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FORTUNE.COM // APR.1.19
INSIDE BEIJING ELECTRIC VEHICLE’S headquarters, a glass-
and-steel complex on the Chinese capital’s edge, a
cafeteria awaits renovation so that cooks can crank out pizza and
other Western fare for the posse of foreigners the company ex-
pects to hire. “We need to have a more international feeling,” says
Wang Shitao, a Chinese engineer who earned a master’s degree
in Germany in energy storage before returning to his country to
ply his skills in its new and booming electric-car industry. “You
cannot force them to eat Chinese food all the time.”
Nor, the Chinese government has decided, can bureaucrats
continue to aggressively steer Chinese electric-car buyers to
domestic brands. The inescapable reality: Beijing Electric Vehicle
needs a tune-up.
All but unknown outside its homeland, Beijing Electric Ve-
hicle, or BJEV, is China’s largest maker of pure-electric vehicles
and the world’s No. 2 manufacturer, behind Tesla. A decade old,
BJEV owes its growth to state support.
But now the Chinese government is ratcheting back that aid.It’s slashing customer subsidies for the cheap-
est electric cars, which are the bulk of BJEV’s
sales. And it’s opening the country’s electric-
vehicle market to greater competition from
the West’s better-established automakers, a
move widely seen as a bid to tamp down the
global trade war.
As a result, BJEV must get a lot more so-
phisticated, and fast. Thus its plan to hire an
army of electric-car experts from abroad.
Because the electric-car market in China
dwarfs those of all other countries—China
accounted for 60% of the 1.3 million electric-
only cars sold globally last year, according to
Bloomberg New Energy Finance—and be-
cause the growth in demand for electric cars
is expected to outpace that for conventional
vehicles, foreign firms see it as a fight for theirTECH
China is opening
the door to Western
electric-car makers,
creating upheaval for
the nation’s home-
grown companies
and opportunity for
foreign rivals.CHINA’S ELECTRIC-CAR SHOWDOWN
Tesla, General Motors, and Volkswagen are betting big on the world’s largest market for electric vehicles.
But the country’s domestic manufacturers, like BJEV, have a huge head start. By Jeffrey Ball