The U.S. head of Nio Inc, an electric automaker viewed as one of the major Chinese rivals to Tesla Inc, will depart from the company, the firm stated in a filing on Friday, the first major management departure since its September IPO.
Padmasree Warrior, CEO of NIO USA and global chief development officer, is going to resign from her posts on December 17 for “personal interests”, the company stated.
Warrior joined Nio, formerly called NextEV, in 2015, and led the company together with founder and CEO William Li to become one of China’s most legitimate rivals in the worldwide race to develop electric vehicles.
Before joining Nio, Warrior was worked as chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco Systems Inc as well as chief technology officer at Motorola.
China is the world’s largest and fast-growing region for new-energy vehicles (NEVs), a category making up electric battery cars and plug-in electric hybrids.
NEV sales in the first 10 months of this year came in at 860,000 vehicles, rise of 75.6 percent year-on-year.
