Nio To Go Public On New York Stock Exchange, Expects To Raise $1.8 Billion In IPO

Chinese automaker Nio has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange, despite not selling any products in the United States.

In a filing on Monday, Nio said that it wants to raise as much as $1.8 billion in the initial public offering.

CNBC reports that Nio has more than 6,200 employees, but it only recently commenced deliveries of its first mass-market production vehicle, the all-electric ES8 SUV. The startup expects to commence deliveries of a more affordable 5-seat SUV, dubbed the ES6, in 2019 and will follow it up with an electric 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,” Nio said in the filing. The company also said that it intends on “periodically” performing facelifts and refreshes of its existing models.

As of July 31, Nio had delivered just 481 examples of the ES8 SUV but confirmed that it has reservations for more than 17,000 cars, which customers have put deposits down for.

As is required for a filing like this, Nio has had to acknowledge some of the risks which could impact its future business. For example, the automaker admitted that if “accidents associated with our autonomous driving systems occur, we could be subject to liability, government scrutiny and further regulation.”

Nio is one of 55 companies with permission to test autonomous vehicles on the streets of California, though curiously it hasn’t announced any plans to sell its vehicles outside of China.