Nio reported mostly uneventful 4Q results and provided in-line 1Q guidance, Deutsche Bank analyst Edison Yu's team said.

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Nio (NYSE: NIO, HKG: 9866) reported its fourth-quarter and full-year 2021 earnings earlier today, and as always, Deutsche Bank analyst Edison Yu's team, which follows the company closely, provided their initial observations in the first place.

The following is the text of the team's research note sent to investors today.

Nio reported mostly uneventful 4Q results and provided in-line 1Q guidance.

Deliveries were already reported at 25,034 units, leading to revenue of 9.90bn RMB, coming in ahead of our 9.72bn RMB forecast, helped by higher ASP.

Gross margin of 17.2% was ahead of our 17.0% forecast, due to better vehicle margin (20.9% vs. our 19.4%), partially offset by lower "Other" margin (-32.7%).

Opex of 4,187m RMB came in higher across the board on R&D and SG&A mainly due to greater personnel and marketing/promotional costs.

All together, adjusted EPS of (1.07) came in worse than our (0.86) estimate.

Management provided an in-line outlook for 1Q22 as anticipated (just 1 week left in the qtr), calling for 25,000-26,000 deliveries (implies just under 10,000 at midpoint for March).

This compares with our 25,000 forecast and suggests to us the Shenzhen COVID-19 lockdown is not having much of an impact.

Revenue is expected to be 9.63-9.99bn RMB, above our ingoing 9.57bn RMB forecast.

On the full-year, Nio does not provide an official outlook on volume but gave direction on the below items during the earnings call:

Production: 60 JPH likely in 3Q at the existing Hefei factory (20,000/month) including both ET7+ES7 (incremental 10,000 to existing 3 models)

NEO Park (2nd plant): targeting 60 JPH (240-300k design capacity depending on OT); assumes ET5 getting to at least 10,000/month exiting December

Pricing: no plans to raise in the near-term despite rising raw material costs but will adjust accordingly as the year progresses

Vehicle gross margin: 18-20%

R&D: increase by more than double YoY, implying >9bn

SG&A: 4Q run-rate as % of revenue was likely too high so expect some normalization

Capex: increase substantially YoY