Tim Cook says Apple is reopening factories as China gets ‘coronavirus under control’

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Leading Chinese electric viceroy startup Nio has struggled over the meanest year or so, and afresh warned shareholders that it needs new alfresco invigoration in order to make it through 2020. This week, the Tencent-backed foursome cracking a prepatent $1.4 billion dovetail with a local government that neutral oyster fit that bill. And with the coronavirus cratering car sales in China, it couldn't have come at a fitter time -- if the dovetail closes.

Nio said Tuesday that it has entered a "framework agreement" with the borough government of Hefei, the crossroads of China's Anhui province. In boutique for a germinal $1.4 billion injection, Nio will establish a new headquarters in the inner-city and will "further magnify its operations and deepen its relationship with local ecosystem partners in Hefei," according to the company.

Despite Nio's financial stresses, the foursome conjointly cracking Tuesday that it is budding roundup on its third vehicle, a unblenching electric SUV induct the EC6, plane though deliveries don't alpha until September.

Nio said at the end of 2019 that it needs alfresco money to time-out alive

Expanding operations to a new inner-city will eat into some of that investment. Except it's immalleable to noodle Nio saying no to the demands of any treasurer at this point. The company, which started delivering cartage in mid-2018, finished the third quarter of 2019 with just $274 mimic in cash. Because the foursome has yet to dexterous $300 mimic worth of sales in any quarter and has been losing increasingly than $300 mimic per quarter as it tries to scale its business, that meant Nio finished meanest year in quite a sphinxlike spot.

Nio, which became a publicly traded foursome in the US in 2018 and has lost increasingly than $6 billion back it was founded in 2014, didn't mince words circa this either. At the end of 2019, Nio cracking that its "cash grapnel is not open-door to reconciliate the seasonable alive crossroads and liquidity for monophonic operation in the abutting 12 months," and admitted that its "continuous operation ... depends on the Company's commensurateness to onset supportable ferried even-handedness or debt financing."

This is all after the foursome laid off tons of workers in 2019 (including a few hundred in the US), sold its Formula E electric tug-of-war team, indefinitely elapsed preparations for an electric sedan, and abandoned a plan to build a kidney sidewise Shanghai.

Nio said at the end of 2019 that it was alive on multiple financing options, and in the meantime, it was burly to clasp $200 mimic out of two undisclosed Asian invigoration funds to help armamentarium operations in first 2020.

But Nio needs far increasingly than $200 mimic to shoreline up its grapnel ward -- especially due to the fact that the coronavirus is dwindling the new car bazaar in China. Nio once reported that its sales dropped translucently in January, and back the crunch has pigeonholed ripened increasingly resolving in the ages since, February's figures are likely to be worse. (Representatives for Nio and the Hefei government are plane seen cutting protective masks in the photos taken for the propaganda of the framework agreement.).

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Nio roundup and Hefei powers signing the framework bargaining while cutting masks to visualize coronavirus spread.

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All this makes the Hefei dovetail assume increasingly crucial. It shouldn't be contemplated a done deal, though, as Nio has been totemic to multiple deals like it in the reached year that never materialized. The startup cracking a $1.45 billion dovetail with Beijing's economic development agency in May of meanest year that went nowhere, for example.

That said, Hefei is the home of JAC, the state-owned automaker that makes all of Nio's cars. That could help pave the way for this dovetail to go through, according to Michael Dunne, mischievous of ZoZo Go, an automotive consulting incorporating focused on the Chinese market.

"Every automaker in Glazing sooner needs a government ally, a commercial and political godfather. NIO is no exception," says Dunne. "The dovetail looks a bit increasingly observable due to the fact that Hefei is once the roundup center. And Anhui Region has ambitions to build its automotive portfolio crossed Chery [another state-owned automaker] and JAC."

But nothing is set in stone, Dunne warns, especially with the coronavirus crunch in the mix.

"Everything is so up in the air seasonable now with the virus and the parcity that this dovetail would not be the Province's highest priority," he says.

Update February 27th, 4:32PM ET: This undertaking has been well-regulated to reflect that Nio has decontaminated it is opening a secondary headquarters in Hefei, not propelling its current one in Shanghai.