Nio, the Chinese electric vehicle maker that turns 11 in November, is battling mounting losses, sluggish domestic demand for its core brand and sub-brand Onvo amid intensifying competition, and disappointing sales performance in Europe.
Hailed in 2018 as another ‘Tesla killer,’ the company began deliveries of its debut model — the ES8 — later that year, with its second model — a smaller SUV named ES6 — entering the Chinese market in May 2019.
However, in the final months of that year, the Shanghai-headquartered company came close to financial collapse.
The company, founded and led by the billionaire William Li, had burned through $3.67 billion between 2017 and 2019 while delivering fewer than 32,000 vehicles.
Its shares, which rose above $10 during the first week of U.S. trading in 2018, sank to $1.39 by late 2019.
In early 2020, the government of Hefei, a city in Anhui province, extended a $683 million financing agreement to the EV maker, providing crucial financial relief.
Nio’s U.S.-listed shares peaked in early 2021 amid a broader rally in electric vehicle stocks, buoyed by the debut of its second-generation ET7 sedan and an ambitious pledge to expand to 24 new global markets within four years.
In the second half of 2021, Lucid and Rivian debuted on Nasdaq and briefly reached market capitalizations higher than those of Ford and GM — a reflection of the speculative bubble surrounding publicly listed EV makers at the time.
Those valuation levels have not been seen again since.
Amid the same market frenzy, Nio’s U.S.-listed shares nearly doubled from $30 to $55.
However, since Nio‘s all time high reached in early 2021 at $66.99, the company’s stock has declined by nearly 95% to $3.51 — bringing it to its lowest point since 2020. The stock has fallen 46% year-to-date.
Despite continued efforts to increase deliveries while avoiding entering price wars, Nio faces an increasingly difficult road ahead.
In December 2023, Nio secured a $2.2 billion investment from CYVN Holdings, an Abu Dhabi-based investment vehicle, providing significant relief to the Chinese EV maker’s liquidity pressures.
This followed a $738.5 million strategic equity investment announced six months earlier. Currently, the company has two members of the Abu Dhabi-based firm in its board of directors.
In October, Nio also said it had partnered with CYVN Holdings to launch a joint venture named ‘Nio MENA’, marking its official expansion into the Middle East and North Africa regions.
The company said last month it recorded a net loss of $930.2 million in the first quarter of this year, up 30.2% from a year earlier.
Operating losses reached $884.4 million, marking the company’s second-largest pretax loss on record. To contain costs, Nio has implemented several rounds of layoffs across its Chinese, US, and European teams.
Its cash balance dropped 43% year on year to $3.6 billion by the end of March, excluding proceeds from a capital raise in April.
The company aims to reach profitability by the fourth quarter of this year — a target that hinges on more than doubling sales without resorting to price cuts while reducing R&D investments and SG&A expenses.
The company has undertaken a sweeping review of its projects, teams, and investment priorities, identifying initiatives that are unlikely to generate positive returns within the year and taking “determined actions” to terminate or postpone them, according to company executives.
As part of the cost-cutting push, Nio said it aims to limit R&D expenses to between 2 billion and 2.5 billion yuan ($279 million–$349 million) per quarter — a year-on-year reduction of 20% to 25%.
Selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses are also expected to decline sequentially starting from the second quarter.
CEO William Li has repeatedly stated that Nio will not participate in price wars, even as other Chinese carmakers continue to slash prices. The latest was BYD, which significantly cut prices across its lineup to clear inventory in a final push before the end of the second quarter.
During the company’s most recent earnings call in early June, Li said Nio is targeting monthly deliveries of 25,000 units for the main Nio brand and an equivalent 25,000 units per month for the Onvo sub-brand.
In June, the Nio brand delivered 14,593 vehicles (down 31% from a year ago) while the Onvo brand reported its best sales month of this year with 6,400 units sold.
To reach the target set for the final quarter of the year, the family-oriented brand needs to quadruple its figures. For that, the management is counting on the demand for the two new SUVs that will arrive later this year: the L90 and its five-seat variant, the L80.
Nio delivered 72,056 vehicles in the second quarter of 2025 across its three brands Nio, Onvo, and Firefly — 56 units above the low end of the guidance provided in early June.
In late November, the chief executive said the company’s goal for 2025 was to double its sales.
The EV maker delivered 221,970 vehicles in 2024, a 38.7% increase compared to the previous year.
However, the electric vehicle maker delivered 114,150 cars in the first half, meeting just 25.7% of its full-year target.
The company is banking on its newly launched Firefly brand, additional models under the Onvo sub-brand, and refreshed versions of four core Nio models to accelerate deliveries in the second half.
Nio launched Onvo in May 2024 to compete with Tesla, but also Li Auto, which also targets the family segment.
Its debut model, the L60 SUV, started deliveries in September last year. It initially performed strongly with over 10,000 deliveries in December, but demand weakened in early 2025 after suffering a wave of order cancellations in the final weeks of the year.
In November, the company set internal targets of 16,000 deliveries in January and 20,000 in March. Actual volumes fell short: 5,912 in January, 4,049 in February, and 4,820 in March.
Cumulative deliveries for the second quarter totaled 17,081 units and the underperformance led to the departure of brand head Alan Ai.
He had previously pledged to step down if the brand failed to meet its ambitious delivery targets. In December, he expressed confidence that Onvo’s L60 would outpace Xiaomi’s SU7 ramp-up.
In March, Ai revealed a wave of order cancellations that began in late 2024.
Despite resisting calls to resign, stating, “A fragile ego is the last thing Onvo needs,” Nio announced his departure shortly after March delivery figures were released — showing that the second target of the year had been missed by 75.9%.
He was replaced by Fei Shen, a longtime executive and former head of Nio Power — the unit covering the company’s charging and battery swap technology.
Firefly, Nio’s second sub-brand aimed at entry-level urban buyers, launched last December and deliveries started in late April. It delivered 3,680 units in May and 3,932 in June.
Last month, six Firefly vehicles were shipped to the Netherlands for media test drives, which began earlier this week and marked the brand’s European debut. Public test drivers begin this week, on July 7.
Norway will follow in the coming weeks, with further market entries planned for later this year.
The company is under a large amount of pressure to prove there is demand for its vehicles across the new markets it is expanding to but also in China.
Nio expanded to Europe in 2021 with a launch in Norway, the world’s most EV-friendly market.
The Nordic country was followed by Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark in 2022. But sales have underperformed.
In Germany, the company sold 1,244 vehicles in 2023 and just 388 in 2024 — according to EU-EVs— with a cut of local incentives by the local government slowing down the EV adoption in the country.
Across its five European markets, Nio sold 1,118 vehicles in 2023 and 1,238 in 2024, according to the data platform.
In March, CEO William Li said the company would retain its direct-sales model in these countries but scale back investment.
President and co-founder Lihong Qin said national distributors must reach profitability and positive cash flow within a rolling 12-month window. While all Group models support battery swapping, investment in charging infrastructure is now left to local partners.
As of July, Nio operates 60 battery swap stations in Europe — 20 in Norway, 20 in Germany, and the remainder across Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
Growth has dramatically slowed as only 10 new swap stations were added across the five markets over the last twelve months.
Internal sources have recently told EV that Nio Power’s European team now has only five active employees, two of whom are on long-term sick leave.
In April, Reuters reported that CATL was in talks to acquire a controlling stake in Nio Power, though Li dismissed the reports. The rumour came shortly after the two companies agreed to work together on battery swap with CATL investing up to about $346 million in the division.
Nio has also suspended its long-touted plans to expand into the U.S. market, an ambition first unveiled in January 2021 as part of its goal to operate in over 25 countries and regions by 2025.
The decision to halt the U.S. entry was reported exclusively by EV last month and has been accelerated by worsening trade tensions and new tariffs announced earlier this year by U.S. President Donald Trump.
As part of the retrenchment, Nio laid off last month its Chief Business Officer for the US organization, Saurabh Bhatnagar — a person familiar with the matter told EV.
Despite having long insisted on the direct-to-consumer model as essential to Nio’s premium brand positioning, the company is now adapting its strategy.
In June, Nio announced plans to expand to over a dozen new European markets over the next 18 months.
Unlike its previous expansion waves in 2021 and 2022—when it built local teams—all new markets will be handled by national distributors. This mirrors the approach taken by other Chinese EV makers entering Europe, including BYD and XPeng.
The first market where Nio adopted a distributor-led model was Israel, as reported exclusively by EV late last year.
For now, of the five markets it already operates in, only Denmark—its smallest and slowest — has seen a shift away from direct sales.
At the company’s October 2022 launch event in Berlin, Nio introduced a leasing-only model in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark under the banner of “Nio Subscription,” diverging from the direct sales approach it had adopted in Norway.
The program allowed consumers to lease vehicles rather than purchase them. In Germany, for instance, monthly subscription rates for the flagship ET7 sedan started at approximately €1,200.
However, following criticism from prospective customers and media, Nio reversed the policy and introduced the option to buy vehicles outright in these markets.
Several top-level executives have departed the company over the past year. Zhang Lei, Nio’s Vice President of Digital Cockpit and Software Development, left the firm in a year ago.
In July 2024, CFO Steven Wei Feng stepped down after five years, citing personal reasons. He was succeeded by Stanley Yu Qu, formerly Senior Vice President of Finance.
Last week, Associate Vice President Chengchen Hu announced his resignation after nearly four years with Nio, where he served as Chief Expert of Technology Planning.
While several Chinese media outlets credited Hu with playing a leading role in the development of Nio’s first in-house autonomous driving chip — the 5nm Shenji NX9031 — the company publicly denied his involvement.
In a statement posted to Weibo, Ma Lin, Nio’s Assistant Vice President for Branding and Communications, clarified that Hu was not part of the chip team and emphasized that his responsibilities were focused on long-term technology planning.
About a week after Onvo chief Alan Ai stepped down in early April, Nio implemented a new series of executive changes affecting both the Onvo brand and broader marketing operations, according to internal emails obtained by EV.
Xia Qinghua, formerly Head of User Operations and Services at Onvo and a key figure in the brand’s development, transitioned to the Group’s core brand as Regional General Manager for Nio’s Shanghai operations.
Nio has also seen turnover among its European leadership team.
Ralph Kranz, a former executive at Volvo Germany, joined Nio in early 2022 to lead preparations for the brand’s entry into Germany, Europe’s largest auto market.
However, he departed the company less than two years later. Marius Hayler, who previously led Nio’s operations in Norway and Denmark, was appointed to replace Kranz but also left the German role in under a year.
According to official data from Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA), Nio registered just 1,263 vehicles in the country in 2023.
Ruben Keuter, who oversaw Nio’s activities in the Netherlands, also exited the company earlier this year to join Hyundai.
Of the five national heads overseeing the company’s European presence at the time of the October 2022 launch, only Matthias Lundgren, who leads the Swedish team, remains in place.
Nio Houses, the company’s large-format stores in premium locations, grew from 155 in June 2024 to 187 by mid-2025 — only seven new stores added in six months. That compares to 25 openings in the second half of 2024.
