On March 14, Li Auto announced its fourth quarter and full-year financial report for 2024. Ideal Auto's fourth quarter revenue was 44.3 billion yuan, with quarterly deliveries of 158,696 vehicles. Full-year revenue was 144.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16.6%. In 2024, Ideal Auto's deliveries reached 500,508 vehicles.
With the continuous improvement of scale effect and operating efficiency, the quarterly net profit was 3.5 billion yuan and the annual net profit was 8 billion yuan. The annual operating cash flow reached 15.9 billion yuan. As of the end of 2024, the company's cash reserves were 112.8 billion yuan. Looking forward to the first quarter of 2025, Ideal Auto expects quarterly deliveries to be 88,000 to 93,000 vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 9.5% to 15.7%.
In 2024, the production and sales of new energy vehicles in China will grow by more than 30%. Plug-in hybrid vehicles will become a new driving force for the growth of the new energy market, and new car sales will account for 40% of the total share of new energy vehicles. Following the three hot-selling products of Ideal L7, Ideal L8 and Li L9, Li Auto will launch the Ideal L6 for young families in April 2024. The monthly sales of Ideal L6 in the fourth quarter of 2024 will be more than 20,000 units.
Through its four AI teams, namely smart driving, Ideal Classmates, smart industry, and smart business, Ideal Auto empowers user experience upgrades and organizational process changes, driving improved operational efficiency.
Since the second quarter of 2024, Ideal Auto's directly-operated store network has continued to undergo structural adjustments, expanding its store scale by reducing the number of tail supermarket stores and expanding head auto city center stores. By the end of the fourth quarter, the total number of stores nationwide increased by more than 40% year-on-year.
In 2024, Ideal Auto's R&D expenses reached 11.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.6%. For two consecutive years, the R&D investment exceeded 10 billion yuan, and the investment in hardware, software and talent introduction was increased. Intelligent driving and Ideal Classmates are the two core AI products of Ideal Auto.
In the fourth quarter, Ideal Auto's industry-first end-to-end + VLM new generation intelligent driving technology architecture was first pushed to all users. As an interactive carrier of the intelligent space, in 2024, Ideal will be fully upgraded based on the full-stack self-developed base model Mind GPT, and its reasoning ability will be comprehensively improved. At the end of the year, Ideal successfully entered the two major terminals of mobile phones and PCs from the car side, providing convenience for more users.
