PurposeTo examine how shareholding affects optimal profits, R&D innovation, NEV market scale and social welfare in two supply chain models with partial and cross ownership patterns.Design/methodology/approachThe gradual retreat of government subsidies has directly weakened the financial support available to the stakeholders of new energy vehicles (NEVs). In this context, upstream and downstream enterprises of NEV are constantly seeking new business models of cooperation to achieve possible win-wins. NEV supply chain shareholding is an emerging new practice for such explorations. However, its performance in the NEV supply chain is seldom investigated. In this paper, we employ a Stackelberg game model to investigate how partial and cross-ownership affect the optimal decisions in a NEV supply chain.FindingsResults showed that: (1) Compared with the unilateral shareholding model, the battery supplier will benefit from cross-ownership in the supply chain, while the NEV manufacturer will not necessarily benefit from it. At the same time, cross-ownership will bring the greatest incentive for battery R&D (2) Supply chain downstream competition will not necessarily lead to the improvement of the total consumption of NEVs or the level of battery design. Pareto improvement can be brought only when one of the manufacturers holds less than a certain equity threshold. In addition, downstream competition will also not necessarily bring more benefits to the battery supplier.Originality/valueAt present, NEV supply chain management has attracted widespread attention from scholars from all walks of life. Previous studies have been carried out that covers topics such as pricing strategies and optimal profits and the role of NEV in the sustainable development of the automotive industry supply chain, or disparate impacts of government subsidies and carbon emission regulation on supply chain members. However, as far as the authors know, compared with the new emerging NEV corporate practice, the shareholding phenomenon between upstream and downstream in the supply chain of NEV has not been studied in the existing studies.