Economist: Xiaomi’s new SUV

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00:00The Chinese company Xiaomi, they're currently soaring their shares, and that's after a new SUV hit the market.

00:09Is this a killer for Tesla, possibly, maybe?

00:14Excellent question. And the chief executive of Xiaomi, when he was talking about this new SUV,

00:20they had almost 300,000 orders in an hour.

00:24He sort of, you know, he didn't mention Tesla by name, but he made it very clear that that was who he was chasing.

00:33And this SUV is priced a little bit more competitively than Tesla's Model Y.

00:38So it's clear that this is who he wants to compete with.

00:42But I think that we, you know, I think there are some real concerns about the EV market in China,

00:47which is led right now by BYD that has the biggest market share.

00:51BYD has launched an amazing cost-cutting program in the month of June,

00:57discounting of between 10% and 30% across all of their models.

01:01And I think there's a lot of fear over whether this will shake out some of the weaker competitors in China, including Tesla.

01:09But BYD seems to be very, very happy to sacrifice profit margins in order to pick up market share.

01:17And it's interesting because the Europeans have been saying, look, BYD, these Chinese electric car makers are eating our lunch.

01:24They're coming in.

01:25They're undercutting European products.

01:28It looks like BYD is now doing the same thing in its home market.