Geely and NIO "join hands", Li Bin: We can only survive through unity
The involution in the new energy vehicle track has intensified, and competition has spread to the battery swapping and charging sector. Amid the industry reshuffle, automakers are accelerating coordinated layout, and the cooperation between Geely and NIO (9866.HK) has been further deepened accordingly.
On September 28, NIO issued an announcement stating that the company has signed agreements with multiple subsidiaries under Geely Holding Group focusing on battery swapping and charging businesses.
According to the agreement, Geely Holding Group will take a stake in NIO Energy Investment (Hubei) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "NIO Energy") with 100% equity of Yiyi Internet it holds and 640 million yuan in cash. Among them, NIO Energy is NIO's subsidiary mainly engaged in battery swapping and charging businesses, while Yiyi Internet is a subsidiary under Geely Holding Group that mainly provides B-end battery swapping services.
After the implementation of this transaction, Yiyi Internet will be fully merged into NIO Energy, Geely Holding Group will also obtain 30% equity of NIO Energy, and the shareholding ratio of NIO's subsidiary NIO Holdings in NIO Energy will drop to 63.6%. After the transaction is completed, the valuation of NIO Energy will reach 160 billion RMB.
It is worth noting that there are also gambling clauses set in the transaction for Geely to acquire NIO's equity this time. The announcement shows that the equity of NIO Energy held by Geely Holding Group is linked to several operational milestones. If the relevant performance fails to meet expectations, its shareholding ratio may be reduced to a minimum of 20%; in addition, Geely Holding Group has also obtained an option that within two years after this transaction or before the new round of financing of NIO Energy, Geely Holding Group can make an additional 6.4% cash investment in NIO Energy to increase its shareholding ratio to 34%.
While promoting the equity transaction of NIO Energy, NIO Holdings will also contribute capital to subscribe for the newly issued shares of Haohan Energy, a subsidiary under Geely Holding Group that operates the charging business. After the transaction is completed, NIO Holdings will hold 10% equity of Haohan Energy, and the two parties will also open up charging resources.
The agreement also stipulates that after obtaining the share subscription funds, Haohan Energy will use the relevant funds to purchase several charging assets of NIO.
Just five days before Geely and NIO reached a cooperation on battery swapping and charging businesses, Geely had just officially announced a new generation of energy replenishment technology "Geely Smart Charging", whose supporting charging piles can reach a peak power of about 2250 kilowatts per single gun. Geely plans to build more than 22,000 charging stations by the end of 2027, of which more than 15,000 are smart charging stations.
Not only Geely and NIO, a large number of domestic new energy automakers are accelerating their layout in the energy replenishment sector. On August 28, BYD announced that its 10,000th flash charging station was officially put into operation. Recently, Lian Yubo, chief scientist of BYD, reiterated that it plans to build 90,000 charging stations in more than two years, with the station construction density comparable to that of gas stations.
At a time when competition in the new energy vehicle industry is becoming increasingly fierce, complete vehicle products are no longer the only main battlefield for automakers to compete. Supporting energy replenishment services such as charging and battery swapping are becoming the new focus of industry competition. The deepening of business cooperation between Geely and NIO essentially reflects the two parties' hope to further strengthen their market competitiveness through synergy.
At the cooperation briefing on September 28, Li Bin, founder and chairman of NIO, said that unity is the only way to survive. China's automotive industry is facing new challenges and opportunities. How to enter a stage of truly high-quality development, reduce repeated investment, and improve operational efficiency of enterprises is an important issue facing every company. Competition between the two companies will certainly exist, but there are also a wide range of areas for cooperation, so there is no need to set them against each other.
On the day the cooperation news was announced, the share prices of NIO and Geely Automobile both rose. As of the close of September 28, NIO's share price rose 1.35% to HK$28.44 per share, with a total market value of about HK$71.4 billion; Geely Automobile's share price rose 3.65% year-on-year to HK$16.17 per share, with a total market value of about HK$174.4 billion.
NIO Introduces Strategic Partner
In the new energy vehicle energy replenishment system, the battery swapping model has long been a relatively niche technical route. Since its establishment in 2014, NIO has continued to lay out the battery swapping track, and has now successfully built "battery swapping" into one of the iconic labels of its brand.
Compared with charging technology, battery swapping technology not only has the advantage of fast energy replenishment, but also has many other advantages, such as lowering the car purchase threshold by renting batteries, extending battery life through unified battery custody, and directly renting upgraded battery packs.
However, most automakers are unwilling to choose this technical route. On the one hand, charging technology is constantly improving and the speed of flash charging is getting faster and faster; on the other hand, it is due to cost considerations.
To meet the battery swapping needs of car owners, NIO needs to build a large number of battery swapping stations on its own. According to NIO's official disclosure, the construction cost of NIO's first-generation battery swapping station is about 3 million yuan, the second-generation is about 2 million yuan, and the third-generation and fourth-generation stations drop to about 1.5 million yuan. At present, NIO has a total of 4,126 battery swapping stations. Rough calculation shows that its total construction cost will reach the level of tens of billions of yuan.
Moreover, compared with charging piles that can adapt to multi-brand vehicles, restricted by vehicle model design, battery specifications and other factors, the adaptation scope of battery swapping stations is naturally small, and it is difficult for different brands to interconnect.
For example, in 2025, NIO once signed a cooperation agreement with CATL, and NIO's sub-brand Firefly will be compatible with CATL's Chocolate Battery Swapping Platform. But in October of that year, Li Bin said that Firefly would not access the Chocolate Battery Swapping system, the specific reason being that Firefly uses liquid-cooled batteries while the Chocolate Battery Swapping system uses air cooling.
In addition to the construction cost, the depreciation of fixed assets brought by the completed battery swapping stations will also seriously drag down the performance of automakers. In 2025, NIO's depreciation and amortization expenses of fixed assets reached 9.375 billion yuan, far higher than the 2.988 billion yuan and 4.635 billion yuan of Xpeng and Li Auto in the same period.
Affected by this, NIO has continued to lose money in recent years. From 2023 to 2025, NIO's revenue was 556.18 billion yuan, 657.32 billion yuan, and 874.88 billion yuan respectively; the net losses attributable to shareholders were 211.47 billion yuan, 226.58 billion yuan, and 155.71 billion yuan respectively. In the first half of this year, the company's revenue increased by 85.77% year-on-year to 576.70 billion yuan; the net loss attributable to shareholders narrowed by 89.88% year-on-year to 12.18 billion yuan.
However, excluding items such as equity incentive expenses, NIO has recorded positive adjusted operating profits for three consecutive quarters up to the second quarter of this year.
In order to reduce the operation and construction costs of battery swapping stations, NIO has taken many measures in recent years, including introducing partners to operate together, transferring asset ownership to focus on asset-light operation and other models.
As early as 2020, NIO joined forces with well-known institutions such as CATL, Hubei Science & Technology Investment Group, and Guotai Junan International to establish the battery swapping subsidiary Wuhan NIO Power, which operates battery asset leasing services.
In addition, NIO Energy has also cooperated with Wuhan state-owned assets to build battery swapping stations. In August this year, NIO Energy delivered 36 charging and battery swapping stations to Guanggu Transportation Group. The above charging and battery swapping station assets are owned by Guanggu Transportation Group, while NIO Energy is responsible for operation.
This cooperation between NIO and Geely is also aimed at reducing the operation and construction costs of battery swapping stations and increasing the density of battery swapping stations through cooperation.
Geely has also been deeply engaged in the battery swapping business for many years, and operates battery swapping online ride-hailing vehicles through its subsidiary online ride-hailing company Cao Cao Mobility. According to the prospectus of Cao Cao Mobility, the customized battery swapping models of the company have an average 36.4% lower holding cost than typical pure electric vehicles. By the end of 2024, Cao Cao Mobility had deployed about 34,000 customized battery swapping models in China.
Therefore, as early as 2023, NIO and Geely signed a strategic cooperation agreement on battery swapping, carrying out all-round cooperation in battery standards, battery swapping technology and other aspects.
Now, the cooperation between NIO and Geely has been further deepened. Li Bin said that after the transaction is closed, NIO and Geely will operate two battery swapping networks for C-end and B-end users at the same time, serving different user groups respectively. The B-end network is based on Yiyi Internet, and involves Cao Cao Mobility and future businesses such as Robotaxi.
Li Bin also said that the two parties will more actively promote the construction of the battery swapping network. In addition to C-end battery swapping stations, they will also do a good job in adapting to Geely's future C-end battery swapping vehicle products; the B-end commercial vehicle battery swapping network will combine Geely's business arrangements for scientific layout and efficient operation, and strengthen synergy. The two parties aim to complete the construction and operation of 10,000 battery swapping stations by 2030.
However, as early as 2023, NIO began to take the lead in founding the "Battery Swapping Alliance". In addition to Geely, automakers such as Changan, Chery, JAC, Lotus, GAC, and FAW Group have also signed cooperation agreements with NIO. But so far, most automakers have not launched battery swapping models that are compatible with NIO's battery swapping stations. Now, the cooperation between NIO and Geely has been upgraded to the equity level, and whether the cooperation effect can be further improved still needs to be answered by the market.
Geely Makes Up for Shortcomings
For Geely, this cooperation with NIO can not only expand the battery swapping market, but also further expand the layout density of its charging piles.
As competition in the new energy vehicle track intensifies, automakers and power battery enterprises have successively laid out flash charging as a selling point for new cars, which also forces automakers to increase the construction of flash charging stations to meet the charging needs of car owners.
Taking BYD as an example, in March this year, BYD launched the second-generation Blade Battery supporting the megawatt flash charging solution. In September this year, the company officially announced that the number of flash charging stations has exceeded 10,000, and 90,000 charging stations will be built in the future.
In contrast, Geely's layout of charging stations is slightly less than that of BYD. Geely previously stated that it has built and put into operation more than 2,500 charging stations and 12,000 self-built charging guns, including more than 1,500 ultra-fast charging stations and more than 7,000 ultra-fast charging guns.
In this context, cooperation with other automakers has become one of the important means for Geely to rapidly expand the scale of charging stations.
In recent years, mutual cooperation between automakers to build charging infrastructure and open charging stations to each other has become an industry practice. In 2025, Xpeng Motors and Volkswagen China signed a cooperation agreement to open their exclusive ultra-fast charging networks to each other. Xiaomi Auto has also launched charging network cooperation with NIO, Xpeng Motors and Li Auto, and the charging piles of NIO, Xpeng and Li Auto will be connected to Xiaomi's charging map.
According to NIO's official website, the company has built 30,600 charging piles so far, and the number of connected third-party charging piles is as high as 1.7759 million. If Geely can cooperate with NIO in the charging sector, its speed of expanding charging piles will be further improved.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Morgan Stanley Finance" (ID: damofinance), written by Damo Finance, authorized for release by 36Kr.