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The headline was ugly, but not hopeless
XPeng woke up Monday and chose chaos: the Chinese EV maker reported a wider-than-expected second-quarter loss, then paired it with a Q3 revenue outlook that landed below analyst estimates. Investors did what investors do — hit the sell button first and ask questions later.
Revenue did grow 8% year over year to 19.74 billion yuan, but that still missed expectations. Deliveries were basically flat at 103,295 vehicles, which is not exactly the kind of number that makes the market start humming your theme song.
Margins are getting better... but the loss got worse
Here’s the weird part. XPeng’s gross margin improved to 20.7% from 17.3% a year ago, so the company is clearly squeezing more juice out of each sale. But its vehicle margin slipped to 12.1%, and operating loss widened to 1.14 billion yuan.
That’s the classic “progress, but make it expensive” problem. The company says the product-generation transition is pressuring margins, which is corporate-speak for: the old models are fading, the new ones aren’t fully doing the heavy lifting yet.
The robotics side quest is suddenly very real
While the EV business was busy being messy, XPeng’s robotics unit raised more than $900 million at a valuation above $6.3 billion. Alibaba and Tencent joined as strategic investors, which is a pretty loud vote of confidence if you’re trying to build the future of physical AI and humanoid robots.
XPeng says it wants the next-gen IRON humanoid robot in mass production by the end of 2026, with commercial launches expected in 2027. In other words: the company is no longer just selling cars. It’s trying to sell a whole sci-fi pitch deck.
Why investors should care
The Q3 outlook is the real gut punch. XPeng expects deliveries of 115,000 to 121,000 vehicles and revenue of 21.7 billion to 23.4 billion yuan, both below Wall Street’s hopes. That makes the stock’s premarket drop make plenty of sense.
Big picture: XPeng is still in the awkward middle phase — the EV business needs to prove it can scale profitably, while the robotics dream is expensive but potentially huge. Investors just have to decide whether they’re buying a carmaker, a robot story, or both.