Disintegration, core competency, and industry structure: Chinese automotive OEMs in electrification and digitalisation

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The article proposes a framework based on core competency to analyse the structure of China’s electric vehicle (EV) industry. We treat the emerging EV industry as a complete and independent unit newly created, not a branch derived from the existing internal combustion engine (ICE) automotive industry. It is vertically disintegrated into three blocks: a battery industry, an intelligent and connected vehicle (ICV) sub-sector, and a segment composed of all EV original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). We discover that vertical disintegration and (re)integration are advancing rapidly and vertically specialised mass production has been consolidated in some key block. With the powerful rise of ICV industry ecosystem, loosely structured strategic alliances between major players of different industry seem to be the dominant form of vertically specialised production networks for the future. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.