He Xiaopeng: Don't touch cars below 100k yuan; they are large in scale but too small in value.

“From around the 4-5 years starting last year, it’s the most critical 4-5 years for a turning point in China’s auto industry. Scale matters, but scale isn’t absolute. A lot of that scale actually doesn’t have much value.” On April 2, Xiaopeng Group Chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng said in interviews with media outlets including The Paper that, as of today, scale is no longer the most core variable in the automotive industry.

“Having a certain scale is just the first threshold—it’s far from the threshold for winning.” He emphasized.

With the transformation of the auto market and the acceleration of technological iteration, Xiaopeng Group is also continuously optimizing its strategy and adjusting its development direction. Recently, Xiaopeng announced that it would change the company name from “Xiaopeng Motors” to “Xiaopeng Group,” and He Xiaopeng, in an interview, was also responding to this decision for the first time.

He said this is Xiaopeng’s rethinking and layout as it tries to transform from a new auto company into a technology company. Over the past 10 years, Xiaopeng’s most core business has been cars. Looking ahead, as the industry moves from the previous 10-year period of new energy vehicles into a new 10-year period in which new energy vehicles are combined with intelligent agents, we will also see enormous changes in robotics within this new 10-year period.

“2-3 years ago, I still thought that the transformation of robotics would happen in the next 10 years—that is, the third 10-year period. But over the past year, the changes in physical AI foundation models—honestly, they really surprised me. I believe the era of robots will arrive faster.” he added.

He Xiaopeng acknowledged that, “I think today’s car companies aren’t a good business model—they’re all very inwardly competitive. Everyone wants to pursue high-quality development and doesn’t want to get trapped in involution. But fundamentally, in cars, the hardware side itself isn’t a particularly good business model, and that’s the fact I’ve seen over the past few years.”

In an interview, Yang Guang, Product Lead for MONA at Xiaopeng Group, said that across China’s auto market, competition at each price segment is extremely fierce. He explained that now there are 180-190 new models every year. If you also count facelifts and model-year updates, then 1,200-1,300 new cars will be launched.

Given such intense market competition, He Xiaopeng believes that this year’s domestic market will face some challenges, but at the same time it will also be an opportunity for the industry to achieve high-quality development; the overseas market, meanwhile, has ‘huge opportunities.’

He revealed that Xiaopeng also has plans to expand overseas with products not related to automobiles. “We hope that next year, not only cars will go global, but also other product lines will go global,” he said.

On the evening of April 2, Xiaopeng officially launched the 2026 Xiaopeng MONA M03, with prices starting from 119.8k yuan. Within 37 minutes of going on sale, the number of binding orders for the deal exceeded 10k units. This model is one of Xiaopeng’s flagship products, and its monthly sales have repeatedly surpassed 15k units.

He Xiaopeng commented that MONA starting in April is the first car of the company’s second quarter, and it also represents a turning point for Xiaopeng—from scaling up to high-quality development.

He emphasized that Xiaopeng won’t make models priced below 100k yuan. “Xiaopeng 2026 MONA has a much better profit than the 2025 MONA. It reflects one of Xiaopeng’s very important capabilities: the cars are getting better and the pursuit is getting higher in terms of gross margin. Making cheap cars with low profits has no value. So people will see that in the auto sector, Xiaopeng doesn’t go after cars priced within 100k yuan. We have a sense that the value is too small.”

In the fourth quarter of 2025, Xiaopeng achieved quarterly profitability for the first time. He Xiaopeng said, “If we don’t count our spending on brand-new R&D, including chips, the next-generation AI, robots, and some other new products that we can’t disclose, then in the auto sector we have already achieved fairly large-scale profitability. We can also do that this year.”

（Source: The Paper）