TMTPOST -- The American depositary receipts (ADRs) of dropped 7.8% on Tuesday even though Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker reported highest ever quarterly sales and delivery guidance.

Credit：Xpeng

 Xpeng said its revenue, gross margin and deliveries set their quarterly records from October to December. Revenue popped 23.4% year-over-year (YoY) to RMB16.11 billion (US$2.21 billion), and an increase of 59.4% from the previous quarter. Gross margin climbed 8.2 percentage points YoY to 14.4%, compared with the margin of 15.3% three months ago.

Xpeng’s net loss on non GAAP basis was RMB1.39 billion for the fourth quarter, narrowing around 21.5% from the same period of 2023. Non-GAAP basic net loss per American depositary share (ADS) was RMB1.47, also narrower than the RMB1.98 per ADS lost a year earlier.     

Revenue from vehicle sales rose 20% YoY to RMB14.67 billion with a 96.6% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) increase, driven by stellar deliveries. Vehicle margin, the gross profit of vehicle sales as a percentage of vehicle sales revenue, more than double from the last quarter of 2023 to 10%, representing an increase for six quarters in a row. Xpeng delivered a total of 91,507 EVs for the fourth quarter, up 52.1% YoY.

Xpeng expected deliveries for the first quarter of 2025 to be between 91,000 and 93,000 units, representing a new quarterly record with a YoY increase range of around 317.0% to 326.2%. Revenue for the current quarter is anticipated to surge 129.1% to 139.8% YoY to a range of  RMB15.0 billion to RMB15.7 billion. Analysts projected the revenue would come in at RMB15.28 billion.

“In the fourth quarter of 2024, we achieved a series of notable results that reflect holistic upgrade in our capabilities to grow scale. We are well-positioned to significantly expand our market share in the Smart EV industry both in China and globally,” said CEO He Xiaopeng. “I believe that AI will accelerate the development of L3 and L4 autonomous driving in the automotive sector. We are committed to building Xpeng into an AI-empowered global automotive company and a smart technology brand beloved by users worldwide.”

On an earnings conference later Tuesday, He vowed to further enhance Xpeng’s  organizational capacity, user-centric product development, AI and automotive technology, commercialization, and globalization this year. He underlined the drive of artificial intelligence (AI) technology for the industry, noting he has emphasized the next decade in the automaking industry will be the era of AI on the last earnings call and AI tech day.

He told analysts that Xpeng has developed a cloud-based foundational model that boasts tens of billions of parameters, leveraging over 100 million kilometers of real driving data for pre-training. That marks an unprecedented scale of model parameters and data volume in the field of autonomous driving in China, He said. To further enhance the model's generalization capabilities and its ability to manage long-tail scenarios, the company employ reinforcement learning techniques and then implement the model in vehicles, applying distillation, pruning, and quantization techniques, and have successfully boosted the model's accuracy by over 100%, according to He.

He expressed confidence on Xpeng’s development of autonomous driving.  In the second half of this year, XPeng will be the first in China to offer a smart driving experience that boasts software capabilities and user experience equivalent to L3 autonomous driving, said He. He added that L3 autonomy will generate strong user demand and exceptional user loyalty, marking an iPhone 4 moment for AI-defined cars. Xpeng also plans to mass-produce vehicle models that will support L4 autonomous driving in low-speed scenarios in 2026.

XPeng and Tesla are the only two companies worldwide that are capable of providing globally reliable AI smart driving experience without relying on high-definition maps or LiDAR and using a single software suite across the vehicle models. He said Xpeng looks forward to competing alongside the world's leading AI autonomous driving companies in both the Chinese and global markets. Starting from the P7+, all new XPeng models, including the recently launched 2025 G6 and G9, will come with industry-leading pure vision-based AI smart driving as a standard feature across all trims, no extra costs or add-ons.

He also disclosed orders of the new 2025 G6 and G9 launched last week continue to pile up and have exceeded Xpeng’s expectations. Moreover, the surge in store visits following the new model launches has driven an increase in demand for the company’s entire lineup.