Geely Takes 30% of Nio Power as CATL, BYD and Hyundai Push Battery Tech

Nio said on Monday it signed a definitive agreement with subsidiaries of Geely Holding. Geely buys 30% of Nio Power and pays mostly in assets: the entire equity of its commercial battery swap business, Yiyi Power, plus 640 million yuan ($94.8 million) in cash. Nio filed the announcement with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and CnEVPost reported it.

Nio China keeps control with 63.6%. The existing investor, Wuhan Guangchuang Emerging Technology Phase I Venture Capital Fund, holds 6.4%.

The structure is unusual for a Chinese EV deal of this size, and the milestone clause inside it is the reason. CnEVPost reports that Geely's final stake can be adjusted after closing based on operational performance, down to a floor of 20%. Geely also holds an option to put in a further 640 million yuan within two years, or earlier if Nio Power signs a binding new financing round. Exercised in full, that would lift Geely to 34% and cut Nio China to 60%.

What Geely is actually buying

The second leg of the transaction runs the other way. Nio China is subscribing in cash for newly issued shares of Zhejiang Haohan Energy Technology, Geely's charging business, for a 10% stake. Haohan will use the proceeds to buy certain charging assets from Nio. Neither company disclosed that amount.

Electrek put the implied value of Yiyi at a little over RMB4.1 billion ($610 million) once the cash is stripped out of the 30% stake. The same piece notes a wrinkle in the valuation history. Nio Power's first outside money came in May 2024, when the Wuhan Guangchuang fund led a RMB1.5 billion round that worked out to roughly 9.1% pre-Geely. That implies about the same RMB16 billion valuation the network carried when it had far fewer stations than it does now. In March 2025, Nio said CATL was advancing an investment capped at RMB2.5 billion in Nio Power. CATL does not appear in the ownership table Nio published.

The network itself is the asset. Nio had 3,790 swap stations when it passed 100 million cumulative swaps in February, and it is targeting 1,000 more this year. It aims to operate 10,000 stations by 2030, with annual electricity demand across the network expected to exceed 10 billion kWh, per CnEVPost.

Nio is not selling from weakness. Its latest earnings show 107,658 vehicles delivered in the second quarter of 2026, an 18.5% vehicle margin, a small non-GAAP profit, a GAAP loss of RMB528 million, and RMB56.7 billion in cash at the end of June, according to Electrek.

According to Nio, the two companies have "preliminary plans" to bring battery swapping to consumer models from Geely-related entities, as well as to its commercial mobility businesses.

That caveat matters because it is the part that would change the market. China's swap sector is splitting into camps: Nio's network, CATL's Choco-Swap network, 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. Geely Holding is the parent of Geely Auto, Zeekr, Lynk & Co, Volvo Cars and Polestar, and it plans more than 22,000 charging stations with over 100,000 connectors by the end of 2027.

The battery race around the deal

The swap deal landed the same week that solid-state batteries produced two very different messages from Asia. Every major automaker has spent years promising the technology, and none has shipped it at scale.

BYD's executive vice president Stella Li told Carwow's Spanish outlet that BYD is in a "leading position" on solid-state commercialization and technology, and that a model with the technology arrives next year, Engadget reported on 27 September. That aligns with what Sun Huajun, chief technology officer of BYD's battery subsidiary FinDreams, said at a conference in February 2025: a demonstration and installation in 2027, mass production around 2030. BYD chief scientist Lian Yubo said at the same event that solid-state would be used mainly in high-end models, alongside lithium iron phosphate.

Hyundai's research and development chief Manfred Harrer is less bullish on the near term, and more blunt about why the company keeps spending anyway. "You cannot give up right now on that. That's clear," he told reporters last week, according to InsideEVs. "You must be in the game."

Harrer expects small-volume halo cars with solid-state packs within five years, tracking QuantumScape's expectation of high-performance vehicles by the end of the decade. He also said raw material costs will stay extraordinarily high for many years. "I am not believing you can solve the raw material cost problem in five years from now," he told reporters. Hyundai is developing the cells internally and with Solid Power, and plans in-house nickel manganese cobalt cells in the Santa Fe extended-range EV early next year.

The two positions are not contradictory so much as a division of labour: BYD sells the timeline, Hyundai sells the cost. Neither has a car you can buy with a solid electrolyte in it, and the demonstration vehicles shown so far include a Ducati with QuantumScape cells and a Mercedes with Factorial's tech.

Commercial vehicles get the numbers first

Where solid-state is still a promise, commercial vehicle batteries are already shipping with figures attached. At IAA Transportation 2026 in Hanover, CATL unveiled TECTRANS II, a modular platform whose heavy-duty configuration claims up to 1,000 kilometers of range and megawatt-level charging, reaching 80% in 25 minutes, CleanTechnica reported on 27 September.

CATL puts gravimetric energy density at 170 Wh/kg, claims 96% system round-trip efficiency, and rates the heavy-duty pack for 12 years or 1.5 million kilometers with 70% capacity retention. The company estimates the standardized architecture can cut commercial vehicle development cycles by about 50% and R&D costs by 60% to 70%. It also signed a memorandum of understanding with DHL Group at the show to develop green freight corridors in Europe.

Volvo took the other headline at the same event: its new generation of heavy-duty electric trucks was named International Truck of the Year 2027, the jury recognizing the range rather than a single model. The FH Aero Electric is rated at up to 700 kilometers, with megawatt charging, and series production of the next generation began on 14 September at the Tuve plant in Gothenburg, with Ghent in Belgium to follow.

Volvo says about 7,000 of its electric trucks have accumulated roughly 500 million kilometers since 2019, with nearly 2,000 customers in more than 50 countries.

One context point worth keeping straight, because it is easy to overstate: the swap deal, the solid-state talk and the truck awards are separate stories that happened to converge in the same news cycle. Nio's filing does not depend on solid-state cells, and CATL's TECTRANS II numbers are company claims, not independently verified test results.