Automotive is where China's semiconductor localization drive stops being an industrial-policy abstraction and becomes a procurement mandate with a deadline. China builds roughly a third of the world's vehicles — 34.4 million sold in 2025, per CAAM — and more than half of them are now NEVs, which carry two to three times the silicon of a combustion car. That makes China the largest single market for automotive chips on the planet, and until very recently one of the least self-sufficient: as late as 2020, domestic content in Chinese vehicles was on the order of 10%. Beijing noticed, the 2021 chip shortage made the point unmissable, and the Nexperia fiasco of late 2025 turned a policy preference into a strategic conviction on both sides of the trade war. The result is the fastest, most politically supercharged import-substitution campaign in the industry — running against the deepest qualification moat in semiconductors. This primer maps who is winning, category by category.

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