Shanghai's NEV industry continues to grow

More than 1.1 million new energy vehicles were put into use in Shanghai by April, outnumbering any other city in the world, Chen Kele, deputy director of intelligent manufacturing promotion division at Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization said during a media briefing on Friday.

According to Shanghai's NEV industry development implementation plan (2021-2025), released in February 2021, at least 1.2 million NEVs should be produced annually by 2025, with the value of industrial output exceeding 350 billion yuan ($50 billion).

Tesla, whose gigafactory based in Lingang Special Area went operational in late 2019, serves as one good example of industry leaders' contribution to the local industrial growth and the completion of the NEV ecosystem, he said.

Tesla's Lingang facility churned out 727,000 cars in 2022, up 49.7 percent year-on-year. The value of the NEV maker's annual industrial output has thus come at 183.9 billion yuan, accounting for 23 percent of the city's total. Tesla has boosted Shanghai's industrial output grown by 1.3 percentage points, according to SHEITC's calculation.

Meanwhile, more than 95 percent of the parts produced in the gigafactory are now localized. Tesla has provided 700 billion yuan worth of business opportunities to 360 suppliers in the upstream value chain and 100,000 job opportunities. A total of 60 Chinese automakers have entered Tesla's global supplier system.

The Tesla facility in Shanghai now employs more than 24,000 people. By the end of 2022, Tesla has opened 20 university-enterprise cooperation classes, nurturing some 670 students with skill sets meeting up to Tesla's demand.

"All these will help to complete China's NEV industrial chain, upgrade technologies, expand production capacity and lower costs," said Chen.

On April 9, Tesla signed cooperation agreements with the Lingang Special Area Administration to build a new mega factory in the area, which will be dedicated to manufacturing the company's energy-storage product Megapack. The new plant is scheduled to break ground in the third quarter of this year and start production in the second quarter of 2024.

While Shanghai is striving to build a world-class automotive industrial cluster, continued efforts will be made to further optimize its overall business environment to attract more industry leaders to set their footprints in the city, said Chen.