In China’s fiercely competitive new energy vehicle (NEV) market, where penetration rates continue to rise, prices keep falling, and product concentration intensifies, making money has never been easy.
After all, selling cars can rely on subsidies, promotions, and traffic-driven momentum. But profitability ultimately comes down to products, scale, costs, efficiency, and organizational capability.
Profitability is not merely a numerical turning point on a financial statement. For an emerging NEV maker, it is a milestone that proves, at least for now, that its business model works.
Leapmotor (零跑) has done it.
On March 16, Leapmotor released its 2025 financial results. The company delivered 596,600 vehicles for the year, doubling its sales for the second consecutive year and topping the sales ranking among China’s emerging NEV makers. Revenue reached RMB 64.73 billion, up 101.3% year on year. Net profit stood at RMB 540 million, marking the company’s first full-year profit. Gross margin rose to a record high of 14.5%. Cash on hand reached RMB 37.88 billion, while both operating cash flow and free cash flow turned positive.
This means Leapmotor has not only sold more cars. It has finally made money.
Revenue of RMB 64.73 billion marked Leapmotor’s first time crossing the RMB 60 billion threshold. Net profit of RMB 540 million also placed it among the few profitable players in China’s emerging NEV sector.
Nearly 600,000 deliveries not only made Leapmotor the top-selling emerging NEV maker in 2025, but also enabled the company to build genuine economies of scale across procurement, manufacturing, channels, amortization, and R&D allocation.
More importantly, this scale was not supported by one or two high-premium models. It was built on a broader consumer base, a wider price band, and a more mainstream market foundation.
A Smart Positioning Player
Leapmotor has never locked itself into the premium market, nor has it deliberately created an elite brand image.
Instead, it has chosen a much broader mass-market route.
It has to be said that Leapmotor is a smart positioning player.
Over the past few years, the most heated narratives in the NEV market have almost all revolved around the premium segment.
Refrigerators, televisions, and sofa-like seats; advanced intelligent driving; 800V architecture; LiDAR; large SUVs — the industry narrative has consistently centered on moving “upward.”
This path is certainly not wrong. After all, the premium market is more likely to generate brand effects and higher per-vehicle profits.
But the largest opportunity in China’s auto market has never been in high-end consumption for a small group of people. It lies in the much broader mass market.
Whoever can truly enter, understand, and establish a long-term foothold in this market is more likely to achieve both sales volume and profitability.
Today, as NEV penetration continues to rise, the traditional leaders of the internal-combustion era have been slow to transform, creating a structural gap in the heart of the mass market.
This has provided a rare window of opportunity for new entrants, drawing a wave of emerging automakers into the market.
Yet most of these new players chose the premium route at the beginning. The affordable mass market has long lacked a strong “positioning player.”
BYD (比亚迪), which laid the groundwork 20 years ago, captured the first wave of dividends and rose rapidly on the strength of its battery technology, becoming the undisputed leader. Geely Auto (吉利汽车), after completing its “One Geely” strategic integration, quickly followed and also delivered its best performance in history.
Among China’s emerging NEV makers, however, Leapmotor is currently the only one that has truly built up this market segment and achieved full-year profitability.
It was not the only company to see this opportunity. But it was the one that actually entered the market and delivered results.
Taking on the Largest and Toughest Piece of the Market
The piece of the market Leapmotor wants to capture is simple and direct: the young mass-market segment.
This segment is large enough, but it is also the hardest to win. The mass market is the most competitive, the most price-sensitive, and its consumers are the most demanding.
It is not difficult to make a car cheap. The real challenge is to make it affordable while ensuring that it does not feel cheap or compromised.
When many automakers enter the affordable segment, they often cut design, materials, and details in exchange for sales volume. Leapmotor, however, has never interpreted “affordable” as “good enough.”
Zhu Jiangming, founder, chairman and CEO of Leapmotor, put it plainly: “Leapmotor wants to become the UNIQLO of the auto industry, allowing users to buy with confidence and purchase better quality at lower prices.”
But he added another point: “Leapmotor also has products with a tone and high-end configuration similar to Chanel and Zegna.”
This means Leapmotor sets the same requirement for every product series: high quality, good value, and affordability. Even the A-series A10 is expected to deliver a level of refinement close to MINI and smart models.
UNIQLO became popular around the world not because it was the cheapest, but because it made “affordable, good-quality products with reliable quality” stable enough. Consumers do not buy it to show off. They buy it for peace of mind.
Leapmotor’s operating philosophy follows the same logic. It does not want to turn cars into luxury goods. Instead, it wants to make “good quality and high specifications at an affordable price” its own label.
In the view of EqualOcean Auto (亿欧汽车), this is exactly where Leapmotor is both smart and restrained.
It is not that Leapmotor lacks the ability to move upward. Its D platform includes the D19 and D99, with dual Qualcomm Snapdragon 8797 chips, 1,280 TOPS of computing power, kilovolt-level high-voltage architecture, and a complete set of premium technology expressions.
But Leapmotor has not abandoned more mainstream product lines such as the A and B series. Instead, it has invested heavily in a RMB 100,000-level product like the A10.
Zhu Jiangming said that the A, B, C, and D series are vertically aligned, and many controllers used in high-end vehicles are also used in the A10. Cao Li, executive director and senior vice president of Leapmotor, has also said that making a small car does not simply mean doing less. The real difficulty lies in “delivering higher quality and better configurations at a similar price.”
This is not empty talk.
Leapmotor’s four major series — A, B, C, and D — are now being rolled out across the board. The B platform has introduced the B10 and B01; the A-platform A10 has been unveiled and launched; and the D-platform D19 and D99 are waiting in the wings. The A10 is positioned as an “intelligent, premium, long-range SUV,” built around the logic of “good but not expensive” and “technology for all.” Lafa5 and A10, meanwhile, are more clearly tasked with helping Leapmotor break into the young mass-market segment.
“Youthfulness” has been discussed too often. Some interpret it simply as brighter colors, cuter styling, or hiring a young celebrity endorser.
But Leapmotor’s understanding goes beyond that.
Cao Li has explained Leapmotor’s understanding of youthfulness more than once:
“Youth is a consumer mindset. To impress users with a youthful mindset, you need to give them enough intelligent functions and lively, engaging elements. Youthfulness is not about making a car smaller or cuter. It is about making users feel that the car is practical, technological, emotionally valuable, and worth trying.”
This is also why Leapmotor has brought advanced intelligent driving to A-class vehicles such as the A10.
Many people ask: do small-car users really need advanced intelligent driving?
Zhu Jiangming’s answer is direct: yes. Once users experience intelligent driving, it is hard to go back. A car may be driven for ten years. If it is not equipped with intelligent-driving functions today, users may feel a clear gap once such functions become more widely adopted in the next one or two years.
As a result, Leapmotor has brought LiDAR and parking-space-to-parking-space capability down to the A10 level, while keeping the price attractive enough. Zhu Jiangming revealed in an interview that the 505-km LiDAR version of the A10 already accounts for more than 53% of orders. In recent days, as reservations have been converted into firm orders, intelligent-driving versions have continued to account for a high share.
This, in turn, shows that the young mass market does not lack demand for advanced configurations. Users simply do not want to pay inflated premiums for them.
What they want is value that they can see, use, and afford.
Leapmotor has captured exactly this point.
It has taken “advanced configurations” out of the premium market and brought them back into the mass market. It has also stripped “youthfulness” away from superficial marketing and grounded it in the matching of design, refinement, functions, and price.
It is not trying to become the cheapest brand. It is trying to become the brand that offers “better value” in the same price segment.
What Zhu Jiangming has repeatedly emphasized is this simple idea: “At the same price point, higher configurations, better quality, and good value without being expensive.”
Making the Road Work in the Most Competitive Price Band
Leapmotor has been able to do this not because it dares to engage in price competition, but because it has its own cost methodology.
Cao Li has mentioned in multiple interviews that Leapmotor’s gross margin target across its product lineup remains at around 15%, and that the company does not sell cars at a loss. The proportion of self-developed and self-produced components has already exceeded 65% and is still rising.
In other words, Leapmotor’s affordability is not achieved by sacrificing profits. It is built through vertical integration, modularization, platformization, and economies of scale.
This is the biggest difference between Leapmotor and many products that merely “look cheap.”
Some forms of cheapness come from temporary promotions, margin concessions to clear inventory, or bets on a short-term window. What Leapmotor wants to build is a low-price, high-configuration model that can hold up over the long term.
Leapmotor’s 2025 financial results show that this path has initially worked.
More importantly, even after becoming profitable, Leapmotor has not lost its sense of crisis.
Someone once asked Zhu Jiangming how he felt after becoming one of the few profitable emerging NEV makers.
He said that there are now 17 chairmen of Chinese automakers sitting at the table, but the Chinese market cannot accommodate 17 auto company chairmen forever. Leapmotor must work very hard just to ensure that it is “not the first to be eliminated.”
Zhu Jiangming admitted that he is always prepared for danger even in times of stability. “The weak players have already been eliminated. Those left are all strong. So we must stay clear-headed at all times and fight to remain at the table.”
These remarks precisely reveal the clarity and realism of both Zhu Jiangming and Leapmotor.
Profitability does not mean safety.
Being first in sales does not mean being first forever.
China’s RMB 5 trillion auto market is large enough, but whether a company can stay at the table does not depend on short-term momentum. It depends on continuous progress, control, and self-renewal.
In the view of EqualOcean Auto, Leapmotor’s current position is one in which it is “tasting the sweetness of profitability while tightening the string even further.”
Zhu Jiangming once explained why Leapmotor is still reducing costs and improving efficiency despite its positive momentum: “Because competition is too brutal. To survive, we must always do this.”
Cao Li has also said: “Leapmotor’s cost reduction and efficiency improvement did not start this year. We have always been doing it.”
Therefore, what is truly compelling about this financial report is not the RMB 540 million profit itself, but the fact that Leapmotor has placed “making money” back into a longer industrial logic.
It saw the gap in the mass market and positioned itself early. It understood youthfulness, but did not turn it into cheapness. It pursued scale, but did not give up refinement and originality. It made money, but never believed that it had already won.
Another emerging NEV maker has become profitable in China’s RMB 5 trillion auto market. This is certainly a major victory for the innovation and upgrading of China’s auto industry.
But more important than “making money” is how the company made that money, and how it plans to continue surviving.
Leapmotor’s answer is not mysterious. It is to make products that most consumers can afford and are willing to buy in the largest market; to raise refinement, configuration, and design in the most competitive price bands; and to maintain constant respect for cost and efficiency at the fiercest moment of competition.
This road may not be easy.
But at least for now, Leapmotor has completed the first stage.
For China’s auto industry, this may also be a signal worth taking seriously: in the NEV era, the largest piece of the market is big enough to accommodate multiple positioning players.
BYD has captured it. Geely Auto has captured it. Now, Leapmotor is beginning to capture it as well.
This is not the endgame.
It is a new beginning.