What happened
Shares of Chinese electric vehicle maker NIO (NIO 2.30%) were trading lower on Monday, on sectorwide weakness after another electric vehicle start-up reported sales well below Wall Street's expectations.
As of 2:30 p.m. EDT, NIO's American depositary shares were down about 5.6% from Friday's closing price.
So what
There was some minor news on NIO on Monday, but it wasn't bad news. The Chinese government has developed new regulatory standards for electric vehicle battery swap stations, and NIO -- which operates one of the country's largest battery swap networks -- helped to write the new regulations. The new rules will go into effect on Nov. 1.
NIO reportedly helped write new regulations governing battery-swap stations in China. The regulations will go into effect in November. Image source: NIO.
That's not why the stock is down today, of course. It's always hard to be sure, but I think it's probably down for a couple of reasons. First, U.S. electric commercial vehicle maker Workhorse Group reported first-quarter results that were well below Wall Street's expectations, at least with respect to revenue. The company shipped just six of its new delivery vans in the quarter, as various issues complicated its effort to ramp up production. Analysts had expected a much higher total.
Did that sour some investors on the electric-vehicle segment as a whole? While NIO's business is in a much better place than Workhorse's, it's possible that Workhorse's woes were contributing to the broader EV stock sell-off on Monday.
Now what
It's also worth noting that segment leader Tesla has been under selling pressure recently. Tesla's stock was also down over 5% at 2:30 p.m. on Monday, and while the reasons for that are unrelated to NIO's business, investors have tended to buy and sell Tesla and other electric vehicle stocks as a group in recent weeks.
Put another way, as Tesla goes, so go other EV stocks right now, including -- to some extent, at least -- NIO's.
