Nio announced January deliveries of 7,225 units, which China's top investment bank CICC believes is in line with the company's planned monthly capacity of 7,500 units, indicating that production is at capacity and strong consumer demand ahead of the Chinese New Year that falls on February 12 this year.

Nio's delivery in January was up 352.1% year-on-year and 3.1% from December, marking the sixth consecutive month of record monthly sales.

The flagship mid-size SUV ES8 delivered 1,660 units; the mid-size SUV ES6 delivered 2,720 units; and the coupe SUV EC6 delivered 2,845 units, setting a new high for this model.

The continued climb in sales comes from increased consumer acceptance of electric vehicles, stronger product competitiveness, expansion of brand influence and appeal, and efficient customer acquisition due to excellent user experience and word-of-mouth effect, CICC said in a report on Tuesday.

Nio OS 2.9.0 was pushed on January 25, with 150 new features and 304 optimized features, and Nio has achieved 47 version iterations in total.

In January 2021, Nio built 7 new battery swap stations and plans to build 12 more battery swap stations by February 8, for a total of 191 battery swap stations before the Chinese New Year.

Nio launched Nio Autonomous Driving (NAD) at the Nio Day held on January 9. The system can gradually realize point-to-point autonomous driving in scenarios such as highways, urban areas, parking and charging.

The Aquila hyper-aware system is equipped with 33 high-performance sensing hardware and features industry-leading LIDAR. The supercomputing platform Adam is equipped with four NVIDIA Orin chips with up to 1,016Tops of computing power.

The NAD hardware system will be standard on the latest model, ET7, and will be available on a subscription basis for users who need a full set of autonomous driving features, i.e. AD as a Service (ADaaS), opening up a new business model for intelligent driving services.

Nio ET7 sets the current benchmark for autonomous driving hardware platforms and will also open a new round of smart car hardware race and accelerate the change of the auto industry to intelligence, CICC said.

Focusing on the forward earnings premium from smart driving services, CICC remains unchanged on Nio's earnings forecast and maintains its $85 price target, corresponding to 49% upside.

(Source: cnEVpost)