It’s not really working out for General Motors Co. in China.
Once the automaker of choice for Chinese emperors, GM is now fighting to keep a foothold in the world’s largest market. Sales in 2025 were less than half of GM’s historic high of 4 million vehicles sold in 2017. In 2024, the company lost money in China for most of the year before breaking even.
Executives in recent months have touted GM’s return to profitability in the hyper-competitive market, which is “no small feat,” as Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson put it during a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago conference last month.
Still, analysts say the Detroit automaker is a long way from a full turnaround. “They’re surviving, not thriving,” said Bill Russo, founder and CEO of Shanghai-based Automobility Limited.
GM is not alone. Legacy rivals based in the United States and Germany have struggled in China in recent years as buyers there increasingly spurn western models in favor of less expensive Chinese brands featuring market-leading technology, electric powertrains and fresh designs.
Experts use the term “bottoming out” to describe GM’s current status in China, where it shuttered a factory in the northeastern city of Shenyang last year as part of a $2.7 billion restructuring effort to right-size capacity. Much of the pain hit in 2024, when GM reported a $4.4 billion impairment charge over China, including a $2.4 billion restructuring plan to reduce overcapacity.
“What we found and what we were able to do with our partners is restructure that business to be successful in a smaller slice of that market,” Jacobson said. “And what that’s allowed us to do is to capture the brand equity and the share and the recognition that we have as being a longtime participant in that market with the right infrastructure to be able to be profitable at a smaller level than we were. And that’s no small feat.”
It’s ‘not return to dominance’
GM’s history in China spans decades. Before its 1997 China joint venture with SAIC Motor, GM exported Buicks to emperors — a historical fact that persuaded the Obama-era auto task force to retain the Buick brand amid restructuring associated with GM’s federally induced bankruptcy.
But global automakers like GM and Volkswagen AG, to name two, have since struggled to compete with a flood of domestic brands that crank out increasingly high-tech, electrified vehicles with the help of government subsidies.
“They’re not the company that they were in China,” Russo said of GM. “It’s an early recovery, not a return to dominance. And that’s no shame on them. You’ve got to stabilize the patient before you can hope they recover. I call it bottoming out. It’s not a turnaround.”
German carmaker Volkswagen has also promised right-sizing in China, and this year cited tough competition in the country as a factor in its poor performance last year, according to Reuters. Porsche AG this month announced China sales are expected to drop by roughly a third following a 26% drop in deliveries in 2025, Bloomberg reported.
“Domestic subsidies, regulatory environment, complex logistics, distribution — there’s a whole host of reasons why penetrating (is) so hard,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said. Still, to remain competitive globally, Ives said it’s worth it for GM to fight it out “given how important China is on the global stage,” he added. “They have to continue to have a foothold in China.”
How to make money in China
There are two ways to make money in China, Russo said: EVs and exports. Roughly a third of vehicles made in China in January were exported, and domestic demand has not grown for nearly a decade.
“If you’re going to grow, it’s not going to be into the domestic market,” Russo said. “And if you are ICE heavy, combustion heavy, you’re in the shrinking lane because more than half the passenger vehicle market in China last year was new energy vehicle types.”
GM is making progress with its electrified fleet in China. About half of GM’s 1.8 million vehicles sold in China last year were electrified, which CEO Mary Barra touted to investors during a January earnings call. She said she’s “confident in the turnaround of our China business.”
Still, GM and other global automakers in China trail the local competition in terms of tech-heavy offerings, Russo said: “Chinese companies are further evolved not only in the electrification of the propulsion system, but also the reconfiguration of the car as a smart device.
“The digital services in vehicles matter to a population of people who grew up with smart devices, and they expect the car to be part of that universe. That is a total swing and miss, that the multinational carmakers just didn’t get that.”
GM’s answer to increasingly intelligent Chinese vehicles are newly launched Buicks with advanced driving assistance technology: the L7 and ENCASA, the first models from Buick’s new premium sub-brand ELECTRA.
“We will continue to implement a robust product launch strategy in China in 2026, ensuring that every new model includes at least one new energy option to meet the growing demand from local consumers,” according to a statement from GM.
The second path for global automakers to make money in China is through exports, a politically fraught option for U.S. companies under President Donald Trump’s onshoring and tariff push.
“There is a growth lane for what they do have, but they haven’t leveraged it to the extent that they could,” Russo said. “GM has actually been a significant exporter from China in recent years, but mainly through Wuling. A large number of products that they build in that southwest China JV does get exported to other markets. Some of them are combustion-engine powered vehicles branded as Chevrolet, (and) a lot of them go to Mexico. So GM has found a way to leverage their China footprint for global expansion.”
Fighting for a sliver of pie
In 2023, GM’s market share in China was 8.4%, down from 9.8% in 2022 and 11.2% in 2021, according to company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. GM reported a slight uptick in China market share from 7% in 2024 to 7.1% in 2025, although Russo said GM’s reporting “significantly overstates the position of the GM-branded portfolio alone.”
“One important point when interpreting GM’s market share: GM typically reports its China results, including SGMW (SAIC-GM-Wuling),” Russo wrote in an email. “Because Wuling accounts for a large portion of volume — especially in the mini-EV segment — that inflates the overall GM share relative to the performance of GM’s U.S. brands themselves.”
Excluding deliveries of GM’s minority share in SAIC-GM-Wuling, “the picture is quite different,” he wrote. GM brands produced through the 50-50 SAIC-GM joint venture represent about 2.1% of China’s passenger market, he added: “From a PR standpoint, GM does a very good job of claiming full credit for Wuling.”
Declining market share has forced GM and other legacy automakers to realize that the “good ol’ days are over,” said Tu Le, managing director of automotive consultancy Sino Auto Insights.
“We’re going to have to work really hard to not only maintain our market share, but we’re going to build better products and provide more value,” Le said of how global automakers should approach China. He added that to GM’s benefit, the automaker hit its bottom in China before other global companies.
“They’ve stabilized in the world’s most-competitive market,” Russo said. “They’ve had modest growth and restored profitability and taken meaningful steps. But in the China hyper-competitive EV environment, a true turnaround requires consistent share gains, not just a rebound off of a low base.”
sballentine@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: GM is ‘surviving, not thriving’ in China. Here’s why
Reporting by Summer Ballentine, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
