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XPeng sold 2,249 G9s, right, in January and 5,218 vehicles overall for the month. That is down 60% from January 2022.
Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
Sometimes better than feared can be good enough.
Electric-vehicle deliveries in January from
NIO
(ticker:
NIO
),
XPeng
(XPEV) and
Li Auto
(LI) all took big dips from December, but shares of all three companies were rising Wednesday anyway.
NIO delivered 8,506 vehicles in January, down 46% from the 15,815 delivered in December and down 12% from the 9,652 delivered in January 2022. American depositary receipts of NIO were up 1.8% in premarket trading.
S&P 500
and
Dow Jones Industrial Average
futures were both down about 0.3%.
XPeng
delivered 5,218 vehicles this past month, down 54% from the 11,292 delivered in December and off 60% from the 12,922 delivered last year. 2022. XPeng shares gained 3.8% in premarket trading.
Li posted the best month, relatively speaking. It delivered 15,141 vehicles in January, down 29% from the 21,233 delivered in December and up 23% from the 12,268 delivered in January 2022. The stock rose 6.1%.
Together, the trio delivered 28,865 vehicles in January, down 40% from the 48,340 delivered in December and down 17% from the 34,842 delivered in January 2022. It was the lowest combined month of deliveries since the 28,645 delivered in May 2022 when significant pandemic restrictions constrained production.
The stocks were doing fine for a couple of reasons. For starters, investors were ready for a dip. Some incentives for EV purchases ended in December, creating a rush to buy at year-end. The combined December delivery number was a record.
What is more, the stocks have been badly beaten up. NIO shares are down about 51% over the past year. XPeng shares are off about 70%. Li shares have held up the best, dropping about 9%.
“The street should not read too much into the poor Jan sales at the current stage,” wrote Citi analyst Jeff Chung in a Wednesday report. He predicts that in the first quarter of this year, sales of so-called new energy vehicles will come in at about 1 million, down about 41% compared with the final quarter of 2022. He still expects NEV sales to grow for all of 2023 compared with 2022.
NEVs include both plug-in hybrids and battery-electric vehicles. Most of the Chinese data that is reported groups those two kinds of cars together.
Tesla
(TSLA) is the EV leader around the globe and sold about 42,000 vehicles in China in December. Investors can probably expect that number to come down for January. Tesla stock was unchanged in premarket trading Wednesday.
Investors like to see growth, but the reduced availability of purchase incentives and strong December sales were too much for the companies to overcome. The focus now will be on how sales rebound in coming months.
Write to Al Root at [email protected]
www.barrons.com
