Volvo CEO Is Predicting Chinese Dominance Of Our Automotive Future. "Jalopnik" 5090

 

BY MATTHEW DEBORD   SEPT. 9, 2025 12:05 PM EST

 

It's fair to say that recently unretired Volvo CEO Håkan Samuelsson has some special insight when it comes to China and the car business, so when he says that the Middle Kingdom is going to set the pace for our automotive future, he should be taken seriously. China's Geely controls Volvo, and Samuelsson has seen up close how rapid the country's rise has been over the past decade. From a Bloomberg interview (via Automotive News), here's a taste of his comments:

 

There will be new dominant players, exactly as Ford, GM, Toyota and Volkswagen were in the old world. In the new world, there will be two or three very strong Chinese brands. That makes the room for the old ones tougher. So, this will trigger a [wave of] restructuring. Some companies will adapt to new circumstances and survive. Others will not.

 

Ouch! Samuelsson clearly thinks Volvo will make it, but he also isn't hemming and hawing when it comes to difficulties the brand faces. In the same Bloomberg interview, he offers a cavalcade of urgent changes and thorny challenges, ranging from Volvo's need to concoct an interim electrification strategy that leans on hybrids to figuring out how to navigate the China factor in the face of U.S. tariffs.

 

Excessive competition in China

 

Samuelsson obviously doesn't think the current structure of the Chinese market will persist. There are too many brands, with spectacular domestic growth powered by the anticipated size of the market overall. If you look around the world, you see U.S. and European markets that have peaked. The only major market that can promise massive growth is China, and so that's where the focus naturally falls.

 

Increasingly, Western automakers are surrendering to China's onslaught of domestic players and retreating from selling their cars in the local market. Their concern now is that China will try to solve its problem of manufacturing overcapacity by dumping vehicles on primarily the European market, attempting to grab share with low prices. The U.S. is less vexing both because of the tariff wall and the fact that Americans are the only people in the world who favor, at scale, great big SUVs and pickup trucks that run on gas. Samuelsson is 74 years old and has seen this movie before; he knows that consolidation will create Chinese winners and losers, and that the winners will ultimately be quite powerful.

 

What is Volvo's role in this?

 

Volvo is lucky that it has backing from Geely, and if you read between the lines of his comments, you can tell that Samuelsson knows it. But like other small, offbeat brands such as Jaguar, Maserati, and Aston Martin, – small, Volvo's position is precarious. Yes, it posted some good numbers for EV sales in 2024, but with government incentives disappearing in the U.S., that performance could be hard to repeat. Most of its sales are still in Europe, and that region is setting up to be the industry's main battlefield, with the Chinese cars coming in droves.

 

What Volvo has going for it, of course, is the Geely factor combined with brand value that's still pretty solid. That's why it can still sell more than 750,000 cars a year. It doesn't entirely need to go all-in (yet) with EVs, thanks to a diverse powertrain strategy that also features plug-ins and hybrids. That said, the conundrum for the future is to figure out where Volvo fits in a radically altered automotive landscape. Success would probably mean sticking around as a respectable player in a China-dominated future, much as it did in the past when the U.S., Japan, and Germany ruled the world.

 

Read More: https://www.jalopnik.com/1963236/volvo-ceo-predicting-chinese-dominance/