The mantra from the Chinese government to their home-grown EV industry is to “Go Global” but that seems to have hit a speed bump as authorities in the Peoples Republic have now told the fledgling industry to avoid both India and Turkey as appropriate places to set up factories.
The Ministry of Commerce has recently held a meeting with some of the leading players to assess the risk of doing business abroad, in particular where to put their overseas production facilities, according to Bloomberg.
Even as Chinese EV manufacturers are scrambling to create production facilities around the globe in an attempt to avoid punitive tariffs, the message from the central government seems to be to protect technology and assets by keeping as much as possible at home.
The policy now seems to keep all of the technology at home to avoid building a potential competitor in an emerging market. I guess this is just kismet, after all, many would argue that it was the very widespread plagiarism of others’ technology that built the likes of many of the Chinese EV manufacturers.
To get permission to build cars in the PRC you needed to enter into technology sharing agreements that in effect transferred know-how to local firms. Now, I guess, they are just worried that history may repeat itself.
During the meeting the EV makers were told to focus their future efforts on knock-down production lines and thus export vehicles in kit form so vehicles can have the final assembly closer to the market. This way there would be less need to set up large scale supply chains and facilities outside of the PRC and preserve jobs at home.
During the meeting, India and Turkey were both mentioned specifically as places where full scale facilities would be ‘inappropriate’.
