On April 1, Baidu’s Apollo Go opened bookings on its own app in Dubai, the first international deployment of its proprietary autonomous ride-hailing platform.
Two days earlier, on March 30, WeRide and Uber launched the first fully driverless robotaxi operations in Dubai, allowing riders to book without a human operator through the Uber app.
The two consecutive launches make Dubai the first city outside China where multiple Chinese autonomous driving companies are running fully driverless commercial robotaxi services in parallel.
Apollo Go’s Dubai fleet uses Baidu’s sixth-generation RT6, a purpose-built autonomous vehicle developed in-house. The cars deployed by the WeRide-Dubai collaboration are Robotaxi GXRs, built on Geely’s Farizon vehicle platform and powered by WeRide’s Level 4 autonomous driving software.
WeRide, an autonomous driving company founded in Guangzhou in 2017, now operates over 200 robotaxis in the Middle East and has achieved operational profitability in the region since 2025, well before achieving the same at home. Baidu’s Apollo Go, despite running the largest robotaxi fleet in China, has only just reached unit economics break-even in its flagship city of Wuhan.
The Dubai launches by Baidu, WeRide and Geely are the latest snapshot in a pattern of Chinese technology companies expanding aggressively overseas. As competition accelerates at home, Chinese companies are looking to the Middle East to expand their operations, find paying customers and build the international footprint that years of margin-crushing domestic competition have made both necessary and overdue.
China’s EV price war started in late 2022 and has continued with no sign of slowing. Over 130 brands now compete for EV and plug-in hybrid market share in China, and almost none is earning a positive return.
BYD, the dominant player amongst Chinese EV makers, demanded its suppliers cut prices by 10% in 2025, illustrating how deeply the price war has compressed margins across the entire supply chain. The consolidation analysts have long predicted — a return to normal pricing after smaller competitors are squeezed out — has not happened.
The same story applies to the food delivery sector. Meituan, China’s dominant delivery platform, faces intensifying competition from the two other e-commerce platforms JD.com and Douyin as a so-called food delivery war has driven down commission rates and delivery fees across the industry.
Meituan’s response has been to expand overseas through its international brand Keeta, which launched in Saudi Arabia in September 2024 and became the kingdom’s third-largest food delivery platform within four months.
Just as WeRide and Geely launched the first robotaxis in Dubai, Keeta Drone obtained the UAE’s first commercial beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone delivery license from Dubai’s Civil Aviation Authority in December 2024.
Within a year, a Chinese delivery company went from having no presence in the Gulf to operating drone deliveries in Dubai and commanding significant market share in Riyadh. Keeta’s market entry strategy in the Gulf, similar to that of EVs in China, has been to drive down prices through aggressive vouchers and waived delivery fees, capturing market share through low or negative margins.
Though it has stopped delivering a competitive edge at home, the same strategy still works overseas. The Gulf has become a preferred destination because it offers what China’s saturated market does not: regulatory openness to new technologies, government partners eager to co-invest in smart-city infrastructure, and a first-mover advantage in markets where American and European competitors have been slow to enter.
Beyond the need to expand into new overseas markets, the Gulf also presents structural appeals for Chinese tech companies. Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority has set a target of 25% autonomous journeys by 2030, a goal that is reinforced by Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, which treats technological modernization as a national priority.
Together, these policies give Chinese firms a government-backed runway that would be far harder to secure in the US or Europe. With no other Western autonomous driving company currently operating commercially in the Gulf, Chinese companies have established themselves as the default autonomous mobility providers.
The momentum is showing in the numbers. China’s automotive market share in Arab Gulf countries rose from 2% in 2019 to around 15% in 2025. Of the 8.32 million cars shipped overseas by Chinese automakers in 2025, 1.39 million, roughly one-sixth of the total, went to Gulf countries.
Chinese brands are pairing high-quality products with aggressive new market entry, and it is paying off: The Gulf is absorbing domestic overcapacity while Chinese technology companies build global brands.
The conventional narrative about China’s economic slowdown emphasizes the domestic difficulties that come with compressed margins, overcapacity and weakening consumer demand. The expansion of EV makers and delivery platforms into Gulf markets reveals the other side of the coin.
The same competitive intensity that is destroying profitability at home is also producing companies that are technologically advanced, operationally efficient and willing to enter new markets at price points that established players cannot match.
WeRide and Keeta share the same trajectory. WeRide reached operational profitability in the Middle East while still burning cash in China. Keeta captured significant Saudi market share in just months, deploying the operational infrastructure and delivery logistics that Meituan refined through years of domestic competition.
This is the side of China’s economic story that the slowdown narrative tends to miss. Falling growth rates and domestic overcapacity coexist with a generation of Chinese companies hardened by years of brutal competition, now exporting both products and operational know-how at a pace that is reshaping markets overseas.
What is working in the Gulf today suggests that the slowing domestic and global economy has not slowed the momentum of Chinese innovation – it has redirected it.
Chenjie Song is a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University and public policy consultant for Development Reimagined, a China-Africa policy consulting company.