Shenzhen-based BYD Co. Ltd., which counts Warren Buffett among its investors, is charting out major plans to electrify its presence in India, which it sees as a “global powerbank”, and make the country a hub for its South Asia business.
The $20-billion company already produces electric buses and batteries in India and recently did a soft launch of its electric van. It plans to treble its lithium-ion battery capacity in the country apart from further deepening its presence in the electric mobility space.
“We’re taking the market very seriously and all the information that we’ve been collecting from the government and other sources give us the confidence to invest in India,” Zhang Jie, Executive Director, BYD India Pvt. Ltd., told a group of Indian journalists who visited the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen last week.
Listed in the Hong Kong and Shenzhen stock exchanges, BYD, which controls about 7% of the world’s lithium mines is the only company in the world that is linked from mines to batteries and further to electric vehicles.
The company, which has a capacity of 65 giga watts (GW) to produce lithium ion batteries in China, currently owns a 1GW plant near Chennai. It wants to position itself for the upcoming electric vehicle revolution in India by trebling its battery capacity but it’s not clear if the expansion will be in Chennai or through a new plant elsewhere.
Pointing to the need for a clear roadmap from the government for the shift to electric vehicles, Mr. Zhang said that the company would come in fully with vendors and a sizeable capacity for producing electric vehicles once the roadmap was clear.
There are 214 electric buses produced by BYD that are now running in India, a majority of them in Hyderabad. It now plans to expand into inter-city transport where it is already testing its vehicles. It aims to sell about 2,000 units of electric buses in 2020 in India.
The electric van, T3 MPV, will be sold through B2B channels for now. At some stage in the near future, BYD electric cars will be launched in India and the company is careful to preserve its brand image.
Electric forklifts are another key focus area where BYD aims to carve out a 15% share of the market in the next three years.
The Chinese major also plans to assemble mobile phones in the country. The company signed an MoU with the Tamil Nadu government two weeks ago to invest ₹2,800 crore in a phone assembly unit near Chennai that will employ 11,500 people. Mr Zhang did not confirm though if this will be to assemble the I-Phone.
(The correspondent was in Shenzhen recently at the invitation of BYD)
