Stephen Wilmot

There have been two waves, essentially, of Chinese car exports.

And the first wave was centered on emerging markets and combustion engines a few years ago.

Russia was a big target market.

Then last year, we got a much more interesting wave of exports, and BYD is very much the lead in that, and that's much more high-tech, focused on electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.

And they've been appealing to Western European consumers, for example.

Also emerging markets, places like Mexico and Brazil, Australia, they're highly attractive products, and they've pitched them at quite affordable prices, and consumers are lapping them up where they can.

It's been a bit of a slow burn.

They came to Europe in 2021 and at first they started with a strategy which was perhaps a bit surprisingly focused on almost luxury level prices.

But then they kind of pivoted a bit and last year sales really took off.

They brought out newer vehicles in kind of small car categories that Europeans buy a lot of.

And so they're competing squarely with the likes of Toyota and Volkswagen, the local market leader.

There's massive overcapacity in the Chinese car industry.

EVs have been a kind of priority sector, strategic sector in Beijing.

And that's led to a lot of EV startups and a lot of competition within China.

And so BYD has been doing rather less well in China.

So they have a lot more production capacity than they have before.

demand for and that's created pressure to export and overall vehicle exports from china which is already since 2023 the world's largest car exporter rose to over 7 million vehicles and china has unique political challenges too throughout the world that are putting up some barriers what have their efforts been to expand in europe and the u.s what have those looked like

Yeah, that's a very good point.

And absolutely, the barriers are political.

There have been tariffs, not just in the US, but also in a number of other countries, including the European Union, that have increased the price of cars imported from China for consumers.