Chery and Great Wall Motors are both established Chinese carmakers, but one is leading in exports.
It’s a little tough, even as an automotive enthusiast or even a motoring journalist to keep track of China’s automotive industry. In a sentence, the Chinese automotive industry is in a world of its own, with countless joint-ventures, sub-brands, one-offs, spin-offs and more.
Most of this can safely be ignored by anyone outside of China. But now that the Chinese automotive industry has one foot firmly planted in our market in the form of Geely’s partial ownership of Proton and their success with the X50 and X70 here, it’s time to contextualise some of their brands.
Two new Chinese brands that are looking at making a big push into Malaysia very soon are Chery and Great Wall Motors. Both brands have some history in Malaysia, but this time they’re going to go all out. There’s more will than ever to succeed in the Malaysian car market and this time they’ve got the right products and experience with overseas markets to hit their targets and make existing players a little scared.
While both Chery and Great Wall now have very competitive and even comparable products to bring to market, it’s important to understand the difference in size of these two companies. And one of the ways we can determine that is to look at their export numbers in the same time frame. Thankfully, both companies have released that data for the first half of 2022.
From January 2022 to the end of June 2022, Chery managed to export some 148,000 vehicles. That doesn’t sound like much, but for the company, it represents a massive 24.9% increase year-on-year. In June 2022 alone, the company sold 35,818 vehicles outside of China, which is a 50.3% increase over the number of cars they exported in June 2021. Products like the Arrizo 6, the Tiggo 2 and Tiggo 8 series have made great headway in markets like Brazil, Chile, and South Africa. They’re looking forward to the launch of the Omoda 5, which is being touted as the company’s first global car.
Now let’s look at Great Wall Motors’ export numbers for the first half of 2022. In the same period of time, Great Wall sold 62,823 vehicles overseas, 19,608 of which were GWM Pick-Ups. This number includes vehicles from all five of GWM’s brands, Haval, Wey, ORA, POER and Tank.
Despite being a very experienced exporter of cars, GWM was hit with many issues in the first half of 2022 which slowed deliveries down. And despite exporting fewer vehicles than Chery, it should be noted that GWM sells models that are a little more upmarket. 14% of their exported vehicles cost more than 200,000 yuan (RM131K). It should also be noted that the company has cumulatively exported 1 million products and is targeting more challenging markets like Australia and New Zealand.
