China’s Tesla-killer ready to go public in New York
Chinese electric carmaker Nio, which is often seen as an alternative to Elon Musk’s Tesla, is preparing to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
The company said in a filing on Monday that it’s looking to raise as much as $1.8 billion in the initial public offering (IPO). Nio is backed by Chinese conglomerate Tencent and another giant tech company, Baidu. The Shanghai-based firm listed Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bofa Merill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Citi, Credit Suisse and UBS as underwriters.
Nio started selling its first vehicle, the ES8 SUV, in December – three years after the company was founded. The vehicle comes with a price tag of $65,000, or about half the current price of the most basic version of Tesla’s Model X SUV in China.
The Chinese company is seeking to launch the more affordable ES6 sport-utility vehicle next year and bring out a sedan called the ET7 in 2020. “We are generally targeting to launch a new model every year in the near future as we ramp up our business,” the company said in Monday’s filing.
Like Tesla, Nio is burning through money. The company had a net loss of $502.6 million on less than $7 million in revenue in the first half of 2018, according to the filing.
Nio’s move to sell shares in the US comes at a time when Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a plan to set up a gigantic factory in Shanghai, China to corner a market where the government is promoting new-energy vehicles with incentives for buyers.
According to Bloomberg estimates, by 2040, more than half of all new car sales and a third of the world’s automobile fleet, which is 559 million vehicles, will be electric.
For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section
