NEV industry on rise in Xi'an

Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi province, has become a key industrial base for Chinese carmaker BYD, second only in importance to its headquarters in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province.

In the first half of the year, BYD's new energy vehicle (NEV) sales outpaced US carmaker Tesla to become the world's top-selling NEV maker.

The development is seen as being inextricably linked to both Xi'an in terms of its progressive automobile industry policy, optimal business environment and compatibility.

From January to May, BYD in Xi'an produced 280,000 vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 146.2 percent, with 270,000 of them NEVs.

"We are building a BYD new energy auto part production expansion project. In the future, all the advanced components required for BYD's NEVs will appear here and BYD's annual output in Xi'an will also increase from 300,000 to 600,000," said Liu Zhenyu, general manager of BYD in Xi'an.

The BYD Parts Industrial Park – with a planned investment of 15 billion yuan ($2.24 billion) – is a major project in Shaanxi and in Xi'an that is currently under construction.

Xi'an's NEV industry is widely said to have strong foundations, an early start and cutting-edge technology, which created the conditions for the explosive growth of NEVs in the past two years.

In the face of the complex and severe domestic and international situation, from January to May this year, Xi'an's NEV output continued to surge, with production and sales increasing 748.5 percent year-on-year.

Xi'an has recently issued plans for accelerating the high-quality development of the NEV industry. Projections are that by 2025 Xi'an will be a first-class NEV industrial base, with the scale of its production and sales at the forefront of the country.