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On the evening of September 21, Dongfeng Honda released a brand-new new energy vehicle brand "Lingxi", the first model "Lingxi L" concept car synchronous global debut, the new car will be launched in mass production next year.

At the press conference, Dongfeng Honda released a brand-new LOGO logo for Lingxi brand. The logo of the new brand consists of three polygons, and the whole LOGO presents an upward sprint posture. According to the official, the design inspiration of the brand-new brand logo comes from "flying bird disease," based on the concept of polyhedral appearance design, adopting the three-wing front face modeling design, the visual effect appears particularly young, the overall recognition is also OK.

It is understood that the products of "Lingxi" will be produced based on the brand-new pure electric platform, and the product positioning, target users and market pricing are obviously different from e:NS pure electric brand. "Lingxi L" is the brand's first model, the car positioning sedan model, but Dongfeng Honda did not disclose more details about the new car at this conference, only explained the new car styling design concept content. From the concept model design point of view, the new car head vertical and horizontal two headlight belt design is quite "avant-garde", and the rear also uses a very long through-type taillight, the car is expected to target young people. Dongfeng Honda said the car was "dominated by young people and designed for young people" and was Dongfeng Honda's first new energy concept car designed by a young team.

In fact, Dongfeng Honda has been relatively aggressive in its goal of electrification. On July 16, Dongfeng Honda announced in a high-profile manner that Dongfeng Honda will launch its brand-new independent pure electric brand in the second half of this year. The electric proportion will reach more than 50% before 2025. After 2027, no new fuel vehicles will be launched. More than 10 pure electric vehicles will be launched accumulatively before 2030.

However, despite this, Dongfeng Honda inevitably fell into the sales decline dilemma.

According to the data, the annual production and sales scale of Dongfeng Honda jumped from 300,000 vehicles to 700,000 vehicles during 2015-2017. Among them, the sales volume in 2017 is 727,000 vehicles; the accumulated terminal sales volume in 2020 is 820,400 vehicles, up 104.0% year-on-year, setting the highest annual sales record, but since then the sales volume has been falling continuously. Influenced by multiple adverse factors such as unstable supply chain, lack of core and electricity, Dongfeng Honda sold only 793,300 vehicles annually in 2021. Entering 2022, with the transformation of automobile market development, mainstream joint venture automobile enterprises as a whole encountered sales growth pressure, Dongfeng Honda is no exception, the annual sales volume continued to decline to 652,400 vehicles.

According to the official website, Dongfeng Honda currently sells 8 fuel models, 1 hybrid model and 2 new energy models, including 1 plug-in hybrid model and 1 pure tram model. "In April 2022, Dongfeng Honda e: NS1 went on the market, and the new car was positioned as a small pure electric SUV. At that time, the price range after subsidy was 175,000 - 218,000 yuan." However, the car market sales performance after the launch is very general, January to August this year, Dongfeng Honda e: NS1 cumulative sales of 3635 vehicles.

In other words, under the general trend that new energy vehicles gradually become the mainstream of the market, Dongfeng Honda's main sales source still depends on fuel vehicles, while the sales volume of new energy vehicles is not outstanding, which also leads to further decline of Dongfeng Honda sales volume. Data show that from January to August this year, Dongfeng Honda accumulated sales of 340,900 vehicles, a year-on-year decline of 27.16%, among which Honda CR-V, Civic, Yingshi sent the top three models, cumulative sales of 110,600, 98,000 and 32,300 respectively.

Of course, Dongfeng Honda isn't the only joint-venture brand in China to see sales decline. Under the background of shrinking fuel vehicle market, the market share of many Japanese automobile enterprises in China continues to decline. Data show that the market share of Japanese cars in China in 2020 is 24.1%, but by the first half of this year it has fallen to 17.6%, down 6.5%. As for the reasons for the decline in market share in China, in addition to the sharp contraction of domestic traditional fuel vehicle market share factors, the main reason is that the joint venture Japanese brand in the new energy vehicle products slow progress.

"The decline in sales of fuel vehicles and the slow transformation of electrification" are the problems faced by many joint venture automobile enterprises at present, and they are also the problems that Dongfeng Honda urgently needs to solve at present. With the release of this brand-new brand of Dongfeng Honda, in the field of new energy, Dongfeng Honda will rely on the strong electric intelligent hybrid technology brand, e:NS electric brand and Lingxi new energy automobile brand as the core, and carry out layout around the three new energy technology routes of pure electric (EV), hybrid (HEV) and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) to build an electric product camp covering all levels of market segments.

Dongfeng Honda said it expects the proportion of Dongfeng Honda electric products to exceed 50% by 2025, with more than 10 pure electric models launched by 2030. In addition, in order to promote the electric transformation as soon as possible, Dongfeng Honda's fourth factory, which is also Honda's first new energy benchmark factory in the world, Dongfeng Honda New Energy Factory will be officially put into operation in 2024. It should be noted that the transformation speed of joint venture automobile enterprises has been obviously slow at present. At present, Dongfeng Honda is selling only Honda e: NS1 model and sales performance is not good, while the next positioning medium-sized pure electric SUV pure electric car e: NS2 and this latest release of Lingxi L will not be available until 2024, in this context, Dongfeng Honda wants to rely on electric vehicles to reverse sales is not small.

At present, there are only about three years left before Dongfeng Honda bans the launch of new fuel vehicles. As the first mainstream joint venture brand to launch independent new energy brands, Dongfeng Honda will be able to regain the lost market share after launching the brand-new new energy brand "Lingxi".

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