Multiple new energy vehicle companies release 2025 financial reports with varying performance outlooks

(Source: Che Bai Hui Research Institute)

Automakers’ 2025 financial reports are finally here. Recently, NIO, Li Auto, and Leap Motor released their 2025 annual financial reports, each showing different performance “scenarios”: NIO, despite still operating at a loss for the year, achieved its first quarterly profit; Li Auto continued to be profitable but showed signs of phased pressure; and Leap Motor turned losses into profits, becoming the second Chinese new car-making company to be profitable for the full year.

Meanwhile, all three companies revealed their future development plans during earnings calls. Whether it’s NIO’s layout of five mid-to-large SUVs, Li Auto’s “embodied intelligence,” or Leap Motor’s “million vehicle sales,” combined with macro automotive sales data from January to February this year, it all seems to highlight the challenges and difficulties in the 2026 automotive market competition. Industry insiders say that as intelligent, green, high-end, and international development become core directions of the industry, technological innovation will be a key way to enhance product strength.

01

Performance Differentiation Among the Three Companies

The three automakers show different states in their financial reports. In 2025, NIO still operated at a loss overall but achieved its first profit in the fourth quarter. Financial data shows that in 2025, NIO’s three brands delivered a total of 326,028 vehicles, a 46.9% increase year-over-year; total revenue from vehicle sales reached 76.884 billion yuan, up 32.0% from the previous year; gross profit margin for the year was 13.6%, compared to 9.9% in 2024; and NIO’s full-year net loss was 14.943 billion yuan, narrowing by 33.3% from the previous year. Notably, in the fourth quarter, NIO achieved its first quarterly profit, with a net profit of 283 million yuan, turning positive year-over-year.

This performance is closely linked to sales growth. “In the fourth quarter of 2025, the company delivered a total of 124,807 smart electric vehicles, a 71.7% increase year-over-year. The quarterly delivery volumes for NIO, Lado, and Firefly brands all hit record highs,” said NIO founder, Chairman, and CEO William Li.

The increase in gross margin is also a factor. NIO’s CFO Qu Yu stated that in Q4 2025, the company’s vehicle gross margin was 18.1%, and other sales gross margin was 11.9%, mainly benefiting from significant growth in sales and revenue, product mix optimization, and cost reduction measures.

However, Li also admitted that the company faces rising costs. “This year, due to AI’s demand for computing power and geopolitical factors, there are upward trends in chip prices and bulk materials like copper and lithium carbonate, which put significant pressure on costs and margins,” Li said during the earnings call. In response, NIO plans to launch three new large models this year, leveraging the existing lineup of five large vehicles to absorb and control raw material risks.

While Li Auto remains profitable, its operational performance faces pressure. The 2025 financial report shows that Li Auto’s total annual revenue was 112.3 billion yuan, down 22.3% year-over-year; net profit was 1.1 billion yuan, down 85.8%; and non-GAAP net profit was 2.4 billion yuan, down 77.5%. In Q4, net profit was only 20.02 million yuan, a sharp decline from 3.5 billion yuan in the same period last year. Delivery data shows that in 2025, total deliveries were 406,343 vehicles, an 18.8% decrease year-over-year; in Q4, deliveries were 109,194 vehicles, down 31.2%. The gross profit margin for 2025 was 18.7%, compared to 20.5% in 2024. In Q4 2025, vehicle gross margin was 16.8%, down from 19.7% in Q4 2024, a decrease of 2.9 percentage points. Li Auto explained that the decline was mainly due to product mix changes.

Li Auto Chairman Li Xiang admitted during the earnings call, “The past year has been a crucial period of strategic adjustment for Li Auto.” The pain from transitioning from extended-range to pure electric, supply chain bottlenecks causing delivery delays, initial sales policies for Li Auto i6, and the subsequent reduction in average selling price due to product mix changes are reflected in the financial data.

Leap Motor turned losses into profits in 2025, with a net profit of 540 million yuan. In terms of sales, the company delivered a total of 596,555 vehicles, a 103.1% increase. Revenue from vehicle and parts sales reached 62.01 billion yuan, up 96.0%, driven by increased overseas vehicle deliveries and related carbon credit trading income. Revenue from services and other sales was 2.72 billion yuan, a 413.2% increase, mainly due to a significant rise in overseas vehicle sales boosting related carbon credit trading income.

Gross profit margin improved from 8.4% in 2024 to 14.5% in 2025, thanks to ongoing cost management, product mix optimization, and other revenue streams. Leap Motor maintains its target of 1 million vehicle sales for this year.

02

“Intelligentization” as a Key Development Focus

High-quality automotive development relies on technological innovation. From the disclosed information, companies aim to build their unique “moats” through R&D investments, with intelligentization being a key area.

On February 26, NIO announced that its chip subsidiary, Anhui Shenji Technology Co., Ltd. (“Shenji”), completed its first round of equity financing, raising over 2.2 billion yuan. Shenji mainly handles NIO’s intelligent driving chips.

NIO stated that Shenji’s initial orders mainly come from NIO itself, and the company is actively expanding into emerging businesses such as embodied robots and agent reasoning, providing comprehensive chip and smart hardware solutions for the era of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Additionally, Li Bin believes that the combination of world models and reinforcement learning has enormous potential, and the company plans to invest heavily in data training this year, with two major versions expected in Q2 and Q4.

Li Auto views cars as living intelligent agents, with AI being the key to vitality. During the Q3 2025 earnings call, Li Xiang said that only by choosing embodied intelligence can they truly change users’ lives.

“2026 will be a critical year for Li Auto to evolve into an embodied intelligence company,” Li Xiang stated at the latest earnings presentation. Facing intensified competition in the new energy vehicle market, the company aims to strengthen its technological “moat” and transition from an intelligent electric vehicle company to an embodied intelligence enterprise, establishing a competitive advantage for the next stage.

Li Auto’s R&D expenses for 2025 remained roughly stable at 11.3 billion yuan, a 2.2% increase from the previous year, with 50% allocated to AI-related investments. In Q4, R&D costs reached 3 billion yuan, up 25.3%, mainly supporting expanded product lines and AI-related projects.

Leap Motor’s R&D spending also increased year-over-year. In 2025, R&D expenses totaled 4.29 billion yuan, up 47.9% from 2.9 billion yuan in 2024, driven by increased R&D efforts and team expansion.

In terms of intelligent driving, in February 2026, Leap Motor launched its city navigation assist feature on the B/C platform across multiple cities. The company also plans to roll out nationwide city navigation assist in Q2 2026 and aims to complete the development of its intelligent driving base model and AI large model-based assisted driving solutions by the end of 2026.

Tsinghua University professor Deng Zhidong said that future automakers will essentially be AI companies with hardware platform manufacturing advantages. Therefore, the entire ecosystem must embrace AI more deeply. AI-driven cars will become integrated “hardware platform + AI software” mobile AI agents. Compared to pre-installed standardized hardware, diverse AI software and value-added services may occupy higher-value segments of the industry chain.

Experts emphasize that technological innovation must break through core bottlenecks, focusing on frontier fields such as intelligent driving chips and in-vehicle operating systems. Accelerating new energy vehicle product iterations, promoting low-carbon transformation across the industry chain, and simultaneously developing cutting-edge technologies like vehicle-road collaboration, solid-state batteries, smart cabins, low-altitude flying, and embodied intelligence are crucial to securing future industry leadership.

Source: Economic Information Daily

Reporter: Li Zixin