Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer Nio (NYSE:NIO) is off to a strong start this year.
The automaker has announced that it delivered 7,225 vehicles in January, more than four times the 1,598 cars it delivered during the same month last year.
The January figures mark Nio’s sixth-straight month of record high deliveries, bringing the start-up’s cumulative deliveries to 82,866 since last August.
It’s taken Nio six years to reach this point, while Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) delivered 180,570 cars in the last three months of 2020 alone.
Nio’s share price has risen 17% so far in 2021, just shy of Tesla’s 19% gain. Both stocks are outperforming the S&P 500's roughly half-percent rise for the year-to-date. Nio is widely seen as the top competitor to Tesla in the electric vehicle sector.
However, the stock of another U.S.-listed Chinese electric car company, Xpeng, are up 15% so far in 2021. Xpeng said it delivered 6,015 electric cars in January, a third-straight record month of deliveries. The company’s P7 sedan accounted for more than half of last month’s deliveries for a total of 18,772 since its mass rollout began in late June 2020.