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Its no secret that Tesla stock (Nasdaq: TSLA) has had a horrible 2025. After ending 2024 with a bang, the electric vehicle maker’s shares declined rapidly as competition increased, CEO Elon Musks involvement in politics turned off many of Tesla’s liberal customers, and President Donald Trumps tariffs sank global markets. Today, Tesla shares sit at around $320a far cry from their all-time high of more than $488 set in December. Meanwhile, things are looking up for the stock prices of two Chinese electric vehicle makers Nio and XPeng. Though these brands are not especially well known in America, their stocks are traded on U.S. markets, and each company has seen its share prices surge this yearparticularly in the last week. Heres what you need to know. XPeng Inc. stock is up over 90% in 2025 XPeng is a Chinese electric vehicle company that was founded in 2014. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker XPEV. And since the year began, those shares have surged. Since January, XPEV shares have risen a staggering 91% as of yesterdays market close. Yesterday alone, the companys share price surged more than 11%, and today, in premarket trading as of the time of this writing, XPEV shares are up another 2% to $23.24. XPeng Inc. is one of the many EV players in China, and it currently has a market cap of around $20 billion, making it much smaller than Chinas EV king BYD, which is currently worth around $133 billion. Of course, XPeng is also minuscule next to Tesla and its $1 trillion market cap. Yet XPeng has something these other carmakers donta stock price that has surged in 2025. As noted by BarChart, XPeng has seen success with its new models this year in China, which has helped fuel sales. The company has also seen exports grow in several foreign markets in 2025, including Europe. But what has most recently helped Xpeng stock this week in particular is its Q2 financials. The company reported gross second-quarter margins of 14.3%, 3.8% higher than in the previous quarter. These growing margins are helping fuel the companys bottom line, something that is quite remarkable considering the EV price wars in China right now. Price wars usually lead to reduced margins as automakers compete to lower the sticker price of cars. Even better from an investors point of view: Quarterly sales surged 125.3% year-over-year. Deliveries also hit a record quarterly high of 103,181. Nio stock is up than 14% in the past two days But XPeng isnt the only Chinese EV maker having a great week. Nio Inc. (NYSE: NIO), a Chinese EV company also founded in 2014, saw its stock price surge yesterday. NIO shares jumped over 9.2% to close at $5.54 yesterday. Today, the EV makers shares are up another 5.3% in premarket trading as of this writing. But unlike Xpeng, Nio shares arent up because of a quarterly report (the company reports its Q2 of fiscal 2025 results on September 2). Instead, Nio shares are up because the company has announced a new affordable SUV. As reported by CNBC, this week Nio unveiled its new ES8 SUV. The ES8 is designed for affordabilitysomething seen as critical in Chinas increasingly crowded EV market. The vehicle will be priced at around 308,800 yuan, which is just around $43,000. It also comes with a battery subscription plan, which allows owners to upgrade or swap batteries via a monthly fee. Nio has traditionally targeted the high-end EV market in China, but with the release of the ES8 SUV, coming in September, the company is targeting a new segmentand investors seem bullish about the move. In June, Nio reported its Q1 2025 results, in which it revealed 42,094 EV deliveriesup 42.1% from the year earlier. Sales grew 18.6% for the quarter versus a year earlier, but had declined by 43.1% from the earlier quarter. Revenues grew 21.5% YOY to $1.6 billion. As of yesterdays stock price surge, Nio is valued at around $11.8 billion.
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E-Commerce
The Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the Supreme Court decided Thursday.The split court lifted a judge’s order blocking $783 million worth of cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Republican President Donald Trump’s priorities.The court split 5-4 on the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts was among those who wouldn’t have allowed the cuts, along with the court’s three liberals. The high court did keep the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directive blocked for future funding with a key vote from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, however.The decision marks the latest Supreme Court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold. The plaintiffs say the decision is a “significant setback for public health,” but keeping the directive blocked means the administration can’t use it to cut more studies.The Justice Department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not be “subject to judicial second-guessing” and efforts to promote policies referred to as DEI can “conceal insidious racial discrimination.”The lawsuit addresses only part of the estimated $12 billion of NIH research projects that have been cut, but in its emergency appeal, the Trump administration also took aim at nearly two dozen other times judges have stood in the way of its funding cuts.Solicitor General D. John Sauer said judges shouldn’t be considering those cases under an earlier Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for teacher-training program cuts that the administration also linked to DEI. He says they should go to federal claims court instead.Five conservative justices agreed, and Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a short opinion in which he criticized lower-court judges for not adhering to earlier high court orders. “All these interventions should have been unnecessary,” Gorsuch wrote.The plaintiffs, 16 Democratic state attorneys general and public-health advocacy groups, had unsuccessfully argued that research grants are fundamentally different from the teacher-training contracts and couldn’t be sent to the claims court.They said that defunding studies midway through halts research, ruins data already collected and ultimately harms the country’s potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists’ work in the middle of their careers.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lengthy dissent in which she criticized both the outcome and her colleagues’ willingness to continue allowing the administration to use the court’s emergency appeals process.“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins,” she wrote, referring to the fictional game in the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.”In June, U.S. District Judge William Young in Massachusetts had ruled that the cancellations were arbitrary and discriminatory. “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, said at a hearing. He later added: “Have we no shame.”An appeals court had left Young’s ruling in place. Lindsay Whitehurst, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
As young people report feeling lonelier and less connected than ever, the dating app Hinge is driving its users into real human experiences. CEO Justin McLeod shares how the platform is combating digital fatigue amongst users, as well as navigating the risks and opportunities of AI in online dating. McLeod also explores Hinges recent collaboration with renowned psychologist Esther Perel, and offers insider tips to find that special someone in the chaos of modern romance. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You partnered earlier this year with Esther Perel who’s a renowned psychotherapist to launch Your World prompts. Are there things from her perspective or your perspective at therapy do or don’t apply to what you’re trying to do with folks in their dating lives? I’ve had a long-standing relationship with Esther and I think she’s been skeptical about dating apps and we’ve had our conversations about how beneficial they are in the right way to implement them, and I think over time we’ve really earned her trust as a partner because we really do approach it in a very thoughtful way that’s very human-centric and very outcome-based. And so I think she trusts us. And especially because the prompts fit so well with her brand. She has her game. Where should we begin where she writes prompts for people to have deeper conversations at places like dinner parties or at the office. I feel like a very natural fit. I should say for the listeners, these prompts are not about building your profile, they’re about having conversation with someone to get to know them better. Precisely. Essentially that’s what we’re trying to do on Hinge. The purpose of a prompt on Hinge is to prompt you to talk about something so that you can start interaction and a conversation, form a connection, and then move offline. And she had some great ideas for some prompts that she wanted to put on Hinge. They are very much in the spirit of inviting someone into your world. So before we go out, you should listen to X, or when I want to feel more like myself, I go do Y. And that really helps people understand a bit like what am I listening to? Where am I spending my time? And giving people a bit of a fuller picture about who you are. We mentioned in passing earlier the rising conversation about more in-person experiences and young people choosing them or wanting that in some ways over digital interactions. Now you’re a digital service of course, but you’ve also talked about expanding into broader community building and in-person activation. I’m curious how you think about real-world iterations, how important that might be to Hinge’s future and where you’re going with it. Well, we do millions of in-person events every month and they’re called dates and that ultimately is the purpose of what we’re doing and that really is our wheelhouse. Listen, I’m all for people spending more time meeting together in person out in real life. We have a program called One More Hour because we support groups that gather together on a regular basis. We see the decline in time spent together in person, especially among young people. And the requisite increase in anxiety and depression among that group. So the more people are spending time together out in real life and the less time on their devices the better. And that very much mirrors the ethos of Hinge where we really are trying to get you to spend less time on our app, more time out on dates and relationships so that you’ll find your person and then ultimately go tell your friends to try Hinge. Does the brand of Hinge need to have a community in the real world . . . I don’t know, interaction for itself aside from my personal date that I might be going on? Yeah. I think we are so precious and thoughtful about our brand and we really try to do things that are really going to have an impact and aren’t just for show. And to be able to do something at scale with quality across tens of millions of users where people can get together in real life on a regular basis and still maintain the control of the experience and the brand is not territory that I exactly know how to approach. There are lots of people out there doing real life events and I applaud it, encourage it, we fund it, we’re all for it, but it’s just not our core competency. When you look at the competition at the other apps . . . Actually I don’t even know how much you do look at the competition. I know some of it is in-house within your parent company with Match Group, which also owns Match and Tinder and OkCupid and a bunch of others. How much do you pay attention to the competition? We really don’t look to the competition. That’s a mistake that I’ve made the first time around, is spending way too much time thinking about the competition and what they were doing. And when I did the reboot of Hinge, I steered the team to just pay attention to our customer and our users who are out there trying to find dates and there’s so much rich territory when we just try to deeply understand our users and the problems they’re facing. And that is why I think Hinge has become so innovative. And I think a lot of other dating apps are paying attention to us because you can see how they’re all slowly introducing features that make them more and more similar to Hinge and that’s why it’s all the more important that we don’t look at them, we actually look to our users and to emerging technology and that’s how we stay at the forefront of innovation. How much of building your business from this point is there’s a road map that you’re on that you’re implementing versus reacting and staying open and finding whatever’s next? Or do you have like no, no, no, we know where we’re going, we know exactly where we’re going next. I think we know the big picture of where we’re going. I think we know high-level that the future and what AI is going to enable is much more personalized matching. We can collect more data that’s more nuanced and use it in a better way to create a much more efficient matching process. And we can help our users put their best foot forward by giving them the right coaching and the right udges so that they fill out good profiles and use the app well. Those I think are the two main vectors of work that we’re focused on right now and we have to stay really curious because the market’s changing a lot, technology’s changing a lot, and so how exactly that is going to manifest, we don’t know yet and I think we can’t know because everything is changing so quickly. So that’s why it’s really important to have just a very nimble team, a very solid research organization and continue to just experiment.
Category:
E-Commerce
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