At the same time, the real impact on the sales of car companies is not only marketing and strategy, but also the product quality and the car companies themselves.

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