Seres' Zhang Xinghai has greater ambitions now.
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Author | Zhou Zhiyu
Editor | Zhang Xiaoling
Standing in the center of the Chongqing Seres Super Factory, Zhang Xinghai did not leave much time for the cheers from the audience.
On January 13, when a Wenjie M9 slowly rolled off the inspection line, it marked the brand’s first achievement of one million deliveries. Zhang Xinghai, founder and chairman of Seres, made a public commitment on the spot: the first million vehicles took five years; for the next million, he demands it be completed in two years.
Sources close to Seres say this number is calculated only for the domestic market, and achieving this goal is not difficult.
Clearly, Seres, deeply tied to Huawei, now has even greater ambitions.
In the past, Seres was often regarded within Huawei’s map as the "testing ground" for the Smart Selection car model. The market always doubted whether this company, which once produced motorcycle springs and nearly went bankrupt, could sustain Huawei’s massive traffic volumes over the long term.
Zhang Xinghai’s latest statement sets an even more ambitious expectation for the upcoming ranking battle within the HarmonyOS Intelligent Mobility system.
This is a hunt without the smoke of gunpowder.
Everyone is gambling—gambling who can be the first to cross the scale-driven life-or-death line, gambling who can grab the ticket for the next decade in Huawei’s increasingly crowded "circle of friends." And in this round, Zhang Xinghai has put tens of billions in real cash as chips on the table.
To understand Zhang Xinghai’s dash forward, you must first make sense of Seres’s astonishing ledger.
Seres and Huawei are deeply intertwined. Seres’s financial report shows that, since starting cooperation in 2021, Seres has paid Huawei a total of 75 billion yuan in procurement fees over three and a half years.
In just the first half of 2025, Seres’s procurement from Huawei reached 20 billion yuan, while Seres’s revenue for the same period was only 62.36 billion yuan, meaning the procurement costs paid to Huawei represent 33% of Seres's income. Based on the associated delivery volume of 147,000 Wenjie vehicles, this roughly equates to about 136,000 yuan flowing into Huawei’s account for every car sold by Seres.
In traditional auto manufacturing logic, a single supplier rarely receives such a high proportion of procurement. This 136,000 yuan per vehicle cost includes core components like smart cabins and driving assistance systems, and also covers Huawei’s extensive channel sales service fees.
The costs are steep, but Seres still delivers a profit sheet that makes its peers green with envy. Even after paying these massive procurement fees, Seres’s gross margin reached as high as 26.5% in the first half of 2025. By the third quarter, it climbed further to 29.4%, leaving other new forces far behind and securely ranking Seres as number one.
The Wenjie M9’s dominance in the luxury vehicle market above 500,000 yuan—7 out of every 10 vehicles sold in that segment being M9—proves that the tuition fee of 75 billion yuan was not only worth paying, but also bloodily profitable. However, Zhang Xinghai is clearly not satisfied.
Once upon a time, Seres (then called Sokon Group) had thin profits and a depressed stock price; its first collaboration model, the SF5, hardly made a splash in the market. The Wenjie M5 helped Seres climb, and the M9 turned things around completely.
Seres Vice President Kang Bo recalled that when he joined in 2022, cumulative sales had not even reached 30,000 units.
Now, standing at the milestone of one million vehicles, Zhang Xinghai’s sense of crisis is even stronger.
The cold scrutiny of the capital market is a mirror. What it reflects is deep market concern over the "Huawei content" in Seres being diluted. Under HarmonyOS Intelligent Mobility, the "Five Realms" structure is set, and even old aristocrats like Audi are lining up to get involved. As Huawei’s resources inevitably transition from exclusive favor to universal benefit, Wenjie’s sales share within the system has slipped from a solid lead to 72%.
With the Damocles Sword hanging overhead, Zhang Xinghai can only keep embracing Huawei with one arm, while reaching out for a "Plan B" with the other.
This explains why Seres’s R&D bill has suddenly become so aggressive—in the first three quarters of 2025, R&D investment reached 5.06 billion yuan, nearly matching the entire 2024 total. Zhang Xinghai is using current profit windows to frantically make up for shortcomings in chassis, manufacturing, and other "hard tech," seeking to grow a strong body of Seres outside the algorithmic brain of Huawei.
He’s even trying to put eggs in baskets beyond just automobiles: partnering with ByteDance to layout embodied intelligent robots; mandating that 20% of Hong Kong IPO funds go overseas—all to find a breath of independent air outside the "Huawei ecosystem."
Thus, behind Zhang Xinghai’s slogan of "another million in two years" lies a sense of urgency.
This is not just a capacity slogan, but a beachhead assault over future speaking rights. He must use Wenjie M9’s monopoly profits in the high-end market to reinvent Seres itself before Huawei’s "circle of friends" becomes fully crowded.
For this battle, he has put up sky-high chips: 75 billion yuan in "tuition fees" over three and a half years, and nearly 20 billion yuan in recent years for equity in Invoin and buying trademarks.
The so-called "bold gamble" of two million in two years is actually Seres using a more certain future to hedge against uncertainty. After 2026, Seres no longer wants to be just a passenger on Huawei’s war chariot—it wants to become the ticket holder, perhaps even a shareholder partner.
This is the true color behind Zhang Xinghai’s ambition.
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