The Chinese electric car manufacturer Nio has presented its business figures for the first quarter of 2022. Nio was able to increase deliveries and consequently sales, but is still in the red.
Nio delivered 25,768 electric cars in the first three months of the year, 28.5 per cent more than in the same quarter last year and 2.9 per cent more than in the fourth quarter of 2021. However, this was already known since the CPCA figures in April. In the course of the quarterly figures, however, Nio also breaks down sales by model: The best-seller was the ES6 with 13,620 units, followed by 7,644 EC6s – so together the electric SUV and electric SUV coupe account for 82.5 per cent of sales. Of the larger electric SUV ES8, 4,341 vehicles were sold, and Nio was only able to hand over the flagship sedan ET7 to customers 163 times. But this is hardly surprising: deliveries only started at the end of March, just a few days before the end of the quarter. A better picture of production and demand will therefore emerge in Q2.
Nio’s total revenue in Q1 2022 was around 9.9 billion. Yuan (just under €1.4 billion), up 24.2 per cent year-on-year, but only 0.1 per cent from Q4 2021.
Nio’s net loss in the first three months of the year totalled nearly 1.8 billion yuan (about 260 million euros), up 295 per cent from Q1 2021 and down 16.8 per cent from Q4 2021.
The board is optimistic about the overall trend. “Despite the volatilities of supply chain and the challenges in vehicle delivery resulting from the recent COVID-19 resurgence, we witnessed robust demand for our complementary products and achieved an all-time high order inflow in May 2022,” said William Bin Li, founder and CEO of Nio, adding that the first batch of test production of the ET5 has rolled off the production line at the new NeoPark in Hefei. The smaller sedan is scheduled for delivery from September.
“To quickly recover from the COVID-19 impact and fulfill the growing market demand, we have been working closely with supply chain partners to ramp up the production capacity and accelerate the vehicle delivery since the beginning of June,” said CFO Steven Wei Feng. “While making decisive investments in new products, technologies and businesses, we strive to continuously optimize our cost structure, improve operating efficiency and create long-term value for our shareholders.”
The high order intake in May mentioned by William Li will then probably be reflected in the sales statistics this year. There is no sign of that yet: Nio also lagged behind other carmakers such as Xpeng, Neta or Leapmotor in May with 7,024 sales. Nio did not reach five-digit sales figures in any month in 2022.
Keyword: Nio manages to contain Q1 financial expenditures