In the current industry of internal competition, NIO Automobile has been exposed to layoffs.
On November 3rd, Li Bin, founder, chairman, and CEO of NIO Automotive, issued a full staff letter in response to rumors of layoffs. The letter mentioned that NIO will reduce the number of positions by about 10%, and the specific adjustments will be completed in November.
According to financial report information, as of the end of 2022, NIO has nearly 26800 employees. This means that if this adjustment is implemented, NIO's layoffs will affect nearly 2700 current employees.
About 10% of positions will be reduced
In this internal staff letter titled "Organizational Optimization and Two Year Priorities", Li Bin discussed that NIO will carry out adjustments related to organizational and resource investment direction. According to the organizational and business optimization plan formulated by the company, the company will reduce the number of positions by about 10%.
Li Bin revealed that in the past two months, NIO has conducted over thirty two-year business plan analysis and discussions to determine the goals, key success factors and priorities, action plans, required resources, and identify opportunities for organizational optimization, cost reduction, and efficiency improvement for each business in the next two years.
According to the entire staff letter, NIO has established business priorities and formulated specific plans for organizational and business optimization in the past two weeks based on the following principles: ensuring long-term investment in core key technologies and maintaining leading advantages in technology and products; Ensure sales and service capabilities are able to cope with fierce market competition; Ensure the timely launch of 9 core products from 3 brands; Improve organizational efficiency, merge duplicate departments and positions, change inefficient internal workflow and division of labor, and eliminate inefficient positions; Resource efficiency improvement, delaying and reducing project investments that cannot improve the company's financial performance within 3 years.
Li Bin expressed his apologies in a letter from all employees regarding the company's move to reduce positions by about 10%. I'm sorry that this adjustment will affect some colleagues, but please understand that this is a difficult decision that the company has to make in the face of fierce market competition, "Li Bin said.
This is not the first time there have been rumors of layoffs
In fact, this is not the first time NIO Motors has reported layoffs. In March 2019, Li Bin issued an internal letter acknowledging that NIO Automobile had experienced some personnel redundancy during its rapid development.
At that time, Li Bin emphasized that improving the efficiency of enterprise operations, optimizing personnel and business structures, working hard, and reasonably controlling the pace of strategic development would be important themes in the next stage. In the internal letter at the time, Li Bin stated that in the first half of the year, a 3% optimization would be carried out on the existing team to control the total number of personnel to within 9500.
At the beginning of this year, Li Bin explicitly stated in his letter to all employees of NIO in 2023 that the work tasks for 2023 will increase significantly, but the company's resource investment will only slightly increase. NIO must tap into its potential internally, especially for inefficient organizations, teams, processes, and projects that require comprehensive sorting and optimization. In 2022, the team continued to expand, but there were cases of unclear responsibilities, inconsistent goals, incomplete processes, and repetitive construction everywhere. There is still great room for efficiency improvement, "said Li Bin.
Faced with problems in his own development and increasingly fierce market competition, Li Bin once reminded company employees to have sufficient psychological preparation for difficulties in 2023 or even longer, but to give up any fluke mentality, maintain a sense of crisis, calmly perceive and analyze changes in the market environment and competitive situation. Only in this way can NIO adapt and cope with the difficult challenges ahead.
16000 new cars delivered in October
In October of this year, NIO Automobile delivered 16000 new cars, a year-on-year increase of 59.84%. From the perspective of delivery volume, NIO's performance is not as good as that of Ideal Automobile and Xiaopeng Automobile in the same period.
Among them, the monthly delivery volume of Ideal Automobile reached a new high, with 40400 new cars delivered in October, a year-on-year increase of 302.1%, and the monthly delivery for the first time exceeded the 40000 vehicle mark.
Driven by the launch of the new M7, AITO Wenjie's delivery performance in October was particularly impressive, with a monthly delivery volume of 12700 vehicles.
Similar to AITO, Xiaopeng Motors has regained growth, with a delivery volume of 20000 vehicles in October, a 31% month on month increase and a 292% year-on-year increase.
On the evening of November 1st, while major new forces announced delivery data, BYD released its October production and sales report. BYD announced that the sales of new energy vehicles in October 2023 were 301800 units, compared to 217800 units in the same period last year; The cumulative sales volume this year was 2.3815 million units, a year-on-year increase of 70.36%.
In June of this year, NIO, which had previously stated that it would never lower prices, announced a reduction of 30000 yuan in the starting price of all models. Li Bin stated that this adjustment has been discussed internally for a long time and has also listened to the opinions and suggestions of some users. Data shows that NIO Motors delivered a total of 126000 vehicles from January to October, a year-on-year increase of 36.30%. According to the previous plan released by NIO, the sales target for 2023 is 245000 vehicles, and the target completion rate for the first 10 months of this year is 50%.
In addition, according to NIO's second quarter financial report, NIO's revenue in the second quarter of this year was 8.7717 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 14.8%, gross profit was 87 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 93.5%, and net loss exceeded 6 billion yuan.
The next two years will be the most intense stage of competition in the automotive industry's transformation period, and the external environment is full of huge uncertainty. Li Bin further stated in this letter that this year NIO has delivered five new products and gained over 40% of the market share in the pure electric vehicle market with a transaction price of over 300000 yuan. However, there is still a gap between the comprehensive performance and the expected target. To win the qualification to participate in the finals, it is necessary to further improve execution efficiency and ensure that there are sufficient resources invested in key businesses, "said Li Bin.