De Lijn’s Decision to Order 92 Electric Buses from Chinese Company BYD Raises Concerns for European Industry

Not only will commuters be left out in the cold if thousands of De Lijn stops are abolished despite our national traffic jam, our industry is also facing a loss. The Flemish public transport company De Lijn has decided to order 92 electric buses from the Chinese bus builder BYD. The Chinese company was the cheapest choice in a public tender. The buses will be produced in Hungary, the springboard with which the Chinese company managed to participate in European tenders.

The awarding of this tender is very problematic for several reasons.

The first is economic. Major bus builders in Flanders, such as Van Hool and VDL, are skipping the contract. The award to BYD will be at the expense of jobs. This week alone, 65 percent of the 2,300 employees at Van Hool are economically unemployed, and according to the unions, this is a social cost that is not taken into account in tenders.

This is also a missed opportunity to further market our bus builders. How do we expect young engineering graduates to achieve green technology breakthroughs here if we push companies out of the market where they can use their creative brains? To be surprised that a company like Van Hool flags to the US or low-wage countries.

Anyway, the results of these types of tenders are simply the hard rules of the free market, according to De Lijn. Only the truth is not that simple. The Chinese electric car industry has received much more and massive government support than ours for many years. For BYD, this involved 11 billion euros in loans from state banks and approximately 5 billion dollars in subsidies, VUB professor Jonathan Holslag pointed out. We should also not forget that China itself shields its market from foreign competition.

There is therefore no level playing field for this tender, to the extent that there is unfair competition. Europe is also once again becoming a destination for Chinese overproduction, which could lead to dumping practices. The EU Commissioner for Competition should investigate this file further.

It is now cynical that the laughing third party in this dossier is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who at European Councils threatens the branches of German and French industry in his country in order to unblock subsidies to Hungary, while he himself deals with Chinese state-owned companies.

Prime Minister Alexander De Croo (Open Vld) will visit China from January 10 to 13, where he will join Xi Jinping next Friday not only as Belgian Prime Minister but also as temporary EU President. Wearing both hats, he will have to push for a level playing field for European industry. If BYD wants to enter the European market, Van Hool, VDL and other EU companies should also be given free rein on the Chinese market. The risk is that otherwise they will be crushed by competition and their know-how will be bought up by China.

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2024-01-05 16:30:15
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