BYD: The Company That Scammed The Entire World

Not long ago, the Chancellor of Germany boarded a plane to Beijing with thirty chief executives sitting behind him. They were not going to sign contracts. They were going to ask Xi Jinping to stop suffocating German industry. Look at what was behind that flight. Mercedes watched its profit fall 28 percent. Porsche lost 92 percent of its bottom line in a single year. Stellantis — the group that owns Jeep, Peugeot and Fiat — posted a 26 billion dollar loss, the worst in its history. Volkswagen announced fifteen thousand job cuts. Four of the most powerful industrial names in Europe, and behind every one of them, the same company keeps appearing. Until 2003 that company had never built a car. It made rechargeable batteries in a rented workshop. And a large part of the price advantage it used to break those companies was not earned on a factory floor. It was written as a cheque by a government. So how does a battery workshop bring a century-old industry to its knees in under a decade? What did it actually build that nobody could copy? And what is sitting on its balance sheet that the balance sheet does not show? None of what follows is hidden. It is in the company's own filings, in a research note published by a Hong Kong analysis firm, in recall notices, in a labour prosecution filed in a Brazilian court, and in an industrial plan the Chinese government wrote down and published online. The strange part is not that any of it is secret. It is that these documents have almost never been read next to each other.