On July 3rd, China’s 20th millionth new energy vehicle was taken off the production line at the Guangzhou GAC Aion factory. It took China 27 years to reach the first million vehicles but only 17 months to surpass 20 million vehicles from the 10th million.
China’s new energy vehicle industry has come a long way since its inception, developing a complete industrial chain system that includes key materials, core components, and the entire vehicle. The rapid export growth of new energy vehicles has opened up a new frontier for Chinese automobile enterprises.
However, this does not mean that Chinese brands have firmly established a foothold overseas. “Wu Songquan, a senior chief expert at China Automotive Center and chief engineer at China Automotive Strategy and Policy Research Center, told Uncle Dao. “ While China has a large total export volume of automobiles, it has a small market share in most individual markets and has numerous brand names, which cannot compete with automobile brands in Europe, America, Japan, and South Korea.”
Aion S
Taking the European market as an example, in the first half of this year, China exported approximately 350,000 new energy vehicles to Europe, with a total sales volume of 1.419 million new energy vehicles in Europe during the same period. Although a 25% market share may seem quite high, due to the large number of new energy vehicle brands in China, the sales of a single brand are not as good as other multinational brands.
Specifically, in the sales ranking of European new energy vehicle brands in the first half of the year, only SAIC MG made it into the top ten; in the model sales ranking, domestic cars MG4 and Polestar 2 rank eighth and 18th respectively, with the leaders coming from traditional multinational car companies, except for Tesla.