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Carmakers and salespeople in Brazil are up in arms at the arrival of a giant cargo vessel carrying thousands of cheap Chinese electric vehicles.
The world’s largest car-carrying ship – one of a number deployed by BYD, China’s biggest carmaker – is said to carry the equivalent of 20 football fields of vehicles. It finished its maiden journey to dock at Brazil’s Itajai port late last month. But not everyone is happy about its arrival.
BYD, China’s top producer of EVs and plug-in hybrids, is offering Brazilian car shoppers relatively low-priced options in a market where the green-car movement is still in its infancy. But Brazilian auto-industry officials and labour leaders fear the vast influx of cars from BYD and other Chinese carmakers will set back domestic auto production and hurt jobs.
Calls for immediate 35% tariffs after flood of EVs
The late-May shipment was the fourth of the Chinese carmaker’s ships to dock in Brazil this year, totalling around 22,000 vehicles, according to Reuters calculations.
BYD, the world’s top producer of electric and plug-in hybrid cars, is the largest among several Chinese brands targeting Brazil for growth. China-built vehicle imports are expected to grow nearly 40% this year, to about 200,000, according to Brazil’s main auto association. That would account for roughly 8% of total light-vehicle registrations.
Industry and labour groups say China is taking advantage of Brazil’s temporarily low tariff barriers to ramp up its exports rather than investing to build Brazilian factories and create jobs.
They are lobbying Brazil’s government to accelerate by a year a plan to increase Brazil’s tariff on all EV imports to 35% from 10%, rather than gradually phasing in higher levies.
“Countries around the world started closing their doors to the Chinese, but Brazil didn’t,” said Aroaldo da Silva, a Mercedes-Benz production worker and president of IndustriALL Brasil, a confederation of unions across six industrial sectors. “China made use of that.”
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