Chinese electric carmaker and Tesla’s rival Xpeng Motors has got a new round of investment from the government of the southern Chinese province whose name it carries – Guangdong. The automaker said it had reached a “strategic cooperation agreement” with the Guangdong provincial government for an RMB 500 million investment in its China subsidiary.
The 500 million yuan ($76.9 million) funding from Guangdong Yuecai Investment Holdings Co., the province’s investment arm, will be used to “accelerate the company’s business expansion,” Xpeng said in a statement.
It is noteworthy that Xpeng Motors is headquartered in Guangzhou, the capital of the Guangdong province. The region has been putting a focus on new energy vehicles and autonomous driving. Warren Buffett-backed electric carmaker BYD is based in Shenzhen, the tech powerhouse in Guangdong. And autonomous driving start-ups such as Pony.ai, WeRide and AutoX are all based in the province.
The investment will help to accelerate the “automobile industry’s strategic transition in Guangdong,” Xpeng said in a press release.
According to He Xiaopeng, CEO and chairman of Xpeng Motors, the company’s next-generation self-driving software and hardware systems will be greatly upgraded to offer better capabilities in assembly of control domain, computing power and high-precision positioning, etc.
Xpeng Motors said it plans to launch the world’s first mass-produced intelligent car equipped with LiDAR. The company believes, for the present, LiDAR can efficiently improve a car’s high-precision recognition performance and support the application of NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot) function in urban low-speed scenarios.
Since its $1.5 billion U.S. initial public offering in August, Xpeng has continued to raise money to fuel its growth, ramp up production, and battle against domestic rivals as well as Tesla. In September, Xpeng received 4 billion yuan in financing from an arm of the Guangzhou government. In January, the company secured a credit line of 12.8 billion yuan from major state-owned banks.
The company has been focusing on building its manufacturing base with two wholly-owned factories — one in Zhaoqing and another currently under construction in Guangzhou. After a big surge in 2020, Xpeng shares are under pressure this year and down about 18% year-to-date.
