Author | Chen Wen

Source | Dongjian New Research Institute

Li Bin's personnel adjustments at NIO and Letao continue.

On April 10, NIO issued an internal email announcing a large number of personnel changes.

NIO:

Shen Hong, the former head of User Relations (UR), will leave the company for personal reasons.

Sun Ming has been appointed as the new head of User Relations (UR), reporting to Senior Vice President Wei Jian. Sun Ming will no longer serve as the general manager of NIO's Shanghai regional company.

Xia Qinghua has been appointed as the general manager of NIO's Shanghai regional company, reporting to President Qin Lihong. Xia Qinghua will no longer serve as the head of user operations and services at Letao.

The Brand & Communication (BC) Vehicle & Technology Communication (VTC), Regional Market Collaboration (RMD), and Marketing Planning (MPD) departments have been merged to form the NIO Marketing Activities Planning Department (NMA), with Ma Lin concurrently serving as the department head.

Ma Lei will no longer serve as the head of the Media & Communication Department (MCD) of Brand & Communication (BC). This position will be concurrently held by Ma Lin.

Letao:

The Letao Brand & Communication Department (OBC) of the Letao Business Unit (OV) has been renamed the Letao Marketing Activities Planning Department (OMA), responsible for Letao brand building, communication, user growth, strategic planning of market activities, and operation of official media platforms, while supporting marketing-related work of regional companies. The execution functions of media, user growth, and public opinion within the original Letao Brand & Communication Department (OBC) have been merged into the relevant departments of NIO Brand & Communication (BC).

Ji Hao, the former head of the Letao Brand & Communication Department (OBC), has resigned for personal reasons.

On April 2, prior to this, Ai Tiecheng, the former president of Letao Auto, announced his resignation through the Letao App, no longer serving as president of Letao Auto and senior vice president of NIO. Ai Tiecheng will be succeeded by Shen Fei, the former head of NIO's energy business.

At the same time as the personnel changes at Letao, there were also changes to the internal organizational structure. Letao's R&D, supply chain, and quality departments report to NIO CEO Li Bin; the marketing system reports to NIO President Qin Lihong.

Behind Li Bin's frequent actions is his anxiety about achieving the profitability target for this year's fourth quarter. After all, one-quarter of 2025 has already passed. "Other children have already entered university, while NIO is still repeating its classes."

01 Letao can't sell, and neither can NIO

In the automotive industry, there is usually only one reason for changing leadership at the last minute: cars are not selling well.

Letao needs no explanation. At last year's Guangzhou Auto Show, Ai Tiecheng optimistically stated, "The delivery volume of Letao L60 should exceed 10,000 units in December. It will climb from 10,000 in January 2025, exceeding 15,000 in February and reaching 20,000 in March. If I fail to achieve this, I will have to step down."

However, in the first three months of this year, Letao delivered 5,912, 4,049, and 4,820 new vehicles respectively. Ai Tiecheng's promise did not materialize, and his resignation was inevitable.

Compared to Letao, the sales performance of NIO's main brand is not much better.

In the first three months of this year, NIO's main brand delivered only 27,313 new vehicles, far behind XPeng's 94,408 and Lixiang's 92,864 deliveries.

Therefore, since entering April, NIO has started a substantial price reduction promotion on the consumer side.

At the beginning of April, NIO launched promotional activities such as 5 years of free battery swaps and 5 years of interest-free financial incentives.

Taking the ET5T as an example, in the Beijing region, the original price of the ET5T is 298,000 yuan. After stacking discounts such as the BaaS scheme exemption and trade-in subsidies, the final landing price can be reduced to 155,900 yuan. If NIO's existing owners give up their old car benefits, they can also enjoy a 30,000 yuan repurchase deduction, meaning they can acquire it for only 125,900 yuan.

Other popular models such as the ES6, EC6, ET7, and EC7, with original prices of 338,000 yuan, 358,000 yuan, 428,000 yuan, and 458,000 yuan respectively, can be priced as low as 161,000 yuan, 181,000 yuan, 251,000 yuan, and 281,000 yuan after enjoying the maximum discounts, with discounts of up to nearly 50%.

For a long time in the past, Li Bin has consistently told the media that NIO "does not reduce prices." However, the background of the above actions is the sales target of 440,000 units this year.

NIO delivered 220,000 new vehicles last year. This year, in addition to the 2025 NIO "5566" models (ET5, ET5T, ES6, EC6), NIO's main brand will also launch the ET9 priced above 750,000 yuan and a new model in the fourth quarter.

In addition to the currently available L60, Letao will launch two new models this year: the three-row SUV Letao L90, expected to be delivered in the third quarter, and the five-seat SUV Letao L80, to be delivered in the fourth quarter.

Coupled with the first new model of the third brand Firefly, which was launched in April, Li Bin believes that with the drive of these nine new products, NIO's overall sales volume will usher in new growth.

However, the launch of NIO's main brand's new models is relatively late, coupled with their high prices, which destines them not to be high-volume models. The boutique small car positioning of Firefly in the Chinese market has long been verified and is difficult to shoulder the responsibility of high sales volume. Most of the sales growth needs to be absorbed by Letao.

The L60 faces competition from the new Model Y, Zeekr 7X, and Xiaomi YU7, while the Letao L90 is in the same market segment as models like AITO M8 and Lixiang i8, facing an unoptimistic competitive situation.

02 Spread too thin

Everything seemed to be getting better, so why is NIO in trouble again? To summarize in a popular saying, "They took too big of a step."

Many startups focus on business concentration at the enterprise operation level, piercing through with a single needle, so as to maximize the use of limited resources. However, as a new force in the automotive industry, NIO has a huge appetite, firing on multiple "battlefields" simultaneously. To sell cars, it builds a battery swapping ecosystem; to improve intelligent driving capabilities, it embarks on self-developed chips; it even ventures into the mobile phone business.

Specifically, regarding car sales, while NIO's main NIO brand still needs to struggle fiercely with competitors and has not yet stabilized its position, it has launched two sub-brands, Letao and Firefly, within a year.

Li Bin has repeatedly stated that the birth of sub-brands is not a rush job but a "natural outcome" after the underlying technology is firmly established. However, Letao's high opening and low closing to some extent indicates that NIO was not fully prepared.

In the early stages of Letao's launch, sales were relatively good due to its high cost-effectiveness and the endorsement of NIO's main brand. Li Bin and Ai Tiecheng repeatedly stated that there were "explosive orders." However, after entering 2025, affected by factors such as production capacity constraints and limited battery swapping, Letao's sales plummeted from over 10,000 units per month to less than 10,000 units combined over two months.

Ai Tiecheng reviewed the reasons for not meeting Letao's sales target in March. First, inadequate preparation led to delayed vehicle deliveries and the loss of many orders. Second, the resulting "secondary disasters" led to insufficient market confidence. "If the orders from last year had not been lost, the trend in January and February of this year would have been better. Letao could have seized the opportunity to turn the new car market effect into a user word-of-mouth effect."

Li Bin summarized it as "low brand awareness of Letao, the sales network needing to climb, immature sales staff, and inadequate battery swapping compatibility."

As for Firefly, NIO's positioning is a global model targeting overseas markets. The direction of going overseas is not wrong, but can NIO afford to fight on two fronts at this time?

A long time ago, NIO started its layout in the European market. According to relevant reports, NIO has currently established nearly a hundred NIO Houses, NIO Spaces, and service centers in Europe, as well as dozens of battery swapping stations and supercharging stations. However, this huge investment only translated into 1,598 sales in Europe last year, accounting for less than 1%. In the first two months of this year, NIO's sales in Europe were only in the double digits, with 31 and 73 units respectively.

A case for reference is that XPeng Auto also planned to launch an independent sub-brand MONA but later reduced it to a model after researching and weighing the difficulty of operating two brands simultaneously.

As for the intelligent driving-related in-vehicle systems, smart cockpits, three-electric systems, and even chips, as long as they are needed in the car, NIO is developing them all in-house. Although in the long run, "full-stack self-development" can achieve independent control of core technologies, which is conducive to forming its own moat, the diversion of energy and resources inevitably leads to mediocrity in everything. After all, traditional mature automakers do not develop all technologies in-house either.

03 The CEO cannot be a good person

Li Bin is clearly aware of the problem: too many projects and insufficient cost control capabilities, which in turn affect the company's profitability. Hence, this large-scale personnel and organizational structural adjustment.

It should be noted that since NIO's inception, Li Bin's reflections on NIO's crises have mostly stemmed from "decoupling issues between decision-making and execution." Many times, he took the blame himself and never adjusted the organizational structure, gradually earning the label of "a good person in the automotive circle" through long-term reputation building.

For example, in the intelligent driving R&D project, Li Bin assembled a team of thousands of people with an investment of nearly 10 billion yuan over three years. However, it still has not shown sufficient competitiveness, failing to achieve end-to-end capabilities, and its performance in urban NOA is far inferior to that of competitors.

Faced with such results, Li Bin did not punish the team in any way but instead continued to cheer them on as usual, saying, "Ideal (another electric vehicle company) only took a few months. Let's just work harder."

In contrast, XPeng Auto also struggled due to sales performance issues. He Xiaopeng first reclaimed the highest decision-making power from the general office, reorganized more than a dozen business organizational structures, and then brought in Wang Fengying to use iron-fisted means to rectify the company's internal management and supply chain, slowly rebounding and returning to the sales rankings.

Therefore, since March of this year, it has been evident that Li Bin is changing beyond the label of "a good person."

In an internal speech to all employees of the product research and development cluster on March 14, Li Bin once again emphasized the core logic of the "basic business unit" (CBU), "to spend money and time on the right things within effective resource boundaries." NIO expects to implement this system on a large scale in the first quarter and fully in the second quarter.

At a small-scale communication meeting of NIO on March 23, Li Bin stated, "We never say that we will defeat someone and take it as an advantage. We don't quite agree with this mindset."

At the same time, Li Bin also advocates keeping every account clear in the company, "For each regional company, each vehicle, each battery, each market activity, each R&D project, each motor, we need to understand and keep the accounts clear. Each business report must have someone responsible for it. This is the company-wide business mindset."

Although in the past decade, NIO has let more than 20 VPs "voluntarily leave," most of them were "asked to leave by the company." However, can the improvement of business performance be achieved solely through "personnel changes"?

Letao has lost the time window for market positioning, the future of Firefly is uncertain, and the battery swapping business is still far from harvest. NIO's reforms have ultimately come too late.