UBS Group AG nearly doubled its holding in Nio during the third quarter, adding 17,314,803 American depositary shares to end September with 36,586,129, according to its latest 13F filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The 89.8% increase, from 19,271,326 at the end of June, took the Swiss bank’s position to its highest since the second quarter of 2025. It was also 27.1% above the 28,777,768 UBS reported a year earlier. It was the second straight quarterly increase, after UBS added 56.1% in the second quarter.
The filing reported the holding at $125.5 million, marked at Nio’s September 30 close of $3.43. That was up 28.7% from $97.5 million at the end of June, even though the stock fell 32.2% over the quarter from $5.06. The value was down 42.8% from $219.3 million a year earlier.
At Wednesday’s close of $3.24, the same holding is worth about $118.5 million.
The 19.3 million shares UBS held at the end of June lost about $31.4 million of value as the price fell, while the 17.3 million it added were worth $59.4 million at the quarter-end price.
UBS’s report lists 24,277 entries with a combined value of $765.0 billion, down from $786.0 billion at the end of June.
Where the Shares Sit
The filing splits the Nio holding across four UBS entities. UBS AG reported 31,587,645 ADS, more than double the 15,360,631 it held in June. That single line accounts for 93.7% of the quarter’s increase and 86.3% of the total.
UBS Switzerland AG held 4,228,257 ADS, up from 3,170,772. UBS Financial Services, the U.S. wealth-management arm, held 769,452, up from 711,675, while UBS Securities LLC’s line fell to 775 from 28,248.
The asset-management unit UBS AM, part of UBS Asset Management Americas, files a separate 13F. Its June report listed 181,351 Nio ADS, and it had not filed for September as of Thursday.
Largest Reported Holding, for Now
The 36.6 million shares exceed every Nio position reported for the end of June. At that date, Morgan Stanley was the largest institutional holder with 27,411,634 shares, followed by UBS, Bank of America and D.E. Shaw.
Most of Nio’s large holders, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, D.E. Shaw, Renaissance Technologies and Goldman Sachs, had not filed third-quarter reports as of Thursday, so the comparison covers different dates. Managers have until November 16 to report holdings as of September 30.
Among banks that have already filed, Barclays reported 4,476,270 Nio shares and Citigroup 816,755, both marked at the same $3.43. Barclays’ holding was its largest since 2022.
Options Lines
UBS’s Nio entry runs across three lines. Alongside the common holding, the bank reported call options on 402,565 underlying shares, down 21.7% from 514,465, and put options on 250,000, up from 85,700. The call position is the smallest since September 2023, when UBS listed calls on 358,503.
Those lines are small beside the holding itself. The calls were valued at $1.4 million and the puts at $857,000, against $125.5 million for the shares, and the option values reflect the underlying shares at the quarter-end price rather than premiums paid. At the end of June, the same lines were valued at $2.6 million for the calls and $433,000 for the puts.
The bank’s option exposure was far larger a year earlier. At the end of September 2025, it reported calls on 12,991,610 underlying shares and puts on 8,985,600. At the end of March this year, it still had calls on 2,813,833 and puts on 3,185,900.
A Two-Year Swing
The latest increase is the largest in share terms since the fourth quarter of 2024, when UBS’s holding jumped from 4,107,936 to 44,160,805.
The position peaked at 74,955,469 shares at the end of March 2025, UBS’s largest on record in Nio, and was reported at $285.6 million. It then fell to 70,147,507 in the second quarter of 2025, 28,777,768 in the third and 24,549,713 at the end of the year.
UBS halved the holding again in the first quarter of 2026, to 12,347,240, before buying back in. Even after two quarters of increases, the position is 51.2% below the March 2025 peak. It is still the fourth-largest Nio holding UBS has reported since the company listed in New York in 2018.
Before the end of 2024, UBS’s Nio holding had never topped the 5,724,462 ADS it reported for June 2024.
Nio was UBS’s largest position among Chinese EV makers by value, ahead of XPeng at $81.1 million and Li Auto at $27.1 million.
UBS Research
UBS analyst Paul Gong initiated coverage of Nio in September with a ‘Buy’ rating and a HK$43 ($5.48) target for the Hong Kong shares, and a $5.60 target for the ADS.
Price Target, a sister publication of EV, archives Wall Street analysts’ research on the electric vehicle, artificial intelligence and semiconductor sectors.
“Nio has been beating investors’ expectations YTD for its profitability improvement, despite a muted share price performance,” Gong wrote. Research and holdings sit behind information barriers, and the 13F does not link the two.
A Falling Stock
UBS added to its position during a quarter in which Nio’s shares lost nearly a third of their value. They had hit a 13-month low in late August, a week before second-quarter results, and closed the quarter at $3.43.
In mid-September, the shares fell to a new 52-week low after Founder and Chief Executive Officer William Li reportedly ruled out a share buyback.
Later that month, they pared early gains after Geely Holding Group agreed to take a 30% stake in Nio’s battery-swapping unit, NIO Power, in a deal valuing the unit at about 16 billion yuan ($2.4 billion) after the investment.
Over the same quarter, Nio Inc. delivered 109,178 vehicles in the third quarter, within the 108,000 to 111,000 it had guided and up 25.4% from a year earlier.
The decline has continued since. On October 21, the American depositary shares traded at their lowest since April 2025, more than 95% below their all-time high, and they closed at $3.24 on Wednesday.
Nio Inc. delivered 34,246 vehicles in October, down 15.2% from a year earlier and its first year-over-year decline since February 2024, as a slump at its Onvo brand outweighed gains at the Nio brand and Firefly. Onvo’s 8,383 deliveries were 51.7% below a year earlier.
The company has not yet reported third-quarter results. In the second quarter, its revenue rose 69.1% from a year earlier to 32.1 billion yuan ($4.8 billion). It is due to unveil new AI cockpit and assisted-driving products on November 25.
