Latest in Geely

About Geely

Geely is the Chinese carmaker that taught the world how to buy a car company and leave it better off. Founded in 1986 by Li Shufu in Zhejiang province, it started out making refrigerator parts, moved into motorcycles and built its first cars in the late 1990s, cheap little sedans that few outside China noticed. Li's ambitions were much larger. In 2010 Geely's parent bought Volvo Cars from Ford, a deal that skeptics expected to end badly and that instead revived the Swedish brand, giving it the money to develop new platforms while leaving its engineering culture largely intact.

Geely Holding has since assembled one of the industry's most diverse portfolios. It controls Volvo, Polestar, Zeekr, Lynk & Co and Lotus, owns a large stake in Malaysia's Proton, shares the smart brand with Mercedes-Benz and builds London's black cabs through LEVC. Li Shufu also became a major shareholder in Mercedes-Benz itself. Technology flows between these brands, with shared architectures such as SEA for premium electric cars and GEA for mainstream models, and Geely's own Galaxy sub-brand has become a big seller in China's fierce electric and plug-in hybrid market.

Abroad, the Geely brand itself is expanding rapidly, with models such as the EX5 electric SUV, the Starray and the small EX2 arriving in Australia, Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America. It competes with BYD, Chery, MG and the established Japanese and Korean brands, and its global reach is helped by Proton, which sells Geely-based cars in Malaysia. The United States remains effectively closed to Chinese-made cars, though Volvo and Polestar give the group a presence there.

This page follows Geely's new models and international launches, sales and earnings, the shuffling of brands inside its empire and its role in China's price war and export boom. It also catches the wider China story, since Geely is so often at the center of it, from European market share to new charging technology. Few companies show as clearly how China's carmakers have learned to combine their own speed and scale with the engineering heritage of the brands they have bought, and how that combination is changing the balance of power in the global industry.