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Zhengzhou plant news. 2 phases 1. Phase 1 car plant starts production 03/30 and second phase by 05/30. Phase 2 battery plant starts production 04/30 and phase 2 by 06/30. Combined should allow production of 1 million a year. Really fast/steep ramp up here. I'm surprised how phase 2 starts so soon after phase 1. Normally, they wait longer time than this.
I think they're just concentrating the ramp ups instead of having them scattered amongst the different plant locations.
Remember we were previously running through production expansion models for BYD based on their public production/sales statements?
It looks like the BYD internal target for Dec 2023 was implicitly stated as about 560K vehicles per month, which works out as an internal run-rate of 6.7 million vehicles per year. That would require a production expansion plan of roughly 20K vehicles every single month till Dec 2023.
So the stated Zhengzhou numbers in the article make sense if they concentrate the Mar, Apr, May, Jun expansions all at a single location. It's likely more efficient to do it this way as well, instead of having multiple locations ramping up.
The danger is having too much capacity located in a single location, but given that BYD is already at a run-rate of 3+ million vehicles per year, having 1 million of capacity at Zhengzhou would only represent <25% of total production, which is an acceptable risk.
It's also likely that sales in Henan province (with 100 million people) will eventually be able to absorb most of that 1 million production capacity as well, which minimises transport costs.
Then after Henen is done, it would make sense to shift to other vehicle plant expansions such as Shenzhen.
And as BYD continues to grow production/sales, a location with 1 million capacity represents less and less risk.
It also demonstrates that every 4 months, BYD plans to ramp up capacity by 1 million vehicles per year.
That sort of scaling is beyond anything that Tesla has or can manage.
