“Can you believe it? Just last month at this time, the local media’s slogan for the exhibition was ‘How Can Prevent Oil Pollution,’ but when we arrived, we found the slogan had changed to ‘How Can Avoid Oil Crisis.'”
On Tuesday night, before going to bed, I was scrolling through my WeChat Moments when I saw a post from a friend who works in the overseas business department of a car brand in southern China. He had a location tag in Johannesburg, South Africa.
After chatting, I learned that he was attending “EV & Charge Live Africa 2026,” which is the South African International New Energy Electric Vehicle and Charging Station Exhibition.
“So, the current situation is extremely favorable for your new energy vehicle business!” I blurted out, only to be immediately corrected by my friend—
“Perhaps it is in the South African market, but it’s not universally true across Africa… Even if oil prices multiply several times, most African countries will still only have gasoline cars, and those will still be secondhand cars.”
After all, there are 600 million people south of the Sahara Desert who lack access to a stable power supply.
In late February 2024, Great Wall Motors held a press conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, specifically to announce the launch of its Tank 300 model in the “Rainbow Nation.”
Great Wall Motors is not my area of expertise, but one sentence in the related news is hard to ignore—2024 marks the seventeenth year that Great Wall Motors has been in the South African market.
Noticing this, I checked the information and confirmed that Great Wall Motors entered this market on the other side of the world as early as 2007 with its pickup trucks, and has persisted in cultivating it year after year. Over the past two decades, it has successively introduced more competitive products such as the Haval H6 and later the Great Wall Cannon series.
In the same year that Great Wall entered South Africa, Geely and Chery also did so. However, the timing of these three domestic brands’ entry was not ideal.
From the perspective of the period around the Beijing Olympics, Chinese automakers at that time had basically learned how to manufacture cars through technology transfer via joint ventures and self-learning.
However, constrained by historical accumulation and innovation capabilities, both their technology and brand value lagged behind European and Japanese brands that had established themselves in the region. For a long time, Great Wall, Chery, and Geely could only rely on price advantages to slowly expand their influence in the local market.
For the reasons mentioned above, Geely and Chery ultimately couldn’t hold on. They announced their withdrawal from the South African market in 2014 and 2018, respectively. However, in November 2021, the latter made a comeback with the competitive new product Tiggo4 Pro (Tiggo 5X).
The turning point came in 2023. At the end of that year, the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers in South Africa released data that revealed this shift: for the first time, some models from Chinese brands surpassed traditional powerhouses in the popular family SUV and crossover vehicle categories.
Localized versions of the Great Wall Haval H6 even outsold the long-time top-selling Volkswagen Tiguan, while several Chery SUVs followed closely behind, ranking among the top sellers.
Since 2010, the increasingly stable quality and consistently competitive prices of Chinese-made cars gradually earned them a good reputation in the South African market, while various proactive marketing strategies also proved effective.
For example, Chery’s long-term role as the official vehicle supplier for the BRICS summits in South Africa significantly enhanced its brand image locally.
If 2023 marked the establishment of a foothold, then from 2024 onwards, Chinese brands began to experience explosive growth in the South African market.
That year, the overall South African new car market was shrouded in uncertainty due to factors such as inflation, with cumulative sales declining by 3% to 6% year-on-year. However, it is precisely this environment that has highlighted the cost-effectiveness advantage of Chinese brands, driving overall market performance to grow against the trend.
Data from research institutions shows that the market share of Chinese brands in the South African light vehicle market surged from a mere 2% in 2019 to 9%. Even more noteworthy is the rapid expansion of the brand portfolio.
From 2023 to 2024, brands such as Dayun, Foton, GAC, LDV (a British brand acquired by SAIC Group), as well as Chery’s Oumonda, Jaecoo, and Jetour, and even BYD, successively entered the South African market, offering a dazzling array of products to local car owners.
However, this period was only the beginning of an explosion.
As Africa’s largest economy, the South African government attempted to seize the opportunity presented by the global automotive industry’s shift towards new energy vehicles. In 2024, its Department of Trade, Industry and Competition released a White Paper on Electric Vehicles, stating the need to shift towards electric vehicle and electric vehicle component manufacturing to ensure South Africa’s continued status as a global exporter of automobiles and auto parts. It also introduced a series of incentives for new energy vehicles.
These policies created a favorable policy environment for the development of new energy vehicles in Africa and provided strong policy support for the entry of Chinese new energy vehicle companies.
