NIO reported the June quarter before the US open on 1 September. Total revenue was RMB32,136.9 million (US$4,736.4 million), up 69.1% year over year — and below the floor of the company's own guide of RMB32,777–34,436 million, by 2.0%. Consensus of about $4.80 billion was missed by 1.3%. The shares fell 4.37% to $4.045 in early trading, from a $4.23 close on 31 August.
The volume was already public before the print: 107,658 deliveries, 2,342 short of the guided floor. So the only open question was what each car earned, and our preview bracketed the answer three ways. It came in at RMB298,509 of total revenue per vehicle — 0.2% from the rate NIO's own guide assumed, and 2.9% below the rate the consensus needed. The Street was not modelling the decline the company had guided to. The company was right.
Underneath that, the number management wanted the quarter judged on: adjusted profit from operations of RMB206.9 million (US$30.5 million), three times the March quarter's RMB66.8 million and the third consecutive positive quarter. On a GAAP basis the same line is a RMB347.2 million loss, and the entire difference is RMB554.1 million of share-based compensation.
And then, as usual with this company, the numbers that decide the next four quarters were on the call rather than in the release.
What the preview asked, and what the print answered
Revenue against the guide and the consensus — missed both, at exactly the per-vehicle rate the guide implied. RMB32,136.9 million against a guided RMB32,777–34,436 million and a ~$4.80 billion consensus. The preview's three implied-revenue rows were RMB32,077 million at the guided rate, RMB32,935 million at March's rate and RMB33,110 million at the consensus. The print landed 0.2% above the first of them. Nothing went wrong with price; the Street had simply assumed revenue per vehicle would rise 0.5% above March when NIO had told it to expect a 2.6% fall.
Vehicle margin against 18.8% — 18.5%, held against a cost increase the release never mentions. Gross margin was 18.4% from 19.0%. Both are enormous against the year-ago quarter, when vehicle margin was 10.3% and gross margin 10.0%. What the release does not say, and Stanley Qu did on the call, is what that 30-basis-point slip was defending against: "If we look at the cost in Q2 as well as the cost in late Q4 last year, the average cost impact or cost increase is around RMB 14,000 per car." Memory, batteries and bulk materials. The margin was held by refusing to discount — "We didn't really lower the price in exchange for the sales volume" — and by supply-chain cost work, not by mix alone.
The non-GAAP operating line against RMB66.8 million — RMB206.9 million, and it is still not GAAP profit. Three consecutive positive quarters is the operating claim the equity story rests on, and 29% more cars did not break it. But the gap to GAAP widened rather than closed: share-based compensation went from RMB375.6 million in March to RMB554.1 million, and the GAAP operating loss was slightly larger than March's. Adjusted net profit was RMB26.1 million — about US$3.8 million on US$4.74 billion of revenue.
The third-quarter guide against 71,770 cars already delivered — 108,000 to 111,000, which needs a September step-up. July and August printed 35,934 and 35,836. The floor of the guide needs 36,230 in September and the ceiling needs 39,230, against a June-quarter monthly average of 35,886. Every month of the guide is a month better than the two the company has already reported for this quarter.
Why the June quarter missed its own volume guide — still unanswered. The release does not mention the shortfall, and no analyst asked about it across seven questions. It is the one item of the five that neither the print nor the call settled.
What the call added
The release contains no cash-flow statement, no full-year guidance and no cost commentary. The call carried all three.
Positive free cash flow — asserted, and guided. NIO publishes a cash-flow statement twice a year, so the June quarter has no free-cash-flow figure to check. Management stated the quarter produced positive operating cash flow and positive free cash flow, and Qu guided it forward: "we expect that in Q3 and Q4, we can maintain the positive free cash flow as well as operating cash flow." Full-year capital spending stays "roughly RMB 6 billion to 7 billion", flat on last year and aimed at the sales and service network rather than capacity.
Vehicle margin is guided flat into a bigger cost increase. Another RMB2,000–3,000 per car of material cost is expected in the second half, taking the cumulative increase against the December 2025 quarter to RMB16,000–17,000 — and the company still expects to "stabilize our vehicle growth margin at the same level as in Q2" and to grow gross profit through it. The load is carried by two cars: Qu said the ES8 and ES9 both run above 20% vehicle margin.
The operating-leverage promise, with a number on it. Non-GAAP selling, general and administrative expense ran about 13% of revenue in the first half and is guided to 10–11% in the second, with a RMB500 million one-off launch cost falling in the June quarter. Research and development goes the other way: guided to about RMB2.5 billion a quarter, against RMB1,983 million on a non-GAAP basis this quarter — a 26% step up from here, after a year of cuts.
And a brand-level price, which nobody outside the company had. Our preview said flatly that NIO does not disclose brand-level average selling prices and that we would not invent one. William Li gave one on the call, from third-party registration data: "in Q2, the average selling price of the NIO brand was RMB 406,000, far higher than the prices of Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi" — and over RMB430,000 in July. Set that against the RMB269,912 the group averaged across all three brands and the mix problem is visible from one number.
What changed in the story
The revenue guide asks for the 3% the Street already thought it had. NIO guided the September quarter to RMB33,285–34,051 million on 108,000–111,000 vehicles. Divide it: the midpoint is RMB307,470 of revenue per vehicle, 3.0% above the quarter just reported — and within RMB100 of the RMB307,552 the June consensus wrongly assumed. The company is now underwriting, one quarter later, the mix improvement the Street mis-timed.
The December-quarter target is last year's December quarter. Li's answer on volume was the largest forward number of the call: "our target for Q4 is achieving an average volume of over 40,000 units per month." That is more than 120,000 vehicles — against 124,807 actually delivered in the December 2025 quarter, an average of 41,602 a month. Taken at its floor the target is a year-on-year decline of 3.8%; taken generously it is a repeat. Either way it is the first quarter in two years where NIO is not guiding to a step up, and it is the number that decides whether the full year lands near RMB128 billion or the RMB136 billion the sell side carries.
The other half of the business got bigger and less profitable at once. Other sales — parts, servicing, power solutions, used cars, financing — grew 12.0% sequentially to RMB3,078.6 million while its gross margin fell from 20.6% to 17.0%. This is the line that compounds with the installed fleet, which passed 1,260,485 cars by the end of August, rather than with each quarter's deliveries — and the four-year-high margin the company was pointing at in March did not hold for a quarter.
The balance sheet moved the other way. Total borrowings went from RMB13,974 million at the year-end to RMB17,613 million, with short-term borrowings alone up from RMB4,692 million to RMB8,165 million. Total shareholders' equity fell to RMB4,045 million, so the company now carries US$20.1 billion of assets on US$596 million of equity. Above that equity sits RMB10,223 million of redeemable non-controlling interests, up RMB1,671 million in six months and two and a half times the group's own equity — and its RMB192.3 million of accretion is why the loss per share is RMB0.29 rather than RMB0.21. A new mark arrived with the quarter: subsidiary Shenji raised RMB493 million across two rounds at a RMB12.25 billion post-money valuation, with NIO keeping 59.95%.
NIO still has no Rule of 40 score, and the call does not change it: a stated positive free cash flow with no figure and no statement behind it is not a margin anyone can compute.
Against the model
Our NIO model was published the morning of the print, and the June quarter was its first projected quarter — so the print grades it immediately.
The base case projected RMB32,779 million. The quarter came in at RMB32,136.9 million, 2.0% below it. The volume half was right by construction: the model was calibrated to the 107,658 deliveries NIO had already disclosed rather than to the guide it missed. The whole error is in the other half, and it splits two ways.
| Model's June quarter | Projected | Reported | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vehicle sales | RMB29,975m | RMB29,058m | −3.1% |
| Other sales | RMB2,804m | RMB3,079m | +9.8% |
| Total revenue | RMB32,779m | RMB32,137m | −2.0% |
The model carried average selling price up 2% on the ES9 and ONVO L80 launches; it fell 1.1%, to RMB269,912. And it carried other sales growing 2% a quarter; it grew 12%. The model split the fleet business and the car business the way NIO's disclosure does, and the fleet business is doing more of the work than either the model or the company's own framing implies.
The full-year arithmetic is where the print and the call actually land. Take the first half as reported, the September guide at its midpoint and a December quarter at Li's 120,000 floor earning the September guide's own revenue per vehicle, and 2026 revenue comes to about RMB128 billion — within a point of the model's base case of RMB128.9 billion and 6% below the RMB135.69 billion the sell side carries. That calculation is ours, and the gap it exposes is not a modelling dispute. It is the difference between the Street's volume assumption and the company's own December target.
The one number that does argue with the model is Li's mid-term claim of 40–50% annual volume growth, against a base case compounding deliveries at 4% a quarter — about 17% a year. But 2026 itself will not reach it: at the December floor the year lands near 420,600 vehicles, up 29% on 2025's 326,028. A management growth ambition stated on a call is not a guide, and this one is already running ahead of the year it was said in.
What the quarter does to the fair value is smaller than any of this sounds. The model's value sits overwhelmingly in a terminal exit at 0.70 times revenue twenty quarters out, so a 2% miss in quarter one is close to noise. Take the level shift at face value — the vehicle line 3.1% lower from here, everything else unchanged — and the exit multiple that makes the base case equal today's price moves from about 0.645 to about 0.665 times terminal revenue. That solve is ours and it is arithmetic on the model's own disclosed exit assumption, not a re-run of the model; the fair values are unchanged pending a revision, which is a separate decision.
NIO was trading 7% below its base case before this print, and fell 4.4% on it. The disagreement in this name has never been about one quarter's revenue. It is about whether a carmaker that has never published a positive year of free cash flow is worth two thirds of a turn of revenue or one third, and the June quarter did not touch it.
What is coming
The September quarter is guided to 108,000–111,000 deliveries and RMB33,285–34,051 million (US$4,906–5,019 million) of revenue, +24.0% to +27.5% and +52.7% to +56.2% year over year. Two thirds of the volume is already reported at 71,770 cars, so September's monthly figure — published in the first days of October — settles the delivery half before the quarter is a week old.
After that, three claims fall due together in the December quarter, and they are all management's own: more than 40,000 vehicles a month, vehicle margin held at about 18.5% through another RMB2,000–3,000 of per-car cost, and non-GAAP SG&A down to 10–11% of revenue from 13%. The December quarter is also the one that carries the second cash-flow statement of the year, which is when the positive free cash flow asserted on this call stops being an assertion.
What we learned
- The quarter earned the rate the guide assumed, not the rate the Street did. Revenue per vehicle was RMB298,509 against the ~RMB298,000 NIO's own guide implied and the RMB307,552 the $4.80bn consensus needed — a 2.9% gap that is the entire revenue miss.
- Revenue missed the floor of NIO's own guide, and the shares fell 4.4%. RMB32,136.9m against RMB32,777–34,436m, on deliveries already public and already 2,342 short of the guided floor.
- The margin was held against RMB14,000 a car of cost inflation, with RMB2,000–3,000 more coming. Vehicle margin 18.5%, guided flat through Q3 and Q4 against a cumulative RMB16,000–17,000 increase since the December 2025 quarter.
- Adjusted operating profit tripled to RMB206.9m, and GAAP still lost RMB347.2m. The whole wedge is RMB554.1m of share-based compensation, up from RMB375.6m in March — so the gap widened as the operating result improved.
- The December-quarter target is a repeat, not a step up. "Over 40,000 units per month" is more than 120,000 against 124,807 delivered in December 2025, and it is what puts full-year revenue near RMB128bn rather than the RMB136bn the sell side carries.
NIO Inc. (NYSE: NIO; HKEX: 9866; SGX: NIO) reported the three months ended 30 June 2026 before the US open on 1 September 2026. Revenue, the vehicle and other-sales split, margins, operating expenses, the GAAP and non-GAAP results, share-based compensation, the balance sheet, deliveries by brand and month, the Shenji financing and third-quarter guidance are the company's own, from the release; the full figure set is on the NIO Q2 2026 earnings page. NIO reports in renminbi and translates the current quarter at its own quarter-end rate, RMB6.7851 to the dollar; the May guidance used RMB6.8980, so the renminbi comparison is the like-for-like one. Quotations and the cost, margin, capital-spending, operating-expense, cash-flow, brand-price and fourth-quarter volume figures are from the earnings call held the same morning and sit alongside the rest of it on the call page; the call is interpreted from Mandarin, so the wording is the interpreter's. Ours rather than the company's: every revenue-per-vehicle figure, which is revenue divided by deliveries; the September and December figures implied by the guide and the target; the full-year revenue and delivery arithmetic; and the projected-versus-reported comparison and implied exit multiple, which come from our NIO model of 1 September 2026 and are assumptions, not company forecasts. Consensus of about $4.80 billion, a loss of $0.05–0.07 per ADS and full-year revenue of RMB135.69 billion are press-reported from third-party estimate feeds and are not series this site verifies. The $4.23 close is 31 August 2026 and the $4.045 quote is early trading on 1 September 2026; a live quote will differ. Guidance and the fourth-quarter and mid-term volume targets are forward-looking statements by the company.
