Nio Hands Geely 30% of Its Battery Swap Unit in $2.4 Billion Deal

Most of Geely's payment is not cash. Nio said in a Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing that Geely contributes the entire equity of Yiyi Power, its commercial fleet battery swap business, plus 640 million yuan ($94.8 million). After closing, Nio China keeps 63.6%, Geely holds 30%, and the Wuhan Guangchuang venture fund holds 6.4%, according to CnEVPost.

The deal was announced on Monday and signed as a definitive agreement, not a memorandum. That is what makes it different from earlier rounds of Nio swap talk.

Nio has been pitching its swap network to other automakers since 2021. Geely signed a strategic swapping partnership in November 2023 and the two expanded to charging network connectivity in March 2024, but those were handshakes. This one comes with assets and cash, as Electrek noted. Nio Power previously raised 1.5 billion yuan in May 2024 led by the Wuhan Guangchuang fund, and in March 2025 Nio said CATL was advancing an investment of up to 2.5 billion yuan. That CATL money never materialized, and CATL is absent from the ownership table Nio published this week.

The valuation has barely moved

Electrek's read on the numbers is blunt: the Wuhan fund's 6.4% stake works out to about 9.1% before Geely comes in, which implies Nio Power was worth roughly 16 billion yuan back in 2024, when the network had far fewer stations. Geely's 30% is worth about 4.8 billion yuan at the deal valuation. Strip out the cash and Nio is effectively valuing Yiyi at a little over 4.1 billion yuan ($610 million). That gap is what the milestone clause is for: Geely's stake can be reduced after closing if the business underperforms, with a floor of 20%. Geely also holds an option to invest another 640 million yuan within two years, which would take it to 34% and cut Nio to 60%.

The network is large. Nio had 3,790 swap stations when it passed 100 million cumulative swaps in February, according to Electrek, and it is targeting 1,000 more this year. Nio Power aims to operate 10,000 stations by 2030, when annual electricity demand across the network is expected to exceed 10 billion kWh, the CnEVPost report says.

Charging assets move the other way

The second leg runs in the opposite direction. Nio China is subscribing in cash for newly issued equity in Geely's Zhejiang Haohan Energy Technology, giving it a 10% stake, and Haohan will use the proceeds to buy certain charging assets from Nio. Neither company disclosed the amount, and the transaction still needs regulatory approvals. Geely plans more than 22,000 charging stations with over 100,000 connectors by the end of 2027, including more than 15,000 smart stations. The companies also say they intend to fully connect their charging infrastructure.

The plans covering battery-swappable consumer models from Geely entities remain preliminary, Nio's filing says, and are subject to further discussions.

That caveat matters. China's swap market is splitting into camps: Nio's network, CATL's Choco-Swap, and BYD betting on ultra-fast charging instead. A Geely brand shipping Nio-compatible packs at volume would make Nio's network the default for a large slice of the market. But no such model has been committed to.

Nio is not selling from weakness. It delivered 107,658 vehicles in Q2 2026, posted an 18.5% vehicle margin and eked out a small non-GAAP profit, per its latest earnings, while still losing 528 million yuan on a GAAP basis. It had 56.7 billion yuan in cash at the end of June. That context comes from Electrek's analysis of the filings.

Background: swapping is expensive to build

The Geely deal lands in the same week China's government set its own battery roadmap. On Monday the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a five-year battery industry plan, dated September 14 and jointly issued by seven agencies, targeting initial large-scale use of all-solid-state batteries by 2030. The document also calls for long-life lithium batteries to reach 15,000 charge-discharge cycles and for leading manufacturers to hit parts-per-billion defect rates, CnEVPost reported.

Solid-state remains a promise for the back half of the decade. BYD executive vice president Stella Li told Carwow's Spanish outlet that BYD is "in the leading position" on commercialization and technology, and that the company will release its first car with a solid-state battery in 2027, Engadget reported on 27 September. That lines up with earlier comments from FinDreams CTO Sun Huajun, who said in February 2025 that BYD would demonstrate and install solid-state batteries in 2027 ahead of mass production around 2030. BYD chief scientist Lian Yubo said the chemistry would go into high-end models first, alongside lithium iron phosphate.

So the two stories sit at different ends of the same problem. Solid-state is a 2030 answer to range and charging. Battery swapping is being consolidated now, because building the stations is expensive and Nio has spent years looking for someone to help carry the cost.