BlackRock cut its position in Chinese EV maker Nio by 11.8% during the second quarter, selling 1.2 million shares to end the period with 9,461,793 shares, its latest 13F filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed.
The world’s largest asset manager finished the second quarter with $15.3 trillion in assets under management. Its position in Nio was valued at $47.9 million as of June 30.
Based on Friday’s closing price, the position was worth approximately $44.8 million.
The reduction followed two consecutive quarters of aggressive accumulation.
BlackRock nearly doubled its Nio holding in the first quarter — adding 5.15 million shares for a 92.2% increase — after raising the position by 153.0% in the final three months of 2025.
Combined, the two quarters increased the stake to nearly five times its Q3 2025 level. The second quarter selling reverses part of that buildup.
Still, it leaves BlackRock’s holdings well above the sub-4-million range where the position sat for most of 2025.
Nio’s Stock Tumble
Nio‘s US-listed share price moved through a wide range across the first two quarters of 2026.
Shares closed at $6.03 on March 31, the final trading day of the first quarter, after a strong start to the year driven by record deliveries and expectations around the ES9 launch.
BlackRock’s Q1 accumulation coincided with a period of relative optimism around the company’s path to full-year profitability.
Nio‘s stock continued climbing into mid-April, reaching a high of $7.00 on April 17.
However, shares retreated steadily from then on.
By June 30, the stock had fallen to $5.06 — a 27.7% decline from the April peak and a 16.1% drop from the March 31 close.
From mid-June onward, Nio‘s US-listed shares traded in a compressed range of around $4.70 to $5.00, weighed down by broader market weakness in US-listed Chinese equities.
A Volatile 5-Year Stake
BlackRock’s Nio holding has also gone through wide swings since 2022.
From Q1 2022 through Q2 2024, the asset manager maintained a large and remarkably stable position in the 60-to-67-million-share range.
Holdings peaked at 66.8 million shares in Q2 2023, when the position’s disclosed value exceeded $500 million.
In Q3 2024, BlackRock executed one of the sharpest single-quarter reductions in its Nio history, cutting 91.6% of its stake — from 60.5 million shares to 5.1 million — in a move that removed the firm as one of the stock’s anchor institutional holders.
Further selling followed in Q4 2024, when BlackRock offloaded another 3.0 million shares to close the year with nearly 2.1 million.
The position bottomed at 2.2 million shares in Q3 2025 before the Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 buildup brought holdings back above 10 million for the first time in nearly two years.
The current 9.5 million shares represent around 15% of BlackRock’s pre-drawdown average holding — a fraction of the historical peak, but a significant recovery from the 2024-2025 trough.
Across 18 quarters since early 2022, BlackRock has been a net seller of Nio shares in 11 of them.
Diverging EV Bets
BlackRock’s Q2 2026 filing shows a mixed approach to the EV sector, with the firm reducing exposure to Chinese-listed names while expanding positions in US-traded EV makers.
Beyond Nio, BlackRock cut its stake in XPeng by 23.5% during the quarter, lowering its position to 2.2 million shares — a stake valued at $29.5 million at quarter-end.
On the US side, BlackRock moved in the opposite direction.
The firm nearly doubled its position in Lucid Motors to 12 million shares, extending a buying streak that has now run for seven consecutive quarters.
BlackRock’s Lucid holdings are now at its highest level since the company went public through a SPAC merger in 2021, on a split-adjusted basis.
The firm also raised its Rivian stake to a record 56.4 million shares.
The accumulation coincides with Rivian‘s ramp of its R2 mid-size SUV, which began deliveries in late June from the company’s Normal, Illinois plant.
The pattern — trimming Chinese EV exposure while adding to domestic names — echoes the approach BlackRock took in Q4 2024, when the firm sold both Nio and XPeng shares while increasing Rivian and Lucid holdings in the same period.
The asset manager is also the second largest institutional shareholder in Tesla, in which it held 214 million shares as of the end of the second quarter — currently worth over $70.3 billion.
