China is fighting a European war on two fronts.
The first front is the product. Software, AI, the engineering race everyone covers. The second front is the buyer. Winning a market means more than landing a spec sheet on a forecourt. It means knowing which attributes Europeans will pay for tomorrow, before Europeans know it themselves.
That second front is where most Chinese OEMs are still thin. And it is exactly where Marco Girometti has done the work. He moved from a European carmaker into a Chinese OEM. He fought the buyer war from the inside, not from a slide deck.
His core claim: the third automotive war will not be decided by battery chemistry or computing power. It will be fought over the definition of value itself. What the customer believes a car is worth.
The sharpest line in the piece: customers do not buy an industrial strategy. They buy a product that solves their needs at a price they consider acceptable.
Chinese OEMs have the speed, the supply chain and the product. What they are still building in Europe is the bridge to the customer. Marco has stood on both sides of that gap.
Transcribed from Jaime Xiao’s LinkedIn feed.