NIO Inc. (NYSE:NIO) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Tim Hsiao: [Foreign Language] So, my second question is about the new ES6. The second quarter guidance came in stronger than market expectation, which could [indiscernible] call to like 3,000 to 4,000 units of additional sales of the new ES6. So, could you share a little bit more about the order intake of the new ES6 since it’s launched to date? And is there is any bottleneck to the delivery of new ES6? In the meantime, are you still expecting the sales aggregate of ET5, ES6, and the upcoming ET5 Touring to achieve 20,000 a month? And when do you expect to achieve that [modeling] (ph) target? So that’s my second question. Thank you.

William Li: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] Thank you, Tim. ES6 is very well received by the users and also received very good feedback in the media. We think the order performance has reached our expectations and the test drive conversion rate of the ES6 actually reached a record high in the history of NIO, so that’s why we’re very confident in terms of the sales performance of ES6. At this stage, especially in June, we need to focus on the ramp-up of the ES6 first. But for the targets in July is that we want to achieve 10,000 units in terms of the production and delivery. We’re very confident to achieve this target in July and the supply chain team, manufacturing team and the other teams are making all sorts of preparations to make sure we can achieve this objective.

Regarding the ET5, ET5 Touring and ES6 overall volume, we believe there is opportunity for us to still achieve 20,000 units in one month. The big challenge for us right now is more about the ET5, because if we look at the ET5’s pricing, we can see that the last year, we still have around RMB12,000 subsidies for the users, and at the same time, users can get the home chargers free of charge last year, but now users will need to pay for the home chargers for the ET5. So, net-net speaking probably for the ET5, if we make the apple-to-apple comparison, it’s probably like a RMB20,000 more expensive this year. This is the fact and the challenge we need to face. But what we need to focus on is to make sure we can find a better way to expand the user needs and the demand.

The more challenge we are facing right now is about the ET5, but just like I mentioned, we’re going to launch the ET5 Touring on June 15. This is going to help us to improve our overall product competitiveness, because we believe ET5 Touring can cater to the diversified needs of individuals and the family users and this can help us to boost our competitive — of our product competitiveness in this specific market segment. Thank you, Tim.

Tim Hsiao: Thank you, William.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Bin Wang from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Bin Wang: Thank you. I’ve got two questions. Number one is about the margin outlook. We’ve reached [10,000 per month] (ph) for ES6 in the third quarter. So what’s the gross margin expectation we can have for the third quarter second half? That is the number one question about gross margin guidance. [Foreign Language]

Stanley Qu: Hi, Bin, this is Stanley. As William mentioned, with the delivery of our NT2.0 product with higher price from Q2 and Q3, the average selling price and gross profit margin per car will recover. So, we are confident that the gross profit margin will start to recover to double-digits in Q3 and over 15% in Q4. Yes, thank you.