China’s Tesla-killer ready to go public in New York
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Chinese electric carmaker Nio, which is often seen as an alternative to Elon Musk’s Tesla, is preparing to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
The company said in a filing on Monday that it’s looking to raise as much as $1.8 billion in the initial public offering (IPO). Nio is backed by Chinese conglomerate Tencent and another giant tech company, Baidu. The Shanghai-based firm listed Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bofa Merill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Citi, Credit Suisse and UBS as underwriters.
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Nio started selling its first vehicle, the ES8 SUV, in December – three years after the company was founded. The vehicle comes with a price tag of $65,000, or about half the current price of the most basic version of Tesla’s Model X SUV in China.
The Chinese company is seeking to launch the more affordable ES6 sport-utility vehicle next year and bring out a sedan called the ET7 in 2020. “We are generally targeting to launch a new model every year in the near future as we ramp up our business,” the company said in Monday’s filing.
Like Tesla, Nio is burning through money. The company had a net loss of $502.6 million on less than $7 million in revenue in the first half of 2018, according to the filing.
Nio’s move to sell shares in the US comes at a time when Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a plan to set up a gigantic factory in Shanghai, China to corner a market where the government is promoting new-energy vehicles with incentives for buyers.
According to Bloomberg estimates, by 2040, more than half of all new car sales and a third of the world’s automobile fleet, which is 559 million vehicles, will be electric.
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