BYD leads deep price cuts for domestic NEVs
A number of domestic car companies had cut prices of several popular models of new-energy vehicles , a prelude to a year of fierce competition in the NEV industry.
BYD brought two new models to the market on Monday with an official guide price of 79,800 yuan (US$11,091). SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile, Chang'an Qiyuan and Hozon Auto closely followed by lowering the price of certain models.
Among them, SGMW offered a price cut of 6,000 yuan for its 150 Advanced Edition, now priced at 99,800 yuan, while the price of both Changan Qiyuan's Q05 and A05 models dropped to around 73,900 yuan.
For the first time, people can have quite some choices of less than 100,000 yuan if they want to buy a new-energy passenger car, especially plug-in hybrid models that BYD mainly targets for better sales.
BYD's competitiveness is reflected in its advantage covering the whole industry chain against the backdrop that plug-in hybrids usually had prices lower than fuel cars, according to a report by China Times, a leading financial newspaper.
As the 2023 sales champion in China's market as well as global NEV market with an annual sales volume of 3.02 million vehicles, BYD has a huge market impact for its peers.
Commanding core technologies and a strong vertical integration ability, BYD also claims a strong say in the whole industry,which contributed to its pricing initiative.
The annual sales and production scale of China's new-energy vehicles reached 9.5 million last year, an increase of 36 percent year on year, ranking the top worldwide for nine consecutive years, among which the growth rate of plug-in hybrid vehicle sales and production soared to 80 percent.
However, competition in the domestic NEV industry should not be underestimated.
BYD sold 201,500 new-energy vehicles in January, up 33.14 percent year on year. But the same month's sales result was countered by Geely and Chery, with a similar scale of over 2 million.
"2024 can be the first year for Chinese auto brands to fuel a brutal competition," said He Xiaopeng, chairman and CEO of Xpeng Motors.
