The disappearance of Weilai

NIO, which just set its 2025 goal, disappeared from the sales list.

Not long ago, NIO Chairman Li Bin said in an internal letter, "The next two years are crucial. Doubling sales in 2025 and achieving profitability in 2026 are tasks that cannot be missed."

Li Bin has the confidence to say this. After all, NIO’s sales data last year was indeed not bad.

As of the end of last year, NIO delivered a total of 221,970 new cars, a year-on-year increase of 38.7%, setting new records for both monthly and annual deliveries. Among them, the Ledao brand delivered 10,528 new cars in December alone, with monthly deliveries exceeding 10,000 units and cumulative deliveries exceeding 20,000 units.

In other words, if NIO's sales continue to soar, it is entirely possible to achieve the goal of "reaching over 440,000 vehicles" by 2025.

However, after entering 2025, NIO's sales situation did not seem so optimistic. When the sales of new energy brands in the Chinese market for the third week of this year were released, NIO was embarrassed again - it disappeared from the list. Moreover, a quick review will also reveal that this is the third consecutive week that NIO has "fallen out of the top ten".

Why did NIO, which was still quite impressive a month ago, suddenly have such an unfavorable start in the new year?

On the one hand, the new energy market itself had a "sluggish" start in 2025. According to public data, the overall sales of new energy vehicles in China in the first week of the new year was 152,000 units, a 48% decrease from the previous month. For example, in the second week of January, even BYD, the sales leader, only sold 42,800 units, only half of its peak period.

January is traditionally the off-season for the auto industry, and low sales are the norm in the industry. If you don’t believe me, you can look at the data from January 2023 and 2024, when some automakers even saw a drop of more than 80%. Therefore, from the perspective of the industry, it is normal for NIO to have no breakthroughs in January.

However, many people are concerned that since the entire industry is in a downturn, the ranking of major automakers should not change much. After all, the downturn in the market is fair to everyone.

So, why did NIO, which was previously on the list, "disappear" from the top ten for three consecutive weeks? From the outside, this is obviously a bit wrong. What problem did NIO encounter?

Relevant information shows that in January this year, NIO upgraded and adjusted its factory. Although the factory quickly resumed normal production, some production capacity was affected.

In fact, production capacity issues have occurred more than once in NIO. We can see this from its product delivery situation. For example, the ET9 launched by NIO at the end of last year is said to be delivered only in Q1 this year.

In addition, NIO has more competitors, such as Xiaomi Motors.

Although NIO and Xiaomi are not following the same product line, the total demand is limited. If someone takes more, someone else will take less. So, when Xiaomi enters the top ten, someone will naturally be squeezed out, but this time it happens to be NIO.

So, does this mean that the sales volume flag set by NIO is over? Obviously, judging from the current sales situation, this is not the case. NIO sold more than 4,700 units in the third week of January, a year-on-year increase of 145.7%. The cumulative sales in the first three weeks were nearly 13,400 units, doubling year-on-year. Among them, NIO brand sales were 2,836 units, and Ledao sales were 1,913 units.

It can be seen that although NIO is not on the top ten list of new energy vehicle sales calculated on a weekly basis, this does not mean that NIO's growth rate is not high.

There are many car rankings now, and the top ten new energy vehicle sales rankings we have seen in the past few weeks do not break down into brand positioning, segmented fields, etc. In other words, this kind of ranking is not very rigorous.

For example, most of NIO's models are luxury cars that can be sold for more than 300,000 yuan. It is actually not fair to compare the sales of cars at this price with cars that cost tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. At least it has little reference value.

If we really want to refer to it, we can actually look at NIO's performance in the luxury car market. For example, in the luxury pure electric car market above 300,000 yuan, NIO is still the number one.

In 2024, the delivery volume of NIO's two main models, ES6 and EC6, with an average transaction price of 340,000 yuan, has exceeded 100,000 units, while the sales volume of the traditional luxury mid-size SUV benchmark, BMW X3 + X4, was only 116,000 units last year. In this comparison, NIO's gold content in the high-end market is still very high.

As for NIO's sales development potential in 2025, the possibility of achieving the goal is relatively high.

Now, the Ledao brand is gradually getting better. In the Chinese new power pure electric SUV market with an average transaction price of 200,000 to 300,000 yuan, Ledao L60 delivered 1,800 units in the second week of January, ranking second.

You know, this car was just launched in the third quarter of last year. This performance shows that the market still recognizes it. If NIO's Firefly is delivered this year, it will also bring a certain amount of growth, further helping NIO achieve its goals.

So, NIO may have its own problems, but its true performance cannot be explained by a new energy weekly list. We also hope that NIO, which has suffered losses for ten consecutive years, can really achieve something different in 2025.