NIO

Sector

Electric cars

Chinese name

蔚来

Programme

Day 5 · 15 Oct 2026 · Hefei

NIO (蔚来) builds premium electric cars whose battery a robot swaps in a few minutes, and it lets customers rent that battery instead of buying it. Founded in 2014, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy in 2019 and was rescued in 2020 by investors from Hefei. At the end of 2025 it made a profit for the first time, and by the end of October 2026 it had already delivered more cars than in the whole of 2025. In Europe, meanwhile, NIO is putting on the brakes. The China Business Mission 2026 delegation had NIO on its programme on day 5, in Hefei.

A start-up that almost didn't make it

William Li (李斌), who had earlier founded the car portal Bitauto, started the company in November 2014 as NextEV, with money from investors including Tencent. The Chinese name Wèilái means 'the blue sky is coming' and sounds like the word for future. NIO built a brand first, with the EP9 electric supercar and a launch in London, and only delivered its first SUV, the ES8, in 2018. That same year it listed in New York.

In 2019 things nearly went wrong: losses in the billions, a recall after battery fires and a share price around 1 dollar. In April 2020 funds from Hefei and Anhui province put 7 billion yuan on the table for 24.1% of the new subsidiary NIO China. The condition: the headquarters moved to Hefei. The cars were already being built there by JAC Motors, because NIO had no production licence of its own. How Hefei works as an investor is explained in our article on the city.

Since then NIO has grown every year. In January 2026 the millionth car rolled off the line in Hefei. From January to October 2026 NIO delivered 334,547 cars, 38.5% more than a year earlier and already more than the 326,028 of the whole of 2025.

Swapping instead of charging

NIO's best-known idea is battery swapping. The driver pulls into a station, a robot removes the empty battery and fits a full one, and a few minutes later the car drives on. By mid-October 2026 NIO had 4,178 swap stations in China and more than 120 million swaps since 2018, according to Gasgoo. The idea is not new: Better Place tried it around 2010 in Israel and Denmark and went bankrupt. NIO makes it work by tying it to a business model.

That model is called Battery as a Service (BaaS). The customer buys the car without a battery, pays considerably less up front and rents the battery by the month. Because the batteries sit in a separate company in which battery maker CATL takes part, a customer can also take a bigger battery temporarily for a long trip. The caveat: competitors such as BYD are betting on charging in a few minutes, which shrinks the advantage of swapping.

Three brands and finally a profit

Until 2024 NIO had a single premium brand. To build volume it added two more, on the same chips, software and swap stations:

• NIO: the premium brand, with large SUVs such as the ES8 and the new ES9 flagship.
• ONVO (乐道): spacious family SUVs in the mid-market, since 2024.
• firefly (萤火虫): a compact premium city car of 4 metres, since 2025.

The third-generation ES8, launched in September 2025, turned the tide. In the fourth quarter of 2025 NIO posted its first ever operating profit, 807 million yuan, and a net profit of 283 million yuan, reports CnEVPost. On 23 October 2026 the 160,000th new ES8 was delivered. In the second quarter of 2026 revenue grew 69% to 32.1 billion yuan. Under accounting rules a loss of 528 million yuan remained; excluding one-off items and share-based pay there was a small profit. The family brand ONVO is still the weak spot: it delivered 8,383 cars in October, far below its target of 20,000 a month. NIO is also developing its own driver-assistance chip, the Shenji NX9031, meant to make it less dependent on Nvidia.

Europe and Belgium: a step back

NIO came to Europe in 2021 with the approach that worked in China: its own NIO Houses as clubhouses for customers, direct sales and swap stations, including one in Edegem near Antwerp. For small volumes that proved too expensive. In 2026 NIO switched to importers in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden; only in Norway does it still sell directly. In May 2026 it announced that it would build no more swap stations in Europe and would not launch a new model generation before the end of 2027. In Germany only 19 new NIOs were registered from January to August 2026, and two of its three German workshops closed at the end of September, writes Electrive.

In Belgium the Swedish group Hedin Mobility has sold NIO and firefly models since September 2025. Since October 2024, NIO cars from China have carried an extra European duty of 20.7% on top of the regular 10% import tariff, as decided by the European Commission. William Li visited Europe in September 2026 and said NIO still believes in the long-term potential. The family brand ONVO will arrive here in 2028 at the earliest.

You cannot ship a network

The contrast between the two markets says a lot. NIO's strongest weapon is not any single car but a system: thousands of swap stations, a battery company, its own chip and a community of owners who help sell. That system works in China, where it has scale and a city like Hefei invests alongside it. In Europe NIO has to do without that scale, facing duties and relying on local importers who mainly sell a car. For anyone doing business in China or working with Chinese carmakers, that is the lesson: look at the network behind a brand, because that is where the lead lies, and that is exactly the part that travels worst.