Apple has been looking to get into car industry for a while and has picked either Foxconn or Luxshare as its car producer. This seems a little strange since neither company are known in this area.
Looks to me Apple has went to its existing suppliers after finding out that it could not get BYD/CATL to follow its orders. Anyhow, I'm posting this because Chinese social media has speculation that there is a large Chinese NEV company that's very involved in this project. We will see which company that is in the coming days.
The other thing is a report that BYD blade factory is having some issues delivering batteries for an external customer (speculated to be Tesla) due to the extremely high requirement in thickness tolerance (0.03 mm required vs 0.1 mm on normal blade battery). I found this to be quite interesting. I think this is a great learning experience For BYD. As BYD's battery subsidiary keep pushing forward with more external customers, they will have to deal with higher requirements that will probably also bring in higher revenues/cost. It seems like once they've done the work to meet Tesla's requirements, they can pretty much meet anyone's requirement whether that would be VW or Ford or Apple or someone else.
BYD also signed agreement to build a huge factory in Zhengzhou that apparently can product 1 million car a year as well as 30 Gwh of blade battery. The first stage will start production in Mar 30th 2023 and have production capacity of 400k car. The second phase will start production on June 30th 2023 with production capacity of 600k car. If you wonder why BYD's margins isn't higher, they are going through such a huge ramp up right now that requires a lot of new hiring costs and capital costs in new plants which are not going to show up in immediate profits, but will help them capture market share for the future. BYD to me is operating like Amazon right now. Forever expanding and getting into new spaces. A lot of ambitious goals for this company.
New BYD product so far announced in 2022 includes
2022 version Han DMi/DMp
Seal
2022 Tang DMp/EV
Frigate 07
Denza D9 MPV
Denza SUV
Frigate 07 spec is medium to large SUV using with DMi/DMp variant, 200 km range on battery alone, focuses in on the 200 to 300k RMB market. It is a product designed for the worldwide market based on Song platform. Its production base is in Xi'an.
Supposedly, all the models this year are aiming in the 200k+ and 300k+ RMB market. Next year, they will have model in the 400k+ and 500k+ market. I'd be really curious what they come up with for the luxury market, since that will be their first crack in the competitive but also high margin segment. The Seal already looks pretty amazing. I wonder what adding another 150 to 200k would bring to customers.
Apparently, Shanghai local officials really bent over backward to get Tesla production going again. Sounds like they got a good working relationship with Tesla. Tesla has already announced expansion at Shanghai recently to reach 2 million in production level. It's likely they will continue to add factories in China outside of Shanghai. Obvious locations are Jilin and around Beijing area, which are where a lot of the other foreign JV/automakers are based in. I don't think a foreign automaker like Tesla is wiling to take a chance in areas with less automotive industrial base.
