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.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS