AutoBeta(AutoBeta.net)05/15 Report--

A piece of news brought the long-silent Aichi car back to the public eye. According to foreign media reports, Hudson acquired Company I (Hudson Acquisition l Corp.) on May 14, New York time. Announced that it has signed a business merger agreement with Aiways Automobile Europe GmbH, an European company that will provide electric vehicles for the European market. According to the report, shareholders of Aichi Europe will receive newly issued HUDA common shares with a total amount of about $400m, and the deal will be completed by the end of this year.

Data show that Aichi Automobile was founded in 2017 and is one of the first new power car companies in China to achieve mass production and delivery. It was founded by Fu Qiang, which once held important positions in FAW-Volkswagen, SAIC Volkswagen, Beijing Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and other car companies. Headquartered in Shanghai Changyang Valley Creative Industrial Park, the production base is located in Shangrao City, Jiangxi Province.

As one of the early-established new car-building brands in China, Aichi has not started low, but since 2023, the operating situation of Aichi has been not optimistic and full of negative news, successively exposed financial crisis, arrears of employees' wages, employees have to pay social security, headquarters office arrears to return rent, factory shutdown, bankruptcy and other negative information. In November 2023, Anji Automotive Logistics (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. applied for bankruptcy liquidation with the Shanghai No. 3 Intermediate people's Court on the grounds that Aichi Automobile (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. was unable to repay its due debts and obviously lacked solvency.

It should be noted that, compared with other new car-building forces in China, the focus of Aichi's development is not at home, but on overseas markets. Aichi Automobile is one of the earliest new energy car companies in China to lay out overseas markets. Between 2017 and 2020, Aichi set up an electric sports car research and development center and factory in Germany, as well as an overseas division and an European sales company in Munich, but its delivery performance in overseas markets was poor. The industry believes that the more critical reason why Aichi is unable to open the market is that its product rectangle is very single and the recognition is not high. Up to now, Aichi has two models: Aichi U5 and Aichi U6.

Tianyan check shows that since its establishment, Aichi has received a total of nine rounds of financing, and there is no lack of well-known investors, such as Ningde Times, DiDi, Tencent Investment, and so on. According to the publicly disclosed capital quota, the total financing has reached nearly 10 billion yuan. But even in this situation, the problem of capital chain is still an insurmountable problem for Aichi cars. With the increasingly fierce market competition brought about by the price war and the frequent problems of the capital chain caused by poor financing, they have not yet obtained the hematopoietic capacity, and the new power car companies with insufficient product power are facing elimination.

At present, it is still full of uncertainty about how Aiqi will develop in the future. According to domestic media reports, Aichi has no plans to stay in the Chinese market. The company already has an European headquarters in Germany, and its future sales will focus on Germany. But as of press time, Aichi did not respond to the news.

Domestic retail data show that the cumulative sales of Aichi cars are 856 in 2022, 29, 26, 37 and 19 respectively from January to April in 2023, and 111 vehicles.

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