BYD's European Factory Hunt Turns Tariff Wall Into Bidding War

China's BYD has confirmed it is in active negotiations with Stellantis and other European carmakers to take over underused factories on the continent, in a move that threatens to invert the logic of Brussels' two-year-old tariff regime on Chinese electric vehicles.

Speaking at the Financial Times Future of the Car conference in London on 13 May, executive vice-president Stella Li said the world's largest EV manufacturer was "looking for any available plant in Europe" to absorb spare capacity, with Italy among the markets under consideration. Li confirmed talks extended beyond Stellantis and signalled that BYD would prefer to own and operate any acquired site outright rather than enter a joint venture. She also flagged Maserati as "very interesting", raising the prospect of a brand acquisition alongside industrial assets.

The strategy would allow BYD to sidestep the provisional countervailing duties of between 17 and 35 per cent that the European Commission imposed in 2024, by producing inside the customs union. It would also accelerate a European footprint that currently rests on a Szeged plant in Hungary, due to open this year, and a second site planned for Manisa, Turkey, in 2027.

For Stellantis chief executive Antonio Filosa, the talks come as the group wrestles with chronic underutilisation across Italian sites including Pomigliano and Mirafiori. For Giorgia Meloni's government, a Chinese rescue of capacity that would otherwise face redundancies is politically awkward but industrially attractive. Renault and Nissan are reported to be reviewing similar approaches.

The development scrambles the political calculus underpinning the EU's tariff architecture, which was designed to slow Chinese market entry rather than transfer European production assets into Chinese ownership. Brussels has so far declined to comment on whether plant acquisitions would trigger foreign subsidy reviews, but the question will now demand an answer.