They have billions of dollars in funding, backing from China’s biggest tech companies and the world’s largest electric-vehicle market on their doorstep. But Chinese EV start-ups face a struggle to survive in the face of intensifying competition and subsidy cuts.
Although analysts are reluctant to name companies that could disappear, the two dozen EV start-ups, among them Nio and Xpeng, which have raised more than $10bn in recent years, are expected to be cut down to a handful.
China’s electric vehicle sales have grown tenfold since 2014 and last year it became the first country where new energy vehicles sales surpassed 1m, about three-quarters of which were pure EVs and the rest hybrids.