NIO has become a 'religion' for its car owners

[ZeEa5KPul]

Good stuff. At least now Chinese people with more money than sense will hand their money over to a Chinese entrepreneur. Take some of the edge off the white worship.

 

[Paul2]

Born in a poor village, how NIO's William Li built China's first local premium car brand


Three years younger than Tesla CEO Elon Musk, William Li was born in a mountain village in central China’s Anhui Province in 1974.

During his childhood, the young man who lived with his grandparents until the second grade could never have imagined that he would one day be able to build China's first local high-end car brand, NIO, in the future.

In Li's hometown, cattle are an important tool of production, and his grandfather used to buy cattle in poor conditions at low prices, raise them at home and sell them to earn a living.

During the season when he didn't need to sell cattle, his grandfather would buy liquor and tobacco from Jiangsu and distribute them to the village farmers when he returned.

Li helped collect the money and keep the books. Looking back on that experience, Li once said, "Grandpa taught me the simplest philosophy of business."

Nearing graduation from junior high school, Li was faced with the first critical choice in his life: whether to attend a professional technical school or a regular high school.

In the early 1990s, a professional-technical school degree was more practical than a high school. Graduates of professional technical schools could go straight to work and thus support their families. But it also meant that there would be no chance of going to college.

(Li during high school years. Source: Sohu)

Eventually, Li chose the latter, and after high school successfully entered Peking University, which is known in China as the best university in China along with Tsinghua University.

Li majored in sociology and minored in law. He also studied computer programming in his spare time and worked extensively on a part-time basis, "holding more than 50 jobs during his college years."

(Li during his college years. Source: Sohu)


In 1996, fresh out of college, Li set up a company called Nanji Technology.

The following year, he co-founded what was then known as Kewen Shuye Information Technology, the predecessor to Dangdang.com.

However, he left Dangdang.com after only a year because he wanted to do something big - start a company like eBay, but Li chose the direction of automobiles.

In 2000, he launched BitAuto, a car website that provides users with car-related information and services, and received $9.5 million in investment.

(Li in 2000. Source: Sohu)

In 2001, the Chinese government first encouraged cars to enter residential households and advocated the development of economical cars.

Subsequently, the market for family cars of around RMB 100,000 ($12,100) swelled rapidly, and the increasing number of car products made many Chinese people unsure how to choose. This also became an opportunity for BitAuto to grow rapidly.

But in that year, the US Internet bubble burst, and BitAuto could not escape the doom.

By the bottom of BitAuto's fate, the company was left with seven people. For the next few years, Li earned money by writing code and making websites for others.

In 2003, Chinese web portals started to come back from the dead.

To avoid competing with the portals, Li did not make BitAuto an informational website.

The portals were not willing to serve car dealers, so Li collected information about these dealers, organized them into an information database, and provided it to the portals for use.

With more and more resources, many companies and websites came to him to discuss cooperation. Car dealers began to pay membership fees to BitAuto, and BitAuto began to have cash flow again.

By 2004, BitAuto's profit reached millions of RMB.

In 2010, BitAuto was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, becoming the first Chinese auto-related Internet company to be listed overseas.

In 2010, an electric car company called Tesla became the second car company to go public in the US after Ford in 1956, in Silicon Valley, where manufacturing was not well developed.

In 2013, Tesla's market capitalization had exceeded $10 billion. At the time, Li was also thinking about what to do next that made more sense.

In April 2014, Musk came to China to deliver the keys to Tesla to the first owners in China.

Many people began to realize at this time that an era of new energy vehicles, full of unlimited imagination, was coming.

In November 2014, Li, who had been "teaching people how to buy cars", decided to start building cars himself, and NIO was born.

When NIO was founded in 2014, it had a team of luxury investors, including Pony Ma from Tencent, Liu Qiangdong from JD.com, Lei Jun from Xiaomi, and Zhang Lei from Hillhouse Capital.

With a large amount of capital, NIO has tapped industry veterans who have worked at Mazda, Maserati, Motorola, Cisco, etc.

In order to acquire the technical team, NIO wholly acquired IAT Automobile Technology and recruited more than 200 automotive engineers to its team.

At that time, China's new energy vehicle market was still a blue ocean, and whoever could be one step ahead could seize the first opportunity.

Without production qualification and car factory, NIO thought of OEM production.

In April 2016, NIO signed an OEM contract with JAC Motors. Not long after, NIO's first electric supercar EP9 was unveiled.

On October 12, 2016, NIO EP9 set the electric car lap time record of 7 minutes and 05 seconds at the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany.

On February 23, 2017, the NIO EP9 set another record of 257 km/h at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, becoming the fastest electric car in the world.

The first batch of NIO EP9 is limited to only 6 units worldwide, and the owners are William Li, founder of NIO, Zhang Lei, founder, and CEO of Hillhouse Capital, Pony Ma, founder of Tencent, Liu Qiangdong, founder of JD.com, Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi, and Li Xiang, founder of Autohome and Li Auto.

At the end of 2017, NIO released the ES8, its first mass-produced electric car.

At the ES8 launch NIO Day, NIO spent RMB 80 million to charter 8 planes, 60 high-speed rail cars, 19 five-star hotels, and 160 buses to invite a large number of investors, media, and 5,000 intended users to the event. While this brought the event to widespread attention, it also drew controversy for NIO's massive money burning.

On September 12, 2018, NIO successfully landed on the New York Stock Exchange in the United States. On the first day of the opening, NIO invited 12 owners to ring the bell in front of the exchange. At that time, everyone had a big smile on their faces, but they did not know that a crisis was brewing quietly.

2018 was the first year that NIO began deliveries, but a number of vehicles were delivered in the second half of 2018 or even at the end of the year.

As we entered 2019, NIO spontaneous combustion incidents occurred one after another in Xi'an, Shanghai, Wuhan, Shijiazhuang and other places.

Although NIO reacted quickly, announcing a recall of some of the cars in question and free replacement battery packs, these incidents hit an emerging car brand hard.

In March 2019, this subsidy for the new energy industry began to be withdrawn. At the same time, NIO's sales were declining, with only 3,989 units sold in the first quarter of 2019, just half of the 7,980 units sold in the previous quarter.

And in the following months of April, May, and June, NIO's monthly deliveries were 1,123, 1,089, and 1,340 units, respectively, with nearly zero sales growth.

At the beginning of NIO, Li once said that if you don't have RMB 20 billion in your hands, don't think about making cars. But NIO still burned money faster than anyone expected.

In 2019, NIO lost RMB 11.3 billion, and the accumulated loss reached RMB 26.77 billion during the three years of its establishment.

NIO's stock once fell from $11 to $1.19 and was considered a company with no future.

People's praise for Li also quickly receded, and some media even called him "the most miserable person in 2019".

Li later said in an interview that money was tight and the company's cash flow could break at any time, a state that lasted for several months.

Although he raised money everywhere, no investors were willing to help.

Thankfully, NIO delivered more than 8,000 vehicles in 4Q 2019 in exchange for more than RMB $3 billion in cash flow, which helped the company survive the toughest period.

In this regard, Li has mentioned several times that he is grateful to the users for not giving up on NIO at that point in time.

Li's persistence finally paid off in 2020, when NIO received RMB 10 billion investment from the Hefei city government. Subsequently, NIO received another RMB 10.4 billion credit from 6 banks, and the funding problem was alleviated.

(Li in 2021)

NIO's monthly sales also rose step by step, and NIO's stock price soared as money in the stock market chased the electric car company.

NIO's stock price has risen 10 times in 2020, with a current market capitalization of $90.1 billion, surpassing a number of established car companies such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and SAIC.

The number of NIO sales is now increasing month by month, and both financial and operational conditions are far better than they were a year ago.

In October 2020, NIO pushed the NOP feature to its users, which enables cars to automatically enter and exit ramps and overtake automatically. In the second half of the year, NIO spent all of the $1.7 billion raised from the stock issue on self-driving technology development.

Currently, NIO is accelerating the development of the second-generation technology platform for assisted driving, and the related self-driving computing chip has been on the agenda for a long time, and an industry-leading self-driving system may be available in the near future.

NIO is a microcosm of the development of new energy vehicle companies in China. With the support of policy and capital, even though its share price is considered to be in a bubble, this does not prevent a large number of institutional investors from continuing to be bullish on it.

It's too early to tell how far NIO will grow, but what is clear is that it has established a firm foothold in China's high-end car market. This is something that no local car company would have thought of before.

Born in a poor village, how Nio's William Li built China's first local premium car brand

During his childhood, the young man who lived with his grandparents until the second grade could never have imagined that he would one day be able to build China's first local high-end car brand, Nio, in the future.

cnevpost.com

Poor village with a notebook???? Having a notebook in nineties China was an unspeakable luxury.

 

[TaiShang]

Poor village with a notebook???? Having a notebook in nineties China was an unspeakable luxury.

Probably he worked for it, and saved money. Poverty may not stop ambition.

 

[TaiShang]

Shipping info sparks speculation Nio may build showroom in US

A shipping document posted on Reddit shows that Nio sent a total of 40 tons of cargo to the United States, sparking speculation that the Chinese electric car maker may be setting up a showroom in the country.

cnevpost.com

A shipping document posted on Reddit shows that NIO sent a total of 40 tons of cargo to the United States, sparking speculation that the Chinese electric car maker may be setting up a showroom in the country.

The information posted by the user nicknamed deepilt shows four shipments, all starting on February 4, from Shanghai-based NIO Co Ltd.

The weight of these shipments were 7,500 kg, 5,000 kg, 15,000 kg and 12,500 kg, respectively. Their product descriptions are rather vague, and it is difficult to tell exactly what the products are.

(Source: Reddit)


The user also posted the following text:

NIO Showroom in USA? What do you think of these huge shipments to USA? NIO possibly opening up a Showroom in San Jose? Or some Auto show? Engineering sample being sent to USA!

Regarding the source of this information, the user states, " I work for a subcontractor company that supplies shipping containers, cranes, forklifts and so on. We use this database for our internal info (not important). I stumbled upon this."

(Source: Reddit)

The comment below this post that received the most upvote said, " Possibly sending vehicles to be inspected tested and prepared for OTA regulated etc. basically test dummies for Silicon Valley. That's my guess. Just like u said engineering samples."

(Source: Reddit)

An NIO spokesperson told CnEVPost that they would not comment on market rumors.

NIO went public on the NYSE in September 2018. Back in January 2018, shortly after the launch of NIO's first production car, the ES8, then-NIO CFO Louis Hsieh said that NIO cars would be sold in the US in 2020. However, that plan was not realized.

On July 24 last year, William Li Bin, founder of NIO, said in response to a question about whether he planned to enter overseas markets, "Now I should say that we are close to thinking clearly and have started to gradually enter the state of execution, which means we are starting to prepare our products and prepare our personnel."

These years a lot of Chinese car companies to expand in overseas markets have done well, but not yet into Europe, the United States, or in some non-mainstream markets and regions, Li said, adding that " NIO's car positioning is relatively high-end, we definitely want to enter the mainstream high-end market, mainly in Europe and the United States."

In November last year, Chinese media reported that NIO had made substantial progress in entering overseas markets and had set up an export business team, while internally launching a "Marco Polo Plan" for this purpose.

NIO's plan to go abroad will start from the European market, with the first stop in Copenhagen, Denmark, the report said.


In an interview with several English-language media, including CnEVPost, Li said on January 10 this year that the center screen navigation map shown at the launch of its first sedan, ET7, revealed the information of entering overseas markets.



And when CnEVPost checked the center screen picture on the ET7 introduction page, it found that the address shown in the picture seemed to be Karl Johans gate in Oslo, Norway, although it was very blurry.

Li said at the time that NIO's entry into overseas markets would start with Europe first, due to the consensus on the importance of electric vehicles and environmental protection in Europe, "The proportion of electric vehicle sales in Europe rose very quickly last year, over 50% in Norway, which is very good."

At the end of January, NIO co-founder and president Qin Lihong said in a speech that NIO hopes to enter overseas markets in 2021 if the global Covid-19 pandemic does not deteriorate significantly.



Earlier this month, NIO created an open position for a mid-to-senior-level executive who is expected to lead a team to expand its business in the US market.

The Job responsibility mentioned the person need to "formulate an action plan to enter the US market and pull through the cluster resources in the headquarters based on key deliverables."