While much of the global auto industry has fixated on aggressive electrification and business-model disruption, Chery — a Chinese carmaker grounded in engineering — spent 2025 redefining what high-quality industrial upgrading looks like, doing it in a heavier, more systematic way.
The group's 2025 report card is a hard-nosed answer worth decoding across several dimensions. It shows how a leading company, through system-level innovation and balanced development, can defend its scale base while crossing over into a high-tech ecosystem group.
What makes this report card hard-core is not a one-off breakthrough, but a growth profile with multiple pillars running in parallel — underpinned by Chery's forward-leaning strategy. By smartening and upgrading its combustion lineup, Chery squeezed more value out of the incumbent market and kept user loyalty, buying time and room for the transition. A full-matrix surge in new energy — across hybrids, pure EVs and range-extenders — reflects years of saturation R&D that rejects path dependence and uses diverse solutions for diverse demand. Overseas, a shift from pure trade to local integration and ecosystem export signals that globalization has entered a higher stage focused on brand, culture and standards. And the push into robotics and smart energy sketches an ecosystem that extends beyond carmaking.
Driving it all is a capabilities engine Chery calls its "Super Tech Shelf."
This is not a grab bag of flashy gadgets. It's an integrated innovation system that spans a global R&D network, an open cluster of labs and modular technology platforms — the structure that ensures Chery's advance isn't a brief charge but a sustained flame fed by deep engineering and constant R&D. It's a marker of China's auto industry moving from scale leadership to system leadership, from shipping products to exporting value, and it offers new thinking — and new routes — from the East for an industry that's increasingly about fusion and co-opetition.
Photo source: Chery Group
Resilience beyond scale
Look closely at Chery's 2025 performance and one feature stands out: balance and risk resistance. In a year full of uncertainty, Chery didn't lurch forward on a single leg; it moved with four-wheel drive — building layered defenses for long-term growth.
The ballast effect of global markets has never been clearer.
Chery's exports topped 1.34 million units for the year, keeping it China's No. 1 passenger-car exporter for the 23rd straight year. On average, one vehicle headed overseas every 23 seconds — more than an accumulation of numbers, it signals a shift in model and mindset.
Chery export vehicles at the port, ready to set sail; photo source: Chery Group
Chery's overseas story has evolved from early trade to deep local integration.
Its production project in Spain is hailed as a model of China–Spain cooperation, with meaning that goes beyond capacity. It marks the successful embedding of Chinese standards, manufacturing systems and management in a mature market. Winning China's first certificate for mutual recognition of China–EU carbon footprint data amounts to preemptive compliance — turning ESG (environment, social and governance) into an admission ticket and a trust builder.
Chery launched the "Chery Global ESG Advisory Alliance"; photo source: Chery Group
With one in five Chinese cars exported being a Chery, the company's global business has clearly grown into a self-sustaining, self-evolving engine of stable growth.
At the same time, an upgraded product mix and the rapid rise of new energy form the other big driver. The Chery brand's base of more than 1.7 million units proves the staying power of its mainstream lineup. JETOUR delivered over 0.62 million units and posted high growth — a textbook win in its niche that validates the "travel+" ecosystem positioning. New energy chalked up a 54.9% year-on-year gain, showing Chery's diversified investments are entering harvest. Models such as the Fengyun A9L, the LUXEED line and the iCAR V23 have become standouts in their segments, underscoring that Chery's transition isn't a rushed flip to EVs but an organic expansion of a matrix built on deep hybrid, range-extended and pure-electric know-how — lifting its NEV business into the industry's top echelon.
More durable than sales figures is a near-obsessive focus on quality and safety — the industry's core. According to J.D. Power, Chery topped Chinese brands in five categories (new-vehicle quality, sales service, after-sales, product appeal and vehicle reliability). A total of 60 models have earned five-star safety ratings worldwide — the bedrock that lets Chery compete globally.
Representative Chery NEV models
Rather than join the industry's arms race in marketing and features, Chery leans into an engineer's ethos and guards the fundamentals. That hard-core quality is its ultimate passport in developed markets with tough regulations — and the deepest moat for the brand.
Quality is the foundation that keeps sales and exports sustainable. New energy is the engine shaping the next growth curve. Globalization provides the stage that transcends any single market cycle. Together they sketch growth that is three-dimensional, balanced and resilient.
From tactical wins to an upgraded strategic identity
Strong results are the outcome; foresight in strategy is the cause. Chery's momentum in 2025 springs from a strategy long in motion — new ICE, new energy, new overseas and new industries. These are not four parallel lines but a connected, mutually reinforcing value network that ultimately powers the company's step-up.
The interplay between new ICE and new energy shows Chery's grasp of, and control over, the industry's transition period.
"New ICE" is no retreat; it's a value rebuild of the combustion powertrain. The launch models — the Tiggo 9X and Tiggo 9 — carry the powerful Falcon driver-assistance suite. The fifth-generation Tiggo 8, introduced last November on the new ICE Intelligent T platform, doesn't just make gasoline cars more capable; it gives them a genuinely electric-like feel.
By quickly bringing frontier smart tech into its bread-and-butter products, Chery is delivering smart parity between ICE and EVs. That not only firms up the most crucial share base today, it gives the huge stock of ICE users a smooth upgrade path — preserving loyalty both emotionally and practically, and buying valuable time and a user base for the NEV shift.
The full-court press in new energy is the core offensive for the future. From the Fengyun series to STERRA, from LUXEED to iCAR, Chery's NEV map covers all technologies, price bands and usage scenarios. And the loop from tech release to product rollout is tight: a Kunpeng "Tianqing" engine claiming 48% thermal efficiency, the stepless Super Hybrid DHT, a Rhino solid-state battery and megawatt fast charging are not lab showpieces — they're landing across hit models and turning into real market bite.
This high-speed coupling of the tech shelf and the product matrix ensures Chery's NEV surge won't be a flash in the pan, but a sustained campaign backed by a steady technical spring.
The "new overseas" and "new industries" pushes, meanwhile, draw the ecosystem boundary beyond cars.
Going abroad has upgraded from exporting products to exporting technology, brands, ecosystems and culture. Building factories in Europe is the hardware export; the global rollout of the Ruixiang Life ecosystem brand — steering development of global models — is the software export of lifestyle and services. Chery's Mojia humanoid robot, a flag for its new industries, is already commercialized and shipped to more than 30 countries and regions. The message is clear: Chery's tech image and industrialization capability now spill beyond autos, entering global competition with independent tech products and opening far more imaginative market space.
Chery's Mojia robot "Moyin" served as designated spokesperson at the 2025 Asian Youth Para Games
On the back of this "four-new" depth and combined strength, Chery in 2025 also confirmed three new identities: a new role in capital markets (a successful listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange), which signals that its transparency, governance and growth story have won entry to a core capital market and opened fresh funding channels for global R&D and ecosystem expansion; a new global speed (leaping 152 places to No. 233 on the 2025 Fortune Global 500), an authoritative nod to its market scale, revenue and operating efficiency — underpinned by strong full-year revenue and profit growth; and a new height in social responsibility. From United Nations partnerships to recycled-aluminum processes and E-FUEL synthetic fuels, Chery is turning ESG from a report into measurable, repeatable tech solutions and business practice — reframing what it means to be a global corporate citizen.
Chery Group ranked No. 233 on the 2025 Fortune Global 500
The confidence that comes from a technology "shelf"
All market results and grand strategies ultimately ride on continuous, bottom-layer tech supply. What impresses in 2025 isn't any single "black tech," but the mature operation of a highly systematized innovation engine — the "Super Tech Shelf" — which is why Chery can invest across multiple tracks and keep its cool.
At its base sit a global R&D network and an open-innovation layout.
The "1+7+N" R&D footprint across Europe, Asia and the Americas gives Chery front-line vision and local adaptation. A team of more than 30,000 researchers — including over 10,000 in software — forms a deep talent bench. Internally, the Yaoguang Lab, and externally, the Kaiyang lab cluster, stitch together a chain from applied engineering to original research. On that, the "tech shelf" is modular and combinable: the Mars architecture, Kunpeng powertrain, Lingxi smart cabin, Falcon intelligent driving and the Galaxy ecosystem are the uprights; beneath them, 17 technology modules and 400-plus "SKUs" can be pulled and mixed like building blocks to fit local needs worldwide. That lifts R&D efficiency, lowers innovation cost, and supports a multi-brand, all-energy product burst.
Chery's fifth-generation high-efficiency hybrid-dedicated engine and Kunpeng Super Hybrid 3DHT
Chery's 2025 tech and product rollouts point clearly to its focus: extreme engineering efficiency, a rebuilt smart-mobility experience and the pursuit of ultimate sustainability. Whether it's the Flying Fish digital-intelligent chassis achieving zero pitch and zero roll, the Kunpeng "Tianqing" engine pushing thermal efficiency past 48% to a claimed global peak, or the Ark amphibious system that can climb and ford water, they reflect a "STEM-first" drive for mechanical merit, energy efficiency and versatility. These broaden the vehicle's capability envelope to meet complex geographies and diverse use cases — the tech source of Chery's reputation for robust, adaptable products.
The AI super agent "XiaoQi" and the Falcon end-to-end model-based driving system showcase full-stack, in-house integration of AI and cars. A world-first "100% recycled aluminum • no-heat-treatment • integrated die casting" process cuts material-side carbon by 80% — not just a process breakthrough but a green public good for the industry. Work on E-FUEL adaptation, meanwhile, offers a practical low-carbon retrofit for the vast ICE fleet, a sign of a pragmatic and comprehensive decarbonization mindset.
These technologies may not turn into immediate sales, but they are Chery's answers to the industry's ultimate questions — and key bets on future high ground.
In brief:
Chery's hard-nosed 2025 scorecard is a victory for a business model built on system innovation. In a volatile era, the biggest certainty comes from structural robustness and the capacity to evolve — the same conviction behind its 2026 goals. Chery says it aims for 2026 full-year sales growth to outpace the industry by a further 10–20 percentage points.
By building a multi-pronged growth system — market resilience, strategic depth and endogenous technology — Chery hasn't just won share now; it has unlocked future potential. Its charge is offering a useful Chinese template as the global auto industry moves from electrification to a deeper fusion of intelligence, globalization and sustainability.
