Exclusive | NIO’s Battle for Transformation Speeds Up Again

In early 2025, at an internal meeting, NIO CEO William Li emphasized to the team the severe challenges the company faced and required the team to anticipate difficulties with a mindset of preparing for at least twice the severity.

This morning, 一见 Auto published an article titled “NIO’s Battle for Transformation Accelerates Again: Opening the Books, Letting Go of Fixations”. The article mentioned some measures NIO is taking through a company-wide, refined operational transformation to combat its operational crisis.

The article contains substantial information. We’ve summarized the key points for quick reference:

At a sales face-to-face meeting, William Li asked Fellows: “How much do external skepticism and pessimistic voices impact sales?” Those who joined in 2018 (having experienced 2019) felt it was only 10%; those who joined in 2020 said 20%; those who just joined in 2024 said 30%.
Starting in April-May, NIO internally established a horizontal organization, the “Vehicle Product Line” (VPL), spanning clusters including Product Design & R&D, Industrialization, User & Service Experience. This aims to optimize cross-functional collaboration efficiency with an end-to-end organizational structure from product to market.
A business statement is generated around the operational capability of each individual Fellow. Metrics for each link are monetized into potential value realized over the full lifecycle. A complete set of business models and tools has been established, refined down to “one car, one price”. Fellows can query their personal business statements – seeing how many cars they sold, how much profit they generated for the company, and how much cost they consumed.
William Li personally paid for a copy of Yoshihide Ohta’s “The Miracle of JAL” to be given to each colleague in the CBU promotion group.
A person close to William Li revealed that he recently reflected that over the past two to three years, driven by inertia in thinking, they took some detours – “The essence of sales is actually about building long-term relationships between people.” Changing the person handling maintenance and communication, while seemingly refining the division of labor, actively severed the long-term connection between the Fellow and the user after the car sale, neglecting the crucial role of the human element.
The switching losses during the “5566” transition this year were much lower than in any of NIO’s previous product transitions. This not only reduced NIO’s own losses but also minimized losses for supply chain partners, with overall loss control nearly 50% better than industry levels.
Taking the car as the Core Business Unit (CBU), NIO established a single-vehicle business model. For each model and each individual car, a single-vehicle business statement can be generated, closing the loop on related R&D, production, sales, and other operations within “one ledger”.
William Li set higher requirements: improving the precision of production-sales model tools, including digitizing forecasts, orders, supply capacity, etc. The goal is to enable “hour-level” agile decision-making in response to any market fluctuations.
In 2024, William Li visited Luxshare Precision for a special study on cost management. Upon returning, he internally emphasized the “one-million-fold cost mindset”, requiring all cost expenditures to be evaluated for reasonableness by multiplying them by one million times. “If you can save CNY 100 per car, multiplied by one million, that’s CNY 100 million.”
A person from NIO’s R&D department revealed that after implementing the CBU mechanism, out of over 500 projects proposed in early 2025, only about half have been successfully approved so far. Projects without clear ROI are being cut.
“All accounts must be fully calculated. For every regional company, every vehicle, every battery pack, every marketing campaign, every R&D project, every motor, every individual – we must calculate the accounts clearly. Every business statement must have someone accountable.”