Rivian has disclosed Chinese-based employees for the first time as the EV maker is increasingly focused on securing more deals in the Chinese supply chain.
The Irvine, California-based brand had 10 employees in mainland China as of the end of 2025, the company’s 2026 proxy statement filed on Monday showed.
The disclosure comes after Rivian‘s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe has consistently stated it has no plans to enter the Chinese market while noting that the country allows rivals to face considerably lower labour costs.
The company has not publicly announced any individual supply agreements with Chinese vendors besides the supply of lithium iron phosphate cells from Gotion High-Tech Co. in late 2024.
A First Since IPO
Rivian‘s 2023 proxy, which disclosed the equivalent country-level breakdown for end-2022, listed zero employees in mainland China.
At the time, the company had a total of 361 non-US employees with countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, Serbia, among others.
The company’s 2024 proxy, filed in 2024, recycled the same end-2022 country breakdown rather than disclosing fresh end-2023 data — which is permitted under SEC pay-ratio rules that allow companies to retain a previously identified median employee for up to three consecutive years.
The 2025 proxy similarly did not disclose updated country-level data.
The 2026 filing — released on Monday — is therefore the first in three years to refresh the country breakdown — and the first ever to show employees in mainland China.
It remains unclear when the company hired the first employees in the country.
Shanghai Subsidiary
Rivian‘s Chinese subsidiary, Ruiwang Automobile Sales (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., was established before the company had any disclosed Chinese-based staff.
The entity first appeared in Rivian‘s subsidiaries exhibit attached to the 2022 10-K, filed in February 2023.
It was not present in the 2021 10-K subsidiaries list, which included only Rivian Asia Limited in Hong Kong as the company’s eastern-Pacific corporate vehicle.
The Shanghai entity therefore existed for a full three years on paper before Rivian disclosed any China-based employees in a country-level breakdown.
However, it is possible some staff were employed in 2023 or 2024 without being captured in proxy disclosures, given the SEC rules permitting recycled median-employee identifications.
Scaringe Rules Out China Sales
Scaringe has used multiple investor and industry forums in 2024 and 2025 to explicitly rule out a Chinese market entry.
Speaking at Morgan Stanley’s 12th Annual Laguna Conference in September 2024, Scaringe said that the company has “made the decision to not enter China for a lot of reasons beyond just cost.”
He cited the price war among Chinese automakers as a key factor.
“The companies are competing in an environment where they’re operating at 0 gross margin and planning to do that for a very, very long time and so, or negative margin, and supported in some cases through other means,” Scaringe said at the time.
“So you have the landscape that’s just very aggressive competition,” the founder added.
Increasingly Focused on Chinese Deals
While ruling out vehicle sales, Scaringe has been explicit that the Chinese supply chain is central to Rivian‘s cost-reduction strategy for R2.
At the same Morgan Stanley conference, he disclosed that Rivian had purchased a Xiaomi SU7 sedan for benchmarking — a vehicle widely described as “China’s Apple Car” for its tight integration with Xiaomi’s broader consumer-electronics ecosystem.
“Every single component through China’s tiered supply base is 20% to 30% to sometimes 40% cheaper than what we would have for a part or a component that’s sourced in a Western market,” Scaringe said.
“And so we are really designing and engineering our supply chains to identify where we see opportunities to leverage the much lower cost basis that exists,” the CEO said.
In a March 2025 fireside chat with Nvidia, Scaringe explicitly contrasted the US and Chinese EV ecosystems, noting that EVs accounted for 45% of all new vehicle sales in China in 2024 versus 8% in the US.
“There Is No Magic in the World”
Across multiple appearances in 2025, Scaringe has framed Chinese EV cost structures as the product of structural macroeconomic factors rather than proprietary engineering breakthroughs — a position reinforced by Rivian‘s own benchmarking work.
“There’s not something magical when you take it apart that’s allowing these really impressive cost structures. There’s no secret magic thing,” Scaringe told Business Insider in October 2025 following Rivian‘s teardown of the Xiaomi SU7. “But rather it’s the compounding benefits of a lower cost of capital.”
“When you take the cost of capital down to zero or less than zero and you have a cost of labor that’s very low — you can do the math, you can build a spreadsheet that can arrive at exactly how they’re doing it,” Scaringe said in a separate appearance.
“The cost of capital is zero or negative, meaning they get paid to put up plants. It’s a very different opportunity,” the CEO added, contrasting Chinese government grants with the U.S. Department of Energy loan structure that Rivian has accessed.
Scaringe used a literary metaphor in a separate interview: “I think it’s like Wizard of Oz. When people think there’s a Wizard of Oz, it’s not helpful. It’s like there is no magic in the world. Everything could be analyzed and calculated.”
On the Xiaomi SU7 specifically, Scaringe said the teardown was a confirmation rather than a revelation: “Cost — we understood how they’ve arrived there. There’s nothing we learned from the teardown.”
“They’ll Win on Tech”
Scaringe’s most pointed warning to Western automakers in 2025 was that the Chinese cost advantage masks a more durable technology advantage that will outlast tariff regimes.
“What’s alarming, if you’re looking at the whole industry, is that the technology is much better. If I was an existing manufacturer, I’d get less hung up on the cost and more focused on ‘the cars are actually better,'” Scaringe told the InsideEVs Plugged-In Podcast in late 2025.
“I think everyone should be planning for that,” Scaringe said of Chinese EVs reaching the US market, “and designing [their] technology stack around that.”
Speaking to Business Insider, Scaringe described Chinese EVs as “technically very advanced vehicles and more advanced than a lot, most of, I should say, most of the Western vehicle manufacturers” — naming Rivian and Tesla as the only Western exceptions.
Even if tariffs equalize manufacturing costs or Chinese firms shift production to the US, Scaringe said, “They’ll win on tech.”
Rare Earths
Scaringe has been increasingly vocal last year about how China’s dominance over rare-earth processing affects Rivian directly, despite the company’s stated focus on a “very US-centric supply chain.”
“We do rely on a supply chain that across its tiers has a number of components that come from other countries and then, importantly, the trade restrictions and what we’re seeing in terms of rare earth metals out of China, that’s a real challenge for electric vehicles,” Scaringe told Fox Business in April 2025.
“Essentially every electric car on the road today is using what’s called a permanent magnet motor, which generally uses some type of rare earth metal,” Scaringe said. “In terms of the processing of the materials, that happens almost exclusively in China.”
Scaringe has separately described China’s “iron grip” on cathode active materials, noting that lithium iron phosphate cells are produced almost exclusively in China.
“Trade policy changes on heavy rare earth metals had a significant impact on production volume,” Scaringe said in a 2025 podcast appearance, indicating that Chinese export-control measures have directly hit Rivian‘s output.
The 10 Employees
Neither Rivian nor public job postings have detailed the specific functions of the Shanghai-based staff.
However, the combination of Scaringe’s public statements, the small headcount, and the entity’s “Automobile Sales” naming convention — notwithstanding the company’s no-vehicle-sales position — suggests the team likely focuses on supplier qualification, sourcing relationships, and possibly small-scale parts manufacturing arrangements that support Rivian‘s North American vehicle production rather than any commercial activity in China.
Rivian sources battery cells from LG Energy Solution Ltd. and Samsung SDI Co., both Korean rather than Chinese suppliers, but the broader R2 supply chain has been engineered with Chinese component-tier participation, according to Scaringe’s own statements.
Other International Teams
The 10 employees in China sit in a different category from Rivian‘s major overseas hubs.
The Belgrade, Serbia engineering office — the company’s largest non-US footprint — grew from 15 employees at the end of 2022 to 383 at the end of 2025, focused on vehicle software and advanced driver-assistance systems development.
The Canadian operation in Burnaby, British Columbia, contracted from 160 to 119 employees.
The Woking, England engineering office contracted sharply from 123 to 22 employees.
The 10-employee Chinese presence is the smallest of Rivian‘s disclosed country-level operations alongside Ireland (1), Switzerland (1), Mexico (11) and Sweden (15).
Rivian ended 2025 with 15,232 employees including its consolidated joint venture with the Volkswagen Group, the company disclosed in a new SEC filing.
R2 and the Tariffs
Rivian‘s decision to expand its formal Chinese presence at the end of 2025 came in a year when the Trump administration imposed escalating tariffs on Chinese-made components and finished vehicles.
The US maintains a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs and a ban on Chinese software in connected vehicles.
Rivian‘s R2, which entered manufacturing validation builds in 2025 ahead of a 2026 launch, has been engineered with a supply chain that Scaringe has described as “designed to leverage the much lower cost basis” of Chinese tier suppliers — though final-assembly is at the Normal, Illinois plant.
