$NIO Inc.(NIO)$Nio Mauled by Grizzly Research

In a scathing report issued on June 28, Grizzly Research accused Nio of cooking its books to continually beat Wall Street forecasts for its earnings and sales. Specifically, Grizzly Research claims that Nio uses affiliate Wuhan Weineng to juice its numbers.

Nio famously runs a battery-as-a-service (BaaS) program where consumers who purchase Nio vehicles pay a subscription fee to swap depleted batteries for fresh ones rather than shell out big bucks for at-home battery charging infrastructure. However, it is Wuhan Weineng, not Nio, that rents the batteries to Nio vehicle owners. Nio sells the needed batteries to Wuhan Weineng and records the sales as revenue.

Following an investigation, Grizzly Research alleges that Nio deliberately oversupplies battery packs to Wuhan Weineng to inflate its revenue figures. Based on Wuhan Weineng’s inventory levels, the short-seller estimates that Nio oversupplied more than 21,000 batteries to Wuhan Weineng last year, and that the oversupply boosted Nio’s revenue by 10% and understated its net loss by half. This is a major allegation, but not implausible given that Nio reported revenue growth of 122% and a 24% drop in its net loss for full year 2021.

Grizzly Research also questions why Nio immediately recognizes revenue from the sale of batteries to Wuhan Weineng rather than spreading the sales out over the seven year subscription period.

Nio immediately fired back at Grizzly Research, saying that the report contains “numerous errors, unsupported speculations, and misleading conclusions.” The electric vehicle maker also said that it will make relevant disclosures as required by market watchdogs in the U.S., Hong Kong and Singapore, where its stock trades. But so far, Nio has not put forward any disclosures and its stock fell more than 10% on the day the Grizzly Research report was made public.