In the opening letter of 2024, Li Bin, CEO of NIO, bluntly said, "Our comprehensive performance did not meet expectations. ”
Last year wasn't the best for NIO, but it wasn't the worst either.
The layoffs at the end of the year and the postponement of the project all revealed the difficulties of NIO, but fortunately, the company won the qualification of independent car manufacturing and obtained large investment in the Middle East and other good information came out at the same time, and it "survived" with a cash flow of 57.3 billion yuan.
It is difficult to get rid of the title of "Wei 10,000".
On March 5, NIO announced its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of last year, with year-on-year revenue and sales growth, and further expansion of losses.
According to the financial report, NIO's annual revenue was 5561.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 129%, of which the main increase came from car sales, which reached 4925.7 billion yuan, accounting for 88 percent of total revenue56%, an increase of 82%, mainly due to sales**.
For the whole of last year, NIO's overall sales were fixed at 160,000 units, ranking second among the new forces, but with the ideal 3760,000 units sold 2160,000 vehicles, there is a huge fault.
Li Bin once said at the 2022 financial report** that NIO's sales target in 2023 is to double year-on-year. According to the annual sales in 2022 12With a result of 250,000 units, NIO's sales target last year should be 24About 50,000 units, but the actual difference is far from the same, and the completion rate is only 65%.
At the beginning of this year, Li Bin set a sales target of 230,000 units in 2024, which is a more conservative target, with an annual growth rate of about 44%. At the same time, at the performance meeting, the company's management put forward an outlook for the first quarter of this year and set a delivery volume of 310,000-3With the announcement of the sales target of 30,000 units in January and February this year, the company's March target is 1280,000-1480,000 units.
Last year, Li Bin once said in an interview that if Weilai sold 10,000 vehicles a month for a long time, he and Qin Lihong, president of Weilai, would have to find a job, but looking back on the sales curve of last year, only in July to achieve monthly sales of more than 20,000, which coincided with the price adjustment of the whole system in June, the number of car buyers increased, and most of the other months only sold more than 10,000 vehicles.
The outlook for the first quarter of this year also shows that NIO's current sales have not met expectations, and the title of "Wei 10,000" has not yet been shaken off. However, during the meeting, Li Bin said with confidence that he was confident that he would return to the level of 20,000 monthly deliveries this year.
In terms of gross profit, NIO's overall gross profit margin fell by 4% year-on-year last year9 percentage points to 55%, mainly due to the decline in gross profit margin of automobiles.
In June last year, the price of the whole Weilai series was reduced by 30,000 yuan, resulting in a decrease in the sales of single vehicles, superimposed on the increase in sales costs, and the gross profit margin of the whole vehicle declined, and the gross profit margin of the whole year was only 95%, down 42 percentage points.
Looking back at the changes in NIO's gross profit margin in the past three years, since 2021, the company's gross profit margin and vehicle gross profit margin have gradually decreased, and the overall gross profit margin for the three years is respectively. 5%。
However, Li Bin is not worried about this, he believes that the company's gross profit margin is expected to pick up this year, and the gross profit margin of automobiles can return to 15%-18%.
Where did the loss of 20.7 billion yuan go?
In Weilai's financial report last year, the most eye-catching was the net loss of 20.7 billion yuan, an increase of 43% year-on-year5%。Looking through the financial report, R&D investment is a big loss, and its R&D investment last year was 134300 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 239%。
In 2020, NIO's annual R&D investment was only 2.5 billion yuan, and in 2021 it was only 4.6 billion yuan, but the subsequent increase was astonishing, with 10.8 billion yuan invested in 2022, a year-on-year increase of more than 134%, and further increased to 13.4 billion yuan last year. According to Li Bin, a lot of things were done last year, and for various reasons, it was more than expected thanks to 10 billion yuan.
Since the model replacement at the beginning of the year, NIO has begun to "smash" money. At the beginning of last year, NIO switched the old ES8, ES6, and EC6 to the second platform production, released the EC7 and ET5T in the middle of the year, and unveiled the ET9 at NIO Day at the end of the year.
However, NIO's "multiple children" have not been able to form a good product sales matrix, and more are competing for their own sales.
In addition to car products, in order to enrich the car-machine interconnection experience, Weilai personally made mobile phones, and launched them in September last year, with a price of 6499 yuan - 7499 yuan, which is even higher than some models of Huawei and Apple on the market. The cost of making mobile phones is self-evident, and the sales volume of Weilai mobile phones has not been announced, industry insiders said that mobile phone products enrich the interconnection experience of Weilai's car machine, and the basic users who will buy Weilai mobile phones are Weilai. However, this does not mean that all NIO car owners will buy mobile phones, and the income of the mobile phone business is weak.
In addition, NIO's self-developed batteries have been developed for two years, from spending 200 million yuan to build a laboratory in Shanghai to building a battery production base in Hefei, NIO has invested a lot, but has not yet achieved mass production.
There is also a larger investment in the battery swap station, the data shows that Weilai built more than 1,000 new battery swap stations last year, Li Bin previously revealed that the completion of a battery swap station in Weilai cost 3 million yuan, which means that the establishment of the light battery swap station last year cost more than 3 billion yuan.
Selling, general and administrative expenses for the full year reached 1288.5 billion yuan, the financial report said, mainly due to the increase in the cost of sales personnel and the increase in sales and marketing activities.
Alps" or carry the girder.
Perhaps aware of the impact of high-investment, low-income projects on the company's financial situation, Li Bin began to rectify its internal business at the end of last year, merging departments and positions that were duplicated, eliminating inefficient positions, and laying off 10% of employees. At the same time, projects that cannot improve the company's financial performance for three years are suspended or postponed.
In the face of the increasingly fierce "** war", although Weilai sold old models with large subsidies at the beginning of the year, Li Bin bluntly said at the performance meeting, "The lowest price of NIO's products is ET5, and there will be no lower ** products." ”
NIO's entry into the low-end market will be tasked with the company's second brand, Alps, and its third brand, Firefly. According to Li Bin's statement, it will help to increase the scale of sales in the future through lower prices, and Firefly's products may be as low as 100,000 yuan.
Perhaps inspired by the ideal sales volume, Li Bin said that Alps will focus on the family market and launch very competitive models, "although we entered the family car market later than some brands, we also have a deeper understanding of the needs of users in this market." He said frankly that the first car of the second brand has already begun to be tested, and the cost and performance are very competitive, and the Model Y will be our direct competitor, and the cost is expected to be about 10% lower than Tesla.
It is worth noting that Alps' first product will start large-scale deliveries in the fourth quarter of this year, which means that it will not be able to contribute to sales until the fourth quarter at the earliest, and whether it can exceed 20,000 units in a single month in the first three quarters still depends on the NIO brand.
There are voices in the market that the addition of low-cost models will increase the difficulty of NIO to improve gross profit, Li Bin explained that the division of labor between the two brands of the company is different, "the NIO brand pursues gross profit, and the market is hot, NIO will not exchange price for volume", and for new brands, Li Bin said that "the demand level of volume will be higher than gross profit".
In addition, Li Bin shared the latest strategy for NIO's proud charging and swapping energy supplement, "The battery swap stations in 2024 will still aim for 1,000, but this year partners will build these battery swap stations."
Last year, NIO successively reached battery swap cooperation with Changan, Geely, JAC, Chery and other enterprises to broaden the "circle of friends" for the future battery swap and energy supplement network. In addition, it has revealed that it does not rule out the possibility of independent financing of the battery swap business.