Less than a week after Nio pre-announced its first profitable quarter ever, the company’s founder and Chief Executive Officer William Li announced that the non-automotive business achieved profit for the January-September 2025 period.
In a company-wide letter sent on Monday, Li revealed that the company’s “non-vehicle business was profitable cumulatively from January to September.”
During the third quarter of 2025, Nio‘s non-automotive revenue reached 2.59 billion yuan — representing 11.9% of the total 21.8 billion yuan ($3.1 billion) revenue reported for the same quarter.
The company has not yet announced a date for the disclosure of its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results.
Over the last few years, the company reported its fourth quarter results in March.
Profitability
While not confirming whether or not last week’s warning includes its non-automotive business, William Li said that the company aims to achieve annual Non-GAAP profitability for the full year of 2026.
“Annual profitability isn’t something easily achieved — don’t take it for granted,” the CEO wrote, saying that reasonable profit margins were “accomplished last year, and we should do so again this year.”
Last week, Nio disclosed that it officially expects to record a profit in the fourth quarter of 2025, after the management reaffirmed the target over the past few weeks.
The company guided for adjusted operating profit of 700 million yuan to 1.2 billion yuan ($100 million to $172 million) in the October-December period, excluding share-based compensation expenses.
On a GAAP basis, Nio expects to report operating profit of 200 million yuan to 700 million yuan for the quarter, representing a narrower but still significant turnaround from year-ago losses.
According to Nomura, Nio‘s guidance for its first quarterly operating profit announcement exceeded expectations, with revenue in the fourth quarter likely to surpass 35.5 billion yuan ($5.1 billion).
If the Shanghai-based EV maker posts revenue above 35.5 billion yuan as the bank expects, it would represent a new quarterly record and a 63% increase from the 21.79 billion yuan reported in the third quarter of 2025.
The figure would also exceed Nio‘s own fourth-quarter guidance of 32.76 billion yuan to 34.04 billion yuan, which the company provided in November alongside its third-quarter results.
5 Million Vehicle Sales in 2035
In order to achieve these financial goals — and after those achievements — Nio needs to maintain an annual growth rate of 40 to 50% in vehicle deliveries, according to William Li.
In the future, “when our annual vehicle sales reach 4–5 million units, our user base will be 20–30 million. How much non-vehicle revenue could that generate?,” the CEO questioned.
Nio delivered 326,028 vehicles in 2025, a 46.9% increase year over year. It plans to record between 460,000 and 490,000 units this year.
“If we can sustain 40% growth each year, by 2035 we could reach 5 million vehicles in annual sales,” Li wrote, adding that these vehicles “will certainly be more valuable than 5 million vehicles from other automakers — not only because our average selling price is higher, but also because of our business model.”
Nio‘s average vehicle selling price stayed at 220,536 yuan ($31,900) in the third quarter of 2025.
It had been declining in the past two years due to the introduction of significantly cheaper sub-brands Onvo and Firefly.
In the fourth quarter, however, it is likely to increase due to the higher than expected demand of the third generation ES8 under the main Nio brand.
The model is priced from 308,800 yuan ($44,600) with Nio‘s Battery as a Service (BaaS) and 406,800 yuan ($58,800) with the battery included.
Late last month, Nio‘s co-founder and President Lihong Qin reaffirmed during a media briefing that the new ES8 SUV has a gross margin of 20%, with an average selling price of over 400,000 yuan.
This is expected to increase overall vehicle margins, which stood at 14.7% in the third quarter.
