Nio is a listed, electric vehicle manufacturer, headquartered in Shanghai, founded in 2014, that IPO-ed in New York in 2018. It has partnerships with CATL and Sinopec.
The company opened its first battery swap station in Shenzhen, in 2018, which has since expanded to 200 battery-swap stations. The 2-millionth battery swap was completed in March-2021.
The Power Swap station 2.0 is scheduled to be rolled out in mid-2021, lowering the swap time to under three minutes, and carrying 13 battery packs.
Aggregating battery packs into an integrated charging stations is also particularly helpful for demand shifting to backstop increasingly renewable-heavy grids.
We have reviewed ten of the company’s patents. We conclude it has a genuine moat in swappable batteries, which could only have been built up by an auto-maker that controls the vehicle and battery designs, as well as the battery swapping stations.