Jiushi (九识) pivots from selling autonomous delivery vans to selling transport capacity
The AMW Read
Established unmanned-delivery fleet leader Jiushi shifts its go-to-market from vehicle sales to a nationwide capacity-rental and franchise model, a segment-level business-model update to a known top player rather than a new entrant or debate-resolving event.
Jiushi (九识) pivots from selling autonomous delivery vans to selling transport capacity
At a September 10 strategy event in Guangzhou, Chinese autonomous delivery vehicle maker Jiushi (九识) unveiled a "city-level physical AI" strategy and launched "Jiushi Rental," a mini-program offering daily, monthly, and yearly leases on its unmanned RoboVans alongside a nationwide franchise program for operating that fleet capacity. CEO Kong Qi said the move traces to an early-2025 case in Kunshan, where a customer scaled from 4 to over 200 leased vehicles and pooled idle capacity across clients, roughly quintupling monthly revenue. The rental model has already run pilots with 300 clients across 45 cities, generating more than 1,500 orders.
Jiushi frames the shift as moving from a hardware seller to a capacity organizer: its "Jiushi Brain" AI core, built on L4 operational data from its fleet, now powers both the RoboVan product and a citywide platform for user access, vehicle operations, and regulatory oversight. The company says it runs the world's largest RoboVan fleet — more than 30,000 unmanned vehicles across 300-plus cities — backed by Ant Group, Meituan, Cainiao, Muyuan Foods, and Jianfa; Cainiao merged its own unmanned-vehicle unit into Jiushi's fleet in early 2026. The bet is that recurring utilization revenue, not one-time vehicle margins, is where unmanned-delivery economics hold up as China's vehicle costs fall from million-yuan prototypes toward mass-production pricing and regulators relax mandatory-safety-operator rules.
For logistics operators and investors tracking China's unmanned-delivery build-out, the signal is that vehicle-margin economics alone won't sustain leaders once hardware commoditizes — recurring capacity utilization, franchise reach, and integration with distribution partners like Cainiao and Meituan become the differentiators. Jiushi's national franchise opening also lowers the capital bar for smaller logistics operators to run unmanned fleets without owning them, which could speed industry-wide volume growth while compressing the per-vehicle margin Jiushi itself captures.
