XPeng's Profit Engine Is No Longer Under the Hood
Published on 09/22/2026 at 12:40 | Editorial boerse-global.de
China's electric-vehicle makers have talked themselves into a corner: they churn out heavily tech-laden cars at a furious pace and barely make money on the metal itself. A merciless price war at home has left deep marks on their income statements, and XPeng is a case in point — the company posted a net loss of 3.12 billion yuan for the first half of 2026.
The market has already rendered its verdict. At a recent price of 9.03 euros, the stock has halved since the start of the year, and it closed yesterday at 9.15 euros, roughly 49 percent lower year-to-date. That leaves the shares hovering just 3.9 percent above their 52-week low — a defensive posture that says investors are not yet buying the turnaround story.
What He Xiaopeng is selling them instead is a fundamental rethink of what XPeng actually is. The founder is quietly abandoning the dream of making it big purely as a volume manufacturer and steering the group toward becoming a technology supplier and software house.
Where the money actually comes from
The half-year figures lay bare the gap between XPeng's two businesses. Vehicle sales remain thin on margin, while services and technology cooperation have turned into a genuine profit driver.
The engine behind that shift is the alliance with Volkswagen, which took a 4.99 percent stake in XPeng back in July 2023 for around 700 million US dollars. In March, series production began on the partners' first joint model, the ID.UNYX 08, which leans on XPeng's cockpit systems, Turing AI chips and driver-assistance software. The payoff showed up in the second quarter of 2026, when service and other revenue surged 93.9 percent to 2.7 billion yuan.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying XPeng?
For legacy automakers, the appeal is straightforward: at VW, the joint development cut project costs by as much as 40 percent, according to industry estimates. XPeng, for its part, is not stopping at Wolfsburg. Reuters reports that management is in talks with potential suitors to license its electronics architecture, driver-assistance software and AI semiconductors to other manufacturers and overseas developers. Roughly six months ago the company set up a dedicated team to commercialize that technology.
It is not alone in that pursuit. Rivals NIO, Li Auto and Leapmotor are also opening up their component and chip work to outside buyers, as China's industry elite tries to carve off a slice of a market long dominated by suppliers such as Bosch and tech giants like Huawei.
Building cars where the tariffs aren't
At the same time, XPeng is walking away from the idea of supplying the world from giant Chinese factories alone. To get ahead of trade barriers and import duties, management is assembling a network of local contract manufacturers.
Assembly is underway in Graz with Magna Steyr, deliveries of locally built units recently began in Malaysia, and in Indonesia the group took a majority stake in a production company. The geographic spread is starting to show in the sales stats: outside China, XPeng moved around 49,400 vehicles in the first eight months of this year, already beating its entire overseas volume for last year. Measured against total deliveries, the export share nearly doubled to 19 percent in the first half.
Those gains are partly offsetting weakness at home, where first-half deliveries in China are estimated to have shrunk by a quarter year-on-year.
Robots, a four-dimensional brain and a Paris debut
How far the company is willing to push beyond cars became clearer on Tuesday. The humanoid robot IRON has moved past the prototype stage and into pre-series production, with a fully automated line in Guangzhou now running and series manufacturing targeted for the end of 2026. XPeng also rolled out an over-the-air update to its operating system, switching from static 3D spatial perception to four-dimensional modeling that is designed to compute traffic events six seconds ahead.
The G9L SUV, unveiled on September 18 and set for its world premiere at the Paris Motor Show in October, serves as the carrier for that technology. The overlaps with the Chinese suppliers Tesla recently examined are considerable.
XPeng is wagering that the know-how behind autonomous driving and physical artificial intelligence is worth more than the welded-together car wrapped around it. Whether two-legged robots and flying vehicles can generate dependable cash flows any time soon remains an open bet for shareholders. The transformation is risky and capital-hungry — but with margin pressure in carmaking showing no sign of easing, He Xiaopeng has few alternatives to pushing into new territory. What the stock now needs is for the letters of intent to turn into signed licensing deals.
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