KazakhstanLi Auto has signed a local-assembly agreement with Kazakh dealer and industrial group Allur to build the Chinese automaker’s first production base outside China, at Kostanay in northern Kazakhstan. It is a small step for a company that only began exporting a year ago, but it marks a shift from selling finished cars abroad to building them there.
The choice of Kostanay follows a pattern already set by other Chinese and Korean automakers in the country. Kia opened a plant in the same city in October 2025, funded directly by the Korean company rather than a local partner, and a multi-brand facility in Almaty run by AMMKZ began building Chery, Changan and GWM models the previous month. Kazakhstan’s local-content rules reward assembly over import, and its membership of the Eurasian Economic Union gives cars built there tariff-free access to Russia and the bloc’s other member states without a separate export step. Allur already assembles and distributes vehicles for several brands in the country, giving Li Auto CKD capacity to plug into rather than build from nothing.
Central Asia has been the proving ground for this expansion. Li Auto entered Uzbekistan in October 2025 and has since logged 5,056 local deliveries, sold through four stores in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, with two more due to open. The company says the region’s cars are calibrated for local climate and road conditions, and integrate Yandex’s navigation and services with local-language support - an adaptation of a Chinese car’s software stack to an ecosystem built around Russian, rather than the Google or Baidu stacks it uses elsewhere.
The launch car for the Kazakhstan push is the second-generation L9, Li Auto’s flagship six-seat extended-range SUV, which the brand introduced to Tashkent on 30 July. Li Auto has now passed 300,000 cumulative deliveries worldwide, and the Kostanay agreement is its first attempt to build that volume somewhere other than China.
Second-generation flagship six-seat EREV SUV. New 800V architecture, 1.5-litre turbo range extender plus two motors for 571 hp / 710 Nm, 72.7 kWh battery, 420 km electric and 1,650 km combined CLTC, 0–100 km/h in 4.9 s. Steer-by-wire and four-wheel steering. On sale in China from ¥459,800.
