Byton CEO Daniel Kirchert at Guangzhou Motor Show 2019.
At the end of a year full of changes, Byton is ready to celebrate. The biggest news from the Chinese start-up in 2019 was when CEO and co-founder Carsten Breitfeld abruptly left the company, later citing undue influence from the Chinese government. When Breitfeld left, the other co-founder, Daniel Kichert, took over as CEO, and he’s who I ran into at the Guangzhou Motor Show in November raising a glass of champagne with some of his 1,600 employees. So I asked him what the group was celebrating there on the show floor.
“It’s a super important moment,” Kichert said. “This is our home base market, our biggest market and the first time we showed the product today. It’s a super important milestone for us. It’s special.”
The raised glasses were not meant to signal that the work is now done. Kichert said Byton has started pre-production of the M-Byte SUV in Nanjing, the first step towards “really serious production.” Byton is now moving to a series of production trials,
“The key is industrialization,” he said. “The first cars are already at a good level, but we have to get the quality right because we really don’t think we have a second chance. We have to really get it right. That is the main focus.”
It’s the main focus because Byton is about to step off of the auto show floor and into customer driveways for the first time in 2020.
“This moment is really important for us because we have a lot of fans here in China, nearly 30,000 reservations, but we didn’t want to release too much information before showing this car,” he said. “So now we will really start doing a lot of communication and prepare for market entry.”
One big part of this is the launch of Byton brand stores. Kichert said the company’s plans call for Byton to open stores in the ten biggest cities in China in the first quarter of 2020. Some, like in Shanghai, are owned by Byton itself, but it is also working on stores that it would operate with partners. “Around launch time next year we will have 40 to 50, and the whole plan is to have in China around 100 stores. So there’s a lot of work to do,” he said.
Byton M-Byte at 2019 Guangzhou Motor Show.
As he was speaking about the production launch of the M-Byte, Kichert returned to the idea that Byton will not get a second chance. This is why, for the first half of 2020, Byton is focusing is on getting the quality right, from the electric vehicle’s UI to its overall functionality.
“To build a new brand really relies on the early adopters’ word of mouth,” he said. “If they are not happy, it will be very difficult.”
