Nio Inc.‘s US-listed shares traded lower on Wednesday morning at $3.32, their lowest since April 2025, while its Hong Kong stock closed within 7.2% of its record low as China’s shrinking car market leaves the company with little overseas volume to fall back on.
The American depositary shares traded at about $3.32 in as of publication time, down 2.3% from the previous close of $3.43 and valuing the company at about $8.4 billion.
Other US-listed Chinese carmakers also fell, with XPeng down 4.9% and Li Auto down 3.1% in early trading.
The intraday low was the weakest since April 11, 2025, taking out the $3.34 touched on June 23, 2025, and leaving only the tariff selloff of April 2025 lower, when the stock bottomed at $3.02 on April 8.
The shares are 51.2% below their $6.80 close a year earlier, down 34.9% from their $5.10 close at the end of 2025, and 58.6% below the $8.02 of October 2, 2025, the peak of the rallies that fully unwound by July.
The Hong Kong Trough
In Hong Kong, the shares closed at HK$26.26 ($3.35), down 0.7%, the lowest close since June 19, 2025, after trading as low as HK$25.82 on October 20. Their lowest close is HK$24.50, set on April 7, 2025.
The Hong Kong line has lost 35.9% this year from HK$40.96, 52.2% from its HK$54.95 high on April 17, and 86.8% from the HK$199.20 it reached on June 27, 2022, three months after Nio’s March 2022 listing in the city.
The Hang Seng Index fell 0.9% on the day, while BYD lost 3.4%, Geely Automobile 2.8% and XPeng 1.7% in Hong Kong.
95% Below the Peak
The US stock set its all-time high of $66.99 on January 11, 2021, the first trading session after NIO Day 2020, held on January 9, 2021, where founder and CEO William Li unveiled the ET7, Nio’s first sedan, priced from 448,000 yuan ($67,100) before subsidies.
“The ET7 launched at this NIO Day is a brand new start for smart electric vehicles,” Li said at the event, and Nio later described the car as its “first model on the second-generation technology platform, NT2.0” when deliveries began on March 28, 2022.
At $3.32, the stock is 95.0% below that peak.
Li ruled out a share buyback at a closed-door meeting with European owners in September, according to an attendee, and had already said he found it difficult to convince investors as the stock slid to a 13-month low in early September.
Analysts Split
JPMorgan cut Nio to ‘Neutral’ from ‘Overweight’ on September 2 and lowered its target to $4.50 from $7.00, citing sluggish demand in China, price competition and limited overseas exposure, and forecast 430,000 deliveries this year, up 32%, 24/7 Wall St. reported.
Citi kept a ‘Buy’ rating but lowered its target to $7.10 from $8.20 a day earlier, according to Investing.com, after second-quarter deliveries and revenue fell short of guidance.
Others have stayed positive, with UBS initiating coverage at ‘Buy‘ on September 10 with a $5.60 target, and Morgan Stanley raising its Hong Kong target to HK$68.50 ($8.73) from HK$58.00 on September 15 in a note first obtained by Price Target, EV‘s sister site and an archive of Wall Street analyst research on the EV, AI and semiconductor industries.
Goldman Sachs was reported to have upgraded the stock to ‘Buy’ with a $7 target on October 9.
Losses, Cash and Dilution
Nio posted a net loss of 528.0 million yuan ($79.1 million) in the second quarter, after a loss of 332.1 million yuan ($49.7 million) in the first, although its adjusted net profit, which excludes share-based compensation, was 26.1 million yuan ($3.9 million).
Revenue rose 69.1% to 32.14 billion yuan ($4.81 billion), and the vehicle margin jumped to 18.5% from 10.3% a year earlier, while cash, restricted cash, short-term investments and long-term time deposits totaled 56.7 billion yuan ($8.5 billion) at the end of June.
Nio sold 181,818,190 new Class A shares in September 2025 at $5.57 per ADS, in an offering it sized at $1 billion, and the October 21 low is 40.4% below that price.
It has since brought outside capital into its battery-swapping business, with Geely Holding Group agreeing on September 28 to take a 30% stake in battery-swapping unit Nio Power, a deal that failed to lift the shares.
Earnings and the 2026 Target
Nio has not set a date for its third-quarter results, which it reported on November 25 last year, and it normally gives its fourth-quarter delivery guidance on the same day.
For the third quarter, it guided revenue of 33.29 billion yuan to 34.05 billion yuan ($4.99 billion to $5.10 billion), up 52.7% to 56.2%.
The company delivered 109,178 vehicles in the third quarter, within its 108,000 to 111,000 range, taking deliveries for the first nine months to 300,301, with 37,408 in September, up 7.7% from a year earlier.
Li set a goal in January of raising deliveries by 40% to 50% this year from 326,028 in 2025, which means 456,439 to 489,042 vehicles, and he reiterated that range on September 1.
At the end of September, with three quarters of the year gone, Nio had completed 65.8% of the bottom of that range and 61.4% of the top, leaving 156,138 to 188,741 deliveries for the fourth quarter.
The lower figure works out to 52,046 a month, more than Nio has delivered in any single month, against a record of 48,135 in December 2025, while Li’s narrower goal of more than 40,000 a month in the fourth quarter would leave the year at about 420,300, growth of roughly 29%.
The company continues to be highly dependent on two of its models: the flagship SUVs ES8 and ES9.
A Shrinking Home Market
The pressure is shared across the industry, since China’s passenger car retail sales fell 28.0% in September to 1.618 million and 21.7% in the first nine months to 13.334 million, while new energy vehicle retail sales dropped 16.7% to 1.084 million, according to the China Passenger Car Association.
The association blamed a high base, after some provinces ended trade-in subsidies in September 2025 and set off a rush to buy, along with high fuel prices, a Mid-Autumn holiday that fell late in the month and rising memory chip costs that slowed new energy model launches.
Buyers have also paid a 5% purchase tax on new energy vehicles since January 1, when the full exemption gave way to a 50% reduction capped at 15,000 yuan ($2,200) per car under a 2023 policy notice.
Carmakers have answered with exports, which rose 73.7% to 917,000 in September, and made up 36% of manufacturers’ sales against 19% a year earlier, while new energy vehicle exports jumped 163.5% to 558,000, led by BYD with 175,877, Chery with 85,990, Geely with 72,893 and Leapmotor with 27,454, the association said.
XPeng shipped 10,055 vehicles abroad in September, equal to 24.4% of its 41,256 deliveries that month, although export shipments and deliveries are counted differently.
The company said it delivered 45,008 vehicles overseas in 2025, up 96%, across 60 countries and regions, before sending its GX SUV to the Middle East and Africa this month.
Zeekr, whose exports are counted within Geely, delivered 37,216 vehicles in September, up 103.85%, and 288,400 in the first nine months, up 100.84%, and began shipping its 9X SUV to the United Arab Emirates in September, while Geely Automobile exported 106,685 vehicles in the month, up 162% and 36.5% of its 292,168 sales.
Nio’s Missing Overseas Volume
Nio Inc. exported 748 vehicles in the first eight months of 2026 across its Nio, Onvo and Firefly brands, according to association data, or about 0.28% of its 262,893 deliveries in that period.
Its best month this year, 181 in August, was a fourth of the record 750 it shipped in December 2025, and the group stayed below 100 a month through much of the first half even though Li said in January that Nio aimed to be present in 40 countries and regions by year-end.
In Europe, Nio Inc. registered 238 vehicles across eight markets in September, where its cars pay a 20.7% EU countervailing duty on top of the standard 10% import tariff, has moved its Dutch business to an all-in subscription model as its own-brand registrations fell, and has pushed Onvo’s European launch back to 2028 or 2029.
That leaves the company almost wholly dependent on a domestic market in which it grew 7.7% in September while Zeekr doubled.
