On the evening of March 9, Ideal Auto announced that the company’s board of directors and remuneration committee had approved a CEO option incentive plan. It plans to issue up to approximately 108.6 million Class B common shares to grant the company’s board of directors and CEO Li Xiang.

          According to the 2021 equity incentive plan, Li Xiang was granted the option to purchase 108.6 million Class B common shares of Ideal Auto. The exercise price of the option is US$14.63 per share, or US$29.26 per American Depositary Share (ADS). This price is 26.8% higher than the closing price of Ideal Auto in the US stock market today.

          In this regard, Ideal Auto officially stated that the goal setting of the CEO option incentive plan is consistent with the company's long-term strategy and shareholders' interests, which will help ensure that Li Xiang himself can continue to lead Ideal Auto to become an industry-leading smart electric vehicle company in the next 10 years.

According to Future Auto Daily (ID: auto-time), Ideal Auto has launched an equity incentive plan before, but the current equity incentive plan only covers other executives and employees, and the CEO does not participate in it.

           In fact, the "performance-to-betting plan" for CEOs is no stranger. As early as 2018, Tesla awarded CEO Elon Musk a similar long-term performance award.

           In Musk's performance incentive plan, for 10 years from January 1, 2019, Musk has no salary or bonus, and can only receive option rewards linked to the market value of Tesla's stock and company performance.

          The premise of unlocking these rewards is to lead the company to increase the stock price by 12 times. According to the standard of 6-month circulating market value, Musk’s option rewards are also divided into 12 progressive goals. If all compensation plan goals are met, Musk will receive more than $50 billion in benefits, which is also the largest executive compensation incentive plan in the history of the United States. In 2020, Musk has unlocked 4 consecutive equity incentives.

          In February of this year, Musk also said that not only the management, Tesla provides stock options to all employees as part of its compensation package.

         Unlike Tesla, which is based on market value conditions and additional revenue and other goals, the incentive plan for the ideal car this time depends entirely on the realization of the delivery goal.

         According to the plan, the acquisition of options will be divided into 6 parts, each of which will be 18,092,900 shares. When the total number of vehicles delivered by Ideal Car in 12 consecutive months exceeds 500,000, Li Xiang will unlock the first batch of options; when the total number of vehicles delivered by Ideal Car in 12 consecutive months exceeds 1 million, 1.5 million, At 2 million, 2.5 million and 3 million vehicles, Li Xiang will unlock the next five batches of options.

          According to Ideal Auto's 2020 financial report, Ideal Auto delivered a total of 14,663 Ideal ONEs in Q4 of 2020, an increase of 67.0% from the previous month, and the total delivery volume in 2020 was 32624. Since Ideal ONE officially started delivery on December 4, 2019, Ideal Car completed the first delivery of 40,000 units in 14.5 months.

        Although the Ideal ONE is already a hot model, it is not easy to achieve the above-mentioned growth target of over 10 times the order of magnitude for the ideal that currently only has the Ideal ONE model on sale.

         According to data from the China Automobile Association, in 2020, the domestic new energy vehicle sales champions and runners-up are Tesla Model 3 and Wuling Hongguang MINI EV, with sales of 137,500 and 112,800 vehicles respectively. In terms of the current annual sales of the ideal ONE, there is still a long way to go.

           In the opinion of an industry insider, the desire to increase sales to hundreds of thousands of vehicles means that the ideal car has to launch more models to lay out the market and be able to create more explosive models.

           According to the plan, Ideal Motors will launch a facelifted model of Ideal ONE this year. Beginning in 2022, Ideal will maintain the rhythm of releasing at least two new cars every year, and the products will cover the price range of 150,000 to 500,000 yuan.