Embark on an electrifying exploration of China's automotive revolution with me as we sit down with Bill Russo, arguably the most authoritative automotive commentator living in China. Together, we unravel the intricacies behind China's strategic pivot to electric vehicle (NEV) prominence. We dissect how policy support and massive investment have shifted gears for the automotive sector, propelling China ahead and challenging Western automakers to either join forces or compete in a high-stakes race. Bill sheds light on the transformative journey, from the rise of homegrown innovators like BYD to Tesla's game-changing market entrance, offering a rare glimpse into the global implications of this electric evolution.
Witness the future of electric mobility unfold as we delve into the innovative business models that are recharging the industry. We discuss the resurgence of battery swapping in China, led by companies like NIO, and its potential to transform EV economics. With fascinating insights into how these advancements could seamlessly integrate into the wider energy ecosystem, Bill paints a picture of a world where cars are not just vehicles but dynamic assets in the renewable energy revolution. From discussions on the role of batteries in bi-directional charging to the prospect of new revenue streams from software and energy services, this episode illuminates the road ahead for the automotive industry.
Concluding our journey, we cast a spotlight on the Western response to China's dominance in the EV supply chain, as Bill advocates for strategic collaboration over competition. Buckle up for a podcast that doesn't just talk about change - it charges towards it.
Embark on an electrifying exploration of China's automotive revolution with me as we sit down with Bill Russo, arguably the most authoritative automotive commentator living in China. Together, we unravel the intricacies behind China's strategic pivot to electric vehicle (NEV) prominence. We dissect how policy support and massive investment have shifted gears for the automotive sector, propelling China ahead and challenging Western automakers to either join forces or compete in a high-stakes race. Bill sheds light on the transformative journey, from the rise of homegrown innovators like BYD to Tesla's game-changing market entrance, offering a rare glimpse into the global implications of this electric evolution.
Witness the future of electric mobility unfold as we delve into the innovative business models that are recharging the industry. We discuss the resurgence of battery swapping in China, led by companies like NIO, and its potential to transform EV economics. With fascinating insights into how these advancements could seamlessly integrate into the wider energy ecosystem, Bill paints a picture of a world where cars are not just vehicles but dynamic assets in the renewable energy revolution. From discussions on the role of batteries in bi-directional charging to the prospect of new revenue streams from software and energy services, this episode illuminates the road ahead for the automotive industry.
Concluding our journey, we cast a spotlight on the Western response to China's dominance in the EV supply chain, as Bill advocates for strategic collaboration over competition. Buckle up for a podcast that doesn't just talk about change - it charges towards it.
Hello and welcome to the Electric and Eclectic podcast show with Roger Atkins and some truly smart and amazingly interesting guests.
Speaker 2:Flip the script is what I as the way I like to describe it learned from how China accelerated its move into leadership in the future of mobility and now leveraged China's lead. It has a need it's far ahead in electrification race but leverage the investments they've made and allow them to invest and create jobs and create opportunities for companies to leverage their supply chain. We can do that.
Speaker 1:Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the latest podcast. This is going to be something all about China, very much all about China, but indeed when you talk about China in the automotive context, you're now talking about the rest of the world, because the impact and the influence now of what is going on in China has been going on in China for some time. It's pivotal around, particularly the electric vehicle revolution, and I'm delighted to have as my guest today somebody who absolutely has had a ringside seat on that, both from the perspective of the traditional internal combustion engine world he's been busy in that for many, many years and indeed where we are now with new energy vehicles, aka electric vehicles. So welcome to the Electric and Eclectic podcast show. Bill Russo, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm great, roger, thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you on what's happening in China and how it's influencing the global automotive industry, absolutely influencing it.
Speaker 3:I can assure you that from over here in Europe, because you're now back in China, your home. I know you've recently been travelling. I think you were at CES. We've met there in the past, some years ago as indeed we've met in China. I think the last time actually was a few years ago now 2017. So the Shanghai Auto Show, and then we spent some time hanging out with the NEO crew. So can you give people just a nice intro as to who you are, what you've done in the past and what you're doing now, please, bill.
Speaker 2:I'll try to keep it brief because it's a long journey that's got me here. I'm now in my 20th anniversary of arriving in China. That was 2004. I had 17 years in Detroit prior to coming to China. So, collectively since the late 1980s, I've been involved in automotive-related businesses. I worked at Chrysler for 15 years of that journey. They brought me to China in 2004. I headed up their Northeast Asia business for four years, but, as you know, I'm now here 20 years, or 16 of the 20.
Speaker 2:I've been working in automotive-related businesses, most recently having started my current company, automobility, in 2017.
Speaker 2:So I've been advising companies on how to approach the market, how to think about the market, how to really transform the way you think about the industry and its business model, because that's what China has done.
Speaker 2:It's effectively not only become the world's largest market, but it's probably become the transformative force for technology innovation. We tend not to, as people from the rest of the world come into China, tend to think of China through a rear-view mirror look at the way it was, but you don't really appreciate it unless you have your boots on the ground here and see how quickly it can change into something different from what it was, into what it aspires to be, and that's really what kept me here, having worked in Detroit in a rather traditional industry, in a role where you kind of had great ideas but only got to see a small fraction of them come to reality. What you see happen in China is dreams become reality much faster. There's far more ambitious, far less deeply rooted, far more experimental way of thinking about the future, and that's kind of what's kept me here so happy to be here, roger, to share some of that journey.
Speaker 3:Wow, Well, that is fascinating that you've been there, as you say, 20 years. You've seen great change, Absolutely. Let's talk about the auto industry that you know so well. I know reasonably well too. In particular, you had an article in the Insight magazine back in the summer last year. That's the Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, and I well, I can see I've got a copy in front of me the end of the Ice Age, it says. China's electric vehicles are hastening the end of the internal combustion engine. What does this mean for foreign automakers? And you explain all in that article. So if we could sort of, if you could praisey, if you like, what you say in there. And can I just ask you a simple question at the beginning Are we now talking about confrontation with the West or are we talking about collaboration with the West?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, good, good way to kind of parse the question. I, yeah, I have witnessed in the span of the last few years and it wasn't it's a coincidence that during the period of COVID, the pandemic, the accelerated rate of exponential rise and secular shift of retail consumer interest in the electric vehicle has happened. It's a coincidence because you couldn't have planned it and executed it in three years. In other words, the seed corn of what has become the EV market, which is now represented about 30% or one third of the total vehicle market in China, the seed corn of that was planted earlier than that. It takes more than three years to execute a product cycle in this industry. So China has kind of carefully over the course of decades, you know, engineered a through both policy and support, a transition of this industry from the internal combustion engine to what it calls new energy vehicles. So the rise of Chinese NEV is where the Chinese brands have sort of taken the lead.
Speaker 2:And when that article was written, which is based on an interview I did with the American Chamber, it was right at the time of the Shanghai Auto Show and I think the world for the first time seeing it firsthand, because during the pandemic there weren't a lot of people traveling to China, so we had people arriving coming to an auto show seeing Chinese companies with products that not only work.
Speaker 2:You know, the paradigm of the way foreign people think of China is they see it through the rear view mirror of being sort of a cheap, low end, very low configuration vehicles.
Speaker 2:But what you have in China are EVs that are not only competing on price but also well configured and well engineered and quite shocking to the executives who arrived and saw that as an eye opening for the first time in many cases. But now, with Chinese brands selling four out of every five new energy vehicles in the lane that is the only growth lane in this market. Right, this market is not a, you know, and I came to China it was about, you know 20 years ago. It was about a 3 million unit annual sales market. That market grew to almost 30 million. It was 28.9 million in 2017. And in 2017, more than 90, probably about 95% of the car sold were combustion engine powered vehicles and in the span from 2017 till now, we now have a market that's about one third penetrated with EVs new energy vehicles, as they call them in China that is dominated by the Chinese brands. Chinese brands now outsell foreign brands in this market, and it's largely on the back of having very well engineered, well configured and affordably priced new energy vehicles.
Speaker 3:Wow, what a story.
Speaker 3:You used to phrase that over the course of decades.
Speaker 3:And of course you and I know and I think probably what quite possibly our listeners knows, because I'm lucky to have very informed listeners that this, as you say, has been constructed, this, this industry or strategy, for some considerable time, the principal architect being gang Wang, who was ironically an Audi engineer working in Germany for that company, and of course then he helped progress this, this plan, Over the course of decades in China is a very different proposition than over the course of decades in the United States or in Europe or in any other democracy, for the very reason of that word and that term, which is governments change, policy changes. There isn't that long term thinking, or there doesn't appear to be, however, yeah, so in my mind, how much of what's now being revealed, achieved in China, is a consequence of it, not and I don't want to talk about politics per se and talk about policy more than politics how much of it is that anchor in long term planning as opposed to, you know, this chopping and changing. We get, we get with democracy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think too much. It's often times get too much credits given to government and policy. It's a critical aspect of what happened here. If you get it right and you can back it with policy and support from public agencies that can help invest in and offload some of the burden from private industry, then that's a plus. That's a plus and frankly, that's the thing that China has going for it that the rest of the world does not.
Speaker 2:If you got the intent and China's intent here and you pointed to the father of the electric vehicle revolution in China, I would say that certainly is Professor Wang Gang. It was the Minister of Science and Technology. He really promoted the 863 program, which was the antecedent of the policies we have here in China that promoted the investment on the part initially of the industry in manufacturing, oriented in e-motor and battery technology investments. And this was 20 years ago. I mean, the beginning of this was in the turn of this century. So, and it took that long right, and we don't have relations in most private industries to go through a 20 year metamorphosis of industrial commercialization. They do have that long view in China.
Speaker 2:But here's the trick that happened it took really the takeoff of the exponential rise of electrification in China really began with retail consumers starting to shop for the EV, and that began in earnest in 2020. That began in earnest in 2020. And it required the consumers in China to be presented with a aspirational product and brand, and that brand wasn't a Chinese brand, it was actually Tesla. Tesla's.
Speaker 2:The opening of the Gigafactory here in Shanghai was the precipitating act, the triggering act that caused Chinese consumers to start shopping for electric vehicles. And when they started shopping they realized wait, there's some very well configured Chinese products available that are presenting a very good value proposition. And hence we start to see the rise of BYD, who at that time in 2020, were still making combustion engine powered vehicles. They stopped making ICEs as the consumer interest in EVs began to rise. They were well prepared with both pure battery electric as well as plug-in hybrid electric configurations, and Chinese brands now have four out of every five EVs sold. So I think the transition took decades. It required policy support and even before the EVs were sold, there was a lot of investment in infrastructure, in building electric vehicle charging infrastructure which de-risk?
Speaker 2:consumer consideration for how the vehicles can be used.
Speaker 3:I'd like to talk about that, bill, because it doesn't get talked about much. We talk a lot of here in the West these days about BYD, about, exactly as you say, what Tesla catalyzed in China. We talk about CATL, robin Zheng, chairman Wang, chang-fu these names now are very familiar in the West, which I love, and you've known them. You've probably met those people. I bumped into Chairman Wang. I did so at the EV100 event in Beijing in 2017. I've known William Lee and Neo for some time. We both have. I haven't met Robin Zheng yet, but I have met Bob Galleon. There's another story there. Bob was a guest on my podcast by way of I spoke to him at a battery event. He's a fascinating American like you, who basically then found a way of working closely with the Chinese Robin Zheng, catl and made a difference. That's another fascinating story, but can we talk about infrastructure then? So what is charging like in China? Is it reliable, is it good, is it affordable? Just a little sense of what it's like to own and drive an EV in China.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, first of all, there's multiple ways of solving the problem of range anxiety. One is making EV charging less of a pain point, more of a convenience in terms of prevalence of charging. So you know, there was a lot of as we said early a lot of public support for investing in building out a public charging infrastructure, which made EV charging coal stations available. Even before there were a large number of people owning electric vehicles. So there actually, some people would joke saying there were zombie chargers out there and not being used. That's not the case anymore Now, with the exponential rise of EV, and just to give you a number 1.4 million NEVs built in 2020, last year, 9.4 million right.
Speaker 2:China, in December, built and shipped 1.1 million new energy vehicles. All right, that's about what was sold in the United States in the entire calendar year in one month. So we're talking about more than 10X development. But why would retail consumers consider an EV? Why are they not considering an EV if they're in the West? Well, one of the main reasons is they feel that owning an EV is compromised versus the multi-generational habit we have in the West of owning vehicles. We buy into the image of being able to take the car out on the Route 66 where there's no infrastructure and driving it anywhere? Right. I used to work for Chrysler. The Jeep tagline was go anywhere Well, you can't go anywhere in an EV. Go where the charging facilities are available. Well, that's the way that China invested in building public charging infrastructure. First is the infrastructure comes first. Henry Ford wouldn't have been able to sell as many cars if there wasn't a gasoline charging network out there, if there wasn't a highway out there for the cars to be ridden on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and this is exactly what Elon Musk concluded right from the get go, didn't he? You can't just make a car company. You have to make a car and a fueling company concurrently. Right, and?
Speaker 2:you know, give the Elon a lot of credit for understanding and building that into his plan.
Speaker 2:But he also had a lot of help from government, mainly the state of California, in helping to bring about things like the carbon trading schemes, the ZEP mandates.
Speaker 2:You know Elon had a boost with a lot of public support, mainly from the state of California, early in the development of Tesla. Well, china has that at a national scale and a lot of what they learned and applied were adapted from what they saw done in the US for Tesla. They just nationally matched it, but not having to put the burden of EV infrastructure on the back of the automotive company. Right, that was the thing they took a step beyond. Right. Don't force the OEM, who already has a task, of investing in building the EV. Don't ask them to build the infrastructure. Right, that's where public and private partnership comes into play and China does that better than any other country that I've seen so far. If you set a policy for reducing the carbon footprint of the transportation sector and you favor, then a battery electric in a plug-in hybrid electric way of doing that, then make sure that there's investment concurrent with the industry to make it attractive for people to industries to invest in for consumers to own an electric vehicle.
Speaker 3:Got it, got it. So just get into a bit more of the detail of what you've, some of what you've just gone through. So in the UK certainly I know it well, I live here and in many other places the early adopters are people typically with houses, with a drive. They can off-street parking, they can charge overnight. That's more convenient, it's cheaper, it has lots of things. But whenever I've been to China and I don't live there, but I've been there a few times I don't see a lot of houses that look like mine with a drive. Most people live in apartments. So I'm really fascinated to understand this. Now, what's the mix between being able to charge at home or overnight somehow, and public charging, and how does that work? Given there's so much volume now of EVs on the street, how do people schedule using that public charging? You know, are there long queues every time you go and want to charge up? How's it working in practical terms? Okay?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what you said is true. I live in an apartment complex. There are many EVs now and people do have in their parking facility or in their parking space a charger. So they do install at the apartment and there are no limit. They don't have to drive it to another place, they put it right in their parking space. So if you want an EV and increasingly people do, you know more than half the sales in Shanghai this year, past year, were EVs. So the you know in cities that's partly because they it's easier to get a license plate. You know to pay for the license plate if it's an EV. So there are supports that encourage people to take the plunge and de-risk the idea of owning an EV but getting access to public but also having your own private charging.
Speaker 2:The other thing that's important to note is, again, people don't have multi-generational habits of how they own and use a car, car purchases. As I said, when I got here 20 years ago it was a three million unit market. So buying cars is really a generation. Maybe we're into the second generation car ownership. So there isn't this expectation of you know utility of the car that dates back decades, right of you know the car on the highway culture.
Speaker 2:Most cars purchased in China are for city use, are for regional use or you know really close proximity types of commutes.
Speaker 2:They, if you're taking a long distance trip it's a big country you get on a high speed train, it's convenient, you can take an aero, you can take a journey to Beijing which is 700 miles or 1,000 kilometers away and it's about four hours in a high speed train connection. So getting around the mobility context is quite different. Evs serve the in-city use case mainly. People don't run it to empty on a single charge. They generally only charge once or twice or three times a week at most. So it's not a high duty cycle use case for the individually owned car. It's different if it's a mobility and service vehicle which is going to get frequent charging, much more frequent because of the high usage. Interestingly, there's a role for battery swapping in that use case and that's also an area of interest that's unique in China, where you know cars that are more frequently used will probably be more likely to be used in a battery swapping or in a plug-in hybrid configuration where you get the extended range from the combustion engine that is used to recharge the battery.
Speaker 3:Yeah, battery swapping. Let's talk about that for a second. You and I both know the journey that's been on. There was Shai Agassi, that Israeli entrepreneur, back in 2007, 2008, 2009,. Really looking like he was going to be, you know, savior of the planet. He was there to try and really energize the electric vehicle proposition by way of the issue of charging, which we've just been talking about, chicken and egg and all that, and it didn't work. It fell over. It finished, partly, of course, because a financial banking crisis arrived at the same time. That didn't help. Didn't help a lot of people. Nonetheless, it appeared to be something that then wasn't ever going to happen.
Speaker 3:Fast forward 10 years or so, maybe a little bit less. You then see NIO and, of course, shanghai Automotive and several other Chinese enterprises were looking at this, as indeed were people like China State Grid, china Southern Grid, sinopec. Here's a big question for them, bill Are we going to misjudge battery swapping in the West, or is this something that just works particularly well in China because of the heavy urbanization, the mega city proposition and, if you like, the gestation of automotive ownership and use? Or should we be getting on with looking at battery swapping in the West Because we haven't been. It still gets ignored and ridiculed, to be frank.
Speaker 3:What's your view.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's a very different context of mobility in China. Battery swapping, as you say, has got few adopters in the industry. There's only, you know, in China actually a better place. We're trying to sell the industry on an idea that it wasn't buying into, the idea of taking the component that in many respects is at the corner of the center of the value proposition of the car. We've in the West built brands around performance, and performance is tied to the power train. In the EB context the power train is wrapped up or at least surrounds there's a battery that defines the capacity and the energy distribution of the car.
Speaker 2:So I think the Western world and the automotive industry was just not a player for the idea of batteries swapping. They didn't want it. So a better place failed. Along comes China and the China context and pioneers like William Lee, who thought about the problem in a different way. He saw battery swapping as a way of mitigating the cost of the capex burden that you asked the customer to bear for owning the battery. Take that out of the equation and turn that into a recurring revenue. Turn capex battery into op-ex.
Speaker 3:In fairness, that was exactly how Shia-Gassey pitched it back in the day. I can assure you, because here's the irony I just left London taxes when I met Shia for the first time in 2007. I personally think if they'd gone with battery swapping to the Black Cab, the London taxi, I think it would have had a much greater success than as they did with cars gone and the radio fluence, which was all right.
Speaker 2:Asking a branded manufacturer first to sell at retail, to take the price down to sell more cars. That's a counterintuitive logic. The use case for battery swapping is different. Now, william Lee's calculus was I want to be a services platform, I want recurring revenue and that's one way of doing it.
Speaker 2:I actually want to not only be a car maker, but I want to be part of the energy ecosystem. I want to be neo-power. I want to have the storage device be part of the energy grid. So seeing an avenue for extending the business model beyond the car to the energy storage and distribution ecosystem, that was a new idea that the auto industry does not see as part of their adjustable market. Let me add another part of this A car as a EV should have upgrade ability.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons I think consumers were lucked into embracing EV is we all own devices with batteries and we know batteries over time get bad right and if the batteries degrade I don't wanna have to trade the whole car. So if a better battery comes along or my batteries lose performance, all I gotta do is take it to a swapping station or change my plan. You know interesting thing that Neo did when they announced the ET7, the vehicle is. They talked about the car and said you can upgrade to a solid state battery. They announced that car three years ago Now. There was no solid state battery. Still isn't today. There may never be, but the idea of you can buy this car and if a better battery comes along, swap it.
Speaker 2:That's something that upgrade ability is a value proposition for battery swapping that I think most of the traditional industries don't. They can't articulate in that manner.
Speaker 3:It's future proofing. But in and around all of what you've just described, this is my kind of sense or hope that we're now starting to see, slowly but surely, the real connection of the energy revolution renewable energy revolution and the electric mobility revolution coming together by way of the battery as the pivot, with bi-directional charging, with things like battery swapping. But this bi-directionality, where the battery then becomes a tool, it delivers a service, so to speak, and isn't just something sat in a dumb asset, you know, parked up somewhere, that feels to me like an imminent revolution that really will be the game changer for both renewable energy storage, ess and the electric vehicle. And it feels to me people like Faye Shen, who we both met he's the principal, if you like, architect of that ambition of Neo to be an energy company I feel they are the outlier in many ways. Arguably, people will say Tesla R2, that was part of the game plan, and maybe one or two others.
Speaker 3:But I think, if we're looking at replacing recurring revenues that are lost through the departure of friction parts and internal combustion engines, that there's only really two big things that you can replace that lost revenue with, and that is software, data and energy. Yeah, if you're then going to try and capture that commodity, those commodities, those recurring revenues. It seems to make absolute sense to me. So people like Tesla, people like BYD, people like Neo, to my mind, focusing much more now on both the charging infrastructure, the job of the battery and where it sits, I think it's profound and I mean, am I right? Is that what you're kind of alluding to? Are you thinking?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think it's the companies with vested interest in building that infrastructure that will play in that segment. I think, obviously, and one of the things that Neo did recently is announced partnerships with Cheong-Anh and with GLEE to go together to leverage this infrastructure that they built around battery swapping, high frequency charging, use cases, a mobility and service vehicles you mentioned London taxi, but very high demand for mobility and service vehicles in China, both for people and goods movement. All that's going to get electrified and you don't want to have those vehicles down for charging. So a five minute swap and you'll see.
Speaker 2:If you go to an auto show, catl showing charging, battery swapping facilities. It's in their interest to do this right, because if you keep vehicles moving and if you charge them frequently, that's obviously then giving up support for the continued usage of batteries versus other alternative propulsion technologies which then advertise their high rate or the rate of charging quickly. So if you're going to replace BEV with hydrogen fuel cell because it can charge faster, then try to compete with battery swapping in terms of keeping a car on the road. The other cost that I think is going to have to be born is high voltage bass charging. So I think battery swapping is a way of keeping battery electric vehicles as viable solutions for a longer period of time, before some of these other alternative technologies can commercialize.
Speaker 3:Right, right, just very quickly because I'd like to wrap on a little bit of how we started. But any sniff of wireless charging just out of interest, because that's something I've always had a confidence in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's an area of development, but I think the challenge there is also infrastructure related and can you improve the charging time? You have to have a lot of them out there and you have to be able to do a passive discharge quickly. And I think that's still the technology has not reached commercial scale yet. Interesting companies out there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's. Oh look, I do have some skin in the game here with an American company called Hevo, but there are others. And, of course, tesla recently acquired and then interestingly sold, wyferian, a German wireless charging company, but that's another story. Like I said, I didn't want to dwell on that too much. Can I go back to kind of the beginning, bill, and I'd like to just ask you to wrap up by giving myself and our listener some sense of what might happen next, or what should happen next. I suggested that we, you know we're challenged with. Is it confrontation or collaboration now with China, given the time of all this investment and this strategy that's gone on, how, how, in your view, then, does the Western companies, western governments, europe, the USA, others? What should they do now?
Speaker 2:Well, what they shouldn't do, unfortunately, is what they seem to be doing, which is put up barriers for cross-border collaboration. In the near term, I don't see a path to the future of mobility that's affordable, that doesn't involve some involvement with the Chinese supply chain. We need affordable, scaled technologies which include the batteries, the battery and the battery supply chain, which China now dominates. You know more than I think three-quarter, two-thirds of the world's EV batteries are made in China. If you go up beyond that, the raw materials and the material processing, it dominates the ingredients that go into the EV batteries. So if you want affordable, more than the third of the cost of the EV is the battery. So if you need affordable EVs, china has them. They have them because they've scaled the technology and I think we need that supply, access to that supply chain if we're going to compete with affordable EVs. And I think you know the rest of the world has to make the commitment to making EVs affordable and I think the traditional industry has not done that because it kills their cash cow ICE products. So I think there is, there does need to be a push in this direction. There does need to be offloading those manufacturing industries by investing in infrastructure and I think China would be very willing to collaborate.
Speaker 2:Putting up a barrier in preventing China or putting tariffs in place to prevent affordable EVs from entering the population will only slow down the commercialization of EVs internationally. So I think we need to find a way with rules. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be rules For us to come to China. When I came to China, there were rules. You had a former JV. You had to localize a certain percentage of your production. You know, don't give China free access. You know, make them play a role in helping build the infrastructure that our industries can build on.
Speaker 2:Flip the script is what I is the way I like to describe it. Learn from how China accelerated its move into leadership in the future of mobility and now leverage China's lead. It has that lead. It's far ahead of the electrification race. But leverage the investments they've made and allow them to invest and create jobs and create opportunities for companies to leverage the earth. They're supply chain. We can do that. If you want to win the race to the future, you've got to race faster than the fastest horse, and right now that faster horse is in China.
Speaker 3:Nice, oh, that's so well. Put Bill and flip the script. Yeah, I love that and I concur with that. So, on that note, we could talk so much, so much more. But I'd recommend people look you up on LinkedIn, look for your book and, if I can, if I'm allowed to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, selling to China, selling to China.
Speaker 3:Yeah, selling to China. So there's some great, great stuff in there about advice and helping people, just like the little sort of tip you've given there, the general flavor of what people should do. There's a lot more granular stuff, obviously in your work and in your book and in what you do as a company. I know that you're often cited by international media. I see you often pop up on little TV news items or little snippets in the big journals of the world, so full of admiration and respect for your knowledge, your experience and your guidance. So thank you for doing that with me today on the Electric and Eclectic Podcast Show. We're all the better for your help and support and guidance bill. So thank you and hope to see you soon, maybe at the Beijing Auto Show in April, isn't it yeah?
Speaker 2:Yep, absolutely, come on quickly.
Speaker 3:Good, see you soon then.
Speaker 1:Thanks, so much, Roger. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the show and make sure you follow Roger on LinkedIn, where you'll discover almost all there is to know about the spectacular Electric Vehicle Revolution.