This means that Li Auto had another record month of deliveries in June, and the first time it has surpassed the 30,000-unit mark.
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It's the practice for China's major electric vehicle (EV) makers to announce their deliveries for the previous month on the first day of each month, and Li Auto (NASDAQ: LI) couldn't wait to share a number today to showcase its strong performance.
Li Auto delivered more than 32,000 vehicles in June, taking premium Chinese brands to a whole new level of sales, its founder, chairman and CEO Li Xiang said in a speech today celebrating the company's eighth anniversary.
The company aims to become the No. 1 seller in the Chinese market for passenger cars priced at more than RMB 200,000 yuan ($27,590) and to reach 1.6 million annual deliveries by 2025, he said, repeating previous remarks.
The latest figure means that Li Auto's deliveries in June reached another record high and were the first time to exceed the 30,000-unit mark, up more than 145 percent from 13,024 units a year earlier.
The company delivered 28,277 vehicles in May, up 145.97 percent year-on-year and up 10.11 percent from April, the third consecutive month to exceed the 20,000-unit mark.
Earlier this week, local media reported that Li Auto had recently raised its full-year sales target to 400,000 units from the original 300,000. However, this was subsequently denied by Li.
Li Auto finished the first half of the year with more than 130,000 units sold and does not have any ability to make it to 400,000 units for the full year, he said on June 27.
The company's capabilities, including product, sales, capacity and organization, cannot support 400,000 units sold this year, and the gap is huge, Li said.
On June 18, Li said on Weibo that most members of Li Auto's management team thought the company should set an annual sales target of 360,000 units at the beginning of the year, but he ultimately decided to set a budget target based on annual sales of 306,000 units.
"This was partly because I didn't think we could be too optimistic about the economic environment this year, and partly because we didn't meet our budget targets for all three years from 2020-2022," he said at the time.
Li said the too-low targets he set led the company to place orders at suppliers at the beginning of the year that were clearly not keeping up with current sales, so several key components would take more than a quarter to reach the right capacity if production ramp-up began now.
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Li Auto CEO denies raising sales target for this year to 400,000 units
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