China’s EV makers set sights on Latin America in global expansion
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. CAMAÇARI, Brazil—When Ford Motor shut its factory here in 2021 after more than a century in the country, Uelcson Alves and the automaker’s thousands of other workers in this once-thriving Brazilian town panicked. “It was devastating.
Stores started closing and then health clinics and schools," said Alves. It was the middle of the pandemic, and his family, like many others, suddenly had no health insurance, he said. The town’s streets became eerily empty as many families simply left in search of work elsewhere.
But things are looking up these days in Camaçari. The Chinese are here. BYD, one of the world’s biggest electric-vehicle producers, bought the abandoned plant last year and is rapidly transforming the 1,100-acre plot on Henry Ford Avenue into its Latin American hub.
Largely shut out of the U.S. and facing punitive tariffs in Europe, Chinese makers of electric and hybrid vehicles have flooded Latin America and other regions with cheap cars after ramping up production at home—a strategy that threatens some of the world’s largest automakers at a time of deepening global trade tensions. Latin America and the Caribbean—home to about 650 million people and much of the lithium that EV makers need for batteries—are among the markets at the top of the list.
BYD said it is thinking about building a plant in Mexico, where some 10% of new-car sales are Chinese brands, while also rapidly expanding its fleet of electric buses from Colombia to Chile. Other Chinese companies, such as Great Wall Motor, also are moving to Brazil, taking over a Mercedes-Benz plant that was abandoned after the German company ceased car production in the country. “It’s a big paradigm shift," Ricardo Bastos, Great
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