Doesn't really look like a cooldown cycle for me in China. The competition is extreme there. Weekly new releases with another cool state-of-the-art feature. Pure innovation going on there, which makes me, as a German, kinda worried...
Western companies are completely asleep at the wheel, pun not intended.
The U.S. is trying to do some good old fashioned protectionism to protect its industry but it’s either gonna fail, or it’s gonna reveal the massively lagging U.S. economic system which is incapable of building infrastructure and is increasingly incapable of encouraging R&D and new industries.
The only thing that could hold the Chinese back right now is the Chinese govt which has already managed to destroy 2-3 industries over the past few years (the extremely fast growing tech industry comes to mind) with arbitrary policy and decision making.
If I were a Chinese company right now, I would try and diversify my supply chain, R&D and even top talent into safer Western countries with auto making talent like Germany. However, fierce price competition in China may mean they don’t really have the luxury to do so.
I think now would be the time for the EU or individual European counties to sprinkle some light protectionism on their auto industry to give Chinese EV makers a reason to shift there without angering their Chinese govt overlords.
(BTW the tech industry is not destroyed by any means. Since the goal at that time was anti-monopoly...it did limit the market power of top players though hard to tell its net utility)
This is because in real politik vehicle manufacturing means the ability to make war machines and artillery. If we subsidize China more it is just asking for military losses.
They ordered new NLAWs to be produced, in peacetime, and the lead time on a small batch is like 3 years. I do not see any possibility of winning a prolonged war against any enemy that wears shoes more sophisticated than sandals.
The Western military-industrial complex was dissing primitivity and backwardness of Russian army, and with 10x the budget, I thought they were right. I thought Ukraine would lose militarily, or politically, or lose morale, thank kind of thing.
I never imagined that western military complex is so proud of having it's few expensive and fancy toys that it has actually grown incapable of producing abundant supply of shells and bullets. South Korea supplied more artillery shells to Ukraine than US or EU. Looking at the state of affairs, i cannot help but thing corruption and fraud.
But how can this be? We are comparing to the two most corrupt countries on the plane, Russia and China.
All of western military leadership that is currently antagonising China must be barking mad, China has 10x industrial capacity of Russia.
All of Europe drives steel production out by taxing energy to crazy levels. Can’t eat a cookie and have a cookie. Environment or military security.
There is a big influx of these to Malaysia and Singapore. Pretty sure other countries too but these two stands out because they already have some local Chinese population; which makes the Chinese feel more at home. I am also reading that Chinese low-skill manufacturing is trying to find a foot in Africa; though not sure if that's going to work out.
Every time a new model with better battery chemistry, longer range, faster charging is released, it makes a bunch of older models with previous-gen batteries, shorter range, slower charging obsolete to the point of unsellability. Then they end up rotting in an overgrown lot somewhere. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/
Because of the fast release cadence, a model might become outmoded before it sold enough cars to recoup the development cost, but of course manufacturers can't just stop to save money while everyone else is putting out new models at breakneck speed and eating into their market share. So they're caught in a hamster wheel, burning cash while hoping that someone else will go bankrupt first. WM Motor looks like a candidate: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chines...
There's some techlore floating around https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2023/12/03/bri-notebook-the-... claiming that the overcrowded market is actually good for the industry as a whole because it makes it more competitive abroad, but that's cold comfort for investors who hoped to make their money back and then some.
Ironically Chinese government has quite a lot experience handling overcapacity, sometimes caused by them sometimes not :/
We in Europe foolishly thought we are beyond that and here we are.
Thanks german industrialists.