Is the dealer network the real problem with new Chinese brands?

The usual line about the newer Chinese brands goes like this. The cars themselves are fine, often better equipped than a Japanese car at the same price. What worries people is the dealer: a showroom that opened recently, too few service centres for a whole emirate, parts that come from China on a ship, and an importer that might change and leave owners with a car nobody wants to fix.

If buyers took that worry seriously, it would show up in the used market: a brand with a young dealer network would see its asking prices drop faster with age than one that has been around longer. That part we can check, with limits.

What the listings can and cannot measure here

Our index holds no data on dealers: it does not count service centres or record how long parts take to arrive. So the claim in the title cannot be measured head-on.

What the listings do show, where there is enough history, is how much asking prices fall for each extra year of age. That is the figure that would reveal a dealer penalty if buyers applied one.

For “the showroom is new”, the closest stand-in is the median age of a brand’s listed cars. A brand that has sold in volume for years has older cars on Dubizzle; one whose listings are almost all this year’s model usually has a young presence. It is a rough signal (a brand whose sales are growing fast also ends up with young listings).

Older used market against younger used market

This table keeps the Chinese brands with the most listings, ordered by the median age of the cars they have for sale. The full list of brands is in our overview of Chinese cars in the UAE.

Swipe sideways for more columns

A median age of 0 years means at least half of that brand’s listed cars carry the current model year or a newer one¹¹. Those cars are close to new.

Only three brands in the table have a measured value curve: MG³, Jetour⁶ and Geely¹⁵. Everything else is n/a, because a brand needs 100+ listings and 3 model years before we publish the figure⁹.

The one comparison we can run: MG against Jetour and Geely

MG has the older used market of the three, with a median listed age of 2 years² and the largest number of listings of any Chinese brand, 575¹. Jetour⁵ and Geely¹⁴ both sit at 1 year. If a younger network cost owners at resale, Jetour and Geely should lose noticeably more per year than MG.

They do not lose noticeably more. Jetour loses 11.8% per year of age⁶, a little more than MG at 11.2%³. Geely loses 10.4%¹⁵, which is less than MG. One of the younger brands sits above the established one and the other sits below it. We have not tested whether a spread this small is larger than ordinary variation, so we read nothing into the order.

A small spread like this can come from things unrelated to dealers, such as a facelift that raised the new price of recent model years, or one brand selling more saloons and the other more SUVs. Pinning it on the showroom would be a stretch.

So for the three brands we can measure, we find no sign that the myth holds: asking prices for Jetour and Geely do not fall faster than MG’s, which is what sellers pricing in a bigger dealer risk would produce. This rests on median listed age as a stand-in for the age of a network, which we have not checked against any dealer record.

Where the worry is strongest, there is no curve yet

The trouble is that the brands with the youngest listings mostly have no measured curve. Rox¹¹, Changan¹⁷ and Chery²⁶ all have a median listed age of 0 years, and BYD has 311 listings⁷ but not enough model years behind it for a value figure⁹.

For these brands the value lost per year of age is n/a: Rox¹², Changan¹⁸, Chery²⁷ and BYD⁹. Too few of their cars have been on the road long enough to be resold in numbers, so any resale figure you hear for them today is a forecast, whoever gives it.

The verdict on this myth

On the evidence we have, we see no sign of a dealer-network penalty in resale. Among the three Chinese brands with enough history, the younger ones lose value at about the same pace as MG^3,6,15. For the newest brands the test cannot be run yet, so the myth is neither confirmed nor ruled out there.

That does not mean the worry is wrong. A resale figure only captures what the next buyer will pay. It says nothing about how long your car sits in a workshop waiting for a bumper bracket, and that cost lands on the owner.

Checks to do on the dealer yourself

The listings cannot judge the dealer for you, so ask before you sign:

• Who imports the brand into the UAE, and has that company handled it from the start or taken over from someone else?
• Where are the service centres in your emirate, and can the workshop give you a typical waiting time for common body parts and filters?
• Does the warranty stay with the car if you sell it, and what servicing conditions does it depend on?
• Is there a fixed-price service plan, and what does it leave out?

What this means if you are buying

The rule we would use: if the brand has a measured value curve (MG, Jetour or Geely), do not discount it for having a younger network, because asking prices show no such discount. If the brand shows n/a, treat both resale and after-sales as unknown, buy only a car you are ready to keep until its warranty ends, and get the dealer answers above in writing.

In practice:

1. Open the model page and check the median asking price for the exact model year, for example the Jetour Dashing, the Geely Coolray or the MG ZS.
2. Open the running-costs page to see depreciation next to the running costs.
3. Put the Chinese car side by side with its closest rival in compare, or with a Japanese alternative you are also considering.
4. Check a specific asking price on the Check a seller’s price page before you negotiate.

The Chinese cars page keeps the brand figures current; a brand that is n/a today gets its curve there once it has enough model years on the market.

How we measured

All figures come from active Dubizzle listings in the Cars Oracle index on 7 October 2026.

• Active listings are cars for sale on that date, all regional specs included, within our price filter. In this article they run from 575 for MG¹ down to 79 for Chery²⁵.
• Median age is the current year minus the model year, across all of a brand’s active listings.
• Value lost per year of age uses GCC-spec cars only. It is the median, across a brand’s models, of the slope of median asking price by model year. It is published only for brands with 100+ listings and 3 model years⁹. MG has 575 active listings in total³, Jetour 333⁶ and Geely 229¹⁵, but only the GCC-spec cars among them feed the figure.

These are asking prices, not sale prices, and a listing that disappears is not necessarily sold. The comparison is a snapshot across model years on one day, not the same cars followed over time. The full method is on the methodology page.