FAW (一汽) executive Zhou Shiying (周时莹) urges industry to stop “going it alone”; it has been reported that selling a car loses 20,000–30,000 yuan

Call for cooperation across a fragmented stack

Zhou Shiying (周时莹), deputy general manager of Strategy & Cooperation and director of the Intelligent Industry Development Office at FAW (一汽), told a Beijing forum it has been reported that the Chinese auto industry must stop building isolated tech stacks if it hopes to compete globally. Speaking at the Intelligent Electric Vehicle Development Forum 2026, Zhou laid out five foundational pillars for vehicle intelligence — including data, operating systems and chips — and argued that no single automaker has the resources or time to master them all. Her message: repeated parallel efforts are wasting money and leaving the sector technically fragmented.

Fragmentation, duplicated investment and mounting losses

Zhou warned that companies hoard massive, fragmented datasets and build bespoke OS and compute stacks that do not interoperate. She singled out an overlooked bottleneck: cloud-scale AI training and inference chips, not just in-vehicle silicon. Zhou reportedly posed a blunt question: are Chinese firms doomed to keep fighting each other at home, losing 20,000–30,000 yuan on every car sold? Public figures underline the pressure — only BYD (比亚迪), Li Auto (理想) and Seres (赛力斯) were profitable in 2025, while NIO (蔚来) lost about 18 billion yuan, XPeng (小鹏) over 9 billion and Leapmotor (零跑) over 4 billion — highlighting an industry of “rising revenue, shrinking profit.”

Standardization, division of labour and geopolitical context

Zhou urged standardized interfaces and a clearer division of labour: specialised compute firms provide cloud and edge services, foundries and high-end component makers focus on core parts, OS firms build middleware, and automakers concentrate on brand, safety, chassis and system integration. Her remarks came against a backdrop of Western export controls on advanced semiconductors and a broader push in China for supply‑chain self‑reliance — factors that make domestic collaboration both strategically and economically urgent. If domestic players cannot consolidate capabilities now, Zhou argued, global expansion will be far harder to achieve.