That’s the claim being touted by media of late. However close the call, there’s a lot happening in the electric-car industry in Nanjing’s neighbouring City. From production of batteries to entire vehicles, Changzhou is redefining itself as a global NEV hub.
At the BYD factory in Changzhou, a new car rolls off the production line at the rate of one per minute. That’s the ballpark figure today for the speed of the top automotive production lines in the world. For BYD in Changzhou, such speed in productivity is expected to represent an output value in excess of ¥60 billion this year.
But it wasn’t always like this. Until recently, Changzhou was a rather sleepy place. But it was the solar power industry which was to change that.
Changzhou made its first fortune in cotton. Development of the City’s cotton textile industry that began in the 1920s received a boost during the Second Sino-Japanese War, as Shanghai-based businesses began to look elsewhere. As a result, Changzhou saw many cotton mills established in the following decade.
Today, textiles continue to play a big role in the local economy, as do food processing, engineering, horticulture and high-efficiency agriculture. Changzhou was ranked as the ninth best business city in China by Forbes in 2008.
Then there is that solar power. Changzhou has issued 10 policies to promote the construction of that being called the “New Energy Capital”, forming an industry network based on power generation (photovoltaic), energy storage (batteries), transmission (new-energy equipment) and energy application (new-energy vehicles; NEVs) as the key links to a ecological, new-energy closed loop.
From January to May this year, Changzhou’s exports of NEV batteries and photovoltaic cells increased by 30.7 percent, of which lithium-ion battery exports totalled ¥3.18 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 64.2 percent.
With more than 30,000 components required to produce a NEV, the list of new-energy companies settling in Changzhou is constantly growing; some are well-known giants and others industry rookies. To date, more than 3,400 enterprises in the new-energy automobile industry chain are to be found in Changzhou.
It is planned that by 2025, the scale of the City’s new-energy industry will exceed ¥1 trillion, while a longer term goal is to double that by 2035, reports Xinhuanet.com.
One of Changzhou’s leaders in the industry is CALB (中创新航). They were the ones responsible for the 20 millionth Chinese-made NEV to roll off the production line, equipped with the firm’s pioneering “One-Stop” battery.
That one car was quite a statement, underscoring Changzhou’s growing significance in the new-energy chain. The parallels with solar power and cotton are obvious; both need a lot of sun to grow.
