Why Tesla Soared as Other Automakers Struggled to Make Cars
For much of last year, established automakers like General Motors and Ford Motor operated in a different reality from Tesla, the electric car company.
G.M. and Ford closed one factory after another — sometimes for months on end — because of a shortage of computer chips, leaving dealer lots bare and sending car prices zooming. Yet Tesla racked up record sales quarter after quarter and ended the year having sold nearly twice as many vehicles as it did in 2020 unhindered by an industrywide crisis.
Tesla's ability to conjure up critical components has a greater significance than one year's car sales. It suggests that the company, and possibly other young electric car businesses, could threaten the dominance of giants like Volkswagen and G.M. sooner and more forcefully than most industry executives and policymakers realize. That would help the effort to reduce the emissions that are causing climate change by displacing more gasoline-powered cars sooner. But it could hurt the millions of workers, thousands of suppliers and numerous local and national governments that rely on traditional auto production for jobs, business and tax revenue.
Tesla and its enigmatic chief executive, Elon Musk, have said little about how the carmaker ran circles around the rest of the auto industry. Now it's becoming clear that the company simply had a superior command of technology and its own supply chain. Tesla appeared to better forecast demand than businesses that produce many more cars than it does. Other automakers were surprised by how quickly the car market recovered from a steep drop early in the pandemic and had simply not ordered enough chips and parts fast enough.
G.M. and Stellantis, the company formed from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot, all sold fewer cars in 2021 than they did in 2020.
Tesla's production and supply problems made it an industry laughingstock. Many of the manufacturing snafus stemmed from Mr. Musk's insistence that the company make many parts itself.
Other car companies have realized that they need to do some of what Mr. Musk and Tesla have been doing all along and are in the process of taking control of their onboard computer systems.
Mercedes, for example, plans to use fewer specialized chips in coming models and more standardized semiconductors, and to write its own software, said Markus Schäfer, a member of the German carmaker's management board who oversees procurement.
traced to the outbreak of Covid-19, which triggered an economic slowdown, mass layoffs and a halt to production. Here's what happened next:
A reduction in shipping. With fewer goods being made and fewer people with paychecks to spend at the start of the pandemic, manufacturers and shipping companies assumed that demand would drop sharply. But that proved to be a mistake, as demand for some items would surge.
Demand for protective gear spiked. In early 2020, the entire planet suddenly needed surgical masks and gowns. Most of these goods were made in China. As Chinese factories ramped up production, cargo vessels began delivering gear around the globe.
Then, a shipping container shortage. Shipping containers piled up in many parts of the world after they were emptied. The result was a shortage of containers in the one country that needed them the most: China, where factories would begin pumping out goods in record volumes
Demand for durable goods increased. The pandemic shifted Americans' spending from eating out and attending events to office furniture, electronics and kitchen appliances – mostly purchased online. The spending was also encouraged by government stimulus programs.
Strained supply chains. Factory goods swiftly overwhelmed U.S. ports. Swelling orders further outstripped the availability of shipping containers, and the cost of shipping a container from Shanghai to Los Angeles skyrocketed tenfold.
It also helps that Tesla is a much smaller company than Volkswagen and Toyota, which in a good year produce more than 10 million vehicles each. "It's just a smaller supply chain to begin with," said Mr. Melsert, who is now chief executive of American Battery Technology Company, a recycling and mining firm.
recall more than 475,000 cars for two separate defects. One could cause the rearview camera to fail, and the other could cause the front hood to open unexpectedly. And federal regulators are investigating the safety of Tesla's Autopilot system, which can accelerate, brake and steer a car on its own.
"Tesla will continue to grow," said Stephen Beck, managing partner at cg42, a management consulting firm in New York. "But they are facing more competition than they ever have, and the competition is getting stronger."
The carmaker's fundamental advantage, which allowed it to sail through the chip crisis, will remain, however. Tesla builds nothing but electric vehicles and is unencumbered by habits and procedures that have been rendered obsolete by new technology. "Tesla started from a clean sheet of paper," Mr. Amsrud said.
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Can a Tiny Territory in the South Pacific Power Tesla's Ambitions?
Even with guardrails in place, natural resource extraction remains a sensitive issue in New Caledonia. Nickel prices are up by about 25 percent this year, reflecting the mineral's importance in the campaign to move away from fossil fuels. But so far, that has not led to greater profits for miners.
Goro's previous owner, the Brazilian mining giant Vale, was desperate to rid itself of the mine. Tensions over who would buy the nickel processing plant led to protests that forced Goro to shut for months, the kind of supply chain disruption that could be disastrous for Tesla. The conflict also triggered the fall of New Caledonia's government earlier this year.
"In the history of nickel in New Caledonia, a battle exists between the multinational and the local populations, and there is also the colonial history," said Mr. Mapou, who took power after the Goro conflict and is the territory's first Kanak president. "With Tesla, with the new ownership, we have a compromise now that makes it possible to open the Goro plant, but it remains fragile."
The coastal road to Goro, meandering past a bay studded with colorful coral, is littered with charred cars. The dozens of burned vehicles are detritus from the monthslong struggle that idled the mine and led to the collapse of New Caledonia's government in February. And they are a visceral reminder of the tense politics that could stymie Tesla's efforts to secure a steady supply of nickel.
André Vama was one of hundreds of Kanaks who barricaded the road with burning tires and vehicles this year, strangling the mine's operations.
"From the start, we have been against this mine," said Mr. Vama, who is a leader of a local environmental alliance. "This is our national patrimony, our assets, and the Kanaks, who are victims of history, are not in control of what should be ours."
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Tencent hands shareholders $16.4 bln windfall in the form of JD.com stake
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Move comes as Beijing cracks down on technology firms
JD.com shares plunge as much as 11.2%, Tencent up 4%
Tencent has no plans to sell stakes in other firms-source
BEIJING/HONG KONG, Dec 23 (Reuters) – Chinese gaming and social media company Tencent (0700.HK) will pay out a $16.4 billion dividend by distributing most of its JD.com (9618.HK) stake, weakening its ties to the e-commerce firm and raising questions about its plans for other holdings.
The move comes as Beijing leads a broad regulatory crackdown on technology firms, taking aim at their overseas growth ambitions and domestic concentration of market power.
Tencent said on Thursday it will transfer HK$127.69 billion ($16.37 billion) worth of its JD.com stake to shareholders, slashing its holding in China's second-biggest e-commerce company to 2.3% from around 17% now and losing its spot as JD.com's biggest shareholder to Walmart (WMT.N).
The owner of WeChat, which first invested in JD.com in 2014, said it was the right time for the divestment, given the e-commerce firm had reached a stage where it can self-finance its growth.
Chinese regulators have this year blocked Tencent's proposed $5.3 billion merger of the country's top two videogame streaming sites, ordered it to end exclusive music copyright agreements and found WeChat illegally transferred user data.
The company is one of a handful of technology giants that dominate China's internet space and which have historically prevented rivals' links and services from being shared on their platforms.
"This seems to be a continuation of the concept of bringing down the walled gardens and increasing competition among the tech giants by weakening partnerships, exclusivity and other arrangements which weaken competitive pressures," Mio Kato, a LightStream Research analyst who publishes on Smartkarma said of the JD.com stake transfer.
"It could have implications for things like the payments market where Tencent's relationships with Pinduoduo and JD have helped it maintain some competitiveness with Alipay," he said.
JD.com shares plunged 11.2% at one point in Hong Kong trade on Thursday, the biggest daily percentage decline since its debut in the city in June 2020, before closing with a 7.0.% decline. Shares of Tencent, Asia's most valuable listed company, rose 4.2%.
Shares of Tencent and JD on Dec 23
The companies said they would continue to have a business relationship, including an ongoing strategic partnership agreement, though Tencent Executive Director and President Martin Lau will step down from JD.com's board immediately.
Eligible Tencent shareholders will be entitled to one share of JD.com for every 21 shares they hold.
A Tencent logo is seen in Beijing, China September 4, 2020. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang
PORTFOLIO DIVESTMENTS?
The JD.com stake is part of Tencent's portfolio of listed investments valued at $185 billion as of Sept. 30, including stakes in e-commerce company Pinduoduo (PDD.O), food delivery firm Meituan (3690.HK), video platform Kuaishou (1024.HK), automaker Tesla (TSLA.O) and streaming service Spotify (SPOT.N).
Alex Au, managing director at Hong Kong-based hedge fund manager Alphalex Capital Management, said the JD.com sale made both business and political sense.
"There might be other divestments on their way as Tencent heeds the antitrust call while shareholders ask to own those interests in minority stakes themselves," he said.
A person with knowledge of the matter told Reuters Tencent has no plans to exit its other investments. When asked about Pinduoduo and Meituan, the person said they are not as well-developed as JD.com.
The Chinese internet giant has also invested in overseas companies such as Tesla (TSLA.O), Netamble, Snapchat, Spotify (SPOT.N) and Sea (SE.N). "Going abroad is one of Tencent's most important strategies in the future," a CITIC Securities research note said on Thursday. "The possibility of selling overseas high-quality technology and internet assets is small."
Tencent chose to distribute the JD shares as a dividend rather than sell them on the market in an attempt to avoid a steep fall in JD.com's share price as well as a high tax bill, the person added.
Kenny Ng, an analyst at Everbright Sun Hung Kai, said the decision was "definitely negative" for JD.com.
"Although Tencent's reduction of JD's holdings may not have much impact on JD's actual business, when the shares are transferred from Tencent to Tencent's shareholders, the chances of Tencent's shareholders selling JD's shares as dividends will increase," he said.
Technology investor Prosus (PRX.AS), which is Tencent's largest shareholder with a 29% stake and is controlled by Naspers of South Africa, will receive the biggest portion of JD.com shares.
Walmart owns a 9.3% stake in JD.com, according to the Chinese company. Payments processor Alipay is part of Tencent rival Alibaba Group .
Reporting by Sophie Yu in Beijing and Scott Murdoch in Hong Kong; Additional reporting by Xie Yu, Selena Li, Donny Kwok and Eduardo Baptista in Hong Kong and Nikhil Kurian Nainan in Bengaluru; Writing by Jamie Freed; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu and Muralikumar Anantharaman
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Battling for Bolivia's Lithium That's Vital to Electric Cars
"The amount of lithium we need in any of our climate goals is incredible," said Anna Shpitsberg, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for energy transformation. "Everyone is trying to build up their supply chains and think about how to be strategic."
But Washington has little sway in Bolivia, whose leaders have long disagreed with the American approach to drug policy and Venezuela. That may explain why some energy executives do not think Bolivia is worth the risk.
"You've had 30 years' worth of projects in Bolivia with almost nothing to show," said Robert Mintak, chief executive of Standard Lithium, a publicly traded mining company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, referring to lithium development efforts dating back to 1990. "You have a landlocked country with no infrastructure, no work force, political risk, no intellectual property protection. So as a developer, I would choose someplace else that is safer."
Mr. Egan sees the odds differently.
'I Need to Be Involved'
That Mr. Egan has gotten this far is a marvel. He learned about Bolivian lithium only by chance when he and a friend crisscrossed South America as tourists in 2018.
When they got to the salt flats, a guide explained that they were standing on the world's largest lithium reserve. "I thought, 'I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I need to be involved,'" Mr. Egan said.
He had tried his hand as a sports and music agent and ran a small investment fund at the time. He had invested in Tesla in 2013 at $9 a share; it now trades around $975. (He would not reveal how many shares he had bought and how many he still had.)
But he felt that he wasn't achieving much. Before Mr. Egan traveled to South America, his father, Michael, the founder of Alamo Rent A Car, advised him to make two lists — of his five biggest passions and of the five industries he thought would grow fastest in the coming decades. Renewable energy was on both lists.
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SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks on a screen during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, June 29, 2021. REUTERS/Nacho Doce/File Photo
NEW DELHI, Nov 27 (Reuters) – The Indian government advised people against subscribing to
Starlink Internet Services, a division of billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX aerospace company, as it does not have a licence to operate in the country.
A government statement issued late on Friday said Starlink had been told to comply with regulations and refrain from "booking/rendering the satellite internet services in India with immediate effect".
Starlink registered its business in India on Nov.1. It has begun advertising, and according to the government, it has started pre-selling its service. read more
Responding to a Reuters email, Starlink said: "No comment for now".
A growing number of companies are launching small satellites as part of a low-Earth orbiting network to provide low-latency broadband internet services around the world, with a particular focus on remote areas that terrestrial internet infrastructure struggles to reach. read more
Reporting by Nidhi Verma; additional reporting by Aditi Shah, Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore
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He Helped Build Tesla. Now He Hopes to Do the Same at Lucid.
But mass producing automobiles is a challenge of a different magnitude. Initial versions of the Air cost almost $35,000 more than a top-of-the-line Tesla Model S Plaid. To be profitable, Lucid must appeal to more than just a superwealthy elite.
"Lucid's biggest risks are getting to scale and capacity," said Daniel Ives, a senior analyst at Wedbush Securities who follows the electric car industry. "The first phase has been significantly successful. Now it's about the next level of adoption."
Lucid plans to offer a version of the Air next year that will cost $70,000 after a federal tax credit, and produce 500,000 cars a year by 2030, with a lineup that will include a sport utility vehicle and a pickup. The company had burned through $4.2 billion by June, and its prospectus noted that it might be years away from making money.
To avoid the problems that plagued Tesla in its early days, when for a while it was assembling cars in tents, Mr. Rawlinson is relying on people like Eric Bach, Lucid's chief engineer. Mr. Bach, another Tesla refugee, has worked at Volkswagen and takes a very German approach to manufacturing. He can expound at length on the art of achieving narrow body gaps, the spaces between sheet metal that to engineers are a measure of quality.
"We're not intending to put any tents up," Mr. Bach said, except perhaps "to have a party."
At the same time, the market is increasingly crowded. Automakers like Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen have invested heavily in electric vehicles.
Mr. Rawlinson has confounded naysayers before. He points out that some people doubted that the Model S would be a success, or said Lucid could not build a car with a range of 500 miles and get it out the factory door this year. "There is a track record here of me making claims which seem unrealistic but are absolutely based on science," he said.
Nov. 18, 2021, 9:05 p.m. ET
Success would have an extra bit of sweetness for Mr. Rawlinson, who left Tesla amid rancor with Elon Musk, the company's mercurial chief executive.
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Old Power Gear Is Slowing Use of Clean Energy and Electric Cars
Seven months after workers finished installing solar panels atop the Garcia family home near Stanford University, the system is little more than a roof ornament. The problem: The local utility's equipment is so overloaded that there is no place for the electricity produced by the panels to go.
"We wasted 30,000-something dollars on a system we can't use," Theresa Garcia said. "It's just been really frustrating."
President Biden is pushing lawmakers and regulators to wean the United States from fossil fuels and counter the effects of climate change. But his ambitious goals could be upended by aging transformers and dated electrical lines that have made it hard for homeowners, local governments and businesses to use solar panels, batteries, electric cars, heat pumps and other devices that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Much of the equipment on the electric grid was built decades ago and needs to be upgraded. It was designed for a world in which electricity flowed in one direction — from the grid to people. Now, homes and businesses are increasingly supplying energy to the grid from their rooftop solar panels.
to electricity generated by solar, wind, nuclear and other zero-emission energy sources. Yet the grid is far from having enough capacity to power all the things that can help address the effects of climate change, energy experts said.
"It's a perfect violent storm as far as meeting the demand that we're going to have," said Michael Johnston, executive director of codes and standards for the National Electrical Contractors Association. "It's no small problem."
half of new cars sold in the country by 2030. If all of those cars were plugged in during the day when energy use is high, utilities would have to spend a lot on upgrades. But if regulators allowed more utilities to offer lower electricity rates at night, people would charge cars when there is plenty of spare capacity.
Some businesses are already finding ways to rely less on the grid when demand is high. Electrify America, a subsidiary of Volkswagen that operates an electric vehicle charging network, has installed large batteries at some charging stations to avoid paying fees that utilities impose on businesses that draw too much power.
Robert Barrosa, senior director of sales and marketing at Electrify America, said that eventually the company could help utilities by taking power when there was too much of it and supplying it when there was not enough of it.
$1,050 to $2,585 a year, according to Rewiring America. Those products are more energy efficient and electricity tends to cost less than comparable amounts of gasoline, heating oil and natural gas. Electric cars and appliances are also cheaper to maintain.
"Done right, money can go further toward a more reliable network," Mr. Calisch said, "especially in the face of increased stress from climate change."
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Tesla to Move Headquarters to Texas from California
Tesla will move its headquarters from California to Austin, Texas, where it is building a new factory, its chief executive, Elon Musk, said at the company's annual shareholder meeting on Thursday.
The move makes good on a threat that Mr. Musk issued more than a year ago when he was frustrated by local coronavirus lockdown orders that forced Tesla to pause production at its factory in Fremont, Calif. Mr. Musk on Thursday said the company would keep that factory and expand production there.
"There's a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area," he said, adding that high housing prices there translate to long commutes for some employees. The Texas factory, which is near Austin and will manufacture Tesla's Cybertruck, is minutes from downtown and from an airport, he said.
Mr. Musk was an outspoken early critic of pandemic restrictions, calling them "fascist" and predicting in March 2020 that there would be almost no new cases of virus infections by the end of April. In December, he said he had moved himself to Texas to be near the new factory. His other company, SpaceX, launches rockets from the state.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise said in December that it was moving to the Houston area, and Charles Schwab has moved to a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth.
Mr. Musk's decision will surely add fuel to a ceaseless debate between officials and executives in Texas and California about which state is a better place to do business. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, and his predecessors, have courted California companies to move to the state, arguing that it has lower taxes and lower housing and other costs. California has long played up the technological prowess of Silicon Valley and its universities as the reason many entrepreneurs start and build their companies there, a list that includes Tesla, Facebook, Google and Apple.
Texas has become more attractive to workers in recent years, too, with a generally lower cost of living. Austin, a thriving liberal city that is home to the University of Texas, in particular has boomed. Many technology companies, some based in California, have built huge campuses there. As a result, though, housing costs and traffic have increased significantly, leaving the city with the kinds of problems local governments in California have been dealing with for years.
Mr. Musk's announcement is likely to take on political overtones, too.
Last month, Mr. Abbott invoked Mr. Musk in explaining why a new Texas law that greatly restricts abortion would not hurt the state economically. "Elon consistently tells me that he likes the social policies in the state of Texas," the governor told CNBC.
he said on Twitter. "That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics."
Oct. 7, 2021, 4:53 p.m. ET
On Thursday evening, a Twitter post by Governor Abbott welcomed the news, saying "the Lone Star State is the land of opportunity and innovation."
A spokeswoman for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Erin Mellon, did not directly comment on Tesla's move but said in a statement that the state was "home to the biggest ideas and companies on the planet" and that California would "stand up for workers, public health and a woman's right to choose."
Mr. Musk revealed the company's move after shareholders voted on a series of proposals aimed at improving Tesla's corporate governance. According to preliminary results, investors sided with Tesla on all but two measures that it opposed: one that would force its board members to run for re-election annually, down from every three years, and another that would require the company to publish more detail about efforts to diversify its work force.
In a report last year, Tesla revealed that its U.S. leadership was 59 percent white and 83 percent male. The company's overall U.S. work force is 79 percent male and 34 percent white.
The vote comes days after a federal jury ordered Tesla to pay $137 million to Owen Diaz, a former contractor who said he faced repeated racist harassment while working at the Fremont factory, in 2015 and 2016. Tesla faces similar accusations from dozens of others in a class-action lawsuit.
The diversity report proposal, from Calvert Research and Management, a firm that focuses on responsible investment and is owned by Morgan Stanley, requires Tesla to publish annual reports about its diversity and inclusion efforts, something many other large companies already do.
Investors also re-elected to the board Kimbal Musk, Mr. Musk's brother, and James Murdoch, the former 21st Century Fox executive, despite a recommendation to vote against them by ISS, a firm that advises investors on shareholder votes and corporate governance.
Proposals calling for additional reporting both on Tesla's practice of using mandatory arbitration to resolve employee disputes and on the human rights impact of how it sources materials failed, according to early results. A final tally will be announced in the coming days, the company said.
Ivan Penn contributed reporting.
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Evergrande's Struggles Offer a Glimpse of China's New Financial Future
HONG KONG — Xu Jiayin was China's richest man, a symbol of the country's economic rise who helped transform poverty-stricken villages into urbanized metropolises for the fledgling middle class. As his company, China Evergrande Group, became one of the country's largest property developers, he amassed the trappings of the elite, with trips to Paris to taste rare French wines, a million-dollar yacht, private jets and access to some of the most powerful people in Beijing.
"All I have and all that Evergrande Group has achieved were endowed by the party, the state and the whole society," Mr. Xu said in a 2018 speech thanking the Chinese Communist Party for his success.
China is threatening to take it all away.
The debt that powered the country's breakneck growth for decades is now jeopardizing the economy — and the government is changing the rules. Beijing has signaled that it will no longer tolerate the strategy of borrowing to fuel business expansion that turned Mr. Xu and his company into a real estate powerhouse, pushing Evergrande to the precipice.
Last week, the company, which has unpaid bills totaling more than $300 billion, missed a key payment to foreign investors. That sent the world into a panic over whether China was facing its own so-called Lehman moment, a reference to the 2008 collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank that led to the global financial crisis.
struggles have exposed the flaws of the Chinese financial system — unrestrained borrowing, expansion and corruption. The company's crisis is testing the resolve of Chinese leaders' efforts to reform as they chart a new course for the country's economy.
If they save Evergrande, they risk sending a message that some companies are still too big to fail. If they don't, as many as 1.6 million home buyers waiting for unfinished apartments and hundreds of small businesses, creditors and banks may lose their money.
"This is the beginning of the end of China's growth model as we know it," said Leland Miller, the chief executive officer of the consulting firm China Beige Book. "The term 'paradigm shift' is always overused, so people tend to ignore it. But that's a good way of describing what's happening right now."
speech accepting an award for his charitable donations.
He went to college and then spent a decade working at a steel mill. He started Evergrande in 1996 in Shenzhen, a special economic zone where the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping launched the country's experiment with capitalism. As China urbanized, Evergrande expanded beyond Shenzhen, across the country.
Evergrande lured new home buyers by selling them on more than just the tiny apartment they would get in a huge complex with dozens of identical towers. New Evergrande customers were buying into the lifestyle associated with names like Cloud Lake Royal Garden and Riverside Mansion.
annual report was Wen Jiahong, the brother of China's vice premier, Wen Jiabao, who oversaw the country's banks as head of the Central Financial Work Commission.
elite group of political advisers known as the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
"He could not have gotten so big without the collaboration of the country's biggest banks," Victor Shih, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, said of Mr. Xu. "That suggests the potential help of senior officials with a lot of influence."
Mr. Xu was also a power broker who socialized with the Communist Party's elite families, according to a memoir by Desmond Shum, a well-connected businessman. In his book, "Red Roulette," published this month, Mr. Shum recounts a 2011 European wine-tasting and shopping spree in which Mr. Xu took part, along with the daughter of the Communist Party's fourth-ranking official at the time, Jia Qinglin, and her investor husband.
The party flew to Europe on a private jet, with the men playing a popular Chinese card game called "fight the landlord." At Pavillon Ledoyen, a Paris restaurant, the party spent more than $100,000 on a wine spree, downing magnums of Château Lafite wines, starting with a vintage 1900 and ending with a 1990. On a trip to the French Riviera, Mr. Xu considered buying a $100 million yacht owned by a Hong Kong mogul, Mr. Shum wrote.
To supercharge Evergrande's growth, Mr. Xu often borrowed twice on each piece of land that he developed — first from the bank and then from home buyers who were sometimes willing to pay 100 percent of the value of their future home before it was built.
property grew to account for as much as one-third of China's economic growth. Evergrande built more than a thousand developments in hundreds of cities and created more than 3.3 million jobs a year.
cool down, the damage caused by Evergrande's voracious appetite for debt became impossible to ignore. There are nearly 800 unfinished Evergrande projects in more than 200 cities across China. Employees, contractors and home buyers have held protests to demand their money. Many fear they will become unwitting victims in China's debt-reform campaign.
Yong Jushang, a contractor from Changsha in central China, still hasn't been paid for the $460,000 of materials and work he provided for an Evergrande project that was completed in May. Desperate not to lose his workers and business partners, he threatened to block the roads around the development this month until the money was paid.
"It's not a small amount for us," Mr. Yong said. "This could bankrupt us."
Mr. Yong and others like him are at the heart of regulators' biggest challenge in dealing with Evergrande. If Beijing tries to make an example out of Evergrande by letting it collapse, the wealth of millions of people could vanish along with Mr. Xu's empire.
protested on the streets and complained online about delays in construction. The central bank has put Evergrande on notice.
And China's increasingly nationalistic commentators are calling for the company's demise. Debt-saddled corporate giants like Evergrande were given the freedom to "open their bloody mouths and devour the wealth of our country and our people until they are too big to fall," Li Guangman, a retired newspaper editor whose recent views have been given a platform by official state media, wrote in an essay.
Without proper intervention, Mr. Li argued, "China's economy and society will be set on the crater of the volcano where all may be ignited any time."
Michael Forsythe reported from New York. Matt Phillips contributed reporting from New York.
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Biden's Electric Car Plans Hinge on Having Enough Chargers
For years, start-ups, automakers and other companies have been slowly building chargers, mainly in California and other coastal states where most electric cars are sold. These businesses use different strategies to make money, and auto experts say it is not clear which will succeed. The company with the most stations, ChargePoint, sells chargers to individuals, workplaces, stores, condo and apartment buildings, and businesses with fleets of electric vehicles. It collects subscription fees for software that manages the chargers. Tesla offers charging mainly to get people to buy its cars. And others make money by selling electricity to drivers.
The Transition to Electric Cars
Once the poor cousin to the hip business of making sleek electric cars, the charging industry has been swept up in its own gold rush. Venture capital firms poured nearly $1 billion into charging companies last year, more than the five previous years combined, according to PitchBook. So far in 2021, venture capital investments are up to more than $550 million.
On Wall Street, publicly traded special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have struck deals to buy eight charging companies out of 26 deals involving electric vehicle and related businesses, according to Dealogic, a research firm. The deals typically include an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars from big investors like BlackRock.
"It's early, and folks are trying to wrap their heads around what does the potential look like," said Gabe Daoud Jr., a managing director and analyst at Cowen, an investment bank.
These businesses could benefit from the infrastructure bill, but it is not clear how the Biden administration would distribute money for charging stations.
Another unanswered question is who will be the Exxon Mobil of the electric car age. It might well be automakers.
Tesla, which makes about two-thirds of the electric cars sold in the United States, has built thousands of chargers, which it made free for early customers. The company could open its network to vehicles made by other automakers by the end of the year, its chief executive, Elon Musk, said in July.
Filed Under: BUSINESS Tagged With: American Jobs Plan (2021), Automobile Service and Charging Stations, Automobiles, Batteries, Biden administration, Business, California, Chargepoint Inc, China, Electric and Hybrid Vehicles, Electric Light and Power, Electrify America LLC, Elon Musk, Europe, EVBox BV, EVgo Services LLC, Gold, Industry, Infrastructure, Infrastructure (Public Works), Investments, Mergers, Acquisitions and Divestitures, Money, Oil (Petroleum) and Gasoline, Private Equity, Research, Software, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPAC), Start-ups, Stocks and Bonds, Tesla, Tesla Motors Inc, TPG Capital, United States, Venture Capital, Volkswagen AG, Volta Industries Inc