NIO stirs up a revolutionary storm: Every penny invested should yield results.
"These are just my humble opinions as I'm about to leave. This is my first post and also my last."
On February 25th, a NIO employee named "Little Snail", who was about to leave the company, posted a long article on NIO's internal forum "Speakout Complaints", putting forward ten suggestions. He called on the company to quickly shift from being idealistic to being practical, be market - oriented, reject illusions and empty talk, concentrate resources, and face reality directly.
A few hours later, Li Bin, the founder, chairman, and CEO of NIO, replied with his real name in the comment section: "Thank you all for your suggestions. I'll start from myself to enhance the business awareness of all employees."
There were many sharp criticisms of NIO's current situation in the comments, and many doubts were directly aimed at Li Bin. However, this long article was not only pinned in the hot section but also pushed to all employees via Feishu.
A person close to NIO's management said that it was Li Bin who actively pinned and pushed the article. "He hopes to form a consensus and take actions through this way. NIO must face challenges head - on and accelerate change."
NIO is a car company labeled as a "long - term player". Its three major brands, battery - swapping system, user community, and 12 self - developed technologies all demonstrate its uniqueness, which has won NIO a lot of capital support.
However, in the increasingly fierce market competition, no one has the patience to wait indefinitely. Li Bin often uses football games to analogy the market competition in the intelligent electric vehicle industry. But NIO hasn't scored enough points to enter the safe zone.
In contrast, the operations of other new - energy vehicle startups of the same period have got on the right track. Despite product failures, XPeng Motors spent two years "treating the root cause": rectifying the supply department, firing 10 senior executives, and strictly controlling costs in alliance with Volkswagen... Now it has achieved monthly sales of over 30,000 units for several consecutive months, and its financial performance is becoming clearer.
Although Leapmotor is low - key, through full - domain self - development to reduce costs and the "alternative philosophy", it sold 293,000 vehicles in 2024 and achieved positive net profit in the fourth quarter of last year, reaching the single - quarter profit target one year ahead of schedule. Similarly, after the failure of Li Auto's pure - electric products, it also stabilized its pace in time. Although the release of its pure - electric products was postponed by one year, it still has a cash reserve of hundreds of billions.
Although NIO sold 221,900 vehicles last year, it still hasn't solved the problem of losses. As of the third quarter of 2024, NIO has suffered losses of over 5 billion yuan for four consecutive quarters.
2025 is the 11th year since NIO was founded. It needs to get out of the quagmire of low operational efficiency and achieve results in the overtime game with no way back, rather than constantly postponing the original planned goals by emphasizing "long - termism".
"The current challenges are very great. Other kids have been admitted to college, while we are still repeating the grade." Li Bin also warned employees at an internal meeting. A storm of organizational change centered on cost reduction and efficiency improvement has been set off.
[Cost Reduction: NIO Starts to Do the Math Carefully]
36Kr exclusively learned that since the beginning of the year, Li Bin has organized multiple rounds of internal meetings, emphasizing the severity of the situation to the team, reflecting on and reviewing the work gains and losses, promoting the team to break the inertia, and requiring to enhance the business awareness to achieve the business goals.
At the third - quarter earnings conference in 2024, Li Bin said that NIO would achieve profitability in 2026. But internally, Li Bin said that he would strive to achieve single - quarter profitability in Q4 of 2025.
According to 36Kr's exclusive information, NIO is currently promoting organizational change across the company and implementing a business mechanism called CBU. NIO expects to implement this system on a large scale in the first quarter and fully implement it in the second quarter.
The core logic of the CBU mechanism is to split all the company's business operations into multiple non - overlapping "Cell Business Units" (hereinafter referred to as CBU). Each unit must establish clear ROI (Return on Investment) indicators and performance reward and punishment systems.
In practical terms, each department has to settle costs separately and calculate the costs already spent and to be spent on different projects. For example, the labor cost is calculated according to the working hours of employees.
A NIO insider revealed that the CBU has already been implemented, and the statistical forms have been issued across the company. Everyone in the company is conducting CBU accounting. Last year, NIO already required a strict calculation of the ROI of a project. But the above - mentioned insider revealed that calculating the ROI clearly is just a one - way reporting mechanism for budget approval, while the CBU statistics cover the human efficiency and resource input of each business unit, which is more comprehensive from the perspective of the company's cost reduction and efficiency improvement.
An employee who has worked at NIO for many years sighed to 36Kr, "It's rare that the boss is really serious about figuring out how the money is spent. In the past, we just cut the budget, but after this, we should be able to clearly figure out which projects the money has been spent on."
In 2024, Li Bin promoted the business to sort out 15 company - level system capabilities and promoted the CBU mechanism based on this. An informed person told 36Kr that departments such as NIO's service operation team and energy team have been operating the CBU mechanism for more than a year, and "the phased results are quite good".
A person close to NIO's management said that the ultimate goal of the CBU mechanism is to assign a clear responsible person and business goal to each investment and hold them accountable for the results. In the past, the goals of many NIO projects were not clear, and the rationality of investment and the acceptance criteria for results were not well - defined. "The new mechanism requires that every penny invested should yield results."
"In the past, the logic was that each department multiplied by the department budget. Now the logic is that the CBU multiplies by the business goal. All business goals should be aligned with the company's car - selling and profit - making goals and need to be translated into actual business results." The person said.
A NIO insider recalled that at an annual planning meeting of a first - level department, the department head tried to report the work with "value - driven" as the main line, but was interrupted by Li Bin on the spot.
Li Bin asked the person to focus on the business goals. "Stop talking nonsense. Values are for self - discipline. Don't use values to cover up poor business performance. Why talk about values when it comes to business?"
Recently, Li Bin is determined to promote the local experience of CBU to the overall operation of the company. Under this mechanism, NIO's organizational management logic is shifting from "asking for budgets" to "competing in business operations".
"In the past, it was a budget - based system. In the future, there will be no concept of budget. We'll all talk about 'business goals'. You make your own budget. At the company level, it's about allocating business goals. For example, how many cars can you sell for the company and how much money can you make this year?" Li Bin said at an internal meeting. "The whole company has to do the math. There's nothing that can't be calculated clearly. Things that can't be calculated clearly shouldn't exist." Li Bin said.
It can be said that NIO is starting to do detailed calculations and tighten the financial screws.
In the past two years, NIO has made great progress in financing. In 2023, it received two investments of $3.3 billion from the Middle Eastern institution Abu Dhabi CYVN. In 2024, NIO China received an additional capital increase of 3.3 billion yuan from Anhui state - owned institutions. However, NIO's income can't keep up with its consumption. It has suffered losses of 22.4 billion yuan in the past four quarters.
If NIO doesn't stay vigilant, it may fall off the cliff again.
NIO's current series of in - depth reforms are also the pains it must endure before achieving profitability. Before Tesla achieved profitability in 2019, it also faced the darkest moments such as production hell and running out of funds. It laid off a large number of outsourcing teams, and Musk had to approve budgets over one million dollars himself.
NIO will undoubtedly enter this "wartime state". "The change this time is very significant, equivalent to rewriting an operating system and programming language for a computer." A NIO director - level manager said.
[Li Bin Takes Direct Control of the Supply Chain and Cuts Costs to the Fourth Decimal Place]
Take the supply chain as an example. In the past, NIO's cost team only provided suggestions on procurement prices without mandatory constraints. Since 2024, the cost team has been split from the procurement department and reports directly to the CFO as an independent department. It sets an upper limit on procurement prices, and projects exceeding a certain proportion must go through special approval before being initiated.
A person in NIO's supply chain department said that Li Bin has significantly increased his participation in supply chain management and is deeply involved in many supply chain procurement projects. At key project nodes in product development, Li Bin will carefully examine costs and directly participate in price negotiations for core components such as batteries. Li Bin also regularly analyzes the trend of procurement cost reduction and the achievement of goals with the supply chain team based on weekly sales changes and makes decisions for the next step.
The supply chain is a key link in the operation of automobile companies, directly related to the company's cost control and production efficiency. For example, He Xiaopeng spent nine months to find out why the internal steel cost was much higher than the industry average, which made him realize the importance of personally managing the supply chain.
Under the organizational structure of Li Xiang, the CEO of Li Auto, a supply chain strategy group was also set up. Li Auto went through many explorations before building a systematic supply chain capability. For example, the platform - based commonality of the three models, Li L7/L8/L9, reaches 65%.
Platformization and systematization are also the development directions of NIO's supply chain. Take the seat solution as an example. Previously, each NIO car had a separate seat solution, and the reuse of components between different cars was very low. After realizing the waste, NIO launched a platform - based solution with shared seat frames to improve the reuse rate of components. At the same time, it locked in two seat suppliers, responsible for NIO's high - end platform and mass - market platform respectively.
NIO also introduced suppliers into the CBU system to establish a "joint business report", making costs and profits transparent to each other. After enhancing the scale effect and gaining room for price reduction, the overall cost of seats on NIO's new platform has been reduced by 10%.
NIO has also come up with many ways to enhance the scale effect. For example, it opened up the black - box delivery of components. The business team studied the composition, mechanism, and know - how of components and decoupled the low - value and ineffective costs from the overall solution.
For example, the interfaces of various components such as seats, air conditioners, and reading lights in the car were different, resulting in high matching costs. So the R & D team standardized the component interfaces, optimizing from hundreds of types to forty or fifty types. After reducing the supply types, the cost per car has been reduced from 2,000 yuan to about 1,000 yuan.
Platform - based R & D of components is also a measure for NIO to reduce supply chain costs. In the past, each NIO model pursued extreme differentiation and personalized experience, resulting in a low generalization rate of components. According to 36Kr, for the eight models in NIO's second - generation platform family - style design, there are as many as seven specifications and sizes for components such as the center console armrest box, 12V power outlet, and screen. Even the black shell of NOMI has slight color differences, with ES8 being darker than ES6, which increases the quality risk and management cost for suppliers and brings additional expenses, but users hardly notice.
For the upcoming NIO ET9 and the 2025 models of 5566, a NIO insider said that the generalization and reuse rates of many components that used to be different for each model will be significantly improved. Moreover, the new cars will be fully equipped with self - developed intelligent driving chips, reducing the cost per car by more than 10,000 yuan.
Cost reduction in the supply chain is an endless battle.
36Kr learned that in 2024, NIO sent a team to Luxshare Precision for a special research on cost management. This consumer electronics supply chain enterprise, known as the "king of Apple's supply chain", is famous for its refined cost management, cutting costs to the fourth decimal place.
Based on the research experience, Li Bin emphasized the "million - fold cost thinking" within NIO, requiring all cost expenditures to be multiplied by one million times to consider whether they are reasonable. "If you can save 100 yuan per car, multiplied by one million times, it's 100 million yuan."
[Re - understanding Long - Termism and Making Changes to the "Service Signboard"]
"Long - termism" is the principle that the NIO team adheres to.
In NIO's value system, there is also a concept called "systematic efficiency". A NIO employee told 36Kr that the original intention of this value system was to make employees not only focus on local and short - term costs but also pay attention to long - term value, as well as the costs and efficiency throughout the life cycle.
However, in actual implementation, it often deviates from the original intention: employees lack a sense of specific goals in their work, resources are scattered, delivery is difficult to close the loop as scheduled, and a large amount of upfront investment fails to receive current returns.
This year, when calculating the return on investment within NIO, a clear convergence was made in the time dimension of projects. Plans and discussions over three years are considered too long - term and will either not be carried out or be postponed. Long - term value must be judged in combination with short - term business goals.
This makes NIO re - evaluate the necessity of the existence of many businesses and projects. 36Kr exclusively learned that since December last year, the resource investment and personnel scale of NIO's controversial mobile phone business have been significantly adjusted. The mobile phone software team has been merged into the digital cockpit team, and duplicate positions have been greatly streamlined.
Li Bin was once very determined about self - developing mobile phones, believing that the interconnection between cars and mobile phones would surely become the key to the future ecological experience. However, in reality, when evaluating the return on investment over a three - year period, the self - developed mobile phones bring limited improvement in user value and it is difficult to obtain commercial returns matching the investment.
The adjustment of the mobile phone business is also the result of business slimming based on the CBU mechanism. "Stop the positions and projects that cannot create user value." At an internal meeting to promote and explain the CBU, Li Bin said, "For any amount of money, a position, a project, or an investment in fixed assets, someone has to pay for it. Either earn money from the outside or earn money internally. Don't do things that no one pays for and can't be justified financially."
36Kr also learned that in addition to the mobile phone business, multiple departments in other business clusters of NIO will also proactively streamline the organization and reduce the number of personnel based on the annual business goals in the near future.
A NIO management person said that in the previous budget - based environment, there was a lack of motivation to keep the business lean and efficient. "In the past, everyone only thought about how to get more budgets and expand their teams as much as possible. Now that we have to bear business indicators, I will take the initiative to cut staff without the company's requirement."
NIO's sub - brand LeDao is also making adjustments accordingly. On February 28th this year, NIO issued an organizational announcement to merge the delivery channels of the NIO and LeDao brands. The human resources and channel resources of the teams are integrated and reused to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Meanwhile, in remote areas such as Harbin, Yinchuan, Urumqi, and Xining, the sales managers of LeDao are also concurrently held by the general managers of NIO's regional companies.
Even in NIO's signature "service" projects, the company is trying to optimize.
For example, products such as "Energy Assurance", "Service Assurance", and "Vehicle - using Assurance" for users have always been the key "weapons" for NIO's user reputation. However, due to high operating costs and long - term losses, their commercial sustainability has always been questioned by the outside world.
In 2024, NIO tried to reverse the losses of this business. According to 36Kr, NIO's after - sales service general warehouse, which is mainly used for centralized management and allocation of after - sales parts, has a total area of about 40,000 square meters. Last year, the general warehouse was moved to a new city 10 kilometers away, and the