Live news updates: SenseTime plunges nearly 50% in Hong Kong after lock-up expires

Shares in Tesla rival Nio rebounded in early trading on Thursday, a day after the Chinese electric vehicle maker denied short seller allegations of inflating revenues and margins that sent its share price plunging.

Nio’s Hong Kong-listed shares rose as much as 4.3 per cent, well ahead of gains for the city’s benchmark Hang Seng index of as much as 0.4 per cent.

The marked an improvement from Wednesday, when the stock slumped more than 11 per cent as investors reacted to the allegations made by short-seller Grizzly Research.

The research group said in a report that the Shanghai-based carmaker, via its part-owned battery swapping joint venture Wuhan Weineng, had inflated both revenue and earnings by “flooding” Weineng with extra batteries.

In response, Nio said the report was without “merit and contains numerous errors, unsupported speculations and misleading conclusions and interpretations”.

The company added that its business has been subject to due diligence from both the Hong Kong exchange’s listing process and regular auditing of its financial statements.

Analysts from Citi, the US bank, said the market seems to be “mainly concerned” about an apparent discrepancy between users and the battery inventory ratio at Weineng. “We await further clarity on this from Nio,” the analysts said.

Nio was founded in 2014 and survived a cash flow crisis in 2019 after securing a nearly $1bn injection from state-backed investors in early 2020.

The company has been banking on selling its battery-swapping technology to other groups to quicken uptake of the system and expand the market as it tries to win a chunk of the fast-growing market for EVs.