In 2026, the Chinese automotive market is still undergoing deep adjustments: overall sales are under pressure, the price war shows no sign of stopping, and profit margins continue to be compressed. However, against this backdrop, some companies are still delivering impressive results. Over the past few years, TE Connectivity (hereinafter referred to as "TE"), a global leading technology company in connectivity and sensing, has maintained rapid growth in the Chinese automotive connector market. In addition to feeding technological innovations back to the global market, TE's factories in Morocco, Europe, Brazil, and Thailand are providing support for the overseas expansion of an increasing number of Chinese OEMs.
Observations and summaries reveal that what enables this connector giant to maintain its growth momentum amid widespread industry pressure is not only continuous technological innovation and breakthroughs but also deep-level strategic thinking—reconstructing growth logic with a "boundary expansion" mindset. At the recently held electronica Shanghai, TE directly adopted the theme "Expanding Boundaries Together; Co-creating Value", exhibiting jointly with ecosystem partners to showcase its multi-dimensional boundary expansion concept. Let's take a closer look.
Breaking Technological Boundaries: From Small Wire Diameters to Comprehensive Aluminum-for-Copper Substitution
The term "boundary expansion" has multiple meanings in TE's context. The most intuitive layer is the continuous breaking of boundaries in its own capabilities, especially in technology. Sun Xiaoguang, Vice President and General Manager of TE's Automotive & Commercial Transportation Business Unit in China, stated frankly that coping with involution cannot rely solely on sacrificing profits; more importantly, it requires continuously breaking through technological bottlenecks from an industrial perspective, making products "smaller, lighter, and better", and maximizing cost reduction and efficiency improvement.
In 2024, TE launched a small wire diameter solution—the 0.19 mm² multi-win composite wire. Based on existing test data, this solution successfully achieved approximately 60% copper reduction, 37% weight reduction, and at least 10% cost reduction. It is currently being applied in 18 vehicle models across 14 OEMs.
In 2025, the company further proposed "aluminum-for-copper substitution" for low-voltage current-carrying circuits. The reason is that the rapid development of smart electric vehicles has led to an increasing demand for wiring harnesses per vehicle, resulting in a surge in copper usage and rising costs. The most direct benefit of aluminum-for-copper substitution is reducing copper usage, lowering weight and costs, and simultaneously reducing carbon emissions (copper is heavier and more expensive than aluminum, and copper smelting generates a large amount of carbon dioxide). At this year's electronica Shanghai, TE directly announced the implementation of the "comprehensive aluminum-for-copper substitution" solution.
At the exhibition, TE showcased the full-range innovative applications of aluminum-for-copper technology in vehicle connectivity: a new generation of low-voltage alloy aluminum wires, high-voltage full-series aluminum wires and aluminum busbar connection solutions, and aluminum material system assembly solutions, etc. According to Zheng Rong, Senior Sales and Marketing Director of TE's Automotive Business Unit in China, the innovative solutions can help customers achieve a copper reduction of 18% to 100% in electrical and electronic circuits. It is estimated that after large-scale promotion, it can help China reduce carbon dioxide emissions by over one million tons annually.
Both small wire diameters and aluminum-for-copper substitution are well-known industry solutions that have long proven difficult to implement. Taking aluminum-for-copper substitution as an example, European companies attempted to introduce aluminum wires into automobiles 20 years ago, but issues such as electrochemical corrosion and aluminum creep have never been fundamentally resolved.
In a media interview, Sun Xiaoguang stated that past problems stemmed from "not returning to the first principles." Traditional solutions attempted to compensate for aluminum's defects by improving terminal capabilities without changing the aluminum wire—equivalent to patching a congenitally deficient solution. TE's approach is to redesign from the bottom up: developing high-strength aluminum alloy materials to fundamentally solve the potential difference between copper and aluminum and the electrochemical corrosion problem.
However, Sun Xiaoguang also admitted that the biggest concern in the market promotion of aluminum-for-copper substitution is "bad money driving out good"—if the industry uses low-end aluminum wires to pass off as high-end aluminum alloys, once large-scale problems occur, this strategic direction of aluminum-for-copper substitution could be completely locked out. Therefore, he hopes the industry will hold the bottom line of quality while reducing costs.
Ecosystem Boundary Expansion: Co-creation and Collaboration to Connect Key Nodes in the Industrial Chain
TE recognized early on that breaking through bottlenecks in the connector industry can never be accomplished by a single enterprise independently. To this end, it has been leading "multi-win" cooperation and ecosystem co-creation in recent years.
For the implementation of the aforementioned aluminum-for-copper substitution, material breakthroughs alone are far from enough. Welding processes, production line equipment, and wiring harness factory upgrades—shortcomings in any link would cause the entire solution to fail.
On July 2, TE signed a four-party strategic agreement with Boway Alloy, Jiaocheng Ultrasonic, and Komax to jointly build a mass production ecosystem for "comprehensive aluminum-for-copper substitution". Boway Alloy is responsible for the development and supply of high-strength aluminum alloy materials, Jiaocheng Ultrasonic provides welding process solutions, and Komax ensures seamless switching at the equipment end—wiring harness factories do not need to spend huge sums to replace the entire production line; they only need to replace modules to upgrade from crimping to welding.
During this electronica Shanghai, TE exhibited the low-voltage alloy aluminum wire ultrasonic welding solution jointly developed with partners, compressing the cutting, stripping, crimping, and welding cycle time to about 1 second, and seamlessly integrating with existing automated production lines. This eliminates the pressure of hundreds of millions of yuan in production line upgrade costs for wiring harness factories, solving another major difficulty in the implementation of comprehensive aluminum-for-copper substitution.
"We are not just experts, but also organizers who specifically consider value beyond being experts." Sun Xiaoguang defined TE's role in the ecosystem this way, "We need to make the entire industrial chain save money starting from the OEMs, ensuring that no one over-invests." This positioning is pragmatic and critical: technological breakthroughs are the prerequisite, but economic feasibility is the engine for large-scale promotion.
TE's similar co-creation is unfolding in more dimensions. In July 2025, TE and Geely Auto Research Institute jointly unveiled an innovation laboratory, and strategic cooperation with Li Auto is also being advanced. On the supply chain side, in addition to Boway Alloy, TE has established deep joint R&D relationships with material enterprises such as Kingfa Sci. & Tech. and BASF. These collaborations no longer stay at the traditional transaction level, but are shifting from fighting alone to collaborative incubation.
Business Boundary Expansion: From Four Wheels to Two Wheels, and Then to Embodied Intelligence
The results of technological boundary expansion must ultimately translate into business growth. TE's expansion of business boundaries also reflects the "boundary expansion" mindset.
Two-wheelers have been a highly strategic entry point in recent years. The Chinese two-wheeler market is huge—with domestic annual sales alone reaching tens of millions of units—but the quality in the connector field has long remained at a relatively low level. Especially in recent years, as consumers' demands for the safety and intelligence of two-wheelers have upgraded, leading enterprises have begun to realize that they must use automotive norms and systems to reshape quality. TE's approach is forward development based on customer needs, solving pain points with minimal cost. Zheng Rong revealed that its "Caishiji" (transliterated product name) product has been widely used in the fast-charging market for electric motorcycles, and several leading enterprises have entered the strategic cooperation stage.
Robotics is another new territory being laid out. At this year’s electronica Shanghai, TE set up a humanoid robot solution exhibition area for the first time, covering connection solutions for the four major systems: perception, control, power, and joint. Sun Xiaoguang explained that from a technical underlying perspective, the perception system of robots requires cameras and LiDAR, the control system requires wire-to-board and wire-to-wire connections, the power system involves battery packs and charging sockets, and the joints require wear-resistant wiring harnesses—these are highly homologous with automotive electrical and electronic architectures.
Currently, the embodied intelligence market is still in its early stages, and connectors are not the key variable for explosion. But TE chooses to secure a position in advance, using existing resources and technological reserves to explore new specifications with customers. "We move in the direction of how much value we can provide—one is disruptive value, and the other is extended value. Let's get the value right first, and when opportunities come, we can scale them up at any time," said Sun Xiaoguang.
From four-wheel passenger vehicles to commercial vehicles, and then to two-wheelers and humanoid robots, TE is building an "AUTO+" business landscape. The logic is not complex: the technological capabilities, manufacturing experience, and quality systems accumulated in the automotive field can find new application scenarios in adjacent industries. The key lies in how to migrate capabilities at the lowest cost—which is precisely the core competitiveness TE has accumulated over the years in operational efficiency and scaled manufacturing.
Staying clear-headed amid industrial changes, finding increments in limited spaces, and exploring co-creation beyond fighting alone—TE's "boundary expansion" mindset perhaps provides a sample worth examining for this industry, which is undergoing deep adjustments. When "involution" becomes the norm, the true way to break through may not lie in competing more fiercely in the same dimension, but in jumping out of existing boundaries and redefining the way value is created.