Geely Holding will take a 30% stake in Nio Power, paying with its entire equity interest in Yiyi Power plus 640 million yuan ($94.83 million) in cash. The deal, announced in a Nio statement on September 28, moves the two Chinese automakers from standard-setting talks into shared capital and operations in battery swapping.

The structure runs both ways. Nio will invest in Geely Holding subsidiary Haohan Energy and take a 10% stake upon completion. The statement did not disclose the size of Nio's investment or a timeline for either transaction.

What the deal does concretely deliver is consolidation of commercial-fleet swapping. Yiyi Power's battery swap business for commercial fleets will fold into Nio Power, which will then optimize the combined network to serve Yiyi Power's commercial mobility operations. Geely, one of China's largest automakers by volume, gains a third of the country's largest swap-network operator without building the infrastructure itself.

On the consumer side, the partners will jointly develop unified battery swap technologies and standards. Geely Holding will develop battery-swappable passenger models, and Nio Power will provide the swapping services. The statement named no brands, no launch schedules and no technical specifications — a gap worth noting given how long the swap ecosystem has been touted.

Nio framed the partnership as a way to accelerate network expansion. Nio Power targets 10,000 swap stations in operation by 2030, with annual electricity demand across the network expected to exceed 10 billion kWh by then. Those are targets, not confirmed build-outs, and the pace will depend heavily on utilization of stations serving multiple OEMs rather than Nio vehicles alone.

In charging, the partners plan to fully interconnect their infrastructure to widen coverage and lift network efficiency. Geely's stated construction plan calls for more than 22,000 charging stations with over 100,000 connectors by the end of 2027, including more than 15,000 smart charging stations with over 50,000 smart connectors. Geely also aims to be the first automaker to extend its charging network to every county-level city in China. All of these figures are announced targets rather than completed capacity.

The transaction deepens a collaboration that dates to November 29, 2023, when Geely signed a battery swap agreement with Nio and became the second major automaker — after Changan — to join Nio's battery swap partnership network. That earlier agreement covered joint battery standard development, shared network construction, battery-swappable model development and battery asset management mechanisms.

Nearly two years on, the new equity arrangements give the cooperation a harder commercial footing: shared ownership, merged fleet operations and a defined revenue role for Nio Power as a service provider to another OEM's vehicles. What remains missing is a shipping product. Geely has yet to announce any battery-swappable consumer model under the partnership, and no timeline accompanied the September 28 statement.

For Nio, the deal adds capital and a second major OEM anchor to a swap network it has funded largely on its own balance sheet — a cost burden the company has worked for years to spread across partners. For Geely, it converts a standards alliance into an equity position in swap infrastructure while it develops compatible vehicles.

What to watch next: regulatory completion of both equity transactions, which Nio did not time; the first disclosure of a Geely-brand battery-swappable model and its launch window; and progress against Nio Power's 10,000-station target, the clearest test of whether multi-OEM traffic can carry the network's economics. (Exchange rate: $1 = 6.7489 yuan.)