Chery began by copying other carmakers and became China's biggest car exporter
Chery's first car, in 1999, was an unlicensed copy of a SEAT Toledo body powered by an engine made on equipment bought from Ford's Dagenham plant. For years it could not legally sell outside its home province. Today the company from Wuhu has led Chinese-brand passenger car exports every year since 2003.
Officials in the city of Wuhu, in Anhui province, founded Chery as a state enterprise on 8 January 1997, with generous provincial funding. They recruited Yin Tongyue, then a workshop director at the FAW-Volkswagen joint venture, as technical director, and he still chairs the company. The original plan was to build engines and a parts industry before making whole cars.
The first model, the Fengyun, sold nearly 30,000 units, but Chery lacked a national licence until 2003 and got around the restriction by borrowing one from SAIC, which briefly took a 20 percent stake. Early on it relied on other makers' technology, some licensed and some reverse-engineered. In 2003 it launched the tiny, affordable QQ, a hit despite quality complaints, and General Motors promptly sued, claiming it copied the Daewoo Matiz; the case was settled out of court in 2005. From 2006 Chery built its own ACTECO engines and sold them to other manufacturers.
Exports began in 2001, earlier than its domestic rivals. Overseas sales more than tripled between 2021 and 2023, when they made up 52 percent of the total, and many vehicles are assembled abroad from kits. The company juggles a crowd of brands, from premium Exeed and SUV specialist Jetour to Luxeed, developed with Huawei, and export labels such as Omoda and Jaecoo. Since 2012 it has also built Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles in China through a joint venture with JLR.
In 2025 Chery sold 2,806,393 vehicles, placing it fifth among Chinese carmakers, and on 25 September 2025 it raised about 1.2 billion dollars in a Hong Kong share listing that valued it at nearly 23 billion dollars.
Source: Chery
