Wei Jianjun is tough on efficiency

Author | Zhou Zhiyu

Editor | Zhang Xiaoling

The transformation of the automotive production paradigm has entered a deep-water phase.

Recently, Great Wall Motor officially launched the "Guiyuan Platform." This technical architecture is defined as "the world's first native AI all-power vehicle platform," which will rely on the Guiyuan platform to introduce 51 products across 5 power forms and 7 categories, covering the entire array of models from Ora, Wey, to Tank, and Great Wall pickups. Great Wall Motor Chairman Wei Jianjun interprets this name as a return to the fundamental point that "cars are meant to serve people."

In the past, Great Wall Motor's brand lines were extensive and its technology stack was scattered in the landscape of new energy transformation. There have always been doubts in the market about whether Great Wall can maintain its profit baseline in the second half of intelligence. The launch of "Guiyuan" is clearly an attempt to provide a higher-dimensional response to the increasingly brutal competition in the existing market through extreme unification of the underlying architecture.

According to Wall Street Insights from Great Wall Motor, under this platform, the commonality rate of vehicle components reaches 80%, and the R&D cycle is reduced by about 30%. This means that the overall vehicle R&D, production, and user ownership costs will be significantly lowered.

If the Chinese auto market in 2024 and 2025 is a carnival of marketing, then 2026 will completely return to the harsh reality of manufacturing.

The core features of the Guiyuan platform can be summarized as: extreme modularity and full power compatibility. Great Wall draws inspiration from ancient Chinese movable type printing, decomposing the vehicle structure into 49 core modules and 329 shared components that can be reused, achieving a dynamic vehicle manufacturing technique.

The Guiyuan platform deconstructs the vehicle into components such as engines, transmissions, electric bridges, and batteries. This design allows vehicles to be derived from various models like sedans, SUVs, MPVs, and pickups, much like assembling Lego with limited modules.

Based on the SOA architecture, the platform has accumulated over 2,000 standardized atomic capability tags. These tags transform scattered hardware capabilities into a "library" that AI can understand and call upon, giving the platform strong growth and extensibility.

Through this "movable type" disassembly, the commonality rate of components has been greatly improved. In an industry where independent platforms are generally developed for single models, Great Wall chooses to use a single underlying platform to address the diverse variables of the global market.

This is not only about cost reduction; a senior automotive industry insider pointed out that in a trillion-level track, when the R&D cycle can be significantly shortened, it means that car companies can respond to global market trends from "measured in years" to "measured in months."

This is a smoke-free hunt. Everyone is betting on who can first grasp the profit entry ticket in 2026, the "year of elimination of existing stock."

The timing of Great Wall Motor's release of the Guiyuan platform coincides with a critical juncture in its strategic transformation.

Previously, Great Wall lowered the sales assessment target for its 2026 employee stock ownership plan from no less than 2.49 million units to 1.8 million units, but the net profit target of 10 billion yuan remains unchanged. This indicates that Great Wall is determined to say goodbye to reliance on scale and is exploring a new path to leverage a limited market share for higher profit margins To achieve this goal, Great Wall must make a qualitative breakthrough in per-vehicle profitability.

High-end brands such as Wey and Tank will intensively launch products in the price range of 200,000 to 400,000 yuan. Wei Jianjun pointed out that the average selling price of Great Wall's domestic products has reached 200,000 yuan, while competitors are around 130,000 yuan.

The Guiyuan platform not only shortens the R&D cycle but also reduces parts prices through a highly universal platform architecture. Lu Wenbin, general manager of Ora 5, revealed that thanks to platformization, maintenance costs are expected to decrease by 15%, and repair efficiency will improve by 40%. This not only enhances the vehicle's resale value but also translates into a tangible competitive advantage on the consumer side.

This logic relies on the instinct of surviving through management dividends and technological foundations. Gong Min, head of UBS's China automotive industry research, told Wall Street Journal that the upcoming competition is not about the cheapest price but about providing better products, competing through quality, configuration, brand, functionality, technology, and innovation.

It is worth noting that the Guiyuan platform encompasses almost all power forms available in the market, except for range-extended vehicles.

Against the backdrop of range-extended vehicles becoming popular in 2025-2026, Great Wall still insists on not pursuing range-extended solutions. Wei Jianjun's criticism of this has remained consistent: range-extended technology is backward and inefficient, with too long an energy conversion chain.

Great Wall places more emphasis on its Super Hi4-PHEV system, which adopts an 800V high-voltage architecture and a 4-speed hybrid-specific transmission, achieving an electric range of 363 kilometers and a comprehensive range of nearly 1,400 kilometers. Even in the niche segment of diesel hybrids, Great Wall is attempting to break the stereotype of diesel vehicles being low-end, achieving a breakthrough of reducing comprehensive fuel consumption by 9%.

This choice in technological direction is, in fact, Great Wall's attempt to raise technical barriers to distance itself from low-threshold competitors and maintain its voice in the high-end rugged and multi-purpose market.

Over the past decade, the industry has pursued explosive growth in a single dimension.

However, the logic of Great Wall's "Guiyuan" platform indicates that automotive competition after 2026 will no longer be a single-dimensional price war but will move towards a multi-dimensional coexistence and efficiency-first ecological balance. This represents a more resilient manufacturing system. In this system, R&D will no longer blindly burn money, and production lines will no longer be weak and fragile.

The so-called "gamble" on Guiyuan is, in fact, Great Wall's attempt to simplify the complexities at the front end of the market.

Using the universality of the platform to resolve market fragmentation and using the certainty of production efficiency to hedge against future sales volatility. This may be the true form that China's major automotive manufacturers should embody after experiencing a frantic rush: returning to the starting point to see the endpoint