Nio Group made fundamental miscalculations when it expanded from Norway into the broader European Union back in 2022, one of the company’s most senior executives said in a new interview released on Tuesday.
Mark Zhou, Nio‘s Executive Vice President and Chairman of the Product Committee, said that the company’s early success in Norway did not translate when it attempted to replicate the same approach across the EU.
The premium EV brand expanded to Norway in September 2021.
Zhou cited underestimated infrastructure costs, a slower regulatory environment, and vehicles that were too large for the market.
“We started with Norway because Norway is one of the best locations for the electrical vehicle industry. So we made a very good success,” Zhou said on the ‘Leaders Unplugged’ podcast, hosted by IMD’s David Bach.
“And with that kind of success, we saw Norway is the same as the European Union, which turned out to be totally different. Norway is not the European Union. The consumers are different. The governments are different.”
“We took our success. We wanted to copy the same success in different countries often. It’s not the best approach,” he added.
Norway Sales in 2025
As EV reported earlier this year, the Nio Group has missed its own 2025 sales target in Norway by about 65%.
The company — which offers both Nio and Firefly brands in Norway — had targeted 1,500 vehicles delivered in the Scandinavian country for 2025.
Although sales rose year over year in 2024 — from 621 vehicles delivered in 2023 — 2025 represented the company’s lowest annual registrations since it launched in the market in late 2021.
European Registrations
Zhou’s comments arrive as Nio‘s European sales remain negligible.
The company registered just 56 vehicles across its European markets in January, according to data compiled by national transport authorities.
Germany, Europe’s largest auto market, accounted for a single registration — matching January 2023, when Nio had only just entered the country.
The company operates four flagship showrooms there, in Berlin, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and Hamburg.
Norway, its first European market, saw registrations fall 71% year-over-year to 8 units after having recorded 131 units.
The Netherlands posted 17, while newer markets including Austria, Greece, Portugal, and Sweden contributed smaller figures.
For full-year 2025, Nio Group registered 1,321 vehicles across seven European markets — roughly 300 fewer than the prior year, despite expanding into new countries and introducing its more affordable Firefly sub-brand on the continent.
The core Nio brand saw registrations fall 31% year-over-year across its original five markets.
Exports from China dropped to just 121 vehicles in January, down 83.9% from December, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association.
‘Our Cars Are Too Big’
Zhou said Nio‘s European colleagues repeatedly flagged a basic product-market mismatch that leadership was slow to accept.
“A lot of our vehicles are big because they’re more tailored to the Chinese environment. But some of those vehicles do not fit well in the European environment,” Zhou said.
“Our European colleagues kept telling us, your car, our cars are too big. Maneuvering in the narrow area is really painful,” the executive VP added.
Costly Infrastructure
The infrastructure gap proved equally challenging.
Zhou said the company underestimated both the timeline and cost of establishing its battery-swap network and service operations in Europe, where regulatory and permitting processes move at a fundamentally different pace than in China.
“The speed of infrastructure setups. Europe is much, much lower than, efficiency-wise is much different than the China efficiency,” Zhou said. “So we didn’t anticipate the speed and we didn’t anticipate the total cost of setting it up.”
Bureaucracy
He mentioned the contrast between the two markets in bureaucracy.
“In China, it’s more like the government decides to do something. They just go ahead and do it,” Zhou stated. “But in Europe, you know, there are all sorts of different complications, which we have to learn.
“They exist for good reasons. And we just have to respect that and we just have to adapt to it,” the Executive VP added.
Europe’s stricter data privacy regime also required adaptation.
“The GDPR is so much more strict than the rest of the world. And again, there is a good reason for that because people respect more individuals, respect more privacies. So we just need to adapt to it,” Zhou said.
Firefly
One of the clearest illustrations of Nio‘s European challenge is Firefly, the compact car sub-brand that was designed in Munich specifically for European consumers.
Deliveries in Europe began in the Netherlands and Norway in August last year with other European markets following later in 2025.
Zhou said the vehicle was fully production-ready, with a Euro NCAP five-star safety rating — the highest in its class — before trade tensions forced a change in plans.
“We got everything ready, production was ready, design engineering was ready. You know, we even got Euro NCAP 5-star, the best in the world, got that ready,” Zhou said.
“But because of the conflicts, we had to slow down a little bit to bring the product into the European market,” he added.
Rather than let the production line sit idle, Nio redirected Firefly to the Chinese domestic market, where it was never originally intended to compete.
It is now selling roughly 6,000 units per month there.
European volumes remain small, with the brand registering only a handful of vehicles per month since deliveries began in Norway and the Netherlands last August.
In an internal letter to employees earlier this month, revealed by local media outlet LatePost, founder and CEO William Li wrote that “Firefly serves as our pioneering brand for global market entry.”
Long-Term Commitment
Despite the setbacks, Zhou framed Europe as central to Nio‘s long-term strategy — while acknowledging the company has not yet found the right formula.
“Europe is a very, very important market for Nio, but we need to find better ways of serving our users in Europe,” he said.
He also pushed back against the perception of Chinese automakers as short-term opportunists seeking quick market share.
“We don’t want to just go in there and grab the food and walk away,” Zhou said. “We have to build respect with consumers, with government, with business partners, be part of the society, be able to contribute to the society.”
Nio delivered 326,028 vehicles globally in 2025, up 46.9% year over year, with the vast majority sold in China.
The company currently operates in nearly a dozen European markets and it plans to expand into several more, including Poland, Armenia, and the Czech Republic.
