The milestone arrived with little fanfare. In 2023 China exported 4.91 million vehicles and Japan 4.42 million, and for the first time the world’s largest car exporter was Chinese.[1] It was not a fluke of one year: exports rose again in 2024 to 5.86 million, up more than 19%.[2] A country that barely figured in the global car trade a decade ago now sits at the top of it.
Electric vehicles are the leading edge. China’s new-energy vehicle exports jumped nearly 78% in 2023 to 1.2 million, and in 2024 roughly 1.3 million went abroad, close to a million of them pure battery-electric.[1] The symbolic crossing came in the sales tables: BYD won the full-year global crown for battery-electric sales for the first time in 2025, delivering some 2.25 million against Tesla’s 1.64 million.[4]
Show as a table
| Series | Value |
|---|---|
| SAIC | 35.3% |
| Geely | 18.8% |
| BYD | 17.0% |
| Tesla (China-built) | 7.8% |
Source: reference [3] below.
The walls go up
Success drew a response. In October 2024 the European Union imposed definitive countervailing duties on Chinese battery-electric cars, on top of the standard 10% tariff: 17.0% for BYD, 18.8% for Geely, 35.3% for SAIC, and 7.8% for Tesla’s China-built exports, with non-cooperating makers at 35.3%.[3] The United States went further, raising its tariff on Chinese EVs from 25% to 100% in September 2024, a rate designed not to tax the trade but to end it.[1]
The first wave was cars on ships. The second wave is factories on foreign soil, and it is already under way.
The answer to a tariff wall is to build inside it. BYD opened its first overseas plant in Thailand in 2024 and is building in Hungary, its first in Europe, along with Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and beyond.[4] One caveat on the sales tables: the quarter-by-quarter BYD-versus-Tesla figures are noisy and best avoided; the durable fact is the full-year 2025 crossing.
What it means for capital
The export wave is entering a second and more consequential phase. The first was a trade story, cheap, capable cars shipped to price-sensitive markets. The second is an industrial-footprint story, as Chinese firms plant capacity in Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America to sit inside the tariff walls and beside their customers. That shifts the investable questions from shipping volumes to where the plants land, which suppliers travel with them, and how host governments split the difference between cheap EVs and protected domestic industries. The cars were the opening move; the factories are the game.
| Ref | Publication | Date | Supports |
|---|---|---|---|
| [1] | Global Times (citing CAAM) | Jan 2024 | 2023 export totals, NEV exports, US tariff rise |
| [2] | Best-Selling-Cars (citing CAAM) | 2025 | 2024 export total and growth rate |
| [3] | Cleary Gottlieb | Oct 2024 | EU countervailing duty rates by manufacturer |
| [4] | Electrek | Jan 2025 | BYD-Tesla 2025 deliveries and overseas plants |
References
- Global Times (citing CAAM), “China surpasses Japan to be world’s largest auto exporter in 2023,” Jan 2024. Read source ↗
- Best-Selling-Cars (citing CAAM), “2024 (Full Year) China: Car Production and Exports by Brand,” 2025. Read source ↗
- Cleary Gottlieb, “Definitive Duties Adopted by the EU on Chinese Battery Electric Vehicles,” Oct 2024. Read source ↗
- Electrek, “BYD to open new EV plant overseas with 150,000-vehicle capacity,” Jan 2025. Read source ↗
Every source above is public and linked. This is a research brief from Singularity Dynamics; full briefings on this topic are available on request.