On April 15, NIO announced the completion of the Sinopec Chaoying Station in partnership with Sinopec.
NIO is a global, high-end smart electric vehicle brand founded in November 2014 and listed in the US New York Stock Exchange in September 2018. As of the close of the US stock market on April 14, the company's market capitalization had reached $60.66 billion (approximately RMB 395.53 billion).
Since the completion of the first swap station in 2018, NIO has laid out 201 swap stations across the country with over 2 million swapping units.
NIO’s Vice President Shen Fei said the company will deploy another 299 second-generation swap stations nationwide in the remaining 260 days of the year, completing a combined deployment target of 500 swap stations.
NIO’s Chairman Li Bin also revealed that the company plans to build 5,000 charging and swapping stations by 2025, and that the company has more aggressive plans to deploy more stations internally.
On the same day, NIO and Sinopec signed a strategic cooperation agreement. In addition to the charging and swapping layout, the two companies will also cooperate in new materials and smart electric vehicles, battery rental service (BaaS), vehicle procurement and leisure consumption scenario construction.
The second generation of NIO's power exchange station is an intelligent power exchange system defined by software combining end and cloud, and is the world's first mass-produced power exchange station that realizes automatic vehicle parking. The station has 239 sensors, 21 Tops of computing power, and 4 cloud-based systems that work together to provide up to 312 power changes per day. The second-generation exchange station supports AVP automatic parking into the station, one-key self-service power change in the vehicle, and automatic vehicle attitude adjustment.
Compared to the first generation, the biggest upgrade in NIO’s second-generation power exchange station is that the battery capacity has been increased from 5 to 13, and the daily service capacity of the station has been multiplied from 120 to 312 times, greatly improving the efficiency of power exchange.
NIO's main products include Azera ES6, Azera ES8, Azera EC6, Azera EVE, Azera EP9, etc. In 2020, the company sold a total of 43,700 electric vehicles, an increase of 112.6% year-on-year.