Li Auto landed at a 52-week low today after Q1 2026 earnings delivered a split verdict: revenue beat estimates, but EPS badly missed, and Q2 guidance came in roughly $600 million below consensus expectations.
The EPS picture is stark. Q1 adjusted EPS came in at -$0.30 against a $0.07 estimate — a clean miss on the bottom line even as $3.33 billion in revenue cleared the $3.14 billion bar. The Q2 revenue guidance of $3.5–$3.7 billion fell well short of the $4.17 billion the Street had pencilled in. That guidance gap is the dominant story. Revenue growth without margin visibility is not the trade investors were holding. The stock is now down 13% over the past month and nearly 2.5% on the week, trading at $15.78 — its lowest close of the past year. By contrast, XPEV gained over 10% on the week after its own update, and NIO surged 9% on the day, making the divergence within Chinese EV names impossible to ignore.
The borrow market told the story before the print was out. Availability collapsed to near zero in the days approaching earnings — hitting 1.9% on May 27, down 72% in a single week — meaning almost every available share in the lending pool had already been borrowed. That is the tightest the borrow market has been all year, matching the 52-week floor of 0.06% touched in mid-May. Cost to borrow has also risen roughly 20% over the past month, reaching 1.34% APR. Short interest % of free float edged up to 4.3% — its highest level of the past six weeks — having drifted down from around 4.4% in early May. Short interest isn't extreme in absolute terms, but the direction is incrementally bearish and the lending conditions confirm real demand for downside exposure. Options sentiment reinforces the picture: the put/call ratio at 0.63 is running well below its 20-day average of 0.70, near the 52-week low of 0.61 — a reading that reflects call-heavy positioning that has not aged well into today's guidance miss.
Analysts were already cautious before today. The most recent move of note came from JP Morgan in March, which raised its target modestly to $15.50 while holding an Underweight rating — a level the stock has now broken below. Jefferies downgraded to Hold in January, cutting its target from $28.80 to $17.50. Citigroup and Barclays also trimmed targets earlier this year, though both maintained neutral-leaning stances. The mean price target of $143 in the data appears inconsistent with the stock's current $15.78 price and the individual targets cited, so that aggregate figure should be treated with caution — it likely reflects stale or different-class share pricing. What the direction of travel makes clear is this: the Street has been steadily reducing exposure and targets for months. ORTEX factor scores reinforce the bearish backdrop — the short score ranks at 62, EPS surprise registers in the 8th percentile, and the 90-day EPS momentum sits at just the 3rd percentile, signalling that upward estimate revisions have been absent for the better part of a quarter.
The ownership structure adds an important constraint on the short thesis. Founder Xiang Li controls 22.8% of shares, and Meituan holds another 12.7% — between them nearly 36% of the company is anchored in concentrated, likely long-term hands. BlackRock added roughly 640,000 shares as of late April. That kind of structural float tightness helps explain why availability stays so compressed even at relatively moderate short interest levels of 4.3% of float. There simply isn't much free-floating stock to borrow. CSOP Asset Management added 2.1 million shares in early May, a noteworthy inflow ahead of today's print.
The last comparable earnings event in March 2026 saw the stock fall 5.2% on the day and 6.5% over the following five days — and that was before today's guidance miss, which appears materially worse than the March catalyst. The Q2 revenue guide is the number to watch now: whether management tightens or widens that $200 million range in subsequent communications, and whether delivery data through June tracks toward the top or bottom of guidance, will shape how the borrow market — already at maximum stress — evolves from here.
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