Chinese carmaker Li Auto released on Thursday its first-quarter earnings results, posting slightly higher vehicle and gross margins while guiding second quarter sales to be between 123,000 and 128,000 units.
Vehicle margin slightly increased both sequentially and year over year to 19.8%. The company had reported a vehicle margin of 19.3% in the first quarter of last year and 19.7% between October and December.
In July, the company will launch its second fully electric model. Named i8, the SUV will follow last year’s release of Li Auto Mega, a 5.35-meter-long MPV.
Li Auto’s gross profit between January and March stood at 5.3 billion yuan ($732.9 million), 0.6% higher than a year ago.
However, when compared to the final quarter of last year, gross profit plunged 40.7%.
The company expects second quarter deliveries to range between 123,000 and 128,000 units, which would represent a growth of 13.3%—17.9%.
Despite expecting double-digit growth in deliveries, total revenue is expected to increase only between 2.5% to 6.7% — ranging from 32.5 billion yuan ($4.5 billion) and 33.8 billion yuan ($4.7 billion).
The chief financial officer Tie Li said in a statement that the carmaker “delivered solid results in the first quarter, achieving a 15.5% year-over-year increase in vehicle deliveries and total revenues of RMB25.9 billion during what is typically a seasonally slow period for auto sales.”
“Despite product iterations, our gross margin remained healthy at 20.5%, and net income reached RMB646.6 million, up 9.4% year-over-year, thanks to our disciplined cost management and growing economies of scale,” he added.
Earlier this month, the founder and CEO of Li Auto Li Xiang praised Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) software saying “the performance after FSD 13.0 is still very strong.”
Speaking at Li Auto’s in-house “AI Talk” series, Li said that based on real-world testing, the version of Tesla’s FSD being evaluated in China seems to be earlier than v12.5 — and does not reflect the U.S. automaker’s most advanced capabilities.
The executive noted that versions prior to 12.5 still rely on semi-rule-based algorithms, which may give an incomplete picture of Tesla’s AI progress. “What we can see is that Tesla’s fundamentals are very solid,” he added.
In 2024, the company delivered 500,508 vehicles.
