First Financial News today received information from insiders, Faraday has confirmed the future has received a financing from the Hong Kong consortium, the financing scale of more than 1 billion US dollars, but the specific amount has not been announced.In addition, Jia Yueting is still FF's main contributor and Core founder.
After this financing, FF will enter the second phase of strategy - start mass production plan.First to achieve mass production is the FF91 models, which is FF is currently the only one released high-end production cars. The above insider also First Financial to tell: '$ 1000000000 to ensure that the company will be the first batch of production cars brought to the market in the United States and China, both sales, taking into account FF in China and the United States have set up factories.
According to the exclusive news of First Financial News, Nick Sampson, vice president of engineering and R & D for FF, departed China to China recently. He will go to Hong Kong and several other Chinese cities, but no specific cities will be disclosed.
Sampson's visit to China is likely to represent Jia Yunting on the progress of production in China, but the specific itinerary is currently kept in secrecy.According to "Securities Times" reported on December 25, the music as the car at a general meeting held recently Announced that it has incorporated the music car into FF, which means that FF is able to use China's mass production program with the music car factory in Deqing, Zhejiang.
Although both FF and LeTV vehicles are invested in Jiayue Ting, the two companies are independent of each other in terms of capital and only share resources such as technology platforms. Former FF FF revealed that FF is more like a subsidiary of LeEco and still undertakes LeSEE's mission was to develop technology, but with the departure of Nike, head of LeTV, earlier this year, LeTV disappeared for a long time, and LeTV's factory in Deqing, Zhejiang Province was also overrun.
In the United States, FF mass production plan was also stranded once this year on July 11, FF announced a major strategic adjustment, the closure of previously invested $ 1 billion factory in Nevada, said it will move to the new site.After that on August 5, FF officially unveiled its FF 91 high-end facility in Hanford, Calif. However, the new facility did not achieve any substantial progress in production for the first four months of its existence, with media reports earlier this month saying that Faraday's future in California There is only one piece of equipment in operation in the factory, and only one person is in charge. The reason that the production plan is shelved is the lack of money.
To this end, Jia Yueting the biggest goal this year is to FF as soon as possible to melt the funds to change the status quo, to maintain the company's production and operation of the normal operation. Nick Sampson to the first financial reporter said: 'the next few years the global auto market will experience upside down FF is currently the industry's foremost player and is able to capitalize on these opportunities as quickly as possible. '
According to Sampson, FF already has its own Variable Platform Manufacturing Architecture (VPA), which enables the development of different types of vehicles based on one platform, which will greatly save on investment costs.
According to Jiayue Ting's previous plan, FF annual vehicle production targets for different models will reach 150,000.According to the investment budget set by the FF finance team, if you want to achieve this production target, will require at least 3 billion US dollars in investment.This is from the current 10 Hundreds of millions of dollars of investment still go a long way.
However, to get financing can help FF to alleviate the urgent needs of the current FF has been debt-relief, investment in the company by the private company Jia Yunting suspended in mid-2016, promised in early 2017 billion dollar convertible bonds business so far only 4 This means that if FF can not get financing by the end of this year, the debt will become FF's debt payable.
FF Staff told the media about the turmoil in the company's financial position, saying the company's finance was mainly managed by Jia Yunting and another Chinese vice president, Deng Chaoying, who some employees claim have more power than any CFO.
CBI's access to CV Deng Chaoying's resume on LinkedIn shows her current position is executive vice president of FF after she was a filmmaker with no background in the automotive industry.FR CFO Stefan Krause has been Announced his resignation in October of this year.It is learned that Krause had asked FF to expel Deng Chaoying before leaving his job.
Krause, who has left his job for less than two months now has an independent portal to start a new company Krause confirmed to First Financial News that he is still currently in Los Angeles and has signed up for an electric car company called 'EVELOZCity' to develop a mobile car networking solution Program.