Cost reduction and efficiency improvement reforms are quietly launching within automotive companies. Leading automakers including SAIC, Chery, and GEELY AUTO have chosen to consolidate marketing resources, shifting from independent operations to coordinated strategies.
Since late last year, mainstream domestic automakers have initiated a wave of marketing system integration. SAIC Group is establishing a "comprehensive passenger vehicle marketing company" to integrate marketing resources of Roewe, UnUsUaL and MG brands. Chery Automobile formed a domestic business division to coordinate four major business units. GEELY AUTO restructured its Galaxy Marketing Division into "one platform, two business units" to manage four brands under unified management.
This consolidation wave marks China's automotive industry's formal transition from fragmented marketing strategies to a new era of group-based operations, with far-reaching impacts that will profoundly reshape market dynamics.
**Multi-Brand Integration: Simplifying Complexity**
On September 15, GEELY AUTO announced that under Cayman Islands company law provisions, the proposed transaction under the merger agreement received formal approval from ZEEKR shareholders at the ZEEKR shareholder meeting. The company, merger subsidiary, and ZEEKR will continue working to fulfill all prerequisites outlined in the circular's "Merger Agreement - Prerequisites" section. The merger agreement transaction requires all specified prerequisites to be met before formal implementation, with the possibility that it may not proceed.
As a core integration measure following Geely Holding Group's 2024 "Taizhou Declaration," ZEEKR's delisting from NYSE and integration into the Geely parent entity represents both concrete implementation of "strategic integration and strategic synergy" and a milestone achievement in Chairman Li Shufu's "One Geely" strategy.
Previously, Geely held a special shareholder meeting where independent shareholders approved ZEEKR Intelligent Technology Limited's privatization proposal with a 95.14% approval rate. GEELY AUTO executives indicated that the "major merger" between Geely and ZEEKR is expected to complete by year-end.
In July, Chery Automobile Group announced the establishment of Chery Brand Domestic Business Division, comprising four business units: Exeed Division, Arrizo-Tiggo Division, Fengyun Division, and QQ Division. The Exeed domestic business division's organization and functions will be entirely integrated into the newly established Chery Brand Domestic Business Division.
SAIC Group's subsidiaries Roewe and UnUsUaL are accelerating integration with dual-authorization stores launching. As of October, 72 dual-authorization stores have opened, with plans to complete 100 store integrations by year-end.
On October 28, 2024, SAIC Motor Passenger Vehicle's official WeChat account published a poster titled "SAIC Motor Passenger Vehicle Roewe UnUsUaL: Dreams Merge, Promises Multiply," accompanied by a video stating: "Roewe and UnUsUaL no longer run alone but choose to move forward together." This marks UnUsUaL's return to SAIC Motor Passenger Vehicle after three years of independent operation, with the merger extending beyond channel consolidation to comprehensive repositioning and product line restructuring.
These automakers' series of merger actions undoubtedly point toward more efficient collaborative management and resource allocation. Against the backdrop of increasingly fierce domestic market competition, automakers have recognized the critical importance of optimizing resource allocation, improving resource utilization efficiency, and enhancing organizational coordination efficiency around key domestic market business segments.
**Resource Integration for Enhanced Efficiency**
The deep driving force behind automotive marketing system transformation stems from dual demands: harsh market realities and internal efficiency improvement needs. Based on sales performance from major automakers in the first half of this year, while domestic brands showed overall robust development momentum, internal group data presented mixed results.
Particularly for large automakers like Geely, SAIC, and Dongfeng, previous "multi-subsidiary strategies" penetrated various price segments. Some "sub-brands" performed excellently and operated independently, while others still required parent company support. In this context, merger integration represents the wisest decision.
On one hand, China's automotive industry has been trapped in brutal "involutionary" price competition in recent years. According to incomplete statistics, over 200 vehicle models reduced prices in the domestic market in 2024, with over 60 models joining price reduction campaigns in the first four months of 2025, severely eroding industry profits.
Cui Dongshu, Secretary-General of China Automobile Dealers Association's Passenger Car Market Information Sub-association, noted that automotive industry revenue grew 2% year-over-year from January to October 2024, while profits declined 3.2% year-over-year, with profit margins at only 4.5%. By May 2025, industry profit margins further declined to below 4%, far from the 6%-7% levels of several years ago.
Sustained price competition forces automakers to reassess marketing strategy effectiveness. Individual brands initially positioned in the 300,000-400,000 yuan high-end market significantly reduced prices due to unmet sales expectations. While short-term sales improved, this triggered brand value damage and user trust crises, exposing the unsustainability of "volume-for-price" models.
On the other hand, avoiding internal friction and redundant investment has become an important consideration for automakers optimizing resource allocation. For years, internal brand competition and resource waste within large automotive groups has been common. For example, SAIC Group's Roewe, UnUsUaL, and MG brands previously operated independently, not only increasing marketing costs but also creating internal competition to some extent.
Similarly, Chery's integration of four business units under unified domestic business group management enables precise resource allocation based on brand positioning—Fengyun series focuses on hybrid technology communication while QQ targets urban commuting markets, avoiding internal overlap and waste. Such integration not only helps reduce costs but also facilitates differentiated brand recognition and coordinated development.
Du Tianyu, Dean of Kaileng Capital Research Institute, pointed out that automakers are integrating supply chains through comprehensive product strategies, such as the merger of Lynk & Co and ZEEKR, enabling them to allocate more resources for new product incubation. He believes that amid current extreme prosperity and brutal elimination, domestic brands urgently need to find balance between market expansion and commercial rationality.
Wu Huixiao, Chief Technology Officer of Great Wall Motor Company Limited, stated that over the past decade, China's automotive industry achieved rapid growth through dual policy and market drivers, significantly improving production scale, core technologies, and industrial chain capabilities. However, behind this high-speed growth, resource misallocation and intensified involution have indeed created problems, negatively impacting China's automotive industry credibility.
Looking ahead five years, she expects the industry to enter a steady improvement phase, returning to automotive manufacturing fundamentals and pursuing systematic capability advancement under long-term principles. This requires companies to more precisely understand user needs, more efficiently integrate technological resources, and more solidly build overall system resilience.
**Focusing on Demand: Value Transformation**
This round of marketing system integration demonstrates China's automotive industry's strategic transformation from scale expansion toward quality and efficiency, with significance extending far beyond simple cost savings to encompass long-term competitiveness reconstruction.
Industry analyst Xu Tong noted that for GEELY AUTO, ZEEKR's privatization not only optimizes capital structure but significantly strengthens control over high-end electric brands, facilitating deep synergy in R&D, supply chain, and channels, thereby forming more unified strategic positioning when facing competitors like NIO and Li Auto.
Chery Automobile's domestic business division establishment highlights innovative thinking in reorganizing brand architecture around user scenarios. Exeed, Fengyun, and other divisions focus respectively on high-end fuel, hybrid, and electric market segments, significantly reducing R&D and marketing costs through shared technology platforms, supply chain resources, and digital system backends, achieving efficient resource utilization.
This architecture enables Chery to more precisely grasp different market segment demands, rapidly respond to market changes, and improve overall operational efficiency.
SAIC Motor Passenger Vehicle's advancement of Roewe and UnUsUaL "dream integration" marks an important step from physical channel merger toward brand strategy reconstruction. Dual-authorization stores not only share showroom and after-sales resources but gradually achieve integrated sales systems, user operations, and brand promotion.
Simultaneously, SAIC integrates international business, R&D headquarters, and technology companies into the "comprehensive passenger vehicle" framework, forming cross-functional synergy platforms that enhance coordination capabilities across all domestic brand operations, enabling more agile market response, especially rapid product and resource allocation adjustments during new energy transformation.
Xu Tong emphasized that this marketing reform extends beyond channel integration to establishing shared user data platforms, integrating online and offline touchpoints, driving transformation from "people seeking cars" to "cars seeking people" marketing models. This aligns with the "focus on user needs" concept highlighted by multiple experts at the recent Tianjin Auto Forum.
For example, Geely's "one platform, two business units" reform emphasizes building unified digital marketing platforms supporting Galaxy, Geometry, and other brands in achieving user profile sharing, precise lead allocation, and cross-brand renewal marketing, thereby improving conversion rates and customer lifetime value.
These actions indicate that mainstream automakers are completely abandoning resource dispersion and internal brand friction models, transitioning toward new marketing phases centered on user operations and data-driven approaches. Digital transformation not only compels automakers to reconstruct marketing systems but becomes the strategic transformation driving their shift from "selling cars" to "managing users."
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