The first model from the Nio battery exchange alliance is conducting winter tests, and the Firefly sub-brand will start selling in Europe next year.
Nio (NYSE: NIO) held a 2024 year-end media event today in Shanghai, the city where it is headquartered, and company founder, Chairman and CEO William Li answered more than 200 questions during the three-hour call. hours.
As background, in past years the electric vehicle (EV) maker has held a large-scale media event at the end of the year, a few days before Nio Day, to answer frequently asked questions.
This year’s event was held at a Shanghai hotel, and CnEVPost was on site. The next Nio Day 2024 will be held on December 21 in Guangzhou, where the company will officially launch the ET9 and launch the Firefly brand.
In today’s call, Lee answered a total of more than 200 questions that the company had previously collected from participating reporters, covering a wide range of topics. Below are the main highlights of the event by CnEVPost.
He confirmed to me that Nio’s 2025 sales goal is to double its sales from 2024, or about 440,000 units.
Company management first mentioned the goal of doubling sales for 2025 in its 2024 third-quarter earnings call on November 20, but did not provide further details at the time.
Nio at the time was targeting fourth-quarter vehicle deliveries to be in the range of 72,000 to 75,000 units, meaning it was expecting deliveries in 2024 to be in the range of 221,000 to 224,000 units.
At today’s media briefing, Li said the company expects sales of Nio’s flagship brand to grow moderately in 2025 compared to 2024, without providing further details.
From January to November this year, the Nio brand delivered 180,599 vehicles, up 27.16 percent year on year, according to data compiled by CnEVPost.
The Onvo sub-brand is expected to achieve an average of 20,000 units per month in 2025, more than 200,000 units for this year, Li said.
For the upcoming Firefly brand, Nio expects sales in the thousands of units per month.
In response to a question from CnEVPost, Li said the company is confident of meeting Q4 delivery guidance with more than 30,000 units delivered in December.
Nio needs to deliver at least 30,449 vehicles in December to meet its fourth-quarter delivery guidance, according to CnEVPost calculations.
From Dec. 1 to Dec. 11, Nio Inc. received the highest number of closed orders for the same period in the past six months, Lee said.
In response to a question from CnEVPost, Li said the F3 plant should be operational in the third or fourth quarter of 2025, and is located near the NeoPark F2 plant in Hefei City, Anhui Province.
He did not give me any other details today. Nio currently has two factories in Hefei – F1 and F2.
Nio co-founder and president Chen Lihong said on June 5 that the company had begun construction of a third factory.
The new plant will have a single-shift production capacity of 100,000 units per year and will be used for both Nio and Onvo-branded products, Chen said at the time.
Li confirmed today that the Onvo sub-brand will deliver more than 10,000 L60 vehicles in December and will see monthly deliveries reach 20,000 in March next year.
The Onvo L60 was launched on September 19 and deliveries began on September 28 and is still in the capacity ramp-up phase. Customers who order the model now will have to wait 8-10 weeks for delivery.
Due to the long waiting time to get the L60, some customers chose Nio models at Onvo stores, Li said.
Last month, Onvo’s sales team helped sell 200 to 300 vehicles for the Nio brand, according to Li.
The Onvo brand has not cannibalized Nio, Lee said, saying only 2% of the sub-brand’s customers were originally considering buying a Nio model.
Lee said the Onvo brand will launch two additional models in 2025, with deliveries starting in the third or fourth quarter.
In a Nov. 20 earnings call, Nio’s management said Onvo will launch two SUVs next year, including a six- or seven-seat car and a large five-seat one.
Onvo’s product lineup will not be as large as the Nio brand, with a maximum of four or five models, according to Li. There are currently eight models delivered under the flagship Nio brand.
He assured me that the number of battery swapping stations available to Onvo will reach 1,000 by the end of this year and 2,000 by next April.
The company is positioning the Firefly brand as a luxury small car, similar to the BMW Mini and Mercedes-Benz Smart.
He told me that there is consumer demand for such small cars, but they do not have good options in terms of supply.
In the Chinese market, the Firefly brand will only have one model and will continue to iterate on it.
The Firefly model will be priced similarly to Mini cars in China.
In overseas markets, the Firefly brand may follow a different strategy than in China, and Nio has not yet decided whether it will launch multiple Firefly models overseas, Li said.
Firefly is important to Nio Inc’s strategy to enter global markets, where small cars are in high demand, according to Lee.
The company will begin selling Firefly models in Europe in 2025, in a move that largely coincides with its moves in the domestic market.
The first Firefly model was initially designed for the European market, but has since been converted to be launched in China as well, keeping in mind that there is demand for such models in the country as well.
Firefly’s battery swap network is cheaper to build and easier to deploy because the packages are smaller and designed to be deployed quickly around the world.
Firefly will share the Nio brand’s sales channels and will also have its own user touchpoints, Li said.
The company will maintain reasonable gross margins on the Firefly brand and will work to improve them over time.
Nio still wants to cumulatively enter 25 countries and regions by 2025 and will focus on sales of Onvo and Firefly models in overseas markets because they are less expensive than the Nio brand.
Nio announced a number of partners joining its battery swapping alliance over the past year, saying it would work with them to build models that support battery swapping, but did not provide any other details.
Lee said today that those efforts are moving forward and that the cycle time to build a new battery-swappable model is about 18 months.
Li said the first model from the Nio battery exchange alliance is undergoing winter testing.
He added that by 2027 and 2028, there will be more new models designed using Nio’s battery swapping technology.
One of the most asked questions at today’s event was whether Nio has any plans to launch hybrid models.
Lee reiterated that the company will not launch hybrid models in China, but he did not rule out the possibility of launching such models in foreign markets.
Last month, it was reported that the Firefly sub-brand would launch hybrid models in overseas markets. Nio said in a clarification at the time that it would not launch hybrid models in China, but did not mention overseas markets.
Li said today that Firefly will only offer battery electric vehicle (BEV) models in China, while plans for overseas are still under consideration because charging infrastructure in most other markets lags behind China’s by 5 to 10 years.
As Onvo L60 deliveries increased, deliveries of Nio’s flagship brand models saw successive declines in the past two months.
Lee today denied that this was due to the Onvo brand cannibalizing Nio orders, and also said that Onvo was not taking capacity from Nio-branded models.
In October and November, deliveries of the Nio brand fell due to lower promotions by at least 10,000 yuan ($1,380), Li said.
In the third quarter, Nio sacrificed some gross margins in exchange for higher volumes, he said.
For the Nio brand, the quality of growth and gross margins will have a higher priority in 2025, Li said.
Li said today that he now expects the penetration of new energy vehicles in China to reach 90 percent by 2027 at the latest, three years earlier than his previous forecast of 2030.
He said the likely milestone for China’s NEV market in 2025 would be for the NEV penetration rate to reach 75 percent.
In November, China’s retail penetration of new energy vehicles reached 52.3 percent, the fourth consecutive month above the 50 percent mark, according to the China Passenger Vehicle Association.
In China, new energy vehicles include battery-electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), and fuel cell vehicles. Currently Nio only produces BEV cars.
($1 = 7.2702 Chinese yuan)
Nio Nov Deliveries Details: ES6 at 5,942, ET5T at 4,142
