The owner of a Chinese financial outlet has filed a reputation claim against Nio Inc., objecting to the wording the EV maker used when it announced winning a defamation case against that same operator in early July.
Guangzhou Whale Plus Network Technology Co., which runs the account Jinjiao Caijing, submitted the filing on Monday, according to a post by founder Lu Hua and a report by Chinese media trade outlet Media Insight.
The claim seeks an order to halt the alleged infringement, a public apology, 50,000 yuan in damages and costs.
At issue is a single verb.
Nio‘s July 3 bulletin said Whale Plus had concocted — 炮制 — multiple items of content inconsistent with the automaker’s operating data and financial position. A first-instance court found the conduct infringing.
The expression implies deliberate invention rather than error, a distinction the operator says the ruling did not support.
Three Arguments
Whale Plus contends that characterisation exceeds what the court found, according to the account of the complaint published by Media Insight.
The first-instance ruling turned on a failure to verify third-party data and on insufficiently rigorous citation, the operator says, not on fabrication.
Sourcing forms the second argument. The Nio figures used in the original coverage came from The Paper, Yicai and the Wind terminal, the operator says, and were compiled from publicly available information.
Timing forms the third. An appeal has been lodged and no second-instance hearing has been held, leaving the judgment without legal effect.
Publicising an unfinished case compounded the harm, on the operator’s account, because the bulletin spread across Chinese platforms after posting and now surfaces in searches against the company name.
What Isn’t Established
Lu posted that the case had been accepted.
The filing notice he published alongside that claim describes the dispute being referred first to a local comprehensive social governance centre under Supreme People’s Court guidance on multi-channel dispute resolution.
Referral of that kind is a pre-litigation mediation step in Guangdong practice, distinct from formal docketing. A filing can sit at that stage without a case being accepted for hearing.
Nio had not addressed the filing on its Legal-dedicated Weibo account as of late Tuesday.
A Higher Bar for Professional Accounts
Verification standards sit at the centre of the dispute, and Guangzhou’s courts have recently addressed them directly.
Days before Nio‘s July bulletin, the Guangzhou Internet Court ruled against two bloggers in defamation cases brought by XPeng.
The court distinguished protected opinion from unlawful defamation, holding that subjective views must stay within the bounds of reasonable comment.
Professional automotive content creators face a higher standard of verification than ordinary platform users, the judgment held.
Financial Characterisation
The underlying coverage concerned how Nio‘s results are described, an area where the company’s own framing invites scrutiny.
Nio‘s May 22 legal statement cited operating profit of 66.8 million yuan for the first quarter and two consecutive profitable quarters. That figure is a non-GAAP adjusted operating profit.
On a GAAP basis the company posted a net loss of 332 million yuan for the quarter, against vehicle margin of 18.8% and revenue up 112.2% from a year earlier.
Neither the May statement nor the July bulletin carried that qualifier.
Second-quarter deliveries closed at 107,658 vehicles, 2,342 below the floor of the guidance range set in March.
A Rare Direction of Travel
Automakers suing self-media accounts have become common in China.
XPeng, BYD and Li Auto all maintain dedicated legal accounts to publicise rulings, and several have offered bounties for evidence identifying those behind coordinated campaigns.
Claims running the other way are scarce. Accounts that push back typically counterclaim inside an existing case rather than open a separate front.
The closest precedent involves Li Xiaoye, founder of Yemao Caijing, whose dispute with Alibaba began with an online exchange in 2017 and produced a series of reputation suits at the Beijing Internet Court, ultimately requiring the company’s public relations staff to apologise.
Whale Plus is not contesting the underlying finding in this action, which remains under appeal, but the way Nio described that finding in public.
Three Years of Bulletins
Nio opened the legal department account on Weibo in May 2023 and sued seven bloggers over attacks on its core and Onvo brands.
Three individuals were sued over a rumour that BYD would acquire the company for 16.5 billion yuan in late 2024.
The company sued five more accounts in August 2025 and won judgments against two bloggers that December.
Police took criminal measures against a suspect running more than 4,000 accounts last April.
May’s statement escalated further, citing fabricated claims about an Onvo promotional film.
