This article is edited:
Written on the front:
This article is the original manuscript of the car rules, **please indicate**"car rules", please do not infringe.
Go to the main text:
Recently, Li Bin, chairman and CEO of NIO, released the first internal letter for 2024. The content of the letter is very large, and the general meaning is that Li Bin himself is quite dissatisfied with NIO's performance this year, and the overall performance did not meet the expected target, with an overall delivery of 160,000 vehicles, only 65% of the target.
After 2023, NIO in 2024 will give up illusions and face challenges head-on. The fantasy here, Li Bin said bluntly: one is to give up the illusion that the market competition is not miserable, and the other is to give up the illusion of exchanging price for quantity.
Li Bin said frankly: the next two years will be the most important stage of the transformation of the automotive industry, and the competition will be fierce beyond imagination.
In fact, 2023 can be regarded as a year for NIO to make bold moves, including switching its products to the second-generation platform one after another, also engaging in NIO mobile phones, and even reaching cooperation with traditional car giants Changan and Geely in the battery swap part, and finally bidding farewell to JAC, winning its own production qualifications, and even introducing up to $3.3 billion investment from CYVN, an investment institution in Buzabi.
But for car companies, sales volume is the key to success or failure, and they will lose tens of billions in the first half of 2023.
In the first half of 2023, NIO's sales fell into a trough, and the second-quarter financial report showed that NIO's revenue was 87700 million yuan, gross profit is only 08.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 935%, down 464%, and the cumulative loss in the first half of 2023 alone will exceed 10 billion.
In 2023, NIO delivered a total of 160,000 vehicles, only about 65% of its sales target. Although NIO is still the first in the pure electric vehicle market of more than 300,000 yuan, starting in 2023, it can be said that it is the year of the blowout of hybrid models, and the sales of hybrid vehicles above 300,000 yuan have not yet reached half of the ideal. For reference: Ideal delivered a total of 37 in 202360,000 vehicles.
However, it should be noted that under the premise of an increasingly competitive market, the progress of NIO's new product development and promotion is indeed relatively conservative.
Of NIO's three brands, the main brand will not have new products this year. The second brand, codenamed "Alps", plans to launch its first SUV model in the second half of this year; The third brand, codenamed "Firefly", will not debut a BMW mini-like car in the European market until 2025.
And this kind of progress, for the current NIO, this is already the limit of operation.
"The company's resources are limited, and we are still suffering losses from R&D and infrastructure investments."——Li Bin, December 2023.
Since the second quarter of 2022, NIO has spent 2.3 billion yuan per quarter on R&D, such as the Shenji intelligent driving chip, the SkyOS Tianshu operating system, the 900V global high-voltage platform, the Skyride intelligent chassis, and the global navigation assistance NOP large cylindrical battery. What Li Bin insists on is to ensure that each product can have unique competitiveness.
But unfortunately, the investment in technology does not mean that you can get timely and rapid feedback of products.
The NIO 150-degree battery pack was released in January 2021 and was originally scheduled to be launched in the fourth quarter of 2022, but it did not enter the ramp-up stage until December 2023. The ET7 is equipped with a 1016 TOPS computing platform composed of lidar and four NVIDIA Orin chips, but the car was only delivered to users in March 2022, and the enhanced pilot assisted driving function NOP+ was only delivered in early December of that year.
On the other hand, taking Changan Group's new brand Qiyuan brand as an example, in just half a year of 2023, three models have been launched for different market segments, including: A07 A05 Q05...
It can be confirmed that from the perspective of product upgrading, the current NIO combat effectiveness is indeed much worse than before. The competition will be even more fierce in 2024. I look forward to NIO being able to bring more surprises in 2024.
NIO