Contrary to popular belief that Tesla, the leading electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer is having issues selling to the Chinese market, it's 2019 sales prove otherwise with growth at 40% this year.
The early sale of Tesla in China was low but growth finally came, an important development because China is and will continue to be the largest market for EVs.
The International Energy Agency states that China owns half of the world's EV stock.
In 2018 alone, 1.1 million sales at 2.3 million units of EVs came from the Chinese market.
Tesla's efforts to penetrate China started in 2014. After two years, Tesla grew its sales in the country beating by 13% of the cars it delivered worldwide.
With the earnings of 2016, Tesla was able to finally join Fortune 500. Tesla's 2017 market performance doubled and earned them $2 billion.
This 2017 performance put them on pace in the Chinese auto market gave the idea to the company to work on a deal to become the first foreign automaker to manufacture in China.
However, with the tariff issues between the US and China in 2018, Tesla's profits will be at stake. But since 2014, co-founder, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Elon Musk is aware of the potential of the Chinese EV market.
"Long-term we might sell more cars in China than in the US," Musk said. Because of this, the company still went on with their plans and on July 2018, the deal pushed through to put up Tesla's biggest investment and bet, it's Gigafactory 3.
To sustain Tesla's growth, it is betting on its first manufacturing plant in Shanghai, the Gigagactory 3, to start production by the end of the year with 30,000 units per week.
However, Morgan Stanley's research team who had recently been in China said the factory can start production in November with 35,000 to 40,000 units.
Even with the news of the Gigafactory 3, there were reports that Tesla's sales dropped in the second half of last year. Still, growth is still being shown by the company in 2019 with the release of the Model 3.
Because the units coming out of Gigafactory 3 is not subject to import tariffs, Tesla announced the price for the made-in-China Model 3 to be between 300,000 yuan and 350,000 yuan ($43,431-$50,670) before subsidies, cheaper than its US counterparts.
Musk is expecting 5,000 vehicles a-week-demand or the car in the longer term come next year.
