Schumpeter: My Car’s Sexier than Yours

熊比特：我的车比你的拉风

 

Detroit’s car firms try to show that anything Silicon Valley can do, they can do better

底特律的汽车公司想要证明，硅谷能做的任何事，它们都能做得更好

 

It is fashionable to say that the city of Detroit is on the up after decades of decline. Amid the derelict buildings there are signs of revival; art shops and trendy food trucks abound. But for a truer augury of the city’s possible future, consider the rock-bottom stockmarket valuations of Ford and General Motors (GM), Motor City’s two big domestic car firms. (A third, Chrysler, is owned by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, whose chairman is a director of The Economist’s parent company.) If you put the members of the S&P 500 index in order of their price-earnings ratios, Ford and GM are at the bottom, among the walking dead.

 

现在有一种说法很时兴，说底特律衰退了几十年后，又开始走上坡路了。一片废弃的建筑物中显现出了复兴的迹象，艺术品商店和新潮的流动餐车比比皆是。但要想更准确地占卜这座城市可能的未来，人们应该想想这座汽车之城的两大本土汽车公司福特和通用汽车那跌到谷底的市值。（另外还有一家车企克莱斯勒，由菲亚特克莱斯勒汽车公司[Fiat Chrysler Automobiles]拥有，该公司董事长是《经济学人》母公司的董事。）如果将标准普尔500指数的成员公司按市盈率排名，福特和通用汽车就会跟其他一些僵尸企业一样，排在末尾。

 

For their investors, creditors and 426,000 staff, about 18% of whom are in Detroit, it is a terrifying signal. A low price-earnings ratio is the stockmarket’s way of telling you that business as you know it is over. GM and Ford together made $18bn of underlying profit last year but have a market value of $98bn. That ratio implies that their profits will halve or worse, and quickly. Wall Street has got the hots for a younger crowd of firms that investors think will dominate the transport technologies of the 21st century; electric engines, ride-hailing, ride-sharing and driverless cars.

 

对于它们的投资人、债权人和42.6万名员工（约18%在底特律）来说，这是一个可怕的信号。市盈率低是股市在告诉人们，你所知道的这个行业已经玩完了。去年通用汽车和福特一共创造了180亿美元的基本利润，但它们的市值总共只有980亿美元。这一市盈率说明它们的利润会迅速折半甚至降至更低。华尔街已经迷恋上一帮更年轻的公司，投资者们认为这类公司将主导21世纪的交通技术：电动汽车、叫车服务、拼车服务，以及无人驾驶汽车。

 

Three Silicon Valley firms – Uber, Tesla and Waymo (Alphabet’s driverless-car unit) – are each reckoned to be worth more than GM or Ford. All lose money and bring in no more sales in a year than Ford or GM do in a fortnight. No matter. Expectations are sky high. Morgan Stanley, a bank, expects Waymo’s sales to exceed $200bn by 2030, making it roughly America’s fifth-largest firm. Not bad given it does not have any products for sale.

 

三家硅谷的公司——优步、特斯拉和Waymo（Alphabet的无人驾驶汽车公司）——每家都被认为比通用汽车和福特更值钱。它们都在亏损，一年的销售额也比不过福特或通用汽车两周的销售额。不过没关系。人们对它们的期望比天高。摩根士丹利预测，到2030年，Waymo的销售额将超过2000亿美元，差不多能成为美国第五大公司。这样的成绩相当不赖，尤其是考虑到它现在还没有任何产品可以出售。

 

For the people running GM and Ford it is hard to ignore such huge differences in valuation, even if they reflect bubbly thinking about Silicon Valley. Shareholders and directors are becoming restless, and talented staff demoralised. The pressure to act is intense. GM recently had to fend off an activist attack from a hedge fund. In May Ford fired its boss, Mark Fields, replacing him with Jim Hackett, whose experience as a car executive consists of 15 months running Ford’s tech incubator. Its chairman, Bill Ford, said new blood was needed to deal with technological change.

 

对于通用汽车和福特的经营者而言，如此巨大的估值差距难以视而不见，即便它反映出人们对硅谷的泡沫思维。股东和董事们开始焦躁不安，优秀员工士气低落。迫使经营者有所行动的压力是巨大的。通用最近先发制人，避免了一家对冲基金对其采取维权行动。5月，福特炒掉了老板马克·菲尔兹（Mark Fields），接替他的是吉姆·哈克特（Jim Hackett）。后者所具备的汽车公司高管经验便是在福特的科技孵化部门担任了15个月的负责人。福特的董事长比尔·福特（Bill Ford）称，应对科技挑战需要新鲜血液。

 

Investors are making two mistakes, the car firms argue. First, they underestimate how hard it is to mass-produce cars, and second, they discount the possibility that hidden within them are Detroit’s equivalent of a Tesla, an Uber or a Waymo. Certainly, when you see the view from Ford’s headquarters, of miles of woods, test tracks and factories owned by the company or by the Ford family, it is easy to believe that there might be some buried treasure there.

 

汽车公司认为投资者犯了两个错误。第一，他们低估了量产汽车的难度；第二，他们低估了这样的可能性：它们这些公司中隐藏着下一个特斯拉、优步或Waymo。当然，如果你从福特总部向外望去，看到那连绵数英里的森林、试车场，以及福特公司或福特家族拥有的工厂，你很容易相信那里可能埋着什么宝藏。

 

Take the point on mass production, first. Detroit’s experts sniff that Silicon Valley has no idea how to make millions of vehicles that adhere to the safety and reliability standards of the conventional car firms. Tesla produced the equivalent of 1% of GM’s vehicle volumes last year. One Detroit executive reckons it is 10,000 times harder to build an autonomous vehicle that works on real roads rather than on a Californian test track.

 

先来说说量产。底特律的专家们对硅谷不屑一顾，认为硅谷并不知道如何生产出数百万辆符合传统汽车公司的安全性及可靠性标准的汽车。特斯拉去年的产量仅相当于通用汽车的1%。一位底特律的高管认为，比起生产一辆在加州试车道上行驶的无人驾驶汽车，生产一辆能在实际道路上行驶的无人驾驶车要难一万倍。

 

Yet he is no Luddite, and expects a revolution. Electric vehicles will be mainstream by 2020, he says. Driverless cars will slash the cost-per-mile of travelling, especially if you count the time saved by freeing people from the hours they waste clutching steering wheels. Ride-sharing will mean that the utilisation rate of cars will go up and therefore that fewer vehicles are sold. But that could be offset by new revenue from services such as charging passengers for rides or selling data that is gathered about them.

 

当然，他不是个卢德分子，也预计会有一场革命。他说电动车将在2020年前成为主流。无人驾驶汽车将大幅降低单位里程的行驶成本，尤其是还帮人们省下了紧握方向盘而浪费的时间。拼车服务能够提高车辆的利用率，汽车销量因而会更少，但这可以由服务带来的新收入弥补，例如向乘客收取车费或出售所收集的乘客数据。

 

The car firms try hard to draw attention to the businesses they own that will benefit from these trends. GM has a 9% stake in Lyft (a rival to Uber that is gaining market share), and in 2016 bought Cruise, an autonomous-vehicle firm based in San Francisco, for $600m. GM’s subsidiary, OnStar, connects 7m drivers to various data services. Its electric-car model, the Chevrolet Bolt, is on the road. Ford owns Chariot, a “crowdsourced” shuttle service, and will have 13 models of electric car on the road by 2020. It is investing $1bn over the next five years in Argo, an artificial-intelligence firm that is developing software for autonomous vehicles.

 

汽车公司努力让人们关注它们拥有的、能从上述趋势中获利的业务。通用汽车持有Lyft（优步的对手，市场份额正在增加）9%的股份，并在2016年以6亿美元收购了旧金山的无人驾驶汽车公司Cruise。通用的子公司安吉星（OnStar）为700万司机提供各种数据服务。它的电动汽车雪佛莱Bolt已经上路。福特拥有一家“众包”班车服务公司Chariot，且在2020年之前将有13款电动汽车上路。未来五年，它将向一家为无人驾驶汽车开发软件的人工智能公司Argo投资10亿美元。

 

Investors do not seem to care. In the past few months they have begun to fret about a new risk, that American car sales may be at a cyclical peak. In previous downturns, profits have slumped. Both GM and Ford want to emphasise that their costs can be more easily cut than before the crisis in 2008-10, when GM went bust and Ford nearly did. They also want to show that they will not waste money abroad. In March GM sold its European arm to France’s PSA Group. Ford says that it is prepared to sell some emerging-market operations if they do not produce higher profits soon. But their price-earnings ratios have not budged.

 

投资者似乎并不在乎。过去几个月里他们开始担心一个新的风险：美国的汽车销售可能正在经历周期性高峰。在过去的低迷期，利润曾经暴跌。2008到2010年的金融危机期间，通用汽车破产，福特也几乎倒闭。但两家公司都想强调，与这场危机之前相比，如今它们削减成本要更容易。它们还想表明自己不会在海外浪费资金。3月，通用汽车把欧洲分部卖给了法国标致雪铁龙集团（PSA Group）。福特称，如果一些新兴市场业务不能尽快产生更高的利润，它已准备好将其出售。但两家公司的市盈率仍纹丝不动。

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