Nio: The Tesla of China sinks below IPO price

FILE PHOTO: People gather at the booth of Chinese electric vehicle start-up Nio as it unveils its ES8 SUV at the Shanghai autoshow, in ShanghaiThomson Reuters

• Nio, widely seen as the Tesla of China, slid below its initial-public-offering price on Tuesday.
• Shares priced at $6.26 apiece on September 12.
• One investor recently told Business Insider that Nio is “an easy stock to steer clear of” because of its unproven management and inexperience manufacturing cars.
• Watch Nio trade in real time here.

Nio, which has been touted as the Tesla of China, slid below its initial-public-offering price nearly three weeks after going public, touching a intra-day low of $6.25 per share on Tuesday.

Shares priced at $6.26 apiece on September 12, the low end of its range, causing the electric-car maker to fall short of raising the $1.8 billion it had sought. But on the next day, after touching its record low of $5.35, the stock soared 75%, sending its market capitalization above $12 billion — despite Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu assigning an “underperform” rating and saying he thinks a capital raise is coming in the next 12 to 18 months.

The stock would top out a day later at $13.80. Since then, shares have fallen in 10 of the last 12 sessions, shedding about 36% over that time. 

“Nio’s not a stock we have any interest in,” said Mark Tepper, president and CEO of Strategic Wealth Partners, managing over $1 billion in assets, told Business Insider. “An unproven management team along zero experience in manufacturing cars makes this an easy stock to steer clear of.“

The four-year old Tencent-backed electric-car startup delivered its first volume-manufactured vehicle — the ES8 — to users on June 28, and started to generate revenue this year, according to its IPO filing. Nio said it made $6.95 million revenue in the first half of 2018, and that it had 6,201 unfilled ES8 reservations by the end of August, for which non-refundable deposits had been made but customers could still cancel their orders.

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