The news of NIO’s layoffs should be true. As early as January this year, it was reported in the industry that NIO Chairman and CEO Li Bin mentioned in a letter to all employees that he would streamline the team. The letter pointed out that the team will continue to expand in 2022, but unclear responsibilities, inconsistent goals, imperfect processes, and repeated construction abound, and there is still a lot of room for improvement in efficiency.

Li Bin believes that the work tasks in 2023 will increase a lot, but the company's resource investment will only increase slightly. We must tap the potential from within, especially for inefficient organizations, inefficient teams, inefficient processes, and inefficient processes. The project needs to be comprehensively sorted out and optimized.

This means that layoffs are already part of NIO’s internal plan for this year.

In the past year, Weilai has been pursuing cost reduction and efficiency improvement. In 2022, NIO's annual sales will be only 122,486 vehicles, and it will not reach the sales target of 150,000 vehicles set by NIO early last year. In the first half of 2023, Weilai encountered Waterloo, with monthly sales failing to exceed 10,000 for several consecutive months. It was not until June that Weilai's sales began to turn around due to price cuts and new car launches.

However, the monthly sales volume of only 10,000 vehicles is difficult to support NIO’s huge expenses.

In the first half of this year, Weilai lost more than 10 billion, becoming the largest loss-making car company in China. According to NIO’s semi-annual report, in the first half of this year, NIO’s revenue was 19.45 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 3.74%, and its net loss was as high as 10.926 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 139.1%.

How to solve the huge losses may be what Li Bin said at the beginning of the year: it needs to be comprehensively sorted out and optimized.

Last month, Weilaigang planned to issue one billion US dollars of convertible bonds. The funds raised will be used to repay previous old debts and part of it will be used to supplement working capital. Industry insiders said that at best it is financing, at worst it is borrowing new debt to repay old debt. This is not the first time that Weilai has done this. It has been done many times before, and the cycle is reversed.

Some analysts said that whether it is the overwhelming news of layoffs or the transfer of JAC's NIO factory, NIO's situation is indeed not optimistic. Industry insiders said: With crazy recruitment at the beginning of the year and crazy layoffs at the end of the year, Li Bin has taken too big a step.