Song Zhaohuan: Chinese New Energy Commercial Vehicles Need to Break Two Bottlenecks to Go Global

  Reporter Qiao Xiaoling from China Industry Daily

"The competition of future commercial vehicles is no longer a comparison of single vehicles, but a contest of integrated operation systems covering complete vehicles, spare parts, maintenance, energy, and finance." At the New Energy Vehicle Global Cooperation and Development Forum (GNEV2026) held on August 21, Dr. Song Zhaohuan, Vice President and Chief Brand Officer of Geely Farizon New Energy Commercial Vehicle Group, pinpointed the industry's key challenge. He pointed out that the current global new energy commercial vehicle market has huge growth potential, especially in regions where penetration rates are still low, such as Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Chinese brands are facing a rare window of opportunity. However, the industry's long-term high-quality development is constrained by two major systemic bottlenecks: First, insufficient capability in product and local compliance adaptation. Huge differences in laws, working conditions, and operation models across countries mean simply tweaking domestic models cannot meet long-term overseas demands. As commercial vehicles are means of production, customers value all-weather stable uptime and total cost of ownership more. Second, the lack of overseas supporting ecosystem construction. Weaknesses in segments such as spare parts supply, maintenance, energy networks, and financial products will seriously weaken competitiveness. Passenger car delivery completes the loop, but commercial vehicle delivery has just begun.

Relying on the Geely Holding Group's global system, Farizon explored a "hard first, easy later" breakthrough path — proactively taking Europe, with the strictest standards, as a pilot zone to hone system capabilities with high standards. On August 10, the Farizon Xinghan H European version heavy truck, specially designed for overseas, officially went off the line, meeting EU regulatory requirements and being praised as the "King of New Energy Mainlines", set to appear at the Hanover International Truck Show in September. At the manufacturing end, the first vehicle from the Indonesian KD factory has rolled off the line, marking a key step in Southeast Asian localization manufacturing. At the service end, the Ningbo International Spare Parts Global Distribution Center and the German Gaggenau Europe Spare Parts Warehouse achieved "dual warehouse linkage", fully empowering commercial vehicles with Geely's 40-year global passenger car service capabilities. These measures have translated into actual results: From January to July this year, Farizon's cumulative sales exceeded 107,000 units. Its overseas export volume ranked first in the industry in the first half of the year, with a year-on-year growth of 123%, ranking first in export volume in 28 countries including the UK, Australia, and the UAE. Farizon also won international awards such as What Van 2026 "Zero Emission Van of the Year", becoming the first Chinese brand to reach the finals of the International Van of the Year in 33 years.

Song Zhaohuan emphasized that a single enterprise finds it difficult to solve common challenges; high-quality global expansion of Chinese brands relies on collaboration across the entire industry chain. He proposed three initiatives: Co-research standards, jointly build a global quality standard system, and gradually master the discourse power; Share the ecosystem, partner with energy and financial institutions to layout cross-regional energy supply networks and exclusive financial products to solve pain points regarding charging and purchase thresholds; Guard value together, return to technology, service, and lifecycle value, jointly maintain the global reputation of Chinese brands with reliable quality and localized services. Farizon itself anchors the "30111" strategy: selling 1 million units (sets) annually by 2030, achieving the number one sales rank for both domestic commercial vehicles and global new energy commercial vehicles, with a commitment to 100% green electricity for operations by 2030 and carbon neutrality for the full lifecycle by 2045. Song Zhaohuan concluded that Farizon will shift from "product going global" to "brand, industry, and social responsibility taking deep root locally", continuously outputting mature and efficient Chinese intelligent green transport solutions to the world, and contributing Chinese strength to global transportation carbon neutrality.