UBS Group AG added 6,924,086 Nio shares during the second quarter, lifting its position by 56.1% and reversing a sharp cut made just three months earlier.
The Zurich-based bank held 19,271,326 Nio American depositary shares as of June 30, up from 12,347,240 at the end of March, according to its latest 13F filing with the SEC.
The position was reported at approximately $97.5 million, marked at Nio’s June 30 close of $5.06.
At Thursday’s level the same holding is worth about $86.0 million.
Among managers that had filed second-quarter reports by Thursday, the holding is the largest reported position in Nio.
D.E. Shaw & Co, which held more at the end of March, had yet to file for the second quarter, so the two figures describe different dates and are not directly comparable.
The rebuild follows a first quarter in which UBS had cut its stake by half, from 24.5 million shares at the end of 2025 to around 12.3 million by March 31.
The second-quarter addition leaves the position 21.3% below where it stood at the close of 2025, and well short of the highs reached earlier that year.
A Volatile Run Since Late 2024
UBS’s Nio position has swung dramatically over the past two years.
The bank held a relatively modest 1.8 million shares in the first quarter of 2022, building gradually to just over 5 million by the end of 2023 before drifting back down through most of 2024.
The figures changed abruptly in the fourth quarter of 2024, when UBS’s stake jumped nearly 975%, from 4.1 million to 44.2 million shares.
The buildup continued into 2025, with the position peaking at nearly 75 million shares in the first quarter — UBS’s largest-ever holding in the Chinese EV maker.
From there, the retreat was steady and steep.
The stake fell 6% in the second quarter of 2025, then 59% in the third, then another 15% in the fourth — before the 50% cut in the first quarter of 2026 brought it down to 12.3 million shares — the lowest level UBS had held since late 2023.
The second-quarter increase reverses that trend, though the current 19.3 million shares still sit about a quarter of the size of last year’s peak.
Q2 Stock Performance
Nio‘s US-listed shares declined 16.1% over the April-to-June period.
The stock closed at $6.03 on March 31 and peaked at $7.00 on April 17, before entering a sustained pullback that took shares to $5.06 by June 30.
By mid-June, the stock was trading in a $4.73-to-$5.20 range, where it largely remained through the rest of the quarter.
Nio‘s shares have continued to soften since, closing at $4.54 on Wednesday and trading 1.6% lower at $4.46 on Thursday’s session — as of press time.
Most of a bank’s 13F covers asset management mandates, wealth-management client accounts and a dealer book reported together, and the form does not separate them, so the increase cannot be read as a directional view.
Institutional Ownership
As of Thursday, Nio was held by 506 institutional holders with a combined 290.1 million shares, according to Nasdaq data.
JPMorgan Chase also disclosed a 59% cut to its stake on Thursday, extending a rapid unwind of what had been its largest-ever Nio position just two quarters ago.
BlackRock trimmed its holding by 11.8% during the quarter, ending two consecutive quarters of accumulation, while Deutsche Bank cut its stake by 18% as it expanded positions in XPeng and Li Auto instead.
Citigroup moved the other way, returning to Nio buying for the first time in five quarters with a 37.7% increase to its position.
IMC-Chicago made the most aggressive move of the group so far, more than doubling its stake to 2.6 million shares — though the firm is a market maker and its holdings reflect trading inventory rather than a position taken on the company.
Managers with more than $100 million under investment discretion have until Friday to file their second-quarter reports, and several of Nio’s largest holders had not done so as of Thursday.
Still awaiting updated filings are Morgan Stanley, Renaissance Technologies, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Two Sigma Investments, Citadel Advisors and Aspex Management, all of which round out the list of Nio‘s ten-largest reported holders.
UBS Auto Portfolio
UBS’s rebuilding wasn’t limited to Nio, with the Swiss bank also having increased its position in both Chinese automakers XPeng and Li Auto during the second quarter.
The bank lifted its stake in Li Auto by 81% to 3,153,738 shares, a position currently valued at $37 million.
UBS also grew its XPeng position by 27%, to nearly 5.6 million ADS, though the stake’s value slipped 2% to $73.9 million as the stock declined over the quarter.
In the US, the bank’s Tesla holdings rose slightly — up 5% in shares to 5.7 million. The position’s value jumped 18% to $2.4 billion on a stronger share price during the period.
UBS’ position increase in Rivian was also modest — of 6% quarter over quarter — totaling 10,870,671 shares as of June 30.
Rivian issued about 82.4 million new Class A shares over the same three months, so the bank’s stake in the company was flat to marginally lower despite the larger share count.
Lucid saw a higher buildup, with UBS adding more than 4.2 million shares — a 46% increase — bringing the holding to 13,355,131 shares worth $89.3 million.
Lucid’s own share count rose 19.4% over the quarter after its April capital raise, so part of that purchase was required simply to hold position. The bank’s stake still rose, to 3.39% from 2.77%.
The Lucid entry runs across three lines in the filing.
Alongside the common holding, UBS reported puts covering 290,000 underlying shares, up from 190,000, and opened a call position covering 30,000.
Nio has not yet scheduled its second-quarter results. The group delivered 35,934 vehicles in July, down 11.5% from June, taking deliveries through seven months to 227,057.
The Nio brand accounted for 20,008 of that total, with the ES8 back above 10,000 units, while the flagship ES9 fell 26.5% sequentially in its first monthly decline.
The brand’s average selling price eased 1.9% to 434,600 yuan over the same month.
