Nio has denied that it is pulling back from Europe, three weeks after closing its first flagship showroom on the continent and days after quietly closing a second German site.
“Nio has no plans to retreat from Europe,” a company spokesperson told the South China Morning Post on Tuesday.
The spokesperson said the company remains committed to developing the business, supporting its users and strengthening its research and development capabilities and local presence.
The denial is the company’s second in three months.
Nio‘s Norwegian unit said in June that recent media coverage of its European position gave an unnuanced picture.
Four European locations have now closed inside nine months.
The Slagelse battery swap station in Denmark went first in November 2025, followed by a Berlin lobbying office, the Weiterstadt sales and service hub in mid-July and the Hamburg Nio House on July 20.
Nio registered three vehicles in Germany in July, a 93.6% decline from a year earlier and the third consecutive month at that level, according to the Federal Motor Transport Authority.
Seven-month registrations stand at 18 units, down 89.3% from 168.
The Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt counts new vehicle registrations rather than retail sales.
The Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA) does not disclose how many units went to private or fleet customers as against manufacturer- or partner-registered demonstrators, showroom stock, press cars or courtesy vehicles, and publishes no model-level breakdown.
The Locations That Closed
The Hamburg Nio House shut on July 20, the first flagship showroom closure on record for the brand in Europe.
The site had opened near Jungfernstieg in June 2024 and lasted just over two years.
A company spokesperson told the German outlet Elektroauto News that Nio was streamlining its business activities in the European market, citing conditions in the wider car market, and pointed to prolonged construction work outside the building that is not expected to finish for another five years.
Days earlier the company had quietly closed its Weiterstadt hub in the Rhine-Main region between Darmstadt and Frankfurt, roughly 20 months after opening it.
Weiterstadt was a fuller-service location, opened in November 2024 as the third German site after Munich and Cologne, and its closure cut into the operational network rather than the retail estate.
The page for the hub on the German website now returns an error, and the closure was not announced on the German NioApp.
Owners in the Rhine-Main area now fall back on the Frankfurt Nio House, which carries no workshop, and on the partner-garage network.
The Weiterstadt closure landed a day after deputy country chief Christian Wiegand announced his departure for XPeng.
A swap station in Slagelse, Denmark, closed in November 2025, the first such closure anywhere in Europe since the network debuted in 2021.
The site had been the country’s only swap station and once ranked as the twelfth in Europe, and its removal took the European network from 61 stations to 60.
Battery rental was discontinued in Denmark at the same time, and the brand relaunched there through a local distributorselling vehicles with the battery included.
A Berlin lobbying office, rented at 36 euros per square metre, has also been shut, according to Manager Magazin.
What the Company Has Already Done
Since February the company has taken a series of decisions that narrow its European operation.
Nio broke up its unified European management structure that month, splitting the region into six departments organised by function rather than country and creating a unit tasked with expanding sales through general distributors or dealerships across Europe, explicitly excluding Norway.
Daniel de Groot leads that unit and reports to management in China rather than to European leadership.
The company dismissed its German general manager in February after the country registered a single vehicle in January, and the post has stood empty since.
Christian Wiegand, the deputy general manager and marketing lead, left at the end of July for XPeng, and neither of the two most senior posts at the German business will be filled.
Nio told its European operation in May that no model updates would arrive until late 2027 and no new swap stations would be built.
Every vehicle on sale in Germany is a 2023 or 2024 build on the older NT 2.0 platform, and the three launch models remain the only ones offered.
Every country general manager across the original European markets has now gone except one.
Nio entered Norway in late 2021 and added Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark a year later, appointing a country chief for each and selling through its own retail network.
Ralph Kranz, formerly of Volvo Germany, built the German operation and left in early 2024 after registering 1,263 vehicles in his only full year in the role.
Marius Hayler, who had led the Norwegian entry as the brand’s first general manager in the Nordic market after joining from Jaguar Land Rover Norway in March 2021, moved to Germany in late 2023 and lasted eight months before leaving in June 2024 for Polestar, where he became director for the Nordic countries.
David Sultzer, who joined in September 2023 as regional manager for eastern Germany after a year heading field sales at Genesis Motor Europe, replaced Hayler in June 2024 and was dismissed in February after Germany registered a single vehicle in January.
Mattias Lundgren, who joined in March 2022 to prepare the Swedish launch and ran both Sweden and Denmark from Gothenburg, has also gone.
An Ho, who succeeded Hayler in Norway in late 2023, is the only country general manager left anywhere in Europe.
Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden are now run directly by a European team based in Amsterdam, with no country chiefs of their own, and none of those posts will be refilled.
The senior departures have run beyond the country roles.
Marc Steinmetz, product chief for the EMEA region, resigned in October, the same month Nicola Marsala left as head of the Southern European region.
Peter Seitz, head of product for Firefly in Europe, left on July 3 after about three years, and Wiegand followed on July 31.
The company is seeking subtenants for all four of its German flagship showrooms in Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Hamburg.
Nio Deutschland’s negative equity widened from roughly 22.3 million euros to nearly 80.4 million euros in a single year, in a filing completed on January 16, 2026, past the legal deadline, which warned of a sharp decline in revenue.
The Comparison in Germany
Rival Chinese brands recorded their strongest German month of the year in July while Nio held at three units.
BYD registered 5,240 vehicles, up 365.0% year on year, and XPeng registered 1,253.
Germany’s fully electric market grew 61.7% to 78,609 units in the month.
The Swap Network Gap
Nio operates around 20 swap stations in Germany, nearly four years after entering the market, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
Sixty stations serve the whole continent, concentrated in Germany and Norway, with eight in Sweden.
The Chinese network passed 4,000 stations on August 7, when the company opened its first fifth-generation site in Quanzhou, Fujian province, taking the global total to 4,067.
Founder and chief executive officer William Li said in March 2025 that a German station took 10 months to build and sometimes as long as a year.
The European rollout is now close to frozen.
Nio had already slowed European swap investment by April 2025, when the European arm of Nio Power had been reduced to five active employees, two of them on long-term sick leave and shielded from dismissal.
The network completed its 300,000th European swap on June 21, with the third hundred thousand taking 307 days against 269 days for the second, a slowdown recorded even as more vehicles reached European roads.
The company has pushed Europe down its priorities until 2028, with Li viewing competition on the continent as fierce as in China.
Management has said the decision to deploy swap stations in the new distributor markets rests with each partner, and no distributor has announced one.
Where the Company Is Still Growing
The denial is not without support in the data, provided the frame is the whole continent rather than the founding markets.
Nio Inc. registered 79 vehicles across its eight reporting European markets in July, up 2.6% from June, with Portugal overtaking Norway as the largest single market for the first time at 32 units.
The distributor cohort including Denmark more than doubled month on month to 54 units.
Portugal is served by JAP Group, Greece by Motodynamics, Belgium and Luxembourg by Hedin Mobility Group, Austria and Hungary by AutoWallis, and Denmark by Nic. Christiansen Group.
Firefly, the group’s entry-level brand, entered Europe in August 2025 and now sells in seven markets, though not in Germany or Sweden.
The brand accounts for 83.0% of Dutch registrations this year and has driven the Portuguese volume since entry.
Growth in those markets has come with discounting, and EV found this month that Firefly is holding price cuts in four of its seven European markets through late summer, running 11% to 17% off the Select trim.
Portugal’s promotion expires on August 31 and Norway’s on September 30, the second cut of roughly 17% there inside a year.
What Management Has Said Before
Firefly president Daniel Jin gave the most direct assessment on the record in March, saying the company had learned a lesson and paid a tuition for its early direct-to-consumer strategy in Europe and would rely exclusively on local distributors for the brand’s expansion.
Jin described brand awareness as the biggest obstacle and one that cannot be overcome quickly.
Li set a target in a January 2 internal letter for the group to enter 40 countries and regions cumulatively by the end of 2026 across its three brands.
Nio Norway said in a LinkedIn post on January 16 that tightened value-added tax rules had significantly affected total prices for family and sport utility models, publishing worked figures to show battery leasing as the cheaper route.
Norway is the only European market where the company still sells directly.
Registrations there fell 54.5% sequentially in July to 20 units, ending a climb that had run since January.
What Has Not Been Said
The company has not set out what a continued European presence consists of beyond the distributor markets.
No timetable has been given for bringing the refreshed Chinese lineup to Europe, no European assembly has been announced, and no replacement has been named for any country leadership role.
Nio faces a 20.7% countervailing duty on top of the European Union’s standard 10.0% import tariff, a combined 30.7% on vehicles built in China, and has no local production to offset it.
XPeng assembles three models at Magna Steyr in Graz, Austria, from semi-knockdown kits shipped from China.
The company has not scheduled its second-quarter results.
