Last year, Maserati's parent company, Stellantis, spent 11.6 billion yuan to invest in Leap, which attracted the attention of the whole network. On May 14, Leapmotor International Joint Venture was announced.
As a result of this partnership, Stellantis Group and Leapmotor will establish a 51%:49% joint venture called "Leapmotor International".
The joint venture will be powered by Leapmotor and Stellantis, which will provide global market resources and influence, opening a new model for China's new energy vehicles to go overseas.
The C10 and T03 products were sold to nine European countries in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Greece and Romania in September, and expanded to five continents by the end of the year.
Speaking of Stellantis, many consumers may find this name unfamiliar, if you talk about its car brands such as Maserati, Jeep, Citroen, Peugeot, etc., you may shout "it is it"!
In the Chinese auto market, Stellantis' presence is relatively low, and Guangfic, one of its two joint venture car companies, has gone bankrupt, and Dongfeng Shenlong is in turmoil.
Although Stellantis is a European car company, its predecessor was the integration of France's PSA Peugeot Citroën, Germany's OPEL, Italy's Fiat Group, and the United States' Chrysler.
Stellantis is conservative about the EV project. At present, the vast majority of car companies are losing money in their electric vehicle business, and almost everyone is subsidizing electric vehicles with the fuel vehicle/hybrid vehicle business.
It was also previously reported that Stellantis' Alfa Romeo and Maserati are also expected to introduce Chery's Xingtu Star Era platform.
Leapmotor is a technology company focusing on the R&D and manufacturing of smart electric vehicles, and currently has 4 models on sale, namely Leapmotor T03, Leapmotor C01, Leapmotor C11 and Leapmotor C10.
According to the data, Leapmotor delivered a total of 15,005 new cars in April, which is still far from exceeding 20,000 monthly sales. From January to April 2024, Leapmotor delivered a total of 48,415 new vehicles.
The pre-sale of the new model of Leapmotor C16 started at the 2024 Beijing Auto Show, and the order volume exceeded 11,900 units within 24 hours of pre-sale.
In terms of background, Leap is really starting from scratch, and it is completely a layman to enter the new energy automobile industry.
Zhu Jiangming, the founder of Leapmotor, once said to the public: "Within 3 years, the field of intelligent driving will surpass Tesla" and "sales will reach 800,000 units in 2025".
Sure enough, the new car-making forces are either "crushing BBA" or benchmarking "Tesla", one by one dares to say, and they are worthy of being "China's most crazy car maker"!
Compared with "Wei Xiaoli", Leapmotor has always been known for its cost performance, and the main running model of Leapmotor was Leapmotor T03 - a miniature car priced at tens of thousands of yuan.
C01 and C11, although the price is higher than that of T03, but in essence, it is still a cost-effective route, and the competition is still price.
According to the financial report, in 2022, Leapmotor's net loss will reach 5.11 billion yuan, and in 2023, although the scale of Leapmotor's net loss will narrow, it will still have a net loss of 4.22 billion yuan.
A few more words
Although Stellantis' performance in China has been relatively weak, it is still a force to be reckoned with globally.
If Leapmotor wants to break through the bottleneck in sales and overtake through the corners of overseas markets, it is inevitably not a good way.