Who Owns Which Chinese Car Brand? A Family Tree

Chinese car brands multiply fast, and a lot of them turn out to be siblings rather than strangers. BYD, MG, Jaecoo and Omoda might look like unrelated names on a showroom sign, but several of them share the same parent company, sometimes the same factories and platforms too. Here’s how the ownership actually breaks down, brand by brand, with links through to full coverage of each one.

BYD

BYD is fully independent, a publicly listed company with no larger conglomerate above it, which makes it unusual among the brands on this list. It’s built two very different sub-brands on top of its mainstream range: Denza, aimed at buyers who’d otherwise look at Porsche or Mercedes, and Yangwang, a genuine halo brand building million-yuan hypercars and off-roaders.

Changan

Changan, one of China’s oldest state-owned carmakers, runs two very different EV sub-brands: Deepal for mainstream buyers, and Avatr as a genuinely premium, tech-heavy joint effort with battery maker CATL and Huawei’s software team.

Chery International’s growing family

Chery is the most prolific brand-builder of the group by a wide margin, six wholly-owned export marques under one roof, each with a distinct identity: Omoda and Jaecoo are both well established in the UK, Lepas is a newer arrival, Exeed is Chery’s upmarket EV push, iCaur builds retro-styled off-roaders, and Kaiyi is Chery’s value-focused export brand. Chery’s own-name brand, selling the Tiggo range, is also sold in the UK directly alongside all six.

Two more names deserve a mention, though they’re structurally different from the six above. Luxeed is Chery’s premium EV partnership with Huawei, part of the same Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance covered further down this page. Freelander is a genuine 50/50 joint venture with Jaguar Land Rover, reviving a name that originally belonged to Land Rover, Chery handles engineering and manufacturing, JLR handles design.

* Joint venture with Jaguar Land Rover, not wholly Chery-owned like the rest of the family.

Geely Holding, and a family within a family

Geely Holding is genuinely the biggest player here on a global scale, also owning Volvo, Polestar, Lotus and LEVC, the maker of London’s electric black cabs, though none of those read as “Chinese brands” to a UK buyer, so they’re left off this tree. Within the brands profiled on this site, Geely is the mainstream parent brand, Geely Galaxy is its newer, high-volume EV and hybrid sub-brand, Zeekr is the premium EV marque, and Radar Auto builds electric pickups aimed at rivalling Rivian.

There’s a genuine family-within-a-family here too: in November 2024, Zeekr itself acquired a majority stake in Lynk & Co, the Swedish-founded, Geely-backed brand known for its subscription model. Lynk & Co still sits under the wider Geely Holding umbrella, but its direct parent is now Zeekr, not Geely itself.

SAIC’s five brands

SAIC, another Chinese state-owned giant, owns the widest spread of distinct brands of any group covered here: MG, via a fairly convoluted history involving the collapse of MG Rover and the 2007 merger of Nanjing Automobile into SAIC; Maxus, the modern successor to the British LDV van brand; IM Motors, a premium EV joint venture with Alibaba; Wuling, technically a joint venture with General Motors too, though it operates as a distinctly local, budget-focused brand in China; and Roewe, SAIC’s own domestic brand, closely related to MG.

Worth a footnote: a sixth SAIC-linked name, Rising Auto, existed as an independent premium EV brand from 2021 until November 2024, when it was folded back into Roewe as a product line rather than continuing as its own brand.

Great Wall Motor’s three brands

GWM (Great Wall Motor) splits its range by purpose: Ora builds electric city cars, Haval is GWM’s mainstream, best-selling SUV brand globally, and Tank builds proper body-on-frame off-roaders, genuine rivals to the Land Cruiser and Defender.

GAC Group

GAC Group runs two distinct brands: GAC Aion, its electric-only marque, and Trumpchi, its mainstream domestic brand, sold internationally as GAC Motor.

Dongfeng

Dongfeng Motor Corporation owns Voyah, its premium EV and hybrid brand, alongside Mengshi (internationally, M-Hero), a high-end electric off-road brand built to rival BYD’s Yangwang U8.

FAW Group

FAW Group owns Hongqi, China’s oldest luxury and state-limousine brand, alongside Bestune, FAW’s higher-volume, more accessible marque.

NIO’s three-tier family

NIO is fully independent itself, but has built two sub-brands beneath its own premium range: Firefly, a compact, boutique EV brand, and Onvo, a mass-market family SUV brand. Genuinely, NIO’s own core brand currently has no right-hand drive product at all, while Firefly does, a reminder that sub-brands can move faster than their parent.

Huawei’s Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance

Worth calling out separately, since it isn’t ownership at all, is Huawei’s HIMA alliance, a technology partnership rather than an equity stake, spanning three brands covered on this site. Huawei supplies driver assistance software, sensors and smart cockpit technology; each manufacturer keeps its own factory, sales network and shareholders. Seres builds the Aito range, Chery builds Luxeed, and BAIC builds Stelato. All three lean heavily on Huawei’s tech in their marketing, but Huawei owns none of them.

The simpler relationships

Only one brand covered on this site now has a parent company but no sibling sub-brand to draw as a tree:

• Skywell — owned by Skyworth Group and Nanjing Golden Dragon Bus Company

Fully independent brands

A handful of brands on this site answer to no parent conglomerate at all, and have no sub-brands of their own either, standalone, publicly listed companies that are simply themselves: XPeng, Xiaomi, and Li Auto.

See our full Brands page for the complete list, with history, specifications and UK availability for every brand and model covered.