Chinese electric vehicle (EV) start-up Nio Inc (蔚來) reported a narrower first-quarter loss, while warning that a global chip shortage would keep a lid on deliveries.
The Shanghai-based company posted a net loss of 451 million yuan (US$68.8 million) in the three months ended March 31, compared with 1.69 billion yuan a year earlier, it said in a statement.
It also marked an improvement on the 1.39 billion yuan net loss it posted in the fourth quarter of last year.
Revenue rose to 7.98 billion yuan, beating estimates of 7.16 billion yuan.
Nio delivered 20,060 vehicles in the quarter, a 423 percent increase from a year earlier, when China was in lockdowns amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
It forecast deliveries of 21,000 to 22,000 vehicles this quarter.
Like the rest of the automotive industry, Nio has been hit by the global chip shortage.
The company suspended vehicle production for five days at the end of March.
“The overall demand for our products continues to be quite strong, but the supply chain is still facing significant challenges due to the semiconductor shortage,” Nio chief executive officer William Li (李斌) said in the statement.
A slew of automakers, including Honda Motor Co, BMW AG and Ford Motor Co, this week flagged production cuts and lost revenue from the debilitating chip drought.
“The global chip shortage that has disrupted automakers’ operations in China since late 2020 will get worse before it gets better,” S&P Global Ratings said in a report on Thursday, adding that it “may slow, but not derail the recovery of the Chinese auto sector.”
With its more expensive vehicles and clubby showrooms, Nio is seen as the closest competitor to Tesla in China. Its SUV range starts from 358,000 yuan, more expensive than Tesla’s most popular basic Model 3 sedans, which start from 249,900 yuan.
Nio unveiled its first all-electric sedan, the ET7, in January, a vehicle that pits the firm more squarely against Elon Musk’s electric vehicle pioneer.
Another point of difference between Nio and Tesla is that Nio has embraced the “battery-as-a-service” model, whereby consumers are able to buy the car shell while leasing the battery and upgrading it as technology changes and improves.
This makes the upfront cost of buying an electric vehicle cheaper.
Still, Nio has a way to go to catch Tesla.
In March, 34,635 China-built Teslas were registered in the country, data from the China Automotive Information Net showed.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts