About Rui Chen
In a September 2023 interview, Chris Chen, head of NIO Europe, discussed the company's approach to the European electric vehicle market. Chen stated that NIO's strategy is based on "long-term thinking, good preparations, and just keep patient," and described the competitive EV landscape as beneficial for sustainable growth. He attributed NIO's advantage to its in-house research and development and focus on smart platforms, which he said make its products more scalable and expandable.
Chen outlined NIO's European expansion, noting that the company began its strategy in 2019 and launched in Norway in 2021, followed by Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark in 2022. He described NIO's cars as "chargeable, swappable, and upgradable," highlighting battery swapping and subscription-based upgrades as features that provide flexibility for users. Chen characterized the current market as a good opportunity due to government policies for CO2 reduction and the maturity of smart electric technologies.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Rui Chen's recent appearances.
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Transcript (4 segments)
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Rui Chen0:00
We actually go back to our principles: long-term thinking, good preparations, and just keep patient. There will always be competition in businesses because everybody realizes that EV is a trend, so everybody puts their effort and resources into EV technologies. This is actually good for a more sustainable future growth. We're happy, we're delighted to see this. You just need to differentiate yourself from others, provide better product and better services, and the users will vote for it. That's our principle. Our advantage is always go back to the technologies. We have our in-house R&D, it's very original, and also we focus on the smart platforms, try to make sure our product is more scalable and expandable. In Europe, we launched ET7 this year. We make sure that all our users who are driving our car are able to enjoy the leading-edge technologies and they are always updated with the breakthrough experiences in the car. This is something we can do but not too many other OEMs are doing. Also, we try to build up this power ecosystem to make sure that the users have better recharging experiences. Our car is chargeable, swappable, and also upgradable, which means our car supports charging of course by DC or AC, and also we can support swapping. Not many others are doing this. We can also upgrade the batteries, so people can always opt for a lower battery, like you can choose a 75 kilowatt-hour battery, and then whenever you decide to go for a campaign or go for a trip, you can always choose a larger size of the batteries, you can choose a 100, and you just need to pay for the subscription fee that month. This is super flexibility for the users, bringing extra user experience.
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Interviewer2:16
Chris, just finally, why do you think now is the time, the time is right to expand more aggressively into Europe? There's been criticism of some of the European OEMs that they haven't moved fast enough and they haven't innovated enough on the EV side of things. Do you think that's one reason now you see an opportunity to get in the market early?
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Rui Chen2:42
Yeah, we started the European expansion actually back in the year of 2019. This has been a long thing. When NIO started up, we started up against a global setup. We have the forward engineering center in Oxford, we have the R&D center in San Jose, we have our global design center in Munich. This is a global setup, so we're born to be global. We actually started this strategy and the implementation from 2020, and then in 2021 Norway, and 2022 Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. We started from the very beginning. Why this is a good opportunity? Because you always see follow the market trend, and also you can see a lot of the policies from the government for CO2 free, creating a more sustainable world. Also, you see the technology, the smart technologies, the electric technologies, they're just at this level. So I think this is a good opportunity for us to be part of Europe and try to build up more value for this market.
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Joanna Bursecci3:55
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