Best month of the year for several brands with mid-table challengers gaining solid traction.
Chinese new energy brands continue to hit new heights as China’s automotive market moves decisively away from petrol cars, and with the months hotting up, so too are the sales charts with several brands hitting new highs.
In a market that has declined roughly 20-25% compared to last year, all but six brands in our table didn’t improve on their July performance from 2025, with even BYD returning to growth after a period of decline.
The standout performers in July were Leapmotor, who have firmly cemented their place on the brand podium and topped the 100k mark for the first time, and Fangchengbao, whose top five position coincides with improvements at sister brand Denza as well.
Let’s dive into the results and pick apart what we can.
BYD
BYD ended their near year-long run of year-on-year declines last month and in July put some clear distance between this and last year’s results with a 12% improvement, with sharp domestic declines being masked by sharp export gains.
They posted 350,178 sales of the BYD brand globally, a high not topped since November 2025, but where exports this time last year made up just over 80,000 units of that number, this year almost 180,000 BYD Group cars (so including some Denzas as well), were sold on foreign shores, suggesting domestic sales are down from around 230,000 units per month to around 170,000 this year.
That likely won’t bother BYD too much, given export sales are around 2-3 times more profitable than those in the cut-throat market at home, but it does help to give us a picture of how the brand is being perceived in familiar surroundings.
Their quest to surpass Chery as the long-time leader of exports seems to become more a of formality every month, but with Chery just becoming the first Chinese group to export over 200,000 units in a single month, they’ll have to wait a little longer to take the crown.
Geely Galaxy
Deliveries of Geely’s Galaxy range continue to climb steadily as the range expands, but surprisingly their nailed on monthly silver medal appears at risk from a local rival, with Leapmotor edging ever closer to Hangzhou’s best-known automotive group.
Deliveries of 107,797 units were virtually static from last month, but the year-on-year growth of 13% continues to outpace a market in heavy decline this year, as domestic brands stick the knife in to their international counterparts.
Next up for the range is the new TT, which likely won’t move the needle too much. Meanwhile, China’s best-selling EV, the Xingyuan, is beginning life as the EX2 in international markets so could boost figures from beyond China’s borders.
Leapmotor
Leapmotor became just the third brand to hit 100,000 deliveries in a single month since Wuling Baojun’s three hot months last autumn and, after comfortably dispatching SGMW’s brands on the final podium step earlier this year, are now sidling up alongside giants Geely.
We’ve commented on their unblinking rise in previous months, but for any brand, turning 32,000 deliveries in January into 101,267 in July is quite astonishing.
For a brand already posting impressive numbers last year, a 102% year-on-year gain is unheard of, and an 8% month-on-month gain is the icing on the cake.
Entry-level models like the A10 are becoming a common sight already on the ground in China, and export markets like Europe, where such a model should strike a real chord, are yet to come online. There seems no end to their rise just yet.
Wuling / Baojun
Getting used to life off the podium must be a little upsetting for Liuzhou’s famous little couple, but the good news is the last three months have brought very solid performances with deliveries topping 70,000 units in each of them.
The deliveries remain fairly resilient too, though it’s not clear how many of them are sales in international markets, with just a 2% decline on last year, and a 4% gain on last month.
We’d like to know if Huawei-equipped large SUVs are attracting new attention to the brands, since both are best known for their low-tech, cheap and cheerful microcars like the Hongguang Mini, but we might have to do some more digging for that.
Fangchengbao
Fangchengbao surged back into the top five with their second best-ever month in July, topping 41,000 sales and posting an enormous 191% year-on-year gain.
The brand best known for its chunky off-road looks has been silently emerging as a major powerhouse in China’s NEV midfield, much as Leapmotor did last year, and that’s even before they go full identity crisis and start launching slippery saloons and supercars like the Leopard S and Formula Leopard models shown in Beijing.
It’s debatable how much impact they will have given local audiences tend to be less enamoured by sports cars, but it all serves to demonstrate that there’s no obvious cap on the potential of the brand just yet despite their strong position.
Qiyuan
Changan’s more mainstream NEV brand continues to impress with its delivery figures, nudging 40,000 units in July and recording a 39% improvement on last year.
Their performances remain somewhat unstable, however, with the monthly improvement of 88% neatly demonstrating some very curious delivery activity from Chongqing.
Regardless, they’re hitting strong numbers even before any real export activity takes shape, with Deepal’s models tending to gain entry to international markets first, but if the product is strong at home, there’s every reason to believe it can do well give a chance abroad.
XPeng
XPeng’s epic run through last year had looked to be at risk of fading out slightly after a more sombre start to 2026, but the brand promised us new models galore in 2026 and they have delivered, with the MONA L03, GX, and upcoming G9L all on the books so far.
After hitting their third best month of all time last month, there was a slight dip to 38,027 units in July, but this remains 4% up on last year, and leaves the brand sitting pretty at the sharp end of the midfield pack.
Better still for the brand, the launch of the L03 to international media last month seems to have garnered unusually positive reception for a Chinese model, suggesting they might be on the cusp of becoming a familiar household name beyond China, and for all the right reasons.
Zeekr
Zeekr’s continued rise in 2026 reached a new peak in July with a fourth consecutive record month of deliveries taking the brand to 35,837 units.
That’s a sizeable 111% improvement on the same month last year and sees the brand frimly outpace rivals like Li Auto and NIO, while keeping them in the hunt for XPeng.
The brand appears to finally be building some momentum in international markets, in particular Australia, and is expected to launch in the UK before the end of this year.
AION
GAC’s AION brand is another that has successfully reinvented itself in order to reverse a period of decline, and while numbers aren’t quite at 2024 levels, they’ll be glad to be outperforming last year by 32%.
Deliveries just under 35,000 units is being fuelled by new EREV models alongside BEV variants, as well as collaborations with JD.com for online purchases of battery swap-capable models like the UT and RT.
Li Auto
Li Auto continues to tread water in 2026 but has at least stemmed the bleeding with the i6 fully electric model now regularly one of the top 5 best-selling NEVs in China.
Deliveries of 30,468 units is about average for their performance this year, but crucially is starting to slip further behind big rivals AITO, whose tech-packed SUVs continue to drive the HIMA group’s sales.
Li Auto is clearly working to stem the blood loss on the EREV side of the garage, and with the updated L6 coming on stream soon we’ll get a better picture of how well positioned they are to compete with models like Xiaomi’s new Skynomad N70 in that area of the market.
Xiaomi
Xiaomi remained stable for a fourth consective month at more than 30,000 units, which isn’t bad going for a 2-car brand with one model now 12 months into its life and only domestic sales.
While the new Skynomad N70 and N90 models might not arrive in time to significantly boost August figures, the rumours are that around 100,000 pre-orders were taken following the reveal at the end of last month.#
The only curiosity is that Xiaomi hasn’t released those numbers themselves, given how much fanfare there was around the YU7 achieving 270,000 pre-orders in one hour last year, and 100k pre-orders for a larger, more expensive model should be worthy of celebration.
Deepal
Unlike sister brand Qiyuan, Deepal is at least relatively consistent with their delivery numbers, though July was their second-worst reported month this yeas as they slipped below the 30k mark to 29,213 units.
Short term, that’s a fairly unusual 13% drop in deliveries, but long term the brand continues to outperform the declining market, climbing 8% on last July’s performance.
Arcfox
Arcfox deliveries go from strength to strength in in 2026, and while July was a minor dip on June, the big picture shows a brand now firmly in the plus-20k category growing by 149% year-on-year.
23,517 units delivered in July is likely in most part to the T1 hatchback, which now has a visible presence on streets in China outisde of Beijing, and with a new mid-size model just revealed by MIIT, this is a number that could still grow.
NIO
NIO continues to ride high on the back of the success of the ES8 and ES9 SUVS, with the ES8 just passing 130,000 unit mark in just 305 days, and the ES9 passing 20,000 units in short order.
NIO has, perhaps wisely, not reported how much of the total figure is dependent on those two models, given previously this was around 70-80%, but with both models being higher margin items they likely won’t be too concerned just yet.
Outpacing your own result from last year by 58% is a headline well worth writing, and with the wider group up 71%, it could just be that NIO has weathered its choppiest waters and is ready to fulfill all that promise, even if European sales are dismal.
Denza
Could the much-maligned Denza brand yet make a confounding comeback in 2026? On this evidence, it’s already underway.
After struggling to break through even the 10k sales mark in early part of the year, the resurgence over the last few months has come as some surprise with the brand breaking 20k sales last month and just missing out in July.
That’s a 69% improvement over last year, and suggests that BYD is really giving their premium brand a push ahead of European sales beginning in earnest.
Lynk & Co
Not a great month for Lynk & Co, following the market trend in falling 22% year-on-year to 14,069 units this month.
That’s also a 9% drop on last month and less than half of their peak of nearly 30,000 in October last year.
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the ratio of new energy vehicles hit a new high of 86%, suggesting Lynk & Co might be in a transition phase of sorts to try and end all combustion-only sales in the near future, but where does that leave the popular 03?
Voyah
Voyah’s star has been in steady but not dangerous decline in recent months, culminating in just 13,189 units being delivered in July, albeit still a 9% improvement on last year.
That will likely all change when the brand’s Xiaomi YU7 rival, the Passion S, comes onto the market later this month, with pre-orders already reported over 10,000 units.
If all goes well, it could push the brand back towards the 20k club with brands like Arcfox which is where they’d hope to be by the end of the year.
Onvo
Onvo once again eeked out a plus-10k month in July, but much like after previous launches, the peak numbers are slowly declining.
While that means a 14% drop compared to June, it is a 70% gain over last year, and in the end that’s the number that matters in a chart that will be bob up and down throughout the year.
The L90 has just reached its first anniversary, surpassing 60,000 deliveries in the process, and while that’s surprisingly only half of the more expensive ES8’s numbers, it’s still a success story, one the L60 wouldn’t mind a slice of.
Ora
What’s this? You look away from the market for three months and suddenly one of the poorest performing brands of the last two years is clearing a 10k month.
Hats off to Ora, whose deliveries seem to have quadrupled in the last two months, hitting what we believe is a new record high in July, and outpacing last July by 152%.
The revival would likely seem to be single-handedly the work of the new Ora 5 SUV, which now comes in BEV, ICE, and soon PHEV variants. Apparently the market wasn’t ready for underwhelming doe-eyed BEVs, but is OK if they’re petrol-powered.
Since we don’t yet know the breakdown on powertrain, we’ll have to go with the overall figure for now.
Wey
Wey seems to be in a bit of a rut at the moment, perenially delivering 7k months and never quite breaking the cycle, resulting in a par-for-the-course 23% year-on-year decline.
New MIIT filings have just revealed the brand’s first BEV models are incoming, which is kind of ironic given sister brand Ora is going the other way, but with EVs continuing to dominate Chinese car sales, it’s probably a smart move to make.
AVATR
AVATR is another brand that continues to underperform, matching the overall trend in car sales in China with a 24% year-on-year decline to 7,626 units in July.
With no major new models on the horizon, we’re not entirely sure where the next win is going to come from with a brand whose products deserve much better.
firefly
firefly continues to potter away in the 5k-plus region, posting a pretty hefty monthly drop in July of 17%.
Year-on-year growth isn’t so important given the brand only launched around this time last year, so don’t be lured in by the large figure here.
Maybe this is just the size of the market for a premium compact car in China, but things aren’t improving at all where the car sells abroad and should do better. Clearly NIO needs to pump some better coverage in.
Yangwang
Like much of the BYD Group, Yangwang’s numbers are looking up, with 485 unit sales in July a 43% improvement over last year.
They’re not remotely in the 2k region they managed when Yangwang was launched, but it’s a start.
The question worth asking is, are Chinese consumers with the money to afford Yangwangs still unsure about going Chinese when they could go Italian or German instead? For now, the answer might be yes.
Editor’s Comment
What a change a few months makes. While stories of China’s car market contracting by around 20-25% make most of the headlines, it appears that the victims are generally the foreign brands. On the evidence of the green on our graphic at the top, China’s top 25 or so NEV brands are doing pretty well for themselves with a handful making huge waves in a challenging marketplace.
Notably, some brands have reverted to not repoorting figures at all this month, with iCar and Luxeed two of the usual culprits, and ROX Motors joining them for the first time in ages, despite them reporting throughout thee period of low numbers.
I always look for these little hints that something might not be alright behind the scenes, so we’ll file this and keep an eye on next month. Needless to say, things didn’t look great for them, and this doesn’t suggest it is.
One final note: we’ve decided to remove Tesla from these charts since we don’t get a monthly figure from them, only a wholesale figure, and it’s difficult to know how many cars went abroad and how many stayed in China, but reports at least suggest they’re having some of their best months in a long time, so once we start to compile actual registration data, which they are included in, we’ll cover them in that report.
