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Chery Chairman Yin Tongyue has confirmed that his company is looking to forge closer ties with the UK, including working more closely with its long-time partner in China, JLR.

Speaking to The Independent at the Chery International Business Summit in Wuhu, China, Yin confirmed that Chery was looking to expand from its current sales operation in the UK. “We try to be a citizen of the UK,” he said. “The UK is a very special country. It’s a big country with high technology, a lot of innovation and it’s the finance centre in the world.

“The UK has a very good relationship with the European Union and United States, so everything we try to be. We strongly prepare to be local: local engineering, local R&D, local finance, local manufacturing.”

It’s been reported that Chery has had conversations with Nissan about utilising its Sunderland factory to build Chery vehicles, while Chery will be basing its European headquarters for its Delivan commercial vehicle brand in Liverpool. However, Yin focused more on the potential of Chery’s relationship with JLR to help boost British business.

Chery has had a partnership with JLR in China since 2012 and has just revealed the first of a family of Freelander models designed by JLR in the UK and engineered and built by Chery in China.

“We get a lot of support from JLR, people work very closely,” said Yin, adding: “And so, we have some responsibility to make JLR bigger and great again.”

Owning British brands, like those of JLR – Jaguar, Land Rover, Range Rover – is also something Yin would be keen to achieve. “Once I have a JLR, once I have a Chery, I own it. And then maybe we can get some local brand to be realised again,” he said.

Discussions about Chery using a British brand – in addition to the Freelander name – were confirmed by Guibing Zhang, president of Chery International. “Generally, we are very interesting to recover some old brands in the UK,” said Zhang. “We hope in the future in the UK we also can recover what the UK people like, a very lovely brand we can do together.”

Yin Tongyue, continued saying: “The Freelander – we already make a whole family…“If available, we want a UK brand. A UK brand is very fancy, such as MG – it’s very successful.”

Yin says he has good relations with the UK government, and high-level conversations have already taken place. Yin told us: “We get very strong support from the UK. Just in recent times we have twice met the Prime Minister, once in Beijing and once in London.

“The UK government just said that the UK used to be the biggest car maker in the world, but from 2016 the government was a mess. So how can we make [the UK] fly again? This is what we want.

“We also promised to the government to try to do our best. We invest to have some local teams behind local people. Maybe we try to use some capacity locally – this is the situation.

“We just say: be somewhere, for somewhere. We say in the UK for the UK.”

Yin also says that he is planning to set up a trading company to ship products from the UK to China to offset the balance of trade that currently sits in China’s favour. “We also promised to try and set up the trade company, to take some UK products back to China. The Chinese with the UK is trade unbalance.

“From the Chery side, we try to balance it by ourselves. We take products locally back to China – so a heavy container comes in, and we can carry the container back.”

In just two years, Chery International has had unprecedented success in the UK, with its Chery, Omoda and Jaecoo car brands combining to achieve 2.65 per cent market share in 2025 with 53,604 sales. This year has seen further growth with 5.86 per cent market share so far, while the Jaecoo 7 SUV was Britain’s best-selling new car in the crucial March new registration month.

Globally – just three years after setting up Chery International – the company has achieved over one million sales from the Omoda and Jaecoo brands. A new target of one million sales per year by 2027 was set at Chery International’s April Business Summit.

That growth will come from new brands like Freelander, which is expected to sell cars in the UK, plus the recently announced new Lepas brand that will arrive here later this year, and the iCar 4×4 brand that is also set to be exported to the UK. The Chery, Omoda and Jaecoo brands will also benefit from a new model onslaught, with new cars expected across all three brands in the months and years to come.