October 22, 2024 • 16 mins
Started as a battery company in the 1990s in Shenzhen, BYD is now one of the best-selling EV brands in the world. Once mocked by Elon Musk, the company’s startling growth made it a global player and has sparked tariffs in the US and EU.
On today’s Big Take Asia Podcast, host K. Oanh Ha talks to Bloomberg’s Gabrielle Coppola and Danny Lee about the company’s aggressive expansion and what it means for the global auto market.
Read more: BYD Is Winning the Global Race to Make Cheaper EVs
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
In the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, between North Africa
and Italy lies Malta, a sunny, tiny island nation that's
known for its beaches and ancient temples. But it might
not seem worth the attention of a disruptive global car brand.
(00:29):
So when gabriel Coppola, a Bloomberg auto reporter based in Detroit,
heard that BYD, the Chinese ev company, was selling their
all electric model, the Auto three, in Malta, she was intrigued.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
They sold new cars on the island of Malta last
year was around seventy two hundred. How many cars were
sold in the US over fifteen million, So that is
like a piece of a fingernail of the side of
the US car market.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Mean, it is tiny, but Malta isn't too tiny for Gabrielle, says.
Malta and small markets like it are part of a
key strategy in BYD's global expansion. BYD is facing heavy
tariffs in some of the biggest auto markets, the US
and the EU, so it's looking to boost sales in
(01:17):
emerging countries that don't have their own auto industries. One
automotive analyst compared its strategy to chicken ribs, because chicken
ribs don't have much meat on them, but you also
don't want to throw them away and let them go
to waste.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
It's like a chicken rib market.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
You know.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
You add up all those chicken ribs. That's a lot
of meat in all these countries, and all those little
bits of meat, all those chicken ribs add up to
like ten million cars, and you've got a real business
outside of China.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Byd is now exporting to roughly ninety five markets, including
twenty new ones this year. Meanwhile, It's annual sales in
China are booming, and Bloomberg's China EV reporter Danny Lee
says the car maker has its eyes on surpassing one
of the biggest global players in this space.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
It has been hunting down Tesla over the last several
quarters to being the lead as the best selling electro
vehicle brand globally.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Welcome to the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
I'm Wanha.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Every week we take you inside some of the world's
biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and
businesses that drive this.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Ever shifting region. Today, on the.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Show the story of BYD, how it became one of
the world's largest EV manufacturers, and whether it can succeed
in its quest to become the best selling EV brand
in the world. BYD began as a battery company in
(02:55):
the nineties, started by an engineer Wang chuanful. He was
born in rural Anhui Province in eastern China.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
His parents died when he was still pretty young, and
he was raised by his elder siblings. He is an
engineer through and through. He focused on batteries and that
was the early part of his career was he was
doing very in depth research, experimenting with different battery chemistries
and seeing what batteries could do.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Wong was convinced he could make cell phone batteries more
cheaply than the Japanese companies who were dominating the industry.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
The story goes he got a three hundred and fifty
thousand dollars loan from his cousin. That was the money
he used to start BYD, and so he went south
to Shanjan and he started the company.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
BYD had a humble beginning. Its workers were assembling batteries
by hand, while Japanese companies were using highly automated equipment. Eventually,
Wang developed his own manufacturing production line, but the company
didn't get its big break until the late nineteen nineties
thanks to a young saleswoman named Stella Lee.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
She had joined the company as an export sales manager,
and you know, she basically said, put me in coach,
I want to go out there. I want to make
this happen. I'm going to land these big contracts. I'm
gonna sell.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
So Lee was sent to the US to court Motorola,
which was then one of the world's biggest mobile phone makers.
She showed up in Georgia with a box of battery
samples and spoke very little English, and she spent months
trying to win over the team at.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Motorola to ask them to give BYD a chance in
order to say, look, we have a product which is
lower cost and capable of delivering you the performance of
the margins you need as a business.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Sella was just very persistent, always following up, you know,
what do we have to do next. The people I
interviewed and told me that at first they thought she
was annoying, she was a pest because she was just
never leave them alone.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
But eventually they.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Were like, holy crap, Like can we hire this person?
Like she's amazing?
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Stella is a fascinating person.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Danny Lee is Bloomberg's China ev supply chain reporter based
in Hong Kong, and he co reported this story.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
He's met Lee in person several times.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
When you go to talk to she's such a warm
and welcoming individual. But you know, when it comes down
to business, she knows the details, she knows what she
wants to achieve, and she's very firm with that.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Eventually, Stella's persistence paid off. The executives at Motorola did
give BYD a chance.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
It took two years.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
For them to evaluate the products, and in two thousand,
BYD officially became Motorola's first lithium iron battery supplier from China,
and that gave BYD's products a big stamp of approval.
So how would you characterize Stella Lee's role at BYD
versus Wang Chan Fou's the engineer and company's founder.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Wang is very much the head of the company. He
is the thinker, He is the creator. He wants to
figure out the next steps. However, but for Stella, Stella
is very much the executor She'll be executing on all
of Wong's plans and also being the driving force in
(06:21):
making sure that that business that they have effectively built
hand in hand continues to grow at pace.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Besides being business partners, Wang and Lee are also a
couple with two kids together. BYD declined to comment on
it and said the company doesn't discuss personal matters. What's
clear is that their business partnership has reaped profits. After
the Motorola deal, other big contracts followed and BYD rode
(06:49):
the momentum. In two thousand and two, the company went
public on the Hong Kong Exchange, but just a year
after the IPO, Wang decided that B one should pivot
its future into something beyond batteries. In two thousand and three,
BYD bought a majority stake in a failing state run
car company, sion Tinchuan Auto. That decision didn't go over
(07:14):
well with the company's investors and shareholders.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Lan Schwan Food didn't even know how to drive a
car at the time. The car business is a tough
business to this day is notoriously you know, being a
metal basher. It's low margins, it's a hot very capital intensive.
This is not what BYD's investors were hoping he would do.
They did not want this. Phone lines in shen Jen
were ringing off the hook with people.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
Who are like, what are you doing.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Don't go into the car business.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Though it was a big bet. Wog saw cars as
a natural extension of BYD's battery business. In two thousand
and four, at the Beijing Auto Show, Wang outlined his
vision to use batteries to change the future of the
automotive industry. Very few investors took him seriously, but a
(08:01):
very important one did. In two thousand and eight, Warren
Buffett's Berkshire Hathway invested two hundred and thirty two million
dollars in BYD.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Call it the Buffet effect, but shares of BYD have
jumped five hundred percent since Buffett first announced his buy
In September.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
And the same year that BYD received Berkshire's backing, it
launched its first plugin hybrid EV model now Danny, the
BYD F three d M. It doesn't roll off your tongue,
does it?
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yeah? I couldn't even say it myself.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
And how was it? Received?
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Badly? Badly? The car that BID produced in two thousand
and eight was so poorly received because it looked like
a cheap knockoff Toyota Corolla. The color, the design, it
all looked pretty bad. Consumers want something that looks good
feels good. This was far from it.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
The early models of BYD were so unimpressive that Elon Musk,
CEO of Tesla, publicly laughed at BYD's design in a
Bloomberg interview in twenty eleven.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Vehicles, Warren Buffett On and ten percent stake in that
why do you laugh.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
Trying to compete? Why do you laugh?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Have you seen their car?
Speaker 4 (09:17):
I have seen their car?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, In fact that the Berkshire halfway meeting.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
I saw their cars.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Yeah, well they're a tell me why you're laughing?
Speaker 4 (09:28):
You don't see them at all as a competitor.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
No, But a little more than a decade later, Musk
would hit reverse on his diss of BYD. Last year,
Musk commented on this old interview on X saying that
was many years ago. Their cars are highly competitive these days.
So how did BYD go from being a joke of
(09:49):
the industry to one of the best selling car brands
on the road?
Speaker 4 (09:54):
And where are they headed next? That's after the break.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
In two thousand and eight, BYD's first hybrid EV was
a flop, and Bloomberg reporter Danny Lee said in the
following decade, sales for their other cars also fell short.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
BYD over the past decade prior to around twenty twenty
and was selling cars, but they were just not appealing
and it got to the point where sales were sliding.
So by twenty fifteen the company not only saw poor sales,
it had to think about raising money to.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Figure out how to build better evs. In order to
sell more. BYD poured money into research and development. They
brought in expensive designers from Alfa, Romeo and Audi to
make better looking cars. They also developed what's called a
vertically integrated supply chain. Here's Danny again.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
BYD largely creates its own products. It doesn't have to
rely on external forces for the most important components to
make its automobiles, from the mining of the materials to
make the electric vehicle batteries all the way through to
the components that powder cars, from the chips semiconductor chips
(11:22):
to even the seats, for example, that it is able
to control so much of a supply chain.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
In a teardown of the BYD seal Sedan ubs found
that about seventy five percent of the parts were made
in house, giving BYD a twenty five percent cost advantage
over American and European carmakers, and after about a decade
of hard work, BYD finally hit a golden breakthrough.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
In twenty twenty, BID came out with the Blade battery
and it was a total game changer because it changed
the way the world looked at this technology.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Now there are two prominent battery technologies in the world,
nickel based batteries and lithium iron phosphate or LFP. While
most researchers outside China were experimenting with the nickel based ones,
Wong and his team went against the tide and chose
to make batteries with LFP, which is in general cheaper
(12:23):
and safer, but it comes with a huge flaw. It
lacks energy density, meaning it couldn't go very far on
a single charge.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
People thought LFP could never be used for an individual
wants to go on a road trip, things like that.
But through his engineering innovations, the work they had done
to improve the energy density of LFP chemistry, and the
work they did the design a pack and the software
system that can kind of get the maximum amount of
energy out of that battery. It just showed the world that, hey,
(12:53):
I can make an electric car with decent range using LFP.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
By any measure, the Blade battery was a real turning
point for BYD, and it allowed the company to drastically
reduce overall costs for its vehicles, so much so that
other automakers couldn't help but follow suit. Today, Ford, Tesla,
and Toyota all use LFP batteries in their cars in China,
(13:21):
as do many Chinese automakers. And in just three years
after BYD released the Blade battery, it went from selling
under one hundred eighty thousand electric and hybrid cars to
selling ten times that much.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Everyone I talked to says they have mastered the affordable
EV something that Tesla, Ford, all these other carmakers are
still trying to do. To do that and make money
at it, no one else has done that the way
that BYD and Watchwanfou and Stella and their team have.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
All this gave BYD the cash to fund a new
overseas push.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
They're building a new assembly plant in northeast Brazil that's
going to make one hundred pty thousand cars. They just
opened new assembly plant in Thailand or building in Turkey,
in Hungary, if stated their intentions to build a plant
in Mexico. BYD is leaving no stone unturned.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
But BYD cars aren't available in the US. Tariffs have
kept them and other Chinese made evs out of the country,
and that's a big market to be missing out on.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
How many cars were sold in the US over fifteen million.
I mean, you look at Toyota, Hyundai. Without the US market,
they'd be a lot smaller of a company.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
And it's not just automakers in the US that feel
threatened by BYD. Earlier this month, the EU, the third
biggest car market, voted to slap tariffs as high as
forty five percent on electric cars from China. That was
in response to an investigation that found that China unfairly
subsidized its industry. Next week, BYD is expected to post
(14:55):
strong quarterly earnings, and it says it's on track to
sell four million vehicles by the end of this year. Meanwhile,
Wall Street expects Tesla to sell just two point two
million cars this year. But Gabrielle says by D success
can't just be.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
Chalked up to Chinese government support.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
This is not a story about the power of the
Chinese government. This is a story about the power of
China's brand of capitalism, where you know, you can have
an entrepreneur who is very much a capitalist, who clawed
his way to success after twenty years of hard work
and vision and innovation, and now he's got the power
of the Chinese state behind him. It's important to understand
that if a company wants to figure out how they're
(15:37):
going to keep their auto industries and keep them competitive,
they need to truly understand what's going on. And if
they tell themselves this is all about subsidies and nothing else,
then they're definitely going to fail.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
This is the Big Tack Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm
one Huh.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
This episode was produced by Young Young, Naomi Mum and Quebec.
It was mixed by Alex Suguiera and fact checked by
Adrianna Tapia. It was edited by Caitlin Kenny and Danielle Sachs.
Naomi Shaven is our senior producer, Elizabeth Ponso is our
senior editor, and Sah Bauman.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
Is Boomberg's headed podcasts.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Please follow and review the Big Tick Asia. Wherever you
listen to podcasts, it really helps.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
New listeners find the show. See you next time,
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
In the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, between North Africa
and Italy lies Malta, a sunny, tiny island nation that's
known for its beaches and ancient temples. But it might
not seem worth the attention of a disruptive global car brand.
(00:29):
So when gabriel Coppola, a Bloomberg auto reporter based in Detroit,
heard that BYD, the Chinese ev company, was selling their
all electric model, the Auto three, in Malta, she was intrigued.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
They sold new cars on the island of Malta last
year was around seventy two hundred. How many cars were
sold in the US over fifteen million, So that is
like a piece of a fingernail of the side of
the US car market.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Mean, it is tiny, but Malta isn't too tiny for Gabrielle, says.
Malta and small markets like it are part of a
key strategy in BYD's global expansion. BYD is facing heavy
tariffs in some of the biggest auto markets, the US
and the EU, so it's looking to boost sales in
(01:17):
emerging countries that don't have their own auto industries. One
automotive analyst compared its strategy to chicken ribs, because chicken
ribs don't have much meat on them, but you also
don't want to throw them away and let them go
to waste.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
It's like a chicken rib market.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
You know.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
You add up all those chicken ribs. That's a lot
of meat in all these countries, and all those little
bits of meat, all those chicken ribs add up to
like ten million cars, and you've got a real business
outside of China.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Byd is now exporting to roughly ninety five markets, including
twenty new ones this year. Meanwhile, It's annual sales in
China are booming, and Bloomberg's China EV reporter Danny Lee
says the car maker has its eyes on surpassing one
of the biggest global players in this space.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
It has been hunting down Tesla over the last several
quarters to being the lead as the best selling electro
vehicle brand globally.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Welcome to the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
I'm Wanha.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Every week we take you inside some of the world's
biggest and most powerful economies and the markets, tycoons and
businesses that drive this.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Ever shifting region. Today, on the.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Show the story of BYD, how it became one of
the world's largest EV manufacturers, and whether it can succeed
in its quest to become the best selling EV brand
in the world. BYD began as a battery company in
(02:55):
the nineties, started by an engineer Wang chuanful. He was
born in rural Anhui Province in eastern China.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
His parents died when he was still pretty young, and
he was raised by his elder siblings. He is an
engineer through and through. He focused on batteries and that
was the early part of his career was he was
doing very in depth research, experimenting with different battery chemistries
and seeing what batteries could do.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Wong was convinced he could make cell phone batteries more
cheaply than the Japanese companies who were dominating the industry.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
The story goes he got a three hundred and fifty
thousand dollars loan from his cousin. That was the money
he used to start BYD, and so he went south
to Shanjan and he started the company.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
BYD had a humble beginning. Its workers were assembling batteries
by hand, while Japanese companies were using highly automated equipment. Eventually,
Wang developed his own manufacturing production line, but the company
didn't get its big break until the late nineteen nineties
thanks to a young saleswoman named Stella Lee.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
She had joined the company as an export sales manager,
and you know, she basically said, put me in coach,
I want to go out there. I want to make
this happen. I'm going to land these big contracts. I'm
gonna sell.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
So Lee was sent to the US to court Motorola,
which was then one of the world's biggest mobile phone makers.
She showed up in Georgia with a box of battery
samples and spoke very little English, and she spent months
trying to win over the team at.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Motorola to ask them to give BYD a chance in
order to say, look, we have a product which is
lower cost and capable of delivering you the performance of
the margins you need as a business.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Sella was just very persistent, always following up, you know,
what do we have to do next. The people I
interviewed and told me that at first they thought she
was annoying, she was a pest because she was just
never leave them alone.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
But eventually they.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
Were like, holy crap, Like can we hire this person?
Like she's amazing?
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Stella is a fascinating person.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Danny Lee is Bloomberg's China ev supply chain reporter based
in Hong Kong, and he co reported this story.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
He's met Lee in person several times.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
When you go to talk to she's such a warm
and welcoming individual. But you know, when it comes down
to business, she knows the details, she knows what she
wants to achieve, and she's very firm with that.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Eventually, Stella's persistence paid off. The executives at Motorola did
give BYD a chance.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
It took two years.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
For them to evaluate the products, and in two thousand,
BYD officially became Motorola's first lithium iron battery supplier from China,
and that gave BYD's products a big stamp of approval.
So how would you characterize Stella Lee's role at BYD
versus Wang Chan Fou's the engineer and company's founder.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Wang is very much the head of the company. He
is the thinker, He is the creator. He wants to
figure out the next steps. However, but for Stella, Stella
is very much the executor She'll be executing on all
of Wong's plans and also being the driving force in
(06:21):
making sure that that business that they have effectively built
hand in hand continues to grow at pace.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Besides being business partners, Wang and Lee are also a
couple with two kids together. BYD declined to comment on
it and said the company doesn't discuss personal matters. What's
clear is that their business partnership has reaped profits. After
the Motorola deal, other big contracts followed and BYD rode
(06:49):
the momentum. In two thousand and two, the company went
public on the Hong Kong Exchange, but just a year
after the IPO, Wang decided that B one should pivot
its future into something beyond batteries. In two thousand and three,
BYD bought a majority stake in a failing state run
car company, sion Tinchuan Auto. That decision didn't go over
(07:14):
well with the company's investors and shareholders.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
Lan Schwan Food didn't even know how to drive a
car at the time. The car business is a tough
business to this day is notoriously you know, being a
metal basher. It's low margins, it's a hot very capital intensive.
This is not what BYD's investors were hoping he would do.
They did not want this. Phone lines in shen Jen
were ringing off the hook with people.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
Who are like, what are you doing.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Don't go into the car business.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Though it was a big bet. Wog saw cars as
a natural extension of BYD's battery business. In two thousand
and four, at the Beijing Auto Show, Wang outlined his
vision to use batteries to change the future of the
automotive industry. Very few investors took him seriously, but a
(08:01):
very important one did. In two thousand and eight, Warren
Buffett's Berkshire Hathway invested two hundred and thirty two million
dollars in BYD.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Call it the Buffet effect, but shares of BYD have
jumped five hundred percent since Buffett first announced his buy
In September.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
And the same year that BYD received Berkshire's backing, it
launched its first plugin hybrid EV model now Danny, the
BYD F three d M. It doesn't roll off your tongue,
does it?
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yeah? I couldn't even say it myself.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
And how was it? Received?
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Badly? Badly? The car that BID produced in two thousand
and eight was so poorly received because it looked like
a cheap knockoff Toyota Corolla. The color, the design, it
all looked pretty bad. Consumers want something that looks good
feels good. This was far from it.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
The early models of BYD were so unimpressive that Elon Musk,
CEO of Tesla, publicly laughed at BYD's design in a
Bloomberg interview in twenty eleven.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Vehicles, Warren Buffett On and ten percent stake in that
why do you laugh.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
Trying to compete? Why do you laugh?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Have you seen their car?
Speaker 4 (09:17):
I have seen their car?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, In fact that the Berkshire halfway meeting.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
I saw their cars.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Yeah, well they're a tell me why you're laughing?
Speaker 4 (09:28):
You don't see them at all as a competitor.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
No, But a little more than a decade later, Musk
would hit reverse on his diss of BYD. Last year,
Musk commented on this old interview on X saying that
was many years ago. Their cars are highly competitive these days.
So how did BYD go from being a joke of
(09:49):
the industry to one of the best selling car brands
on the road?
Speaker 4 (09:54):
And where are they headed next? That's after the break.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
In two thousand and eight, BYD's first hybrid EV was
a flop, and Bloomberg reporter Danny Lee said in the
following decade, sales for their other cars also fell short.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
BYD over the past decade prior to around twenty twenty
and was selling cars, but they were just not appealing
and it got to the point where sales were sliding.
So by twenty fifteen the company not only saw poor sales,
it had to think about raising money to.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Figure out how to build better evs. In order to
sell more. BYD poured money into research and development. They
brought in expensive designers from Alfa, Romeo and Audi to
make better looking cars. They also developed what's called a
vertically integrated supply chain. Here's Danny again.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
BYD largely creates its own products. It doesn't have to
rely on external forces for the most important components to
make its automobiles, from the mining of the materials to
make the electric vehicle batteries all the way through to
the components that powder cars, from the chips semiconductor chips
(11:22):
to even the seats, for example, that it is able
to control so much of a supply chain.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
In a teardown of the BYD seal Sedan ubs found
that about seventy five percent of the parts were made
in house, giving BYD a twenty five percent cost advantage
over American and European carmakers, and after about a decade
of hard work, BYD finally hit a golden breakthrough.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
In twenty twenty, BID came out with the Blade battery
and it was a total game changer because it changed
the way the world looked at this technology.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Now there are two prominent battery technologies in the world,
nickel based batteries and lithium iron phosphate or LFP. While
most researchers outside China were experimenting with the nickel based ones,
Wong and his team went against the tide and chose
to make batteries with LFP, which is in general cheaper
(12:23):
and safer, but it comes with a huge flaw. It
lacks energy density, meaning it couldn't go very far on
a single charge.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
People thought LFP could never be used for an individual
wants to go on a road trip, things like that.
But through his engineering innovations, the work they had done
to improve the energy density of LFP chemistry, and the
work they did the design a pack and the software
system that can kind of get the maximum amount of
energy out of that battery. It just showed the world that, hey,
(12:53):
I can make an electric car with decent range using LFP.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
By any measure, the Blade battery was a real turning
point for BYD, and it allowed the company to drastically
reduce overall costs for its vehicles, so much so that
other automakers couldn't help but follow suit. Today, Ford, Tesla,
and Toyota all use LFP batteries in their cars in China,
(13:21):
as do many Chinese automakers. And in just three years
after BYD released the Blade battery, it went from selling
under one hundred eighty thousand electric and hybrid cars to
selling ten times that much.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Everyone I talked to says they have mastered the affordable
EV something that Tesla, Ford, all these other carmakers are
still trying to do. To do that and make money
at it, no one else has done that the way
that BYD and Watchwanfou and Stella and their team have.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
All this gave BYD the cash to fund a new
overseas push.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
They're building a new assembly plant in northeast Brazil that's
going to make one hundred pty thousand cars. They just
opened new assembly plant in Thailand or building in Turkey,
in Hungary, if stated their intentions to build a plant
in Mexico. BYD is leaving no stone unturned.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
But BYD cars aren't available in the US. Tariffs have
kept them and other Chinese made evs out of the country,
and that's a big market to be missing out on.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
How many cars were sold in the US over fifteen million.
I mean, you look at Toyota, Hyundai. Without the US market,
they'd be a lot smaller of a company.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
And it's not just automakers in the US that feel
threatened by BYD. Earlier this month, the EU, the third
biggest car market, voted to slap tariffs as high as
forty five percent on electric cars from China. That was
in response to an investigation that found that China unfairly
subsidized its industry. Next week, BYD is expected to post
(14:55):
strong quarterly earnings, and it says it's on track to
sell four million vehicles by the end of this year. Meanwhile,
Wall Street expects Tesla to sell just two point two
million cars this year. But Gabrielle says by D success
can't just be.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
Chalked up to Chinese government support.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
This is not a story about the power of the
Chinese government. This is a story about the power of
China's brand of capitalism, where you know, you can have
an entrepreneur who is very much a capitalist, who clawed
his way to success after twenty years of hard work
and vision and innovation, and now he's got the power
of the Chinese state behind him. It's important to understand
that if a company wants to figure out how they're
(15:37):
going to keep their auto industries and keep them competitive,
they need to truly understand what's going on. And if
they tell themselves this is all about subsidies and nothing else,
then they're definitely going to fail.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
This is the Big Tack Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm
one Huh.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
This episode was produced by Young Young, Naomi Mum and Quebec.
It was mixed by Alex Suguiera and fact checked by
Adrianna Tapia. It was edited by Caitlin Kenny and Danielle Sachs.
Naomi Shaven is our senior producer, Elizabeth Ponso is our
senior editor, and Sah Bauman.
Speaker 4 (16:13):
Is Boomberg's headed podcasts.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Please follow and review the Big Tick Asia. Wherever you
listen to podcasts, it really helps.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
New listeners find the show. See you next time,
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Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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