Chinese exports of electric vehicles more than doubled (+110%) between January and August, according to data from the Chinese Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM), illustrating the rise of the sector in the Asian country.
Data released Wednesday shows that Chinese automakers exported around 727,000 electric vehicles in the first eight months of the year.
Pure electric vehicles registered an annual increase of 120%, up to 665 thousand units, while exports of hybrid models increased by 73.5%, up to 62 thousand.
Including cars powered by internal combustion engines, China exported 2.94 million vehicles overseas as of August, a year-on-year increase of 61.9% from a year earlier.
The Chinese official press highlighted that the growth in passenger car exports (+69.8%) is higher than the increase in commercial vehicle sales (+31.1%).
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced this Wednesday the opening of an investigation into the subsidies that China grants to its electric vehicle manufacturers, whose prices are “artificially low”, due to this public support, which causes losses to European companies.
“World markets are flooded with cheaper Chinese electric vehicles and their price is kept artificially low thanks to huge state subsidies,” explained Von der Leyen, in a State of the Union address.
Also this Wednesday, the Vice President of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis, responsible for Trade, announced that he will travel to China next week to discuss the issue of subsidies attributed to electric vehicles.
“We are open to competition, but not to unfair practices,” he said.
Nearly six million electric cars were sold in China last year, more than all other countries in the world combined.
The size of the Chinese market and generous state support have led to the rise of local brands, including BYD, NIO and Xpeng, which now threaten the ‘status quo’ of an industry dominated for decades by German, Japanese and North American construction companies.
In 2014, Chinese leader Xi Jinping claimed that developing electric cars was the only way for China to become an “automotive powerhouse.” The country then set a goal for electric cars to represent 20% of total sales by 2025. This figure was exceeded last year, when one in four vehicles sold in China was electric.
Five of the ten best-selling electric vehicle brands in the world are now Chinese. The largest is BYD, which is only behind the North American Tesla. Chinese dominance also extends to the battery industry. The Chinese CATL and BYD are the largest manufacturers in the world. Beijing still maintains strong control over access to essential raw materials, including rare earths.
Source: TSF
