Who makes Aion, Jaecoo and Deepal: China's export badges explained

Aion belongs to GAC. Jaecoo and Omoda belong to Chery. Deepal belongs to Changan, and Nammi to Dongfeng. These are recent brands, most of them created since 2017, and their names were chosen for markets outside China rather than taken from the company that owns them, so the badge on the car does not name the manufacturer the way Toyota or Volkswagen does.

The four parents are among the largest carmakers in the world, and each of them has spent decades building cars in China for a familiar foreign brand as well as its own. Brands sorted by parent group are in the Chinese ownership map. The entries below are grouped by how each brand relates to its owner: some are sold only outside China, some sit two levels below the group that owns them, and one is widely associated with a technology company that holds no stake in it.

A badge that does not exist at home

Omoda, Jaecoo and Lepas were created for export. The cars themselves are sold in China as well, but under Chery badges and different model names, so there is no domestic version of the brand to compare against: no Chinese sales history under that name, no local reviews, no owner reports.

Chery established Omoda in 2022 and Jaecoo in April 2023, and runs the two as a single division with its own dealer network, which is why they usually arrive in a new market together. Chery itself was founded in 1997 in Wuhu, in Anhui province, and has been China’s largest vehicle exporter for years. The Jaecoo 7, the model that took the brand to third in UK sales in the first half of 2026, is sold at home as the Chery Tansuo 06.

Lepas followed in April 2025 as the more premium of Chery’s export brands, and reached export markets ahead of its domestic introduction. Its first cars show the relationship directly: the Lepas L6 EV is twinned with the Chery Tiggo 7 on the same LEX platform. The badge is new, and the engineering under it has been on sale in China for years.

A new badge on an old state-owned parent

Here the badge is recent and the owner is not. Each of these three brands belongs to a state group with decades of history, and in each case that group also builds cars for a Japanese or American partner.

Aion is the largest of them and the one most often asked about. GAC, the state-owned group in Guangzhou, set up the company in 2017, launched Aion as an electric sub-brand in 2018 and renamed the subsidiary GAC Aion in November 2020. By 2023 it was the third-largest battery-electric brand in the world after Tesla and BYD. GAC also runs the GAC Toyota and GAC Honda joint ventures, so the group behind the newer badge is the one that assembles those Japanese cars for the Chinese market. The Aion V carries the badge unchanged worldwide.

Deepal belongs to Changan, the state-owned group in Chongqing and the Chinese partner in the Changan Ford and Changan Mazda joint ventures. Deepal is the export name: at home the brand is Shenlan, which means deep blue. It launched in 2022 and became a standalone brand in 2023. The Deepal G318, a body-on-frame range-extender SUV, has gone from China to Australia, the UAE, Egypt and Russia under the Deepal name.

Nammi is a Dongfeng brand, announced in August 2023 for small electric cars, with the Nammi 01 entering production in January 2024. Dongfeng is the Wuhan state group that has built Nissans and Hondas in China for decades. In Norway, Finland and Switzerland the Nammi 01 is sold as the Dongfeng Box, which puts the parent company’s name on the car instead of the brand’s.

A brand inside a brand inside a group

Some of these badges sit two or three levels below the group that owns them, and the level in between is another name that needs explaining.

Hyptec is the clearest chain: GAC owns Aion, and Aion owns Hyptec. It launched in 2022 as Hyper, the premium line above the mainstream Aion cars, and changed its English name to Hyptec in August 2024 for export markets. The Hyptec S600 is presented by its own maker as a GAC premium sedan, which skips the middle level of the chain.

Chery has the most levels of any of these groups. Alongside the export brands sit Exeed, its premium marque, on sale since 2019, and Jetour, created in 2018 for SUVs and MPVs and known as Jietu in China. Both of those sell at home and abroad under the same name. iCAUR completes the group as the off-road-styled electric brand, sold as iCar in China.

The same car, a different name at home

Ownership is one question and naming is another, and for these brands the two come apart. The domestic name is usually the one that leads to the car’s service history, recall record and owner reports, and it is often not the name on the car in front of you.

Deepal is Shenlan in China. Hyptec was Hyper until 2024, and export material still uses both. iCAUR is iCar. The Nammi 01 is the Dongfeng Box across parts of Europe. The Jaecoo 7 is the Chery Tansuo 06, and Chery’s own Tiggo 7 becomes the Lepas L6 in export markets. Even where the brand name holds, the model name can change: the Aion S Plus sedan is exported as the Aion ES, while the Aion V keeps its name in every market.

Exeed and Jetour are the plainest cases in this group. Both use one name in China and abroad.

A badge shared with a technology company

This one runs in the opposite direction. The company most associated with the car really is involved in engineering it, and is often assumed to own the brand as well.

Avatr is the example. Changan holds 41.57% and the battery maker CATL about 9.38%, while Huawei, the name most associated with the brand, holds no equity in it and supplies driver assistance and cockpit software instead. The Avatr 07L shows both contributions at once: a CATL Shenxing battery pack, and Huawei’s ADS 5 driver assistance as standard. The shareholding runs the other way, in fact - Avatr bought 10% of Huawei’s Yinwang automotive unit for about 11.5 billion yuan.

The same separation runs through Huawei’s HIMA alliance, where the brand and the manufacturer are different companies by design: AITO is built by Seres, Luxeed by Chery. Huawei supplies the technology and the showrooms, the partner builds the car, and no ownership changes hands. Avatr differs mainly in that Changan, CATL and Huawei set it up together from the start.

Which market the car was designed for

Badge and owner are the first two questions. The third is not usually where the car is built, since almost all of these are built in China. It is which market the car was designed for, because that shapes the specification you receive.

A brand created for export means a car specified for its destination from the start: Jaecoo and Omoda models are tuned, equipped and safety-rated for the markets they are sold in, rather than adapted from a domestic version later. A domestic brand exported under a translated name, like Deepal, works the other way round, with a car designed for Chinese buyers and a second life abroad. A premium brand nested inside another one, like Hyptec, is positioned against a domestic price ladder that may not exist where it is sold.

None of this makes a badge dishonest. Omoda and Jaecoo are genuinely run as their own company, Aion is one of the largest EV makers in the world, and Avatr really was built around Huawei’s technology. It does mean the name on the grille answers a narrower question than it appears to, and the parent company answers the rest.

The same question, sorted by owner

The regional ownership maps take the other cut, listing brands by the group that owns them: China, Europe, the United States and Japan. The European half of this series covers a different case, badges whose nationality does not match their owner.