Automotive Business Magazine – Q2 2026 – Digital edition - Magazine - Page 26
Interview
MG
Dylan Robertson speaks with Guy Pigounakis,
commercial director at MG, about heritage, moving
upmarket and new entrant brands
M
G has a dual nationality.
It manages to be both
a storied British brand
with over a century
of history, but also
a Chinese upstart
producing cutting-edge
electric vehicles (EVs).
Chinese manufacturer
SAIC Motor acquired the MG marque
in the late 2000s, and has completely
transformed it since.
Initially, it used engines, platforms and
the Longbridge plant left over from the
MG Rover era, but it now develops its
own cars from scratch.
MG has not built a single car in the UK
in a decade, yet its cars are styled with
Union Jack references, and the brand is
still a British institution.
Automotive Business Magazine spoke
to Guy Pigounakis, MG’s commercial
director, to hear about the curent state of
the brand, and how it fits into the future
of the market.
Pigounakis was also involved in the
previous incarnation of MG, working
at Rover Group from 1995 until its
bankruptcy in the mid-2000s, where he
was responsible for the MG F sports car
programme.
The importance of value
Both in the latter years of its original
incarnation and since its relaunch by
SAIC Motor, MG has focused on value. In
the modern era, where margins are tight,
many brands have looked upmarket in
search of greater profit.
The past decade has seen Mazda inch
ever closer to Mercedes-Benz territory,
and MG is conscious of this. Last year,
it launched the IM5 and IM6, a pair of
posh EVs aimed squarely at Tesla and
the Germans. Pigounakis says: “We'll
never lose our value for money. To us,
having the value for money proposition is
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absolutely critical. That will never go.
“If you look at where the market's
going, there's a massive lack of MG
product in the premium mainstream,
premium fleet sector. Now, that’s over
50% of the market, so it's a huge
opportunity for us to grow up in.
“However, we will not move away from
our core customers who want great
value-for-money private cars.”
MG intends to play this differently. The
IM range, which is its own standalone
brand in China, has been brought to the
UK to help MG widen its reach – not in
order to reshape it into yet another EVonly luxury brand.
Pigounakis continues: “The IMs
are cars that you don't have to make
excuses for, they are entirely competent,
credible cars.
“To grow our share, it is about finding
segments that we don't compete in
today. As I said about the IMs, we were
selling nothing in that segment before.
It's not a case of ‘we were doing OK, but
we could do better’ – we were selling
nothing.
“These 2,000 IMs we’ve sold now, that’s
2,000 registrations we wouldn't have had
this year, and we didn't have last year,
but we will have next year.
“And it won't be 2,000 next year. It will
be 4,000 or 5,000 next year, depending
on how many we get.”
The brand’s ambitions will see it move
in other directions, too. At the tail end
of 2025, it launched the S6 EV, its first
foray into the highly competitive D-SUV
segment, while it is plotting a pair of new
cars for 2026, too.
Pigounakis says: “Two brand new
cars will go into segments that we don't
currently compete in as well.
“So that's the easiest way to grow a
share – to basically have a product that
competes competitively in every segment
of the market.”
