More Chinese car production heads to Spain
- Matthias Schmidt
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
Note: Another day, another Chinese production footprint landing in Europe.
GEELYÂ is widening its European footprint in cooperation with Ford Motor Company, which is in danger of seeing its Western European market share dip below 3% in 2026, leaving a raft of production capacity open for others to exploit.
Chinese OEMs are keen to make the move to the EU to mitigate against anti-subsidy tariffs, with the scope expected to widen to include all fuels going forward.
Under the proposed ownership structure, Ford would maintain 66% ownership of its Valencia plant while Geely Auto would command 34%.
This underlines Geely's intent to enter the regional market at a more accelerated pace, given its market entrance stumbled despite being one of the first Chinese OEMs to enter the market in the early 2020s, focusing on a low-volume premium perspective initially.
However, Q2's over 7,000 regional registrations from the more mass-market namesake Geely brand, mainly in Italy and the UK according to our data and research, give a first indication of where the journey could go moving forward, heading more into a mass-market volume direction.
The EU's IAA piece of legislation, which is still being passed around 27 EU member states, is likely to indicate greenfield FDIs will only be possible with a certain amount of Europeans being employed, the facility having to be part of a JV with a local player with the controlling stake in the hands of the European partner and some form of IP transfer having to take place.
This is likely to indicate that capacity utilisation of incumbent plants like this deal is presumed to be the way forward for Chinese OEMs for now, which is good news for workers currently employed at those facilities.
Geely Holding and Geely Auto brands are also likely to have further local capacity localisation available at the Volvo Cars Ghent facility going forward, as well as Polestar leveraging the Slovak SPA3 exclusive facility.
No Geely Auto brands will likely use that facility, however, as Volvo indicated Geely Auto brands have so far shown no interest in leveraging the SPA3 platform.
Following the state-controlled SAIC MG facility and the Leapmotor/Stellantis and CATL plant, Spain is once again likely being rewarded here for its refusal to back the anti-subsidy tariff legislation, which was enforced from November 2024 and can be seen as a lesson to other nations of rewards on offer for falling in line with Chinese policy.
Chinese brands controlled a record 10.7% of the West European new passenger car market during Q2 2026, according to our own data and research, and surpassed Japanese brand volumes for the first time in the quarter to become the region's largest Asian nation.
* Chinese OEMs doesn't include Volvo Cars which we still classify as European.
This includes extracts from one of our full studies which are available below. To discover more about out studies just contact us
Scope: Western Europe's 18 Markets: EU Member States prior to the 2004 enlargement, plus EFTA markets Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, plus UK – accounting for 90% of the enlarged European region.