Comment by toomuchtodo
1 day ago
BYD owns their own fleet of car carriers for export, with the capacity to have ~30k vehicles shipping to other markets at any one time on their vessels. From this piece:
> BYD Deliveries outside of China hit 1.05 million in 2025. The company has set a goal to expand overseas sales to between 1.5 million to 1.6 million units in 2026, according to a Citigroup Inc. report in November that cited a meeting with BYD management.
Edit: The debt is irrelevant, China isn’t America. They’ll nationalize and inflate away any institutional debt or wipe it out, but still have a third of the world’s manufacturing capacity. Tesla exists on vibes, Chinese EV makers build, for example. jmyeet’s comment mostly nails this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46424124 (citations)
(global light vehicle TAM is ~90M units/year, and Chinese EV automakers are going to soak the market with their production capacity)
China has a huge deflation problem that they export to the world via cheap products. They have a lot of capacity and not enough consumers. So in China, an unstated mild Keynesian approach makes sense. They can sweep debt under the rug and take in inflation from net debtor countries
Which on the one hand is great because through that China exports material wealth to the world.
At the same time production capacity outside of China has to compete with this "rigged" system, which is near impossible to do.
Falling prices, sounds like the way things should be as real technology and markets develop. Inflation is not natural.
Only a capitalist high on stocks can convince you that falling prices are bad. I, for one, welcome these falling prices. I thought inflation was the problem?
> They’ll nationalize and inflate away any institutional debt or wipe it out
This is just the reverse, actually, China isn’t afraid to go so far as to jail CEOs. There is no such thing as too big to fail in China, and all the Chinese domestic companies know it. The bailout playbook is a western thing.
China has been performing debt swaps with local governments to clean up their balance sheets [1], so used as an example. Agree with all of your comment. People make the mistake that China plays by artificial US capital market rules around profit and debt; they do not. They optimize for physical world success, not line go up.
[1] Why China Is Hoping $1.6 Trillion Can Fix Its Hidden Debt Problem - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-16/china-eco... | https://archive.today/HsaHV - April 16th, 2025
Ah, I think I get it. Are you saying that regardless of BYD’s continued existence, China will still have 1/3 of the world’s manufacturing capacity?
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There is no free lunch. Debt in China is still owed to someone. Printing money creates inflation. Oversupply leads to deflation.
It’s why China’s real estate company debt is dragging down the economy as a whole. It’s all connected.
China very much is held to the same rules as the US, especially as it engages with the global financial system.
Which is why they are in so much trouble. The economy is anemic. The last stimulus package barely made a difference. Debt overhang remains.
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They only jail the people that upset the regime.
From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".
That said, it's very difficult to be sure if what I see from the outside is propaganda. Or rather, it is always propaganda even when it's true, and I can't tell how much of it is China's own self-promotion vs. other people giving negative propaganda.
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