XIANGYANG, China — Xiangyang, the city in China's Hubei province that hosts BYD's battery plant, is a 2,800-year-old capital set on the Han River, whose name became that of the Han dynasty, and home to the legacy of Zhuge Liang of Three Kingdoms fame. Today it has been remade into one of China's largest export bases for advanced batteries. Behind that dramatic shift were a "speed campaign" that took the plant from groundbreaking to production in 11 months and a "technology campaign" built on automation equipment the company developed itself.
The Xiangyang plant began exporting in earnest around 2024. Within just two years it grew sharply, and this year it emerged as the largest new-energy exporter in all of Xiangyang. According to Xiangyang FinDreams, export output rose 165% last year from a year earlier. That is double the 83.3% growth in BYD's total battery exports over the same period. Yin Julin, head of the BYD Xiangyang plant, said Thailand, Malaysia and Korea are its main export destinations.
The strength BYD highlights above all is automation. Production is divided broadly into cell assembly and battery pack assembly lines, and the company says the cell assembly line has reached 100% automation with more than 300 pieces of equipment developed in-house.
On the factory floor, robotic arms worked busily pushing electrode assemblies — the core internal component of a battery cell — into aluminum cases. "We do it in three stages to prevent scratches that can occur during insertion," a company official said, pointing to the precision of the process. At the final stage of cell assembly, electrolyte injection was completed in just three seconds in a fully sealed environment. The margin of error is within plus or minus 1 gram, which the company says keeps performance highly uniform across cells. Cells assembled this way are carried by automated guided vehicles to the packaging line, where they pass through more than 60 processes to become finished battery packs.
The Xiangyang city government showed unusual drive to get the plant built quickly. BYD brought the plant online faster than almost any precedent in Xiangyang. Construction began as soon as the project contract was signed in January 2022, and the plant was running and had reached its target production capacity by December of the same year. "Internally we call it 'Xiangyang speed,' it was that unusual," a BYD official said.
Xiangyang's push was something of a gamble. The city badly needed a breakthrough to shift an industrial base built around internal combustion engine vehicles. Xiangyang is a core production base for Dongfeng, Hubei's homegrown automaker, and its dependence runs deep — autos account for about one-third of the city's roughly 700 billion yuan in total industrial output. But as Dongfeng, once genuinely one of China's three largest auto groups, slipped to around seventh place because of a delayed shift to electric vehicles, a sense of crisis spread in Xiangyang as well. In 2021, just before BYD arrived, Xiangyang produced 397,000 finished vehicles — not one of them a new-energy passenger car.
Once the local government moved boldly on industrial transition, change came fast enough to offset its late start. Output at the Xiangyang FinDreams battery plant topped 10 billion yuan in both 2024 and last year. Last year's output rose more than 60% from a year earlier. The company expects annual output to exceed 14 billion yuan if it lifts the utilization rate, now around 90%, to 100%. Economic effects such as local job creation are also becoming visible. Of the plant's roughly 8,000 employees, 90% are from the area. Beyond BYD, Xiangyang has been attracting battery, motor and automotive electronics companies tied to new-energy vehicles, broadening the industrial ecosystem. It is delivering on exports as well. "Thailand, Malaysia and Korea are our main export destinations," Yin said. "We ship 500,000 units a month steadily to Southeast Asia, our largest overseas market."
Dongfeng, still the heart of Xiangyang's auto industry, is also speeding up its own shift to electric vehicles and helping change the city's makeup. Dongfeng Motor's Xiangyang plant, a commercial vehicle production base this reporter visited the same day, completed a smart manufacturing overhaul in 2024 and now flexibly builds more than 600 vehicle variants on a single line — not only internal combustion models but also electric, hybrid, natural gas and hydrogen vehicles. Around the same time, the production base for Nammi 01, Dongfeng's first mass-market compact electric car, also began operating in Xiangyang. With annual capacity of more than 120,000 units, cumulative sales passed 100,000 as of last October, seen as evidence of Dongfeng's electrification potential.
Dongfeng is also eyeing entry into the Korean market on the strength of that shift. It is understood to be weighing plans to build an electric vehicle jointly developed with Peugeot at its Wuhan plant near Xiangyang and launch it in Korea. With not only emerging EV makers such as BYD and Chery but also traditional automakers including SAIC and Dongfeng accelerating electrification and stepping up overseas expansion amid weak domestic demand, pressure on South Korean automakers is mounting further.
