Geely is challenging the giant BYD by adapting quickly to swings in demand and energy prices, seizing on interest in electric vehicles prompted by the war in Iran.
Each April, the world’s top auto executives and engineers fly to China’s main auto show to take stock of BYD, the electric car powerhouse that passed Tesla in global sales last year.
But at the Auto China event now happening in Beijing, another name is commanding attention: Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. In an unexpected development, Geely beat BYD in sales in the first two months of the year and is rapidly broadening its lineup. Geely is now pushing overseas, more than doubling exports to Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere in the past year and taking on global rivals on their home turf.
Geely is rising at a pivotal moment. The war in Iran has sent gasoline prices soaring, reviving consumer demand for electric vehicles – a segment dominated by Chinese automakers. After years of laying the groundwork to expand exports and escape a cutthroat domestic market, Chinese brands appear poised to capitalise and shift the balance of power in the global automobile industry.
Geely has built a business model designed to handle volatility. It is one of the few automakers that can compete across all four major powertrains: gasoline, gasoline-electric hybrids, plug-in hybrids and fully electric. That breadth allows it to shift quickly as conditions change.
When the Chinese Government let government tax subsidies for electric cars expire this year and demand slumped, Geely responded by leaning on its gasoline models. Then, when the war in Iran sent gasoline prices surging last month, Geely resumed pushing plug-in hybrids and electric cars.
With China’s economy also slowing, sales of battery-electric and plug-in hybrid cars in China were down 14% in the first 19 days of April from the same period last year. But sales of gasoline-powered cars plummeted almost 40%.
Geely’s versatility “has become a clear competitive advantage,” said David Zhang, dean of vehicle technology research at the Jiangxi New Energy Technology Institute.
With prices at the pump rising everywhere, Geely said this month that it was converting all of its remaining gasoline vehicles to gas-electric hybrids.
“Every one of their vehicles will be really fuel efficient – that will be another advantage,” said Yale Zhang, the managing director of Automotive Foresight, a Shanghai consulting firm.
Zhejiang Geely, privately held by its founder and chair, Li Shufu, 62, controls a wide network of automakers. It discloses little financial information but has set a target to generate 30% of its sales outside China by 2030.
Shares in Zhejiang Geely’s largest unit, Geely Automobile Holdings, trade in Hong Kong. It sold 3 million cars last year, up 39% from a year earlier. Revenue rose 25% as a price war in China pushed down vehicle prices.
Geely started making cars in 1998 when it began supplying taxis to Chinese fleets. In less than three decades, Zhejiang Geely has grown into a global automaker whose sales now approach those of the 123-year-old Ford Motor Co.
Li’s path was similarly unlikely. As a teenager, he used money set aside for college to buy a camera and start a small business photographing tourists. He then moved into manufacturing components for refrigerators, motorcycles and cars before building entire vehicles in Taizhou, his hometown in coastal Zhejiang province.
By 2006, Geely was selling inexpensive subcompacts for first-time buyers with simple, low-cost designs that looked starkly utilitarian by Western standards.
That did not deter Li’s global ambitions. In a 2006 interview, he urged Ford to sell Jaguar or Volvo – two of the American automaker’s many brands at the time – to Geely. The idea seemed far-fetched, but after Ford ran into difficulties during the global financial crisis, Li borrowed heavily to buy Volvo, a Swedish brand, in 2010. Zhejiang Geely has since revived Volvo.
From early on, Li focused on mastering automotive technology. He expressed admiration in 2006 for German automakers DaimlerChrysler and BMW, then leaders in hybrid-car technology, but was determined not to rely on others. Geely would have to build its own technology “from scratch”.
In a full-circle moment, he paid US$9 billion ($15m) in 2018 to acquire a 9.69% stake in Daimler, which has repeatedly changed its name and is now known as Mercedes-Benz Group.
Geely has built a broad portfolio of domestic and international brands. It acquired the London Taxi Co., which makes London’s iconic cabs, in 2013. It bought a 51% stake in British sports car maker Lotus in 2017 with a 49.9% stake in Proton, a Malaysian automaker. For electric vehicles, it has created brands like Polestar, an affiliate of Volvo, and Zeekr, a premium, technology-heavy offering with cars priced as high as US$132,000.
While moving a lot of production to China, Geely maintains design studios and factories in Europe, and it opened a Volvo factory in South Carolina. This has helped Geely sidestep trade barriers in Western markets.
Geely still faces two big challenges, said Michael Dunne, a longtime consultant on China’s car industry. Its portfolio of brands requires high sales to remain profitable. At the same time, state-owned carmakers in China are dragging down the industry, driving endless price wars and expanding capacity with backing from local governments and state banks.
“Profits have vanished” for car sales inside China, Dunne said. Geely remains profitable as a private company to a considerable extent because of its exports. But across China’s auto industry, he added, “the state-owned enterprises are the ones to bet on” to be the last ones standing.
Geely’s main competitor at home and abroad is BYD, which has grown by saturating the Chinese market with inexpensive electric and plug-in hybrid cars. Many of its models cost less than US$15,000. The price war in China has been particularly severe for subcompact plug-in hybrid cars, BYD’s core segment. BYD’s profits slipped badly last year.
Together with state-controlled automakers SAIC Motor and Chery, BYD and Geely are leading a surge of Chinese cars into the global market. China exported about 1 million cars a year from 2012 to 2020. That figure jumped to 7.1 million last year and is on track to reach 10 million this year, nearly as many cars as the United States makes annually.
With tariffs shutting them out of the US market, Chinese automakers are focusing on Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia, Latin America and Africa.
To compete in those markets, Geely is betting on technology. Consider its newly released Zeekr 8X SUV.
At the push of a button, shades rise across the windows and moon roof, turning the rear seats into a private movie theatre with in-seat speakers. When an owner stands in front and gestures, the car can pull itself out of a tight parking spot. The vehicle also includes an array of advanced self-driving features and starts at US$47,000.
Geely said Zeekr planned to begin overseas sales of the vehicle in the second half of the year. Like many export models from Chinese automakers, the Zeekr 8X is a plug-in hybrid, pairing a large battery with a backup gasoline engine.
Such vehicles were originally produced to address “range anxiety” about entirely electric vehicles, the fear that drivers would run out of power before finding a charger.
That concern has diminished at home as China’s state-owned electricity grid companies have added more charging infrastructure nationwide. Because plug-in hybrids carry the additional cost of a gasoline engine, demand in China is shifting toward all-electric cars.
Instead, automakers, including Geely and BYD, are redirecting plug-in hybrids to overseas markets, where charging infrastructure is less developed.
Europe has emerged as a prime destination. The European Union imposed steep anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in late 2024, but exempted plug-in hybrids, which were still a small segment when the policy was drafted. Imports have surged since.
Speaking last month in Sweden, Li said that geopolitical tensions were reshaping the industry and that the Geely group would rely more on Volvo’s European factories. “Globalisation has come to an end, while we see the trend of economic regionalisation,” he said.
This article originally appeared inThe New York Times.
Written by: Keith Bradsher
Photographs by: Qilai Shen, Felix Schmitt, Chang W. Lee
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