Title: Disintegration, core competency, and industry structure: Chinese automotive OEMs in electrification and digitalisation

Authors: Wei Zhao; Boy Luethje

Addresses: Institute of Public Policy, South China University of Technology, 14/F, Automobile Technology Building, 381, Wushan Road, Guangzhou 510640, China ' Institut fuer Sozialforschung, Senckenberganlage 26, 60325 Frankfurt/M, Germany

Abstract: The article proposes a framework based on core competency to analyse the structure of China's electric vehicle (EV) industry. We treat the emerging EV industry as a complete and independent unit newly created, not a branch derived from the existing internal combustion engine (ICE) automotive industry. It is vertically disintegrated into three blocks: a battery industry, an intelligent and connected vehicle (ICV) sub-sector, and a segment composed of all EV original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). We discover that vertical disintegration and (re)integration are advancing rapidly and vertically specialised mass production has been consolidated in some key block. With the powerful rise of ICV industry ecosystem, loosely structured strategic alliances between major players of different industry seem to be the dominant form of vertically specialised production networks for the future.

Keywords: industry structure; vertical integration; core competency; product architecture; electric vehicle; EV; internal combustion engine; ICE; original equipment manufacturer; OEM; China.

DOI: 10.1504/IJATM.2025.147857

International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management, 2025 Vol.25 No.2, pp.148 - 166

Received: 30 Sep 2024
Accepted: 08 Jan 2025
Published online: 04 Aug 2025 *

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