Asia Tech Wire (Apr 8) -- Avatar, the premium electric car brand of Chinese state-owned automaker Changan Automobile, has denied buying troubled private electric car brand HiPhi.

A Chinese netizen recently broke the news on social media platform Xiaohongshu that Avatar has reached an agreement to acquire HiPhi, adding that HiPhi would officially resume work in April.

To this, a source from Avatar's public relations department responded on Sunday, "The information is not true."

Meanwhile, some media reports said that Avatar has already approached HiPhi and may have reached an agreement to reorganize the team.

Avatar responded again on Monday, saying, "We have no information on this matter at this time through our internal understanding."

HiPhi held an internal meeting on Feb. 18 and announced that it would shut down production for six months.

Not long after HiPhi's announcement of the shutdown, there were rumors that Changan Automobile might have to take action to save HiPhi.

In late February, HiPhi founder and CEO Ding Lei visited Changan's global R&D center and met with Changan Chairman Zhu Huarong.

However, Changan Automobile later responded that the acquisition of a 51% stake in HiPhi and the fact that Changan would take over HiPhi were false information.

Neither party has released any more M&A news since then.