Leapmotor’s year-end party became a social-media punchline: no lunch provided, HR advising staff to “bring your own food”, and a founder forced into a public apology. The episode might have been dismissed as corporate awkwardness, except the company in question is now the poster child for China’s second wave of electric-vehicle challengers. Under Zhu Jiangming, Leapmotor has gone from repeatedly touted as a near-failure to topping the 2025 sales table among new-energy start-ups, making every misstep a matter of market scrutiny.
The turnaround is stark. After cumulative losses of nearly 17 billion yuan from 2019 to 2024 and a net loss of about 2.82 billion yuan in 2024 despite roughly 300,000 deliveries, Leapmotor delivered nearly 600,000 vehicles in 2025 — a year-on-year increase of about 103%. The company also posted its first half-year profit in 2025 (0.3 billion yuan) and widened that to 1.5 billion yuan in the third quarter, helping its founder land on the Hurun rich list.
The numbers tell part of the story; the strategy explains the rest. Zhu’s operating credo is extreme cost discipline married to selective technological independence. He is personally known for frugality — participating in major procurement decisions and even buying cheap convenience-store meals with staff — and has embedded tight cost control into the company’s culture. Leapmotor manufactures only after mastering key systems in-house: electric drive, battery packs, driver-monitoring, cockpit intelligence and ADAS, keeping manufacturing to outsourced partners and achieving roughly 65% self-sourced parts today.
This combination of ‘value for feature’ and vertical control fuels what the market calls Leapmotor’s “half-price” model. The company built momentum with the C11 mid-size SUV — priced under 200,000 yuan yet pitched to deliver features competitive with models twice its price — and replicated that playbook across subsequent models. The result was rapid domestic growth and a sizeable export push, aided by a strategic shareholder: Stellantis’s 2023 investment of €1.5 billion and the creation of a Leapmotor international arm helped Leapmotor ship around 60,000 units overseas in 2025.
Capital injections continued. In 2025 First Automobile Works (FAW) took a stake in Leapmotor with a 3.744 billion yuan investment, consolidating the company’s financial backstop even as governance and execution kinks remain visible. One such kink surfaced in September, when a contract dispute involving a Leapmotor subsidiary briefly led a court to restrict Zhu’s high-consumption activities — a restriction lifted within three days but one that exposed weaknesses in the company’s compliance and contract management processes.
Leapmotor’s success has wider industry significance. In a cohort where early heroes such as Nio, XPeng and Li Auto leaned on experience, internet playbooks and high-margin product positioning, Leapmotor’s route to scale has been low-price escalation and aggressive system-level self-reliance. That approach has allowed it to outpace peers in unit growth and claim the new-entrant sales crown in 2025, even as incumbents and rivals grappled with their own strategic recalibrations.
Yet the achievements amplify, rather than mute, the company’s challenges. Leapmotor now aims to stop being a “new force” and instead meet standards of a world-class automaker, setting long-term goals such as exceeding 4 million annual sales and pushing to the “million-car” mark as a stepping-stone. That ambition requires not merely scale but sustainable margins, stronger brand equity and management bandwidth to run multi-segment global operations — precisely the areas where past Chinese start-ups have stumbled.
The immediate pressure points are threefold. First, brand elevation: Leapmotor’s forthcoming D-series aims squarely at the 300,000-yuan segment with the flagship D19 SUV and D99 MPV, but competing against better-established premium entrants risks diluting the cost-value proposition that built Leapmotor’s initial success. Second, profitability under pressure: EV purchase tax incentives are rolling back and market competition is intensifying, squeezing margins on volume-led strategies. Third, investor patience: Leapmotor’s Hong Kong-listed shares rocketed to HK$76.3 in August 2025 before sliding to HK$45.28 by February 2026, a market reaction that reflects both the exuberance and fragility of investor sentiment toward high-growth automakers.
Leapmotor’s climb is a useful test case for China’s EV ecosystem. It shows that disciplined cost engineering and targeted vertical integration can convert a balance-sheet weakling into a volume leader within a few years. But sustaining that victory will depend on maturing governance, sharpening product segmentation and improving brand perception — and on Zhu convincing markets that frugality and engineering autonomy can coexist with global ambitions and premium aspirations.
For now, Leapmotor is past survival; the company’s next act will determine whether it becomes an exemplar of industrial strategy or another cautionary tale in the churn of China’s fast-moving car industry.