Tech
XPeng is betting big on premium EVs as China’s price war gets even uglier
Chinese EV maker XPeng wants to shed the cheap, mass-market image that “Made in China” has often carried
10 years after three co-founders registered a small EV startup in Guangzhou—one so cash-strapped it couldn’t even afford a proper brand name, and ended up borrowing chairman He Xiaopeng’s own surname instead—XPeng is trying to pull off something much harder than building a car people want to buy in China.
It’s trying to convince the rest of the world to want one too, in a market where “Made in China” hasn’t always meant premium.
Singapore is one of the newest stops on that journey.
In Jul 2024, XPeng debuted here, part of a push the company hoped would take it into 20 international markets that year, up from just four the year before.
That target has since been blown past. Today, XPeng is rolling out new models—like the Mona L03, unveiled at its Munich Brand Day in Jul this year—simultaneously across 65 countries, with overseas deliveries up 96% year-on-year to just over 45,000 units.
Where it all begun
XPeng was founded in Guangzhou in 2014, not by the man who named it after himself, He Xiaopeng, but by two former Guangzhou Automobile Group executives, Xia Heng and He Tao, who were interested in the idea of making “China’s Tesla.”
On the other hand, He Xiaopeng came in from a different industry.
He’d already made his fortune once, co-founding mobile browser company UCWeb and selling it to Alibaba in 2014 for roughly US$4.3 billion (S$5.45 billion). That year, he backed Xia and He Tao’s fledgling car company as an angel investor while still working at Alibaba, and only left to join XPeng full-time as chairman in 2017.
A decade on, the name that began as a fallback is on showroom floors around the world, from Guangzhou to the Nordics—and, since 2024, in Singapore.
XPeng doesn’t sell directly in Singapore, but works through a local distributor: Premium Automobiles. It debuted in the city-state with the G6 Coupe SUV via a pop-up showroom at UOB Plaza 2 in Jul 2024.
This was followed four months later by a permanent, two-storey flagship showroom at 281 Alexandra Road, notably the former site of the old Audi showroom, on Leng Kee’s traditional car-dealer strip.
At roughly 8,700 sq ft, it’s XPeng’s fourth brand-experience store in Southeast Asia, after Malaysia, Thailand and Australia.
Deliveries began at the end of 2024, and XPeng has since said it crossed its 1,000th vehicle delivered in Singapore just over a year after entering the market—a small but significant milestone in a country of six million people.
A premium Chinese EV brand
On pricing, the lineup skews upmarket. The G6 mid-size coupe-SUV, for instance, launched from S$209,999 for the 66kWh variant.
On the other hand, the X9, XPeng’s flagship seven-seat MPV, starts around S$336,999 and runs to S$347,999 for the Long Range variant, marketed as somewhere between a loaded Toyota Alphard and a base Mercedes EQV. It logged 336 registrations in its first five months on sale.
For context, in Apr 2026, the average price of a new car with a Certificate of Entitlement in Singapore starts at S$158,000.
Local marketing has leaned into the “not just another cheap Chinese EV” positioning that vice chairman Brian Gu described.
That premium framing isn’t unique to Singapore, either.
When XPeng launched in Indonesia in mid-2025, the company’s marketing lead there was explicit that it was targeting “premium consumers” who would be “more resilient to economic turmoil,” rather than competing in the mass-market EV price band, the same regional playbook showing up market by market.
Playing the slow game
Set against its Chinese EV rivals, XPeng’s overseas patience has looked almost out of place.
BYD, Nio and Li Auto have all leaned hard into rapid-fire international launches to chase growth as their home market cools.
CEO He Xiaopeng has been candid that there’s no fixed playbook for going international, and that he considers overseas expansion at least a decade-long project to generate half its sales from China, rather than a race in new markets.
“We have taken a very slow path in the past three years because many people think that you should be able to achieve results quickly as soon as you enter the international market. I never thought so,” he said in an exclusive interview with Channel News Asia.
He has always been consistent with his strategy since XPeng’s early years in China, when the company launched fewer localised products than rivals as it laid groundwork for eventually going abroad, arguing the extra preparation time gets earned back later.
The numbers reflect this “slow start” clearly.
XPeng sold only “a few thousand cars” across several European countries over its first three years there, before crossing roughly 1,000 units sold in a single month by Mar 2024.
Two years on, though, that patience has run headlong into a weakening home market—and XPeng is now expanding abroad more aggressively than before.
Surviving a “knockout tournament”
XPeng’s push is happening while China’s EV industry fights through what He Xiaopeng calls a “knockout tournament” at home, one that’s only intensified since he made that statement. Amid price wars and fierce competition, China’s domestic EV sales fell roughly 21% year-on-year in Q1 2026 alone, as demand weakened alongside the broader economic slowdown.
As such, the company went from delivering 141,601 vehicles in 2023 to tripling that pace to 429,445 vehicles in 2025. That growth briefly translated into XPeng’s first-ever quarterly net profit in Q4 2025, a very encouraging inflection point in its history.
However, it didn’t hold for long. By Q1 2026, it was back in the red with a net loss of RMB1.78 billion (S$336 million), and losses continued into Q2 even as volume kept climbing.
Against that backdrop, overseas markets have become less of a long-term bet and more of a near-term necessity for XPeng.
Encouragingly, its cumulative global deliveries passed 1.2 million units by the end of Jul 2026, and its overseas sales and service network had grown to more than 1,000 outlets worldwide by early 2026. up over 150% year-on-year.
Going worldwide
XPeng’s global rollout followed a specific sequence.
Europe came first, starting in the Nordics (Norway, Sweden and Denmark) in 2020— markets chosen for their high EV penetration rates.
From there, XPeng expanded into the Netherlands, and by 2024 had signed agreements to enter Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. The company has also built a presence in the Middle East, including Israel and the UAE, and is targeting Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia across Asia, with Singapore’s G6 launch marking its entry into Southeast Asia proper.
By 2026, that expansion had matured into dedicated infrastructure: XPeng set up independent supply chain teams for Europe and ASEAN, on top of three overseas production projects, a European R&D centre and a Middle East parts warehouse—what the company calls closing the “localisation loop” of production, R&D, service, data and supply chain all being handled regionally rather than out of Guangzhou.
The pace has only picked up since.
In Mar 2026, XPeng entered Mexico under a new three-year Latin America strategy, targeting a leading regional position by 2028. In Jul 2026, it unveiled a long-term strategy for Australia, including five new model launches planned for the second half of the year. Its European manufacturing footprint has deepened too: XPeng now locally produces the G6, G9 and P7+ with partner Magna at a plant in Graz, Austria.
Gu called this “Globalisation 2.0,” back in 2024, betting that international EV demand was about to “grow and explode” in the same trajectory China’s market did, where, as of that interview, Chinese EV penetration had climbed from 10-50% over the prior three years.
At the time, he expected overseas sales to make up around 10% of XPeng’s revenue within one to two years, scaling to as much as half of revenue over the long term.
That timeline has advanced at a significant pace. XPeng blew past the 10% mark well ahead of schedule for Q2 2026. Overseas deliveries topped 20,000 units in a single quarter (Q2 2026) for the first time, up 81% year-on-year, at an average selling price above €40,000 (S$58,800)—well above what XPeng typically fetches at home and among the highest of any Chinese automaker expanding globally.
With the L03 due to begin overseas deliveries in Q4 2026, the company is targeting more than 40,000 overseas deliveries per quarter going forward, and He Xiaopeng has said he expects half of XPeng’s total sales to come from global markets within the next decade.
Not competing on price
A premium price means XPeng has to keep proving the tech behind it.
The company points to its 800-volt electrical architecture in the G6 and G9, which allows for faster charging than most competitors in their class—as evidence it’s competing on engineering, not just price.
That’s a deliberate contrast to rivals who Gu suggests compete on price and end up looking and feeling all the same. Around 40% of XPeng’s global workforce sits in R&D, spread across centres in Silicon Valley, San Diego, Guangzhou and other Chinese cities—infrastructure the company argues supports that premium positioning rather than a race to the bottom.
It has also poured more than RMB50 billion (S$9.45 billion) cumulatively in R&D to date.
Two years ago, He Xiaopeng framed overseas expansion as a slow project he wasn’t in any hurry to finish.
However, that patience is now colliding with a home market that isn’t giving him the runway to wait it out. Whether XPeng can hold onto profit for more than a single quarter, let alone reach the number-one spot back home by 2030, is still a question yet to be answered.
Featured Image Credit: Xpeng, Forbes
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