Xpeng and the second era of Blackberry $BB
Xpeng Motors – or Xiaopeng Motors – $XPEV) is a Chinese car manufacturer founded in 2014 that is committed to the development and production of electric cars. What has given the company a lot of attention is the cooperation with Chinese business-2-business giant Alibaba. In a new round of funding in 2018, Alibaba’s Vice President Joseph Tsai joined Xpeng’s corporate board. Since 2018, the company has two production models in the form of a sedan and an SUV, where in 2020 it is doing research for new models.
After the realization of multiple experience & sales centers and delivery & service centers, Xpeng has also established itself in Mountain View, California. Here is the subsidiary XMotors.ai where it received a license to test self-driving cars by the California Department of Motor Vehicles in 2018. The license was revoked in February 2020 because Xpeng had not submitted a withdrawal report. In the meantime, in May 2019, Xpeng launched a car rental company that serves Guangzhou with its own vehicles.
Despite this withdrawal, the company collected two major contributions from investors for nearly $1 billion dollars. In July 2020, Xpeng raised $500 million dollars from Aspex, Coatue, Hillhouse Capital and Sequoia Capital China. Most recently, in August 2020, it received an additional $400 million dollars from the multinational companies Alibaba, Qatar Investment Authority and Mubadala of Abu Dhabi. As a result, Xpeng filed an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange this month following Li Auto.
Canadian company Blackberry – once a smartphone giant before the dominance of Apple and Samsung – has detected the development of Xpeng. As a result, both companies have announced that a collaboration is in the air. Blackberry is busy transitioning to deliver software for connected devices in the car of tomorrow. To do so, it has brought a large part of its activity to China. In August 2020, BlackBerry announced that it will power Xpeng’s Level 3 domain controller. The operating system is called QNX and has to compete with Android and Linux for the services to Chinese electric car manufacturers. The kernel of Xpeng’s domain controller is Nvidia’s Xavier cockpit chip for automated cars, making the majority of the software and hardware based on foreign innovative technology.
