Aug. 15 (NBD) -- Chinese electric vehicle (EV) startup Nio Inc. on Monday filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to 1.8 billion U.S. dollars via an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

The underwriters expected to deliver the ADRs (American Depositary Receipts) include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Credit Suisse and UBS Investment Bank.

Founded in 2014, NIO has completed several rounds of financing. For instance, in 2015, the company secured 500 million U.S. dollars from investors including Sequoia Capital, and the Shanghai-based carmaker got over 1 billion U.S. dollars in a fundraising round led by Tencent in 2017.

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The economist Song Qinghui held that Nio, if gets successfully listed, will likely become a sought-after investment target in the capital market and will have a positive impact on manufacturing startups of its kind, as China is providing strong support for new economy manufacturing firms.

Jia Xinguang, an analyst in the automobile industry, told Beijing Business Today that Nio seems confident about its car sales, hence raising funds to ensure smooth production and sale.

Nio launched its first volume manufactured EV, the ES8, on December 16, 2017 and began making deliveries to users on June 28, 2018.

The prospectus showed that as of July 31, 2018, Nio had delivered 481 ES8s and had unfulfilled reservations for more than 17,000 ES8s with deposits.

However, Nio hasn't turned losses into profits yet. The carmaker suffered a net loss of approximately 2.57 billion yuan (373.24 million U.S. dollars), 5.02 billion yuan (730.77 million U.S. dollars) and 3.33 billion yuan (483.62 million U.S. dollars), respectively in 2016, 2017 and the first six months of 2018, according to the prospectus.

Li Bin, founder and CEO of Nio, once predicted the loss in 2018 would exceed 5 billion yuan (726.15 million U.S. dollars).

Another auto industry analyst Zhong Shi believed that Nio was following the example of Tesla which first broke into the market with high-end cars and later went public. However, despite the fact that Tesla once surpassed General Motors and Ford Motor in terms of market value, the U.S. new-energy car maker has been struggling to make a profit. On August 8, Tesla announced the plan to go private.

Yan Jinghui, an auto industry analyst, said to NBD that the advantage of automobile startups lies in their financing capability. But some industry insiders warned that going public doesn't necessarily fix every problem and cash-burn carmakers like Nio should realize profit and maintain production capacity to avoid being caught up in the trying situation facing Tesla.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn