Less than a month after the National Advanced Manufacturing Conference was held, Guangdong became the first to follow suit. On October 9, Guangdong convened a province-wide advanced manufacturing conference. During the event, Guangzhou unveiled its roadmap: it will push forward across six major tracks — "land, sea, air" and "chips, displays, pharmaceuticals" — to strengthen advanced manufacturing. At present, the total scale of these six tracks has already exceeded one trillion yuan, and by 2030, Guangzhou's total industrial output value is expected to surpass three trillion yuan.
Among the six tracks, "land" carries the greatest weight. Guangzhou's goal is to build a "trillion-yuan smart car city" by 2030, completing the transformation from a traditional automobile production base into a highland for intelligent connected new energy vehicles. Just one day before the conference (October 8), FAW Group, Toyota Motor, and GAC GROUP (GAC Group) signed a new strategic cooperation framework agreement in Guangzhou. The core of the agreement: GAC Group intends to acquire, through the issuance of shares, the 50% equity stake in FAW Toyota held by FAW Group. After the transaction is completed, FAW Toyota will continue to exist as an independent operating entity, and FAW Group will become an important strategic shareholder of GAC Group. As a result, GAC Group will become the common Chinese shareholder of both "North and South Toyota" joint ventures, coordinating R&D, procurement, production, sales, and related work across the two joint ventures.
The automobile industry is Guangzhou's largest pillar industry, but during this critical period of global automotive market restructuring, the city has also genuinely experienced the pains of transformation. This time, the three giants are joining forces with Guangzhou as the strategic fulcrum, and expectations are high for a multiplier effect of "1+1+1>3." Can this former "China's number one automobile city" use this opportunity to wage a brilliant counterattack?
Cross-regional integration of auto groups
The trend toward cross-regional integration in the automotive sector is becoming increasingly clear. On September 11, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and eight other departments issued the "15th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Intelligent Connected New Energy Vehicle Industry," which explicitly proposed "strengthening early-warning and regulation of production capacity" and emphasized "increasing efforts for legal mergers and reorganizations and cross-regional integration of automobile enterprises."
Just three days later, GAC Group's trading suspension announcement disclosed that it planned to acquire, through the issuance of shares, a partial equity stake in "a certain whole-vehicle joint venture company" held by the counterparty. It was subsequently reported that this joint venture was FAW Toyota. This is the first case of central-local automobile enterprise integration in the country, and its signaling significance is extraordinary.
"Currently, the concentration of China's automotive industry is not high, with many car companies and relatively scattered resources. (This integration) aligns with the industry development trend," Zhang Xiang, a researcher at the Automotive Industry Innovation Research Center of North China University of Technology, told City Evolution. He pointed out that GAC and FAW are not merging but forming a strategic alliance. Under the restructuring plan, the "North and South Toyota" pattern that has lasted for more than two decades will be broken. FAW Toyota was established in 2000, and GAC Toyota in 2004; both remain leading players among joint venture automakers. Data shows that Toyota's total sales in China exceeded 1.78 million vehicles in 2025, with FAW Toyota at 805,500 and GAC Toyota at 772,700.
In the next phase, FAW Toyota and GAC Toyota will jointly shoulder functions including R&D, procurement, production, and sales for the joint ventures. FAW Group, Toyota Motor, and GAC Group will jointly support FAW Toyota and GAC Toyota in promoting mutual progress and continuously enhancing competitiveness. In Zhang Xiang's view, this will boost the overall competitiveness of the Toyota brand, further reduce costs, and increase market share.
Of course, the integration between FAW and GAC is not limited to Toyota. Some analysts point out that if the restructuring plan is truly implemented, FAW and GAC will complete equity binding and become a community of shared interests. Guangzhou's auto parts enterprises and R&D platforms are also expected to expand their market reach through North and South Toyota and FAW. In Zhang Xiang's view, FAW is strong in commercial vehicles, and its Hongqi passenger car brand also has advantages in the luxury car segment, while GAC's independent passenger car brands perform well in the market, and GAC Aion and others lead in new energy technology. Based on the cooperation framework, the R&D resources and supply chains of the two major automakers are expected to be further integrated.
As a result, Guangzhou's role in the national automotive industry chain is expected to shift from "important manufacturing base" to "resource allocation hub." As local media put it — inspection and testing, certification services, and quality assurance are typical high-value-added segments. More cross-regional R&D and manufacturing projects landing locally will open up greater market space for local institutions. Once such capabilities accumulate, they will not only serve Guangzhou but may also become the starting point for exporting professional services nationwide and even globally.
Structural transformation
Going back to 2023. Guangzhou's automobile production reached 3.1792 million vehicles, topping China's automobile cities for the fifth consecutive year. But in 2024, it experienced its "darkest moment," with automobile production falling to 2.5398 million vehicles, and both the titles of "number one automobile city" and "fourth-largest economy city" were taken over by Chongqing. As Guangzhou's largest pillar industry, the development of the automobile industry affects every part of the chain. From 2021 to 2025, the value-added growth rates of Guangzhou's automobile manufacturing industry were 4.4%, 6.3%, 1.6%, -18.2%, and -1.6%, respectively, while the growth rates of the city's above-scale industrial value-added during the same period were 7.8%, 0.8%, 1.4%, -3.0%, and 1.2%. It is not hard to see that both curves bottomed out simultaneously in 2024 and are still in the process of recovery.
It was also in that year that GAC Group announced the implementation of a three-year "Panyu Action," fully transforming toward the consumer market, with the goal that by 2027, independent brand sales would account for more than 60% of the group's total sales, challenging 2 million vehicles. Two years on, results are beginning to show. In the first eight months of this year, the value-added growth rate of Guangzhou's automobile manufacturing industry rebounded to 6.6%, and the city's above-scale industrial value-added grew 5.3% year on year. Among this, new energy vehicle production capacity was released at a faster pace, with output growing 48.9%. During the same period, GAC Group's new energy vehicle sales reached 368,200 units, up 63.06% year on year, accounting for 36.36% of total vehicle sales.
Behind this, Guangzhou's automobile industry is ushering in a "counterattack moment." This Guangdong province-wide advanced manufacturing conference revealed that by 2030, Guangzhou aims to build a "trillion-yuan smart car city" and complete the transformation from a traditional automobile production base into a highland for intelligent connected new energy vehicles. Guangzhou's confidence lies not only in its massive whole-vehicle scale but also in its comprehensive supporting ecosystem. As one of the country's three major automobile industry bases, Guangzhou has gathered 10 whole-vehicle manufacturers and more than 1,200 parts and trading enterprises, forming one of the most complete industrial chain ecosystems in China.
Zhang Xiang believes that "software-defined vehicles" have become a trend. Guangzhou has a developed electronics industry and concentrated innovation resources, and its future role in the automobile industry may increase the proportion of parts supporting and services, extending toward intelligent connectivity. With years of accumulation, Guangzhou's automobile industry already boasts one national-level enterprise technology center, one national-level testing center, and 69 provincial-level innovation platforms of various types, building a globally radiating R&D network centered on GAC Research Institute. In 2025, GAC released 12 automotive-grade domestically produced chips; in April 2026, China's first intelligent new energy vehicle with 100% domestically designed chips — the Aion Hyper GT Summit Edition — made its debut. The path toward building a "trillion-yuan smart car city" in Guangzhou is becoming increasingly clear.
Building a strong manufacturing city
Looking toward the "15th Five-Year Plan," Guangzhou has proposed building a trillion-yuan automobile industry cluster. It aims for annual automobile output value to exceed one trillion yuan, and for the ratio of parts manufacturing output value to whole-vehicle manufacturing output value to rise to 0.7:1. This means Guangzhou has elevated the parts supporting industry to a new level and further translated this into spatial resource allocation.
According to the latest plan, Guangzhou will optimize the spatial layout of the automobile industry, strengthen four automobile industry clusters focused on whole-vehicle manufacturing in Panyu, Nansha, Huangpu, and Huadu, and plan and build a number of core parts industrial parks in Zengcheng, Baiyun, Conghua, and other areas. This also provides opportunities for integrating the automobile industry with the low-altitude economy, semiconductors, displays, and other industries. Intelligent connected new energy vehicles highly overlap with the low-altitude economy and embodied robots in supply chains, and the display screens, sensors, and other intelligent components provided by the semiconductor and display industries can also find new space in local industrial integration.
During this Guangdong province-wide advanced manufacturing conference, Chen Jin, chairman of CanSemi Technology Inc., told local media that the predicament three years ago when "the company's capacity utilization rate had just passed 60%" made CanSemi determined to vigorously promote the linking of upstream and downstream players within the province into a chain and the integration of end-use applications. In the past two years, not only has capacity utilization exceeded 90%, but a large number of future orders have also been reserved. Data shows that from 2023 to 2025, CanSemi's operating revenue was 1.044 billion yuan, 1.681 billion yuan, and 2.582 billion yuan, respectively, with a compound annual growth rate as high as 57.30%. Among this, revenue from the industrial control and automotive electronics sectors increased from 111 million yuan to 544 million yuan, with a compound annual growth rate exceeding 120%, and its revenue share in 2025 has already exceeded 20%.
However, a positive trend does not mean that structural transformation has been completed. At the beginning of this year, the "Guangzhou Plan for Accelerating the Construction of an Advanced Manufacturing Strong City (2024-2035)" precisely analyzed its own "shortcomings and weaknesses" — Guangzhou's automobile industry has prominent problems of "relying too heavily on a single vehicle sector" and "strong in fuel vehicles, weak in electric vehicles," while the electronic information manufacturing industry missed development opportunities in terminal products such as mobile phones and computers. Emerging industries such as artificial intelligence, biomedicine, new energy storage, and integrated circuits were deployed late and remain small in scale. The efficiency of transforming scientific research achievements needs improvement, and abundant scientific research resources have not yet been transformed into industrial innovation capacity and real productivity with high quality and efficiency. These structural problems are the deep-seated reasons for Guangzhou's previous economic pressure and are also the reality that must be faced in building a strong manufacturing city.
From this perspective, the six major tracks of "land, sea, air" and "chips, displays, pharmaceuticals" proposed by Guangzhou look more like a precise "make-up lesson" for its own shortcomings — promoting early breakthroughs in high-potential industries such as automobiles, ship and marine engineering, the low-altitude economy, and integrated circuits, and linking them into a chain.