Image Source : China Visual

BEIJING, April 4 (TMTPOST) —— Wang Xing, a shareholder of Li Auto and CEO of Meituan, cut his stake in Li Auto for three consecutive trading days last week, cashing out about HK $128 million, according to a Hong Kong Stock Exchange document released on Monday.

Wang's stake in Li Auto was reduced from 22.57 percent to 22.35 percent in the past two weeks, although he remains the NEV maker's largest external shareholder.

Li Auto responded that the stock trading was an individual act and that the trading volume accounted for a small portion of Wang's stake.

Li Auto was founded in July 2015 by Li Xiang, who had been the founder of Autohome. In August 2019, Li Auto announced that it had completed a Series C financing of 530 million US dollars, in which Wang led the financing with his investment. After that, Meituan successively participated in three rounds of financing of Li Auto.

The company was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in August 2021. It adopts weighted voting rights, with one vote per Class A common share and ten votes per Class B common share. Li is the beneficiary of Class B common stock. According to Li Auto's 2022 semi-annual report, Wang held 22.81 percent of Class A shares, including interest from Meituan's 15.09 percent, while Li held 6.35 percent of Class A shares.

Wang expressed support for Li Auto many times. He once said on his social media in October 2022 that the next two or three years for China's premium car market would be the time of Li Auto, NIO, and Huawei.

Li Auto is currently priced at more than 300,000 yuan ($43,582). The company plans to capture 20 percent of the market in 2023 at a price range of 300,000 yuan ($43,582) to 500,000 yuan ($72,640).

The growth of new energy vehicle sales is slowing down due to the low demand in the first quarter of 2023. So Tesla started a price war, pushing the market into fierce competition. Li Auto was one of the few companies that stood the test and performed better after that.

Li Auto delivered 20,823 units in March, up 88.7 percent year on year. 52,584 units were delivered in the first quarter, up 65.8 percent year-on-year.

Li Auto has outperformed two other new car makers, NIO and XPENG Motor. In the first quarter, NIO delivered 31,041 vehicles, up 20.5% year on year. XPENG Motor delivered 18,230 cars in the first quarter, down nearly 50% from a year earlier.

Li Auto's vehicle sales revenue reached 44.11 billion yuan ($6.4 billion) in 2022, with a year-on-year growth of 68.8%. The gross profit margin was 19.1%, compared to 20.6% in 2021. The operating loss in 2022 was 3.65 billion yuan ($530 million), an increase of 259.3 percent year-on-year.

The gross profit margin of the total vehicle sales of NIO in the same period was 13.7%, compared with 20.1% in 2021. The company’s net loss for 2022 was 14.44 billion yuan ($2.09 billion), up 259.4 percent year on year. The annual gross profit margin of XPENG Motor was 11.5%, down 1 percentage point year-on-year. The net loss for the whole year of 2022 was 9.14 billion yuan ($1.33 billion), up 87.9 percent year on year.