SF Intra-City has established Lechi New Energy to operate rider battery leasing and swapping, using AI management to cut costs and mitigate legal risks.
Meituan, Ele.me, and SF City Express have been locked in an all-channel price war in instant delivery, which by mid-2026 has devolved into extreme cost-cutting pressure on the underlying workforce infrastructure. The traditional asset-light model of matching urban delivery capacity is now being forcibly dragged into a capital-heavy hardware game defined by high-frequency depreciation, all driven by the fragile battery-life lifeline beneath massive fleets of couriers.
SF City Express, the independent instant delivery leader on the Hong Kong stock market, has recently planted a small, highly experimental chess piece in Shenzhen, the home turf of its chairman Wang Wei. According to Tianyancha App, Shenzhen Lechi New Energy Technology Co., Ltd. was officially incorporated in the Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Cooperation Zone.
The legal representative of this new entity is Li Hao, with a registered capital of just one million RMB, fully owned and controlled by SF City Express.
At a time when the primary market has long lost patience with generic new energy concepts, a capital base of just one million is barely enough to cover the depreciation of a few automated testing instruments in a capital-intensive field like lithium battery manufacturing or new energy vehicles. Many copycat media outlets, accustomed to parroting company announcements, have rushed to interpret this move as SF City Express jumping on a bandwagon or merely setting up a routine administrative shell for defensive purposes. Such shallow, technically correct observations completely miss the clearest financial calculus of a major instant delivery player eyeing the high-frequency battery-swapping revenue from millions of two-wheeled electric scooters nationwide.
Digging deeper into the franchised business categories disclosed by Tianyancha, Lechi New Energy's true hand is laid bare: battery leasing, charging control equipment leasing, intelligent control system integration, and AI application software development.
These highly vertical and interconnected business registration codes reveal that after seeing its gross margins in core urban delivery services squeezed relentlessly by Meituan and JD, SF City Express is now executing a play on "full-lifecycle asset value" for its delivery capacity. The real profit logic behind this one-million-dollar entity is to build a nimble "two-wheeled e-truck battery-swap operations vehicle" without disturbing its core balance sheet.
The life-or-death of the delivery business is essentially determined by couriers' delivery efficiency per unit of time. And the biggest physical bottleneck limiting how many orders food delivery and urban couriers can complete isn't how the algorithm assigns orders—it's how fast the two-wheeled electric scooter underneath them drains its battery during long hauls in high heat or heavy rain. Rather than cede the massive annual revenue from two-wheeler battery swapping and battery rentals to third-party intermediaries like China Tower's battery-swap service or Hello, SF City Express is stepping in now to lock up this high-frequency, essential, and highly stable "long-tail energy revenue stream" under its own corporate shell.
By ring-fencing Lechi New Energy through the clearly delineated structure on Tianyancha, SF City Express can quickly deploy charging control equipment and dedicated battery rental cabinets across major courier stations and logistics hubs in South China without diverting substantial cash flow from the parent company.
The more critical technological inflection point lies in the "AI application software development" prominently listed in its business scope.
In 2026, battery swapping is no longer a simple hardware resale business—it's an actuarial discipline heavily dependent on algorithmic forecasting. How can AI-driven adaptive scheduling systems accurately predict how many battery packs a specific commercial district will consume during the lunch rush? How can intelligent control systems charge the lithium batteries in rental cabinets during off-peak electricity hours to capture the peak-to-valley price spread with pixel-level precision? The real driving force behind these multi-million-dollar orders is SF City Express's attempt to deeply integrate courier battery costs, rental revenue, and the parent company's instant logistics infrastructure through a software-hardware integrated AI energy network.
On the capital and legal front, the initial one-million-RMB registered capital serves as a highly seasoned isolation buffer. Two-wheeled lithium batteries, subjected to prolonged high-frequency charge-discharge cycles and the extreme, rough riding conditions of delivery couriers, carry significant risks of spontaneous combustion, long-tail personal injury litigation, and pixel-level compliance scrutiny from local fire departments and market regulators.
If SF City Express, as the listed parent entity, were to directly shoulder these non-standard special leasing operations fraught with long-tail wear and tear, any regional combustion incident could force substantial estimated liabilities onto its financial statements, potentially creating cross-contamination for its sensitive secondary-market valuation.
This clean corporate firewall on Tianyancha firmly seals all the depreciation weight of battery assets and legal liability risks within the physical boundary of that one million RMB. The evolution of commerce has never been poetic. In this shakeout where margins, battery efficiency, and real cash-generation capability define ultimate survival, old platforms that merely sell traffic and lack control over the underlying toolchain and consumables will inevitably face elimination under the pixel-level cost-cutting strategies of the giants. The Shenzhen coordinate that Lechi New Energy has registered on Tianyancha is SF City Express's pragmatic bill for extracting hardware profits through algorithms in the second half of the game.
