It’s around lunchtime and I’ve spent so much time deep in the weeds of an issue that I need a break. So, here’s a little funny story from my real-world travels in the past few years that given the current Davos meeting topics you might find interesting.
I went to Russia in 2024, because what I was hearing in western media about the sanctions did not align with what I was seeing from reports inside Russia. Before I went into Russia, I spent several weeks in Northern and Eastern Europe visiting various institutions, reading material and checking to see how systems in Europe were engaging with commerce given the Russian sanctions. It wasn’t very exciting work, and sometimes I literally just sat in the lobbies of banks listening to conversations.
When I went into Russia (April, May, June and July ’24) I noticed many of the “Uber cars” were BYD brand, Chinese electric vehicles. It made sense given two years of existing sanctions and few cars from Europe or America available except under costly brokerage fees for acquisition. They like the Geely brand better, but BYDs are much cheaper. A brand new BYD costs around $5,000 to $10,000 USD, in some places even less.
Then later I noticed even more of these BYD cars in Europe. I started to pay attention to them and saw them everywhere.
When I went back into Russia a year later in 2025, there was a very noticeable increase in BYD cars. It was crazy, they were everywhere.
My travels also took me to southeast Asia and again those damned BYD’s were all over the place. In Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, these BYD’s were everywhere, maybe even 30% of total vehicle traffic at times – most certainly well over 50% of all EVs – and there are digital billboards for “Build Your Dream” (BYD) all over the place throughout Asia.
Australia is stocked full of those things, and the middle east, yup, even there too. It became increasingly weird to notice. So many were visible I was wondering how the heck China can mass produce and ship this many cheap EVs so fast.
