Shanghai-based EV maker Nio Inc. continued reshaping its sales network in the first quarter of 2026, closing several showrooms dedicated to the main Nio brand while expanding the store count of its cheaper, family-oriented sub-brand Onvo.
Figures disclosed on Thursday alongside the company’s first-quarter earnings report show that Nio ended the quarter with three fewer Nio Houses and six fewer Nio Spaces.
Nio‘s flagship retail locations are located in central areas, with high foot traffic. The community-oriented sites include lounges, a café, libraries, co-working spaces and event areas.
The smaller ‘Nio Spaces’ are sales-focused showrooms, typically located outside city centers and dedicated to vehicle display.
Despite opening its first multi-brand ‘Sky Store’ in February — bringing all three brands together under one roof — the group ended the first quarter of the year by adding 10 more stores dedicated to its family-oriented sub-brand Onvo.
As of the end of the first quarter, the EV maker operated 168 Nio Houses, 389 Nio Spaces and 430 Onvo stores — compared to 171, 395 and 420 at the end of December, respectively.
“We continue to optimize our sales and service network layout through the highly coordinated ‘Sky Store’ model, expanding market coverage while strengthening local presence and increasing network density,” founder and CEO William Li said on the earnings call that followed the results.
The model integrates pre-sales, after-sales and delivery for Nio, Onvo and Firefly in a single location, allowing the company to reduce fixed costs while expanding into lower-tier cities that would not justify three separate footprints.
President Lihong Qin said in January that Nio plans to expand the ‘Sky Store’ format into roughly 210 prefecture-level cities across China.
Reversing Course
For most of the company’s history, both showroom formats — the Nio Houses and the Nio Spaces — grew in parallel, with the expansion of the brand into new Chinese cities and overseas markets.
However, the trajectory has shifted over the past year as the company introduced its Cell Business Unit (CBU) restructure last year.
Under the CBU, Nio is reorganizing its commercial operations around tighter cost discipline — as it pursues its first full year of profitability in 2026.
As exclusively reported by EV in March, Nio ended 2025 with fewer Nio Houses than it had a year earlier — the first annual decline since the company opened its first flagship showroom in Beijing in November 2017.
First-quarter figures extend that contraction, with the EV maker now operating 19 fewer Nio Houses than its peak of 187, reached in April and June of last year.
Onvo Awareness Challenge
The addition of 10 Onvo stores in the quarter reflects Nio‘s continued effort to lift demand for the sub-brand — which has struggled to maintain the momentum it built around the launch of the L90 SUV last summer.
Li reaffirmed on Thursday’s call that brand recognition remains the central problem, an idea he had already shared late last month.
“Right now, for the Onvo brand, the major challenge is still its overall brand awareness, since Onvo has only been delivering for around 20 months,” Li stated. “We have done a study on Onvo‘s awareness, and its current awareness is basically on par with the awareness of the Nio brand in 2020.”
The CEO noted the company is leaning on celebrity endorsements and door-to-door outreach by frontline employees to draw potential buyers into showrooms.
“It takes a lot of effort, but it is taking effect. Overall, it takes time to build brand awareness, but the good thing is that once the public or users know about the brand, we have a pretty efficient conversion from awareness all the way to order placement,” Li added.
According to the company, traffic at Onvo showrooms more than doubled nationwide during the May Day holiday compared with the previous period — with daily test drives per store rising 60%.
Each location averaged more than a dozen test-drive groups per day for the recently launched Onvo L80 — one of the models Nio is focusing on during this quarter, according to William Li.
European Footprint
In Europe, the company is preparing for a major shift in its business, as it prepares to convert its first-wave European markets — Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden — to a distributor-led model.
The company currently offers its main Nio brand and the cheaper Firefly sub-brand in the continent, with plans to introduce Onvo there in 2027.
However, it remains unconfirmed whether it intends to sublet all its locations.
In Germany, Manager Magazin reported that Nio is looking for subtenants for its Berlin Nio House — one of the most premium retail locations the brand operates across the continent.
Last week, BilNytt reported that “Nio has for a long time been working to get out of its costly lease agreement on Karl Johans gate.”
Several Danish locations have also closed amid weak demand, including the first battery swap station to ever shut in Europe.
Nio‘s local distributor in Denmark — Nic. Christiansen Group — currently operates a Nio Space in Copenhagen.
The EV maker previously operated a showroom and a Nio Hub in the country — which have been closed before the relaunch.
Switching to a mixed business model allows Nio to reduce fixed infrastructure costs while leveraging the established networks of local dealerships.
Nio has also begun monetizing the co-working areas inside its European showrooms by renting them out to third parties, as previously reported by EV — in another effort to extract additional revenue from premium retail real estate signed during the brand’s expansion years.
Nio‘s European retail footprint remains modest compared with its Chinese operations.
In an August 4, 2025 Instagram post, the company said it operated “60 Power Swap Stations & 20 Nio Houses across Europe” — a fraction of the more than 550 locations it runs across the three brands in mainland China.
It remains unclear whether the figure referred exclusively to flagship Nio Houses or also included the smaller Nio Spaces.
According to Nio‘s Norwegian website, the company currently operates eight Nio Houses and 11 Nio Spaces across the continent.
