A figure of roughly US$7,500 per vehicle has put a new spotlight on one of China’s most unusual auto-industry partnerships. A recent report says Huawei received about 50,000 yuan from every Aito sold under the old arrangement with Seres, before the companies shifted the brand to a Seres-led operating model in September 2026. The headline number is striking, but it needs context: Seres has previously confirmed that Huawei received a sales service fee on each Aito, while its public filings show the relationship also covered intelligent-driving hardware, cockpit systems, marketing and access to Huawei’s retail network. The reset therefore is not simply a matter of removing one fee. It changes who controls the product, the showroom, the customer relationship and, ultimately, more of the economics behind one of China’s fastest-growing premium electric-vehicle brands.
What the US$7,500 Figure Really Represents
The newest estimate comes from CarNewsChina, which cited Chinese auto outlet Che Shi Du Ping as saying Huawei received about 50,000 yuan, or roughly US$7,500, for each Aito sold under the previous arrangement. That figure should be treated as a reported estimate rather than an official flat fee. Seres itself said in 2024 that Huawei received a sales service fee whenever an Aito was sold, but the company declined to reveal the exact rate because it was commercially sensitive. Earlier reporting by 21st Century Business Herald described the Huawei “Smart Selection” model as roughly a 10% charge on the vehicle price, split between an 8% channel fee and a 2% technology-licensing fee.
That older percentage-based description also shows why “US$7,500 per car” can be misleading if read too literally. Seres reported that Aito’s average transaction price was 391,000 yuan in 2025. Ten percent of that would be about 39,100 yuan, below the 50,000-yuan figure now circulating. On a 500,000-yuan vehicle, however, a 10% fee would equal 50,000 yuan almost exactly. Aito sells vehicles across a wide range of prices, from more accessible models to versions of the M9 above 600,000 yuan. The most defensible reading is therefore that Huawei’s economics varied with model and transaction price, and that 50,000 yuan is a reported benchmark rather than a company-confirmed universal amount.
Huawei Was Much More Than a Parts Supplier
Huawei’s role was never limited to placing software inside a Seres-built vehicle. In its Hong Kong prospectus, Seres said it purchased intelligent cockpit and driving-assistance components from Huawei for all Aito vehicles. It also bought advertising and promotional services that made use of Huawei’s brand recognition and physical retail footprint. The filing said Aito vehicles were displayed and offered for test drives at about 700 experience centres operated and managed by Huawei, where customers could also place orders before completing sales and delivery through Aito user centres. For a young premium marque, that gave Seres something automakers normally spend years building: immediate access to a nationwide technology retail network and a familiar consumer brand.
The financial relationship went well beyond retail services. In 2024, Seres agreed to buy 919 Aito-related trademarks and 44 design patents from Huawei and related parties for about 2.5 billion yuan. That same year, Seres agreed to acquire a 10% stake in Huawei’s intelligent-vehicle solutions company, Shenzhen Yinwang, for 11.5 billion yuan. Just as important, Seres told Hong Kong investors that its collaboration with Huawei did not involve profit-sharing arrangements. That distinction matters because fees for components, software, marketing and channels are business costs, not the same thing as Huawei taking a slice of Seres’s accounting profit. Calling the arrangement a simple “profit split” obscures how broad, and operationally intertwined, the partnership had become.
Aito’s Scale Turned Small Percentages Into Billions
The old model became financially significant because Aito scaled at extraordinary speed. Seres reported 426,000 Aito deliveries in 2025, up 10.1% from 387,000 a year earlier, while the brand’s average transaction price rose to 391,000 yuan from 377,000 yuan. In January 2026, Aito’s one-millionth vehicle rolled off the line about 46 months after the brand’s launch, with an M9 marking the milestone. That combination of high volume and premium pricing meant even a few percentage points of channel or technology fees could translate into billions of yuan across a full year. What looked manageable when Aito was a small experiment naturally became more visible as the brand moved into mass-market scale.
Seres’s own listing documents also show how concentrated its supplier relationships became. The company said purchases from its largest supplier rose from 5.8 billion yuan in 2022 and 7.2 billion yuan in 2023 to 42.0 billion yuan in 2024, then reached 20.0 billion yuan in the first half of 2025. The prospectus anonymized that supplier, although Chinese auto-industry coverage has widely identified it as Huawei. Gasgoo, using Seres’s prospectus, calculated that first-half 2025 procurement connected to Huawei worked out to roughly 141,000 yuan per Aito when measured against sales volume. That broader estimate includes technology, components and services, so it should not be confused with the reported 50,000-yuan per-vehicle service figure.
Seres’s Profit Squeeze Changed the Calculation
The partnership reset arrived as Seres’s profitability weakened sharply. For the first half of 2026, the company reported revenue of 57.42 billion yuan, down 7.9% year over year. Gross profit fell 24.3% to 12.52 billion yuan, while the loss attributable to owners reached 1.72 billion yuan, reversing a 2.94 billion-yuan profit in the same period of 2025. Gross margin fell to 21.8%, down 4.7 percentage points. Those figures made the economics of every vehicle increasingly important, particularly for a company selling technologically complex premium products while simultaneously funding research, manufacturing capacity, marketing and an expanding service network.
Still, Seres did not blame Huawei’s fees for the loss. Its interim report pointed to a model transition in the second quarter, higher prices for key new-energy-vehicle components and impairment charges on certain assets. The company said battery-grade lithium carbonate prices were up 132.2% year over year on an average daily basis in the first half, while automotive-grade chip shortages pushed up component costs. At the same time, Seres Auto sold 160,800 vehicles in the period, up 5.6% from a year earlier. In other words, the reset came amid a broader cost and product-cycle squeeze rather than a collapse in Aito demand. That distinction is important when assessing why the companies changed course.
The Showroom and Customer Relationship Move Toward Seres
On September 15, 2026, Huawei’s Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance and Seres confirmed a major change in responsibility. Aito remains part of HIMA, but Seres will now lead product definition, product design, brand marketing, retail channels and the service system, with Huawei Terminal continuing to provide support. HIMA also said existing customer rights and future services would not be affected. The change is specific to Aito: Maextro, Stelato, Luxeed and Shangjie remain under the Huawei-led full-process model. That makes Aito a different experiment inside the same alliance, with the automaker taking a much more visible role in decisions that customers actually see.
The shift became tangible the next day. National Business Daily reported, citing Seres and a letter sent to channel partners, that the contracting entity for authorized dealers would change from Huawei Terminal to a Seres Auto affiliate from September 16. Comprehensive service-fee settlement for orders placed before that date would remain Huawei’s responsibility, while orders from September 16 onward would be settled by Seres. Some outlets are also expected to become Aito-exclusive rather than displaying multiple HIMA brands together. For dealership staff and customers, that means the change is not merely a corporate reshuffle on paper; the party running the retail relationship, paying channel fees and managing brand presentation is moving toward Seres.
Huawei Is Still Deeply Embedded in Aito
None of this means Huawei is disappearing from Aito. The official announcement explicitly keeps the brand inside HIMA and describes Huawei Terminal as continuing to “empower” the business. Seres’s vehicles also remain deeply tied to Huawei technology: the company’s prospectus lists Huawei intelligent cockpit and driving-assistance systems among the components used across Aito models, while current Aito product information continues to advertise Huawei Qiankun intelligent-driving technology on relevant trims. Seres’s 10% stake in Shenzhen Yinwang adds another layer of alignment, giving the automaker an equity interest in a Huawei vehicle-solutions business with technology supplied across the automotive sector.
The reset therefore looks less like a breakup than a change in where the boundary is drawn. Huawei can remain involved on the technology side and participate in the HIMA ecosystem while stepping back from day-to-day ownership of Aito’s marketing, retail and service machinery. Seres, meanwhile, gains direct control over the brand assets and customer touchpoints that determine whether a premium vehicle feels coherent from the first advertisement to a service appointment years later. That control is valuable, but it also comes with responsibility: once Seres runs the channel itself, the cost of stores, staff, campaigns, dealer support and customer retention does not vanish. It simply moves to a different part of the operating model.
The Reset Does Not Automatically Mean US$7,500 More Profit Per Car
For that reason, it would be premature to treat the reported 50,000-yuan figure as an automatic per-car profit boost for Seres. The companies have not publicly disclosed a complete new fee schedule that allows a clean before-and-after calculation. The September channel letter confirms that service-fee settlement responsibility moved to Seres for new orders, but it does not show that every old Huawei-related charge disappeared. Huawei technology, components and engineering support still have value and cost money, while Seres must now fund more of the customer-facing operation itself. The real financial outcome will depend on what Seres can save, what it must spend independently and how effectively it can preserve Aito’s premium pricing.
The bigger significance may be strategic. Aito proved that a technology company’s software, retail reach and consumer brand could help an automaker move rapidly into China’s premium market; Seres’s 426,000 deliveries in 2025 and one-million-vehicle milestone show the scale that partnership produced. The new structure tests the next question: whether Seres can keep those advantages while owning more of the brand and channel economics itself. Huawei, for its part, retains a technology-enablement role and continues to lead the other four HIMA brands. The reported US$7,500 number is an attention-grabbing way into the story, but the more consequential change is who now controls the relationship with the person buying the car.
