BEIJING, February 1 (TMTPOST)— Tesla’s rivals maintained their significant growth in delivery in the past month except NIO, suggesting the landscape of China’s native electric vehicle (EV) making is accelerating transition from its troika era.

Source: Visual China

As the annual delivery champion among China’s homegrown EV makers in the year 2021, Xpeng Inc. posted delivery of 12,922 Smart EVs in January with a 115% increase year-over-year (YoY), surpassing the 10,000-unit benchmark for five month in a row. But the startup failed to set a new monthly record as the delivery decreased more than 19% from December, when it delivered more than 15,000 units and refreshed monthly record for a second straight month with YoY rise of 181%.

Li Auto Inc. and HOZON Auto’s brand Nezha also kept their pace to deliver more than 10,000 vehicles in January, with shipments of 12,268 units and 11,009 units and respectively. Notably, an unusually YoY surge 0f 402% first made Nezha one of the top three emerging native EV startups by monthly delivery, with another delivery record and the third consecutive monthly delivery more than 10,000 units, while the former leader NIO delivered 9,652 EVs that month, falling nearly 8% from December and first less than 10,000 units in the past three months. NIO’s YoY growth in January was 33.6%, showing continued slowdown as last November and December recorded increases of 105.6% and 49.7% respectively.

NIO didn’t give any explanation for the monthly slowdown in the statement on Tuesday. The chairman and CEO William Bin Li suggested “the continued supply chain volatilities” as one of the headwinds of his company when it released financial results of the third quarter with the all-time high quarterly delivery of 24,439. Its domestic rivals,such as Xpeng, Li and Nezha, at least based on the recent data, were more resilient when grappling with the chip shortage and other global supply chain disruptions which still screwed the auto industry.