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Jeep, Peugeot, Alfa Romeo, and other Stellantis brands won't be overtaken by Leapmotor just yet, says its global head of brand strategy.
Leapmotor International’s global head of brand strategy, product and marketing, Francesco Giacalone, said there was a "long" way to go and more markets to break into before Leapmotor could topple Stellantis’ other brands.
“There is long journey because there are brands in Stellantis that are extremely strong. There are markets which, where we don't play, there are North America we don't play, which is number one market in terms of size and profitability, of course. So it's long journey,” Giacalone said.
No major Chinese car brands have yet been able to crack the United States market, with the US placing strict tariffs on Chinese imports.
But as the parent company of iconic US and European brands including Jeep, Ram and Peugeot, Stellantis could utilise facilities in the US to build and sell cars locally.
“If a market is particularly successful [and we] will need more volumes, we have the opportunity to use, through the joint venture [between Stellantis and Leapmotor] one of the Stellantis manufacturing sites where we [can] instal the platform and manufacture on behalf of Leapmotor there,” Giacalone said.
Leapmotor has big ambitions, planning to sell 2.5 million vehicles per year by 2030, with 1 million of those intended for the international market.
But Francesco was clear that Leapmotor was not a Stellantis ‘brand’ in the same sense that Jeep, Maserati and others are. Instead Stellantis, which owns 20 per cent of Leapmotor, considers itself only as the distributor of Leapmotor vehicles internationally.
“[Leapmotor] in this moment is distributed by Stellantis, every time I see [the media say] it's a brand of Stellantis group, unfortunately it's not correct,” Francesco said.
Ultimately however, Francesco’s ambitions are most focused on toppling other Chinese brands, at least in Australia, not Stellanti's own.
“Being number one, number two, we do our race against the, uh, direct competitor we consider, which are the other Chinese players. Yeah. Yeah. Then, uh, in the [Stellantis] family, we will be happy when we will be second or third and the others will be far ahead and, but still we will be ahead of, of Chinese players.”
Max is the News Publishing Coordinator for Drive. He enjoys creating engaging digital content, including videos, podcasts, interactive maps, and graphs. Prior to Drive, he studied at Monash University and gained experience working for various publications. He grew up playing Burnout 3: Takedown on the PS2 and was disappointed when real life car races didn’t have the same physics.
