Tesla lost money in 15 years, while NIO lost all its money in 4 years. Traditional car manufacturers are still reliable in making cars.

Recently, along with the exposure of the extravagant top-level life of the boss lady of NIO, NIO also announced its long-delayed second-quarter financial report. The report showed that in Q2 2019, NIO’s revenue was 1.508 billion yuan and its net loss was 3.285 billion yuan.

Although it was expected that NIO's financial report would be very bad, after seeing these figures, I realized that this seems to be the norm for NIO - in the three and a half years since its birth, NIO has lost a total of 40 billion yuan (5.7 billion US dollars). In comparison, Tesla, a well-known American company with huge losses, has only lost 5 billion US dollars in 15 years. Despite this, Wall Street still responded with great ridicule and distrust of Musk's financial skills. It is conceivable what kind of reputation NIO has on Wall Street now.

Perhaps because of this foresight, facing such poor financial data, NIO simply canceled the earnings conference call on the grounds that "this quarterly report has fully covered the information that needs to be disclosed at present." Although NIO's board of directors can temporarily escape by being an "ostrich", facing its own precarious market situation, NIO may really have no future.

Where did NIO’s 40 billion go?

Where did NIO spend the money?

I believe this is the question that many friends who are interested in NIO want to know most. From NIO's financial report, its biggest expenses are R&D expenses and sales and management expenses.

In Q2 2019, NIO's R&D expenses reached US$189 million (approximately RMB 1.301 billion), a year-on-year increase of 70.0% and a month-on-month increase of 20.6%; sales and administrative expenses amounted to US$207 million (RMB 1.421 billion), a year-on-year increase of 48.6% and a month-on-month increase of 7.7%.

In addition, with the decline of domestic new energy subsidies, NIO cannot transfer costs to the newly developed consumer market and can only "swallow its anger" and cut its own profits.

According to conventional logic, investing heavily in research and development will definitely take the product to the next level. Let’s take a look at what NIO has achieved with its 40 billion yuan investment.

On December 17, 2017, NIO booked the entire Wukesong Basketball Stadium, invited Imagine Dragons to perform, and invited nearly 10,000 media to hold the ES8 launch conference. It is rumored that the conference cost 80 million yuan. As a result, the monthly shipments of ES8 are only in the three digits now.

On September 30, 2018, Weibo user Mr. Hu revealed that the claimed range of the NIO ES8 is 350km, but after his own test, the ES8 experienced a system freeze and restart, and the actual range was only about 200km, and the charging pile could not charge normally, so the car had to be returned to the NIO factory for repairs. In response, Li Bin said, "The 200km is because Mr. Hu is a novice driver and is easily excited, which causes the battery to be consumed too quickly."

On June 14, 2019, a NIO ES8 caught fire in the parking lot of the Hanxi Building Materials Market in Wuhan. This was the third spontaneous combustion incident of a NIO car within two months, following the spontaneous combustion of NIO cars in Xi'an on April 22 and Shanghai on May 18.

Finally, in July 2019, NIO announced the recall of 4,803 NIO ES8 electric vehicles produced from April 2, 2018 to October 19, 2018.

In addition to cars, NIO has also invested heavily in technological development.

In 2018, NIO said it would deploy 1,100 battery swap stations in major cities in China by 2002. According to the cost of a battery swap station announced by BAIC, which is about 5 million yuan, NIO will have to spend at least 5 billion yuan in two years to build a battery swap station ecosystem. Of course, considering NIO's current layoffs, factory shutdowns, arrears of payments to suppliers, and poor financial data, it is unlikely that the 5 billion yuan will be raised in a short period of time.

In summary, judging from the financial report and NIO's movements, it does not have a clear plan for its own development, which will have a very serious negative impact on both NIO's future and the new energy market.

Fortunately, traditional manufacturers have begun to enter the new energy market.

The future still depends on established manufacturers

Traditional manufacturers have made considerable moves in the development of new energy vehicle models, but what can be seen is that compared with Internet car manufacturers that launch several models in three years, traditional manufacturers are undoubtedly more cautious and rigorous in the speed of launching models.

Take Audi as an example. Although it only launched its first pure electric SUV, the e-tron, in 2018, Audi began to actively explore new energy as early as 1989.

In 2009, Audi launched its first pure electric concept car named e-tron, which is equipped with a 42.4kWh lithium-ion battery and can provide a range of 248km. I believe that if NIO had this capability in 2008, it would have started making cars with PPT long ago.

However, Audi did not rush into the consumer market, but continued to concentrate on researching new energy. Ten years later, we saw the e-tron, a culmination of its masterpiece.

Judging from the configuration, the e-tron is indeed worth the wait. It is equipped with a 95kWh battery, with a range of 525km under the EU NEDC standard, and also has a fast charging function of up to 150kW. It only takes 30 minutes to charge 80% of the power. It is priced at 700,000 yuan.

The highest-end car currently sold by NIO, the Future ES8, is only equipped with an 84kWh battery. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has a pure electric range of 425km, supports DC 200-420V, and a maximum charging power of 250A. It takes nearly an hour to charge 80% of the power. Oh, by the way, NIO’s main model is battery swapping, and charging power is not important. However, it is unknown when the 5 billion battery swap station will be completed...

Although the price of NIO ES8 is 456,000 yuan, Audi has announced that it will produce e-tron in China in 2020. Industry analysts said that after the e-tron is produced in China, its price will gradually drop to the range of 400,000 to 500,000 yuan, which is undoubtedly the biggest competitor of NIO ES8.

Faced with the biggest anxiety about new energy vehicles, Audi, on the one hand, has taken the approach of building its own charging piles, and on the other hand, has cooperated with Volkswagen's Electrify America to deploy hundreds of fast-charging piles on highway networks and communities, greatly reducing the cost of building a charging network.

Compared with NIO's painstaking efforts to build its own charging network from scratch, it is obvious that Audi's approach of cooperating with other manufacturers is better. After all, even if there is more money to burn, it is impossible to build charging stations in every corner of the world.

On the whole, although most of the new car-making forces are currently "thriving" in the industry, as represented by NIO, we can see that this is a completely false prosperity, and the fanatical capital has inadvertently exposed the vital points behind these companies.

Compared with the steady and reliable traditional car companies, we can feel more clearly the lack of confidence of the new car-making forces. We believe that as more traditional car companies enter the new energy market, the new car-making forces that are good at PPT and "losses" will have a harder time.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.