“Without scale, there is definitely no future.”
“The moment the price was announced, the whole crowd went ‘ah’ — that kind of feeling is something artists especially love.” When the price of the Leapmotor D19 was revealed, the spokesperson Fei Xiang said.
On April 16, Fei Xiang received the first D19 from Leapmotor Technology CEO Zhu Jiangming. This is the first model on Leapmotor’s D platform, offering features such as dual-chamber air suspension and dual Qualcomm 8797 chips, with a price range set at 219,800 to 269,800 yuan.
“Redefining the value benchmark for full-size SUVs under 300,000 yuan.” Leapmotor claims.
This new energy vehicle maker, with a market value of about 76 billion yuan, is targeting 1 million vehicles by 2026. It plans to launch multiple new models this year, including the A10, A05, D19, and D99, covering an ultra-long price range from 50,000 to 300,000 yuan.
“Recently, how Leapmotor scales up is more important than profit targets — this is a survival issue.” Zhu Jiangming emphasized in an interview that China currently has 17 major automakers, and without scale, a car company has no future.
On the same night the Leapmotor D19 launched, 5 to 6 new cars either went on sale or started pre-sales, making competition extremely fierce. “It’s now a ‘sea of cars,’ and the elimination round isn’t over yet — this will be the norm for the next two to three years.” Zhu noted.
Currently, Leapmotor adopts a product strategy of “over-specification plus high cost performance” to quickly ramp up volume. How does it maintain gross margins and avoid losses? In the interview, management specifically explained several cost-reduction strategies.
First, full in-house R&D.
Leapmotor’s proportion of self-developed and self-manufactured core components has exceeded 65%. Even the software and hardware of automated production lines are self-developed to improve labor efficiency, reduce costs, and better control quality.
Second, platform standardization.
Leapmotor Senior Vice President Cao Li explained that the D series platform does not share much with the B and C series, but the electronic and electrical architecture, CTC battery platform, etc., are largely standardized and reusable. Factory production lines can also flexibly switch between multiple platforms. This way, vehicle development efficiency is high, and once scale is achieved, cost advantages can quickly materialize.
Third, marketing cost reduction.
For example, the Leapmotor D19 launch event, like the A10, was held in Jinhua, a prefecture-level city in Zhejiang Province, where Leapmotor’s main production base is located.
“Setting up such a large stage, launch event costs are too high now.” Zhu Jiangming mentioned that this year’s launches are planned to be held in the same location, and joked that before Fei Xiang, they hadn’t considered hiring a spokesperson.
In 2025, Leapmotor delivered 596,500 new cars for the full year, with a gross margin of 14.5%, which is relatively low among new energy startups, yet it still achieved its first profit of 540 million yuan.
Due to strong sales, Zhu Jiangming is relatively optimistic about the future.
He mentioned that for the 2025 B series, three models basically sold 10,000 units per month. The A10 received over 30,000 firm orders within 20 days of launch.
“Why is every model selling so well? The key is learning from past mistakes.”
He noted that Leapmotor’s past planning errors once brought deep lessons, so now it is very cautious when launching models, deliberately planning and designing the product roadmap.
“For every car we develop, we are the most frugal — even including all labor costs, it’s still 1 billion yuan.”
