China’s top three makers of premium electric vehicles (EVs) continued to grow on a fast track in June as discounts and incentives propelled deliveries even as they made profitability more difficult to achieve.
Beijing-headquartered Li Auto, the nearest rival to Tesla in mainland China, led the pack with a 36.4 per cent month-on-month jump in deliveries to 47,774 units, just shy of the carmaker’s all-time high of 50,353 in December.
Guangzhou-based Xpeng saw its deliveries increase for the fifth straight month, with sales advancing 5.1 per cent month on month to 10,688 vehicles.
Shanghai-based Nio rewrote its record for the second straight month, with deliveries rising 3.2 per cent over May’s, hitting 21,209.
“The strong sales numbers add to evidence that the EV market in China is still growing despite worries about slowing momentum,” said Eric Han, a senior manager at Suolei, an advisory firm in Shanghai. “However, leading players are now facing the hard task of improving profitability now that they have to offer discounts and other incentives to bolster sales.”
The industry is still mired in a discount war amid overcapacity worries.
The three top premium EV builders grappled with a drop in deliveries in early 2024 when new rivals such as smartphone vendor Xiaomi launched their new models to attract wealthy drivers.
They were forced to either slash prices or offer incentives, such as exempting users from paying battery rental fees, to maintain their market share.
Nio’s incentives to encourage use of its battery swap technology, which started in May, continued to help the company lure new buyers.
The proprietary technology allows car owners to quickly exchange a spent battery pack for a fully charged one. Under the promotion, buyers of Nio vehicles that rent a swappable battery from the carmaker are exempt from paying 12 months of rental fees, which amounts to 8,736 yuan (US$1,202).
Xiaomi said monthly deliveries of its SU7 intelligent EV surpassed the 10,000 mark in June. The Beijing-based company began delivering the car, expected to take on Tesla’s Model 3, in late March.
The company said it targeted deliveries of at least 100,000 SU7s in 2024.
Zeekr, a premium EV unit of Geely, also reported record monthly sales in June after it shipped 20,106 units, up 8 per cent from May.
A photo taken on April 18, 2023, shows a Li Auto L7 on display during the 20th Shanghai International Automobile Industry Exhibition in Shanghai. Photo: Xinhua
BYD, which is the world’s largest EV maker and builds mainly budget models priced from 100,000 yuan to 200,000 yuan, said its deliveries in June grew 3 per cent from a month earlier to 341,658 units, barely beating the company’s previous record of 341,043 in December 2023.
Shenzhen-based BYD, backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, slashed the prices of nearly all of its cars by 5 to 20 per cent in mid-February. Since then, the prices of 50 models across a range of brands have dropped by 10 per cent on average, according to Goldman Sachs.
At present, only a few EV makers, like BYD and Li Auto, have turned profitable.
And with tariffs freezing them out of Europe and the United States, Chinese EV makers are poised to penetrate further into Southeast Asia, where the market value for cleaner cars is approaching US$100 billion. BYD, Xpeng and Geely are pumping billions of dollars into Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, aiming to seize a greater share of their fast-growing markets for sustainable vehicles.
