Comment by thelastgallon
2 days ago
This is the same story everywhere. Nobody has the know-how or the deep ecosystems needed to do these things.
India has a "made in India" mandate which is hilarious. >80% of solar panel (polysilicon, ingots, and silicon wafers) is from China. Situation is worse with batteries and EVs. Tata, which has been making vehicles for quite some time doesn't have any clue how to make EVs and is building an entire plant with a Chinese company (Chery).
Of course, everything will be labeled "made in ....".
In any country, the super rich have a simple algorithm:
1) Get it manufactured in China, slap your label and sell. Free trade is good for you, thousands of economists reports, blah, blah.
2) When its impossible to compete: China is security threat, we can't allow them. But we'll import most of it (80 - 90% of components) and still put our label.
Its easy to manipulate Govts, lobby or buy (Musk).
Indian companies do not like to do research. Too much risk. They prefer to buy proven stuff. There are small companies doing a lot of what the Chinese are doing (including LFP and other battery chemistry). But they cannot scale up because they lack the necessary investment and order book.
GOI has a new locally-produced solar cell mandate that has been pushed back by six months because the requirement is 8-10x the current production. People are being forced to keep factories shut due to the lack of locally produced cells.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indias-solar-push-id...
I think you're right that politicians and the "deep state" (career bureaucrats) are easy to manipulate.
But there is an obvious explanation: short-term economic growth is a contradictory goal to building local industry. China has built their economy around scale and the rest of the world takes advantage of this. Scaling local industry will be expensive and require investment. Of course politicians are eager to provide both growth and the aesthetics of local industry while paying off their patrons.
This is unsustainable. At some point things will snap and people will swing wildly to the left or right.
Regardless of ideological or humanitarian concerns with China, they are clearly able to manage an economy with a longer term strategy than anyone else on earth, excepting maybe Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. Singapore and Rwanda also seem to be less affected by the malaise of short-term pleasuring of investors. Even norway with its sovereign wealth fund hasn't managed to diversify—or perhaps they simply don't have the labor or resources to do so.
Huh Tata is the best selling EV manufacturer in India.
Their new Chery tieup is utilizing the Freelander architecture from the Chery and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) joint venture in China instead of a pricier internal or JLR roadmap. Remember they own JLR.
This is for their new premium EV line.
You're not wrong, but this is the economic and industrial strategy model for how countries build complex manufacturing capabilities from scratch.
Almost every major manufacturing powerhouse (e.g. Japan in the 50s-70s and China in the 80s-2000s) started as a low-value-add assembler relying on foreign intermediate inputs. You have to get your foot in the door somewhere, and then expand how much of the chain you're in. If you wait till you can manufacture 100% of a sodium-ion cell, it'll never happen.
You need downstream demand first to justify upstream capital expenditure. No private investor will build an electrolyte facility in North America or India if there's zero operation battery cell factories down the street to buy their output.
By starting with cell assembly (even if you're relying on imported Chinese precursor materials), you're creating an anchor customer for future domestic chemical and material suppliers, the human capital of engineers, technicians, and supply chain managers who understand battery logistics and manufacturing operations on the ground, and physical infrastructure that makes the rest of the industry financially viable.
India with mobile phone manufacturing for example went from screwdriver assembly ("screwdriving" pre-assembled kits imported from China) in 2014 with 2-5% domestic value addition, to now being at 30-35% domestic value addition. Things like plastic injection molding, metal frames, packaging, and PCB surface mounting, are localized.
There's a risk of getting stuck in assembly without expanding, but you have to start somewhere. You can't sit on the sidelines and expect an entire ecosystem to magically appear out of nowhere. Moving step by step is the only pragmatic thing you can do.