Qixiang brand two-wheeled bicycles mainly focus on concepts such as youth, technology, and fashion, and are not just a means of transportation.
Because no one, not even the rich, would buy a two-wheeled car of this era as a means of transportation. After this thing was launched on the market, the price reached 2,600 Tangyuan.
This thing is, to put it bluntly, a luxury accessory.
If you don't make some false promises to get those rich people to pay, then basically don't expect to be able to sell.
The Xihu brand cars of Hangzhou Power Machinery Company and the Zhongyuanpai cars of Zhongyuan Automobile Company all focus on the concepts of luxury, comfort, and advanced products, and their potential customers are all the super rich.
It is impossible to compete with these two companies in the luxury car market. Even Zhongyuan Automobile is now in trouble because they have been unable to develop a powerful gasoline engine that can be mass-produced.
So Li Yubo's plan is very simple, that is, to target young rich people, or to be more precise, the children of rich people.
These people are young, rich, and pursue fashion and excitement.
On a daily basis, they would also ride some kind of luxury carriage, but they would also often ride top-notch Jurong horses through the city, or simply ride those two-wheeled high-speed carriages.
The customers that Li Yubo initially targeted were just such a group of people.
After officially withdrawing from the market, the market response was much better than Li Yubo's expected response. As soon as it was launched and accepted for pre-order, more than 50 orders have been received.
At first glance, this order quantity may seem small, but this is a car that sells for more than 2,000 Tang Yuan, and the order value of fifty cars is already more than 100,000 Tang Yuan.
Although the number of fifty vehicles is much lower than the order of more than two thousand vehicles of Hangzhou Power Machinery Company, he believes that if he continues to work hard, the market will get bigger and bigger.
Sure enough, within a month, orders for dozens of vehicles were received one after another, and the total order number exceeded one hundred vehicles.
At this time, Li Yubo felt relieved.
If this trend continues, orders from the civilian market will be larger and more profitable than those from the military market.
Although the military has successively placed orders for 300 vehicles, these orders are to some extent one-time orders, and the military will not place a large-scale second order in a short period of time.
However, the private market has been developing and will become bigger and bigger.
When Li Yubo developed a two-wheeled gasoline car and officially launched it on the market, it also meant that there were already two cars using gasoline as dye in the Tang Empire.
This situation has also attracted the attention of several major domestic oil companies.
These cars burn gasoline, which is also a product refined from petroleum.
Although the overall market size of gasoline is unlikely to be too large so far, or even in the next few years, it represents a future development direction after all.
For this reason, many oil companies have noticed this.
The one that deserves the most attention should belong to Imperial Oil Company.
Currently, there are eight oil companies in the Datang Empire. These eight oil companies are companies that have obtained all complete petroleum-related industry licenses. They own oil fields, refineries, and sales channels.
However, there are differences in development. In the past two years, although Imperial Oil's business has also grown very rapidly, it is still lagging behind compared to other peers.
The main business of current oil companies is to refine kerosene and sell it.
At present, the kerosene market in the empire is very huge, and the potential is also very large.
But this potential can only be said to belong to the rural market, because the urban market has basically been developed. In order to compete for the kerosene market, major oil companies have reduced prices many times to compete.
Since last year, the rural kerosene market has become the main driving force for market growth.
However, Imperial Oil Company was relatively late in establishing its presence in the rural market, and this late step caused them to lag behind in the rural market.
In the empire's huge rural kerosene market, Imperial Oil Company could not even occupy five percentage points, which directly affected their market growth.
It is already very difficult to continue to expand the rural market, and the investment will be very huge, which makes the senior management of Imperial Oil Company quite helpless.
The emergence of current cars has opened their eyes to a brand new market.
"According to data analysis by our company planning department, in the next five years, the selling price of cars may drop to 50% or even 130% below the current level, which means that the market for cars will further increase."
"Not only the private market, but more importantly the industrial market and heavy machinery field!"
"Although there are no various types of construction machinery powered by gasoline engines yet, Songjiang Heavy Machinery Company is already developing tractors powered by gasoline engines, and this product has been widely favored by all parties. Once the development is successful, potential intentions
There are at least tens of thousands of units on order!”
"And in other engineering fields, the market for gasoline engines will also be very huge!"
"Even the Navy has begun research on warships powered by gasoline engines!"
"Therefore, the Planning Department infers that the gasoline market will show explosive growth within five years. Although the overall scale is still relatively small, in ten or twenty years the gasoline market will grow to exceed the kerosene market!"
"In the previous rural kerosene market, our company was already one step behind others. This time we must not lag behind others. We even have to go one step further and plan ahead!"
"As long as we plan ahead, in five or ten years, the gasoline market will become our company's biggest business growth point!"
At the internal high-level meeting of Imperial Oil Company, the managers of Imperial Oil Company were unwilling to give up their votes and were already thinking hard about making a big move.
Soon, they set up a special gasoline research laboratory to study gasoline-related technologies, including how to refine higher-quality gasoline, how to improve the conversion rate of petroleum into gasoline, and other related technologies.
At the same time, they also directly found the only domestic automobile companies, Hangzhou Power Machinery Company, Zhongyuan Automobile Company, Songjiang Heavy Machinery Company, Wuchang Qixiang Automobile Company, etc.
Strategically cooperate with them to launch more convenient gasoline purchasing services for their respective automobile customers.
And began to establish gas stations in many cities to meet the needs of car users.
Other oil companies have noticed Imperial Oil's radical move, and most of them are following up, but the intensity of follow-up is still not as great.