Stephen Wilmot

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.

In the European Union, interestingly, they only imposed the tariffs on electric vehicles, which meant that actually

byd in particular pivoted towards plug-in hybrids which weren't covered by the tariffs in the us there isn't a market for chinese cars the us is the one country that really has so far kept them out and it's not just due to very high tariffs but also the rhetoric against chinese cars from washington and there's a rule that was enacted in the final years of the biden administration called the connected vehicle rule which essentially bans chinese software from cars that makes it very hard for them to

gear up for a market entry though some still are talking about entering the market presumably by leveraging local software providers but it's still a bit unclear and there's some indications that there's a path forward specifically in the u.s what is the latest on that

President Trump said in Detroit this month that Chinese automakers were welcome as long as they built in the US.

The challenge, of course, for automakers is it's much easier for them to build a brand presence through exports initially and then build a factory rather than trying to set up initially by building a factory.

That's a very high risk kind of investment.