Robot Arms Rule BYD's Blade Battery Line in Xiangyang

Despite being a sprawling complex employing more than 8,000 workers, people were hard to spot inside the plant. Instead, dozens of massive yellow robotic arms moved without pause along conveyor lines, while beetle-shaped automated guided vehicles (AGVs) darted between them, ferrying parts and materials exactly where they were needed. Behind them, stacker cranes rising to the ceiling shuttled back and forth ceaselessly, moving battery cells to the next stage of production.

Operated by FinDreams Battery, BYD's battery subsidiary, the site has an annual production capacity of 30 gigawatt-hours (GWh), the largest in China's central region of Hunan, Hubei and Henan among BYD's more than 30 production bases across China.

The plant draws attention because it is the key production base for the second-generation Blade Battery, a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery BYD unveiled in March this year. The second-generation product improves energy efficiency by 5% and dramatically shortens charging times, the biggest obstacle to mass adoption of electric vehicles. The first-generation product took 33 minutes to charge from 10% to 80%, while the second generation goes from 10% to 97% in just nine minutes.

Production speed is measured in seconds. A single line produces 20,000 battery packs a day, and a battery cell can be made every three seconds. About 30% of the batteries produced here are supplied to outside customers.

'Xiangyang Speed': From Groundbreaking to Production in 11 Months, With Robots Assembling Cells

Xiangyang, the city in Hubei province where BYD's plant is located, is a 2,800-year-old ancient capital home to the Han River — the source of the Han dynasty's name — and to Zhuge Liang of the Three Kingdoms. Today, it has been transformed into one of China's largest advanced battery export bases. Behind that dramatic shift lay a "speed campaign" that took the plant from groundbreaking to production in 11 months, and a "technology campaign" built on in-house developed automation equipment.

The Xiangyang plant began exporting in earnest around 2024. Yet in just two years it has grown sharply, emerging this year as the largest new-energy exporter in all of Xiangyang. According to Xiangyang FinDreams, export output value rose 165% last year from a year earlier — double the 83.3% growth in BYD's overall battery exports over the same period.

BYD points to automation as its particular strength. The process is broadly divided into cell assembly and battery pack assembly lines, and the company says the cell assembly line has achieved 100% automation using some 300 pieces of equipment developed in-house.

On the factory floor, robotic arms were busy pushing electrode assemblies — the core internal component of a battery cell — into aluminum casings. "We do it in three stages to prevent scratches that can occur during insertion," a company official said, highlighting the precision of the process. In the final step of cell assembly, electrolyte injection was completed in just three seconds in a fully sealed environment. The margin of error is within ±1 gram, keeping performance highly uniform across cells, the company said. Assembled cells are then carried by AGV to the packaging line, where they pass through some 60 processes to become finished battery packs.

Once Built on Combustion Engines, Xiangyang Becomes a Battery Export Hub With Government Backing

The Xiangyang city government showed exceptional drive to get the plant built quickly. BYD brought the factory online at a pace with few precedents even in Xiangyang. Construction began as soon as the project contract was signed in January 2022, and the plant started operating in December that year, reaching its target capacity. "Internally we call it 'Xiangyang Speed' — that's how unusual the pace was," a BYD official said.

Xiangyang's aggressive push was something of a gamble. The city urgently needed a breakthrough to shift an industrial structure built around internal combustion engine vehicles. Xiangyang is a core production base for Dongfeng, Hubei's homegrown automaker, and its reliance on autos is heavy: the industry accounts for a third of the city's roughly 700 billion yuan in total industrial output. But as Dongfeng — once genuinely among China's three largest auto groups — slipped to around seventh place amid a delayed EV transition, a sense of crisis spread in Xiangyang. In 2021, just before BYD arrived, Xiangyang produced 397,000 vehicles, not a single one of them a new-energy passenger car.

The Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade said China "has secured an overall value-chain competitiveness advantage over Korea in advanced manufacturing such as electric vehicles, batteries and autonomous driving," adding that "the price competitiveness of Chinese products and their expanding global market dominance could act as a common threat across Korean industry."

But as the local government embarked on a bold industrial transition, change came fast enough to offset its late-mover disadvantage. Output value at the Xiangyang FinDreams battery plant exceeded 10 billion yuan in both 2024 and last year, with last year's figure up more than 60% from a year earlier. The company expects annual output value to top 14 billion yuan if it raises the utilization rate, now around 90%, to 100%. Economic benefits such as local job creation are also becoming visible: 90% of the plant's roughly 8,000 employees are local. Beyond BYD, Xiangyang has been attracting a string of new-energy vehicle-related companies in batteries, motors and electronic components to expand its industrial ecosystem.

Dongfeng, still the "heart" of Xiangyang's auto industry, is also accelerating its EV shift and helping reshape the city. Dongfeng Motor's Xiangyang plant, a commercial vehicle production base that this reporter visited the same day, completed a smart manufacturing overhaul in 2024 and now flexibly produces more than 600 vehicle models on a single line — not only conventional combustion engine vehicles but also electric, hybrid, natural gas and hydrogen models. Around the same time, the production base for Dongfeng's first mass-market compact EV, the Nammi 01, began operating in Xiangyang. With annual capacity of more than 120,000 units, cumulative sales topped 100,000 as of October last year, seen as evidence of Dongfeng's electrification potential.

Dongfeng is also eyeing the South Korean market on the strength of its EV transition. It is reviewing plans to produce 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 speeding up electrification and stepping up overseas expansion amid weak domestic demand, pressure on Korean automakers is intensifying.