Nio will share its next-generation battery pack standard, the 800 V high-voltage, fast battery swap platform, with the entire industry, said William Li.
(File photo shows William Li (left), founder, chairman and CEO of Nio, and Qin Lihong, co-founder and president of the company, during a media interview in Shanghai. Image credit: CnEVPost)
Responding to an employee’s doubt about the sustainability of the battery swap business, William Li, Nio’s founder, chairman and CEO, mentioned today that the company will announce the first company that will use its battery swap network on November 21.
After dozens of local media outlets picked up on this, multiple Weibo bloggers shared the full text of Li’s response to the question.
The following is translated by CnEVPost from the Chinese version of Li’s remarks.
We’re not the only one in the industry providing battery swap services, there are seven companies that are doing it seriously.
It’s a tough road to take, but it’s the right thing to do. So far, we have provided more than 32 million battery swaps to our users.
If we imagine battery swap as the cloud service that Amazon was trying to do in 2003, we will find that they are very similar in a few points:
First, the network effect is strong.
Battery swap and cloud services are very similar, battery swap network is equivalent to the cloud service infrastructure of the energy Internet.
It certainly won’t work without a reliable national or even global network.
At present, many companies are providing battery swap services, but they are not able to establish a national network.
Second, the scale of the investment is large and the investment cycle is long.
Amazon, Google invested more than ten million dollars in plant and equipment.
Of course, our investments in battery swap stations are not as large as their magnitude, but the time period is very long. Battery swap station’s investment efficiency is very high.
Third, from serving ourselves to serving external customers, once this is done, the bar is very high.
At the beginning, others do not believe that we can do it, but when the development comes to a certain stage, others will find that the threshold of investment and operation is very high, because this is the infrastructure construction.
Overall, the battery swap network is equivalent to the cloud service infrastructure of the energy Internet.
If you look at today’s Alibaba, Tencent, Amazon and Microsoft, a large part of their market value is contributed by cloud services.
Without cloud services, their market capitalization would all be discounted. And these companies lost money for many years in building their cloud services before finally realizing the success they have now.
Our battery swap business has reached a point where it is ready to be opened to the public, and we will be sharing our standard for the next generation of battery packs, the 800 V high-voltage, fast battery swap platform, with the entire industry.
We will announce our first partnership tomorrow, and are still in talks with 4-5 companies.
We are not the only company in the industry providing battery swap services, but we are the only one that is the earliest and most determined to do so, and we already have a first-mover advantage.
We welcome other companies to join us.
Insisting on long-termism is not an excuse for poor short-term execution; when running a marathon, every step needs to be done well.
The current market is volatile and uncertain. In such an environment of high volatility and uncertainty, the risks of practicing long-termism are increasing and the rewards are becoming less.
Therefore we need to be proactive in dealing with the current market and not fool ourselves.
Nio is not only about pursuing short-term success, but also about pursuing and consistently building long-term competitiveness.
Long-termism is about conceptualizing the underlying logic and long-term goals and executing well at each short-term stage.
Long-termism and short-term execution are not opposed to each other, and our original intention must be vigorously implemented.
Nio to unveil 1st firm to use its battery swap network on Nov 21, report says
