China’s electric car boom is increasingly more about hybrids

Hybrid-powered vehicles are proving more popular than battery-only ones in China, even as consumers shift away from gas-only cars, full-year data shows.

BYD said in a?filing Wednesday?it sold around 4.3 million passenger cars in 2024. Nearly 2.5 million of those vehicles were hybrid-powered, a reversal from 2023 when BYD sold slightly fewer hybrid cars than battery-only vehicles.

Tesla, which sells battery-only cars, is on track to sell more than 600,000 vehicles in China for a second straight year, according to CNBC calculations of data from the China Passenger Car Association.

Battery-powered devices lagged behind

Chinese electric car startups that have so far only sold purely battery-powered vehicles ranked lower in full-year deliveries. Electric carmaker?Zeekr?sold 222,123 battery-powered vehicles,?Nio?sold 221,970 and?Xpeng?sold 190,068.

The final tally for Nio and Xpeng for the year includes figures for the companies’ lower-priced brands, which began deliveries in the second half of 2024.

Xpeng in November revealed its own?hybrid range-extender system, while Zeekr in August announced plans to launch its first hybrid car in 2025.?

Market share growing quickly

China’s push to develop its own electric cars hit a tipping point in July.

The share of new energy vehicles sold?accounted for more than half all passenger cars sold that month, according to the passenger car association. New energy vehicles include battery-only and hybrid-powered cars.

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Alibaba slashes prices on large language models by up to 85% as China AI rivalry heats up

Alibaba announced on Tuesday that it’s cutting prices by up to 85% on its large language models.

Alibaba Cloud, the company’s cloud computing division, said in a WeChat post it’s offering price reduction on its visual language model, Qwen-VL, which is designed to perceive and understand both texts and images.

Large language models are AI models that are trained on vast quantities of data to generate humanlike responses to user queries and prompts. They are the bedrock for today’s generative AI systems, like Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.?

A series of price cuts?

It’s not the first time Alibaba has announced price cuts to incentivize businesses to use its AI products. In February, the company?announced price reductions of as much as 55%?on a wide range of core cloud products. More recently, in May, the company reduced prices on its Qwen AI model?by as much as 97%?in a bid to boost demand.

The price cuts demonstrate how the race among China’s technology giants to win more business for their nascent artificial intelligence products is intensifying.?

Race for market share

Major Chinese tech firms including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Huawei and TikTok parent company Bytedance have all launched their own large language models over the past 18 months, looking to capitalize on the hype around the technology.

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Apple offers holiday discount in China as Huawei competition heats up

Apple is giving customers 500 Chinese yuan ($68.50) off the iPhone 16 Pro or iPhone 16 Pro Max,?and 400 yuan off the iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Plus. Offers also include discounts for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 15.

Apple?offered a similar Chinese New Year deal last year?and in May, the company?offered hefty discounts?as part of China’s 618 shopping festival.

Resistant to discounts

For a long time, Apple has resisted offering discounts through its own retail channels. Instead, third-party retailers would offer deals at certain times of the year. However, as competition ramps up, Apple has been more inclined in the last year to post seasonal deals.

Apple smartphone shipments fell 6% year on year in mainland China in the third quarter of 2024, according to Canalys. The company’s market share also slipped to 14% from 16% a year earlier.?

Chinese challengers

The firm’s latest challenge has come from a resurgent Huawei and other domestic brands. Huawei’s shipments jumped 24% year on year, Canalys data shows, while the company’s market share hit 16% from 13% a year earlier.

Huawei, which was once the No. 1 smartphone player in the world before U.S. sanctions crippled its handset business, has?aggressively launched new devices since the latter half of 2023. These devices?contain chips that many had thought would be difficult to produce?because of U.S. restrictions on Huawei.?

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Top tech predictions for 2025

In the final episode of 2024, CNBC's Tom Chitty and Arjun Kharpal are joined by a whole host of special guests to reflect back on the year, and to look ahead to an exciting 2025 for technology.

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