Bernstein raised its price target on Nio on Friday but kept its rating unchanged, leaving the firm the most cautious major voice on the stock even after a quarter it called a “clean beat.”
Analyst Eunice Lee lifted the target on the US-listed shares to $6.00 from $5.50, and on the Hong Kong-listed shares to HK$47.00 from HK$43.00, while maintaining a Market Perform rating.
The new US target implies upside of just about 7% from Thursday’s closing price of $5.60, the thinnest margin among the analysts who moved this week.
Lee credited the first quarter and the guidance that followed.
“Q1 clean beat, Q2 strong guide,” she wrote, pointing to a second straight quarter of non-GAAP profit.
The note nonetheless kept Bernstein’s long-standing valuation discount in place, leaving the firm bullish on Nio‘s operational momentum but unmoved on the stock.
A Five-Year Hold
The modest raise fits a pattern. Bernstein has never rated Nio a buy.
Lee has held a Market Perform rating since taking over coverage in 2021, through a stock decline of more than 90% and across roughly a dozen valuation updates.
Her target has swung with the business, from $7.50 in early 2024 down to $4.00 by mid-2025 and back to $6.00 now, but the rating has not budged.
The caution has repeatedly set her apart.
When Nio reported its second quarter of 2025, Lee raised her target but said she remained “yet to be convinced” on breakeven, even as several rival banks turned more bullish the same week.
She held the line again in March, reiterating Market Perform after Nio’s first-ever quarterly profit and flagging a sharp pullback in research and development spending as a risk to the company’s long-term competitiveness against rivals racing ahead on assisted-driving technology.
Lee values Nio on a forward EV/sales multiple of 0.5 times, a discount she has applied consistently and left unchanged in Friday’s note.
That multiple is the mechanism behind Bernstein’s persistent gap with the rest of the Street, which has assigned Nio richer valuations on the strength of its delivery growth and multi-brand expansion.
What the Numbers Showed
The figures behind the upgrade marked a turn in Nio‘s financials.
Revenue rose 112% year over year to 25.5 billion yuan, though it fell 26% from the seasonally stronger fourth quarter.
Deliveries reached a record 83,465 units for a first quarter, up 98% year over year, while down 33% sequentially.
Average selling price climbed 16% year over year and 8% sequentially to 273,000 yuan, which Lee attributed to a richer product mix led by the ES8.
The flagship SUV accounted for 54% of the mix in the quarter, up from 32% in the fourth quarter, with a starting price of 406,800 yuan.
Gross margin reached 19.0% and vehicle margin improved to 18.8% from 18.1% in the fourth quarter, both driven by the ES8’s higher contribution.
Nio swung to a net loss of 332 million yuan from a 283 million yuan profit in the fourth quarter, which Lee tied to lower sequential scale, though adjusted net profit stayed positive at 44 million yuan.
“We lifted our price target on the back of stronger sales volume momentum for the newer launches, such as the ES8,” Lee wrote.
The ES8 at the Center
The ES8 is the thread running through Bernstein’s note, the single model Lee credits for the beat across revenue, mix and margin.
The third-generation SUV has led Nio‘s premium push since deliveries began in late September, reaching its 100,000th delivery in 215 days.
It has ranked first in China’s segment for vehicles priced above 400,000 yuan for five consecutive months, regardless of powertrain.
The model’s rising share of the sales mix is what lifted the average selling price and, with it, the vehicle margin that Lee flagged as the quarter’s clearest improvement.
Nio is set to follow it with the ES9, an executive flagship that launches and begins deliveries on May 27, and a five-seat version of the ES8 later in the year.
Guidance Underpinned the Raise
Lee’s reference to a “strong guide” pointed to second-quarter targets well above the quarter just reported.
Nio guided deliveries to between 110,000 and 115,000 vehicles, up 52.7% to 59.6% year over year, and revenue of 32.78 billion to 34.44 billion yuan, up 72.4% to 81.2%
The company delivered 29,356 vehicles in April, up 22.8% year over year, the first month of a quarter management expects to ramp steeply as new models reach the market.
The Bullish Crowd
Bernstein’s restraint stood out in a week of upgrades.
Citi raised its target to $8.20 while keeping a Buy rating, and CMB International upgraded the stock to Buy with a $7.00 target, its first such call in roughly three years.
Bank of America, which held Neutral, nudged its target to $6.80, wary of margin pressure from rising raw-material costs.
Bernstein’s $6.00 sits at the bottom of that group, paired with the only rating that signals neither conviction nor concern.
A Slide That Defied the Upgrades
The analyst optimism did little for the stock.
Nio‘s US-listed shares were trading 5.54% lower at $5.29 in Friday’s pre-market session, with the Hong Kong-listed shares closing 0.4% lower at HK$42.78.
The decline owed partly to a broad sell-off in US-listed Chinese stocks, after Beijing escalated a crackdown on the offshore brokers that channel mainland money into those shares.
Nio had also reversed sharply during Thursday’s earnings call after management warned of the same cost inflation that has kept Bernstein on the sidelines for nearly five years.
