Nio Gets a $2.4B Vote of Confidence From Geely on Battery Swaps

Nio finally got what it's been chasing for years: a real partner with real money for its battery-swapping network. Geely Holding Group agreed to take a 30% stake in Nio Power, the unit that runs Nio's swap stations and charging business, in a deal announced this week that puts a hard price on an asset the market has struggled to value for years.

Under the agreement, a Geely subsidiary is contributing its own commercial swapping business, Yiyi, plus roughly RMB640 million in cash, in exchange for newly issued equity in Nio Power. Once the deal closes, Nio's China unit will hold 63.6% of Nio Power, Geely will hold 30%, and an existing investor, the Wuhan Guangchuang fund, will hold the remaining 6.4%.

The headline number is the valuation: Nio Power now carries a post-money price tag of roughly RMB16 billion, or about $2.4 billion — as Electrek's reporting on the deal terms laid out, that number hasn't moved much since the network's first outside investment back in 2024, even though the station count has grown considerably since then.

Geely's stake now puts a hard price on a battery-swapping network that has logged more than 100 million swaps and 3,790 stations.

That scale is the real asset here. Nio passed the 100-million-swap milestone in February and set a single-day record of nearly 176,000 swaps earlier this year. Swapping is also what makes Nio's "Battery-as-a-Service" pricing model work — the mechanism that let the company price its ES9 flagship SUV at $54,000 by separating the car price from the battery cost.

For investors, the read here is nuanced rather than straightforwardly bullish. Nio stock actually gained only modestly on the news relative to the size of the deal, while EV peers XPeng and Tesla both slipped the same day — a signal, as Yahoo Finance noted, that the market treated this as deal-specific rather than a broader sector catalyst. The stock trades around $3.67, deep in penny-stock territory for a company that once traded above $60.

There's an upside case tied to what comes next, not just the cash. Nio and Geely have described "preliminary plans" to bring battery swapping to Geely-brand consumer vehicles and commercial fleets. If that materializes, it would make Nio's charging network the default standard for a meaningfully larger slice of China's EV market — a real network-effect win in a country where NIO, CATL, and BYD are all fighting over competing charging standards.

The risk side of this trade is straightforward: selling a minority stake in the swap unit doesn't fix Nio's core problem, which is that the vehicle business itself is still losing money. Nio posted a GAAP loss of RMB528 million last quarter even with an 18.5% vehicle margin and a small non-GAAP profit. The deal also still needs regulatory approval in China before it's final, so nothing here is locked in yet.

It's worth noting how this fits into the broader map of Nio's outside financing for the swap business. The Wuhan Guangchuang fund's original 6.4% stake came from a RMB1.5 billion investment back in May 2024, and Nio said in March 2025 that battery giant CATL was in talks to invest up to RMB2.5 billion more. CATL doesn't appear anywhere in the ownership table Nio published alongside the Geely deal, suggesting that earlier discussion either stalled or was superseded by the Geely arrangement instead.

What to watch next: regulatory sign-off on the transaction, and whether Nio and Geely actually finalize those "preliminary plans" to extend swapping into Geely-branded vehicles. That follow-through, more than the deal itself, is what would turn this into a durable moat rather than a one-time cash infusion. Watch the RMB56.7 billion cash balance Nio reported at the end of June, too — that's the buffer funding the company while the vehicle business works toward sustained profitability.

Bottom line: this deal doesn't fix Nio's profitability problem, but it does put a real price on the one part of the business that's genuinely hard to replicate — and that's worth something even at a stock price this depressed.