$IREN Tape Reports

Per Ticker.id: $IREN Tape Reports — 4 podcast mentions across 2 podcasts (30 days), latest 2026-08-06 23:10 UTC.

1. How did China grow its EV industry? Hint: it's not really central planning from Beijing. It was a magical concoction of entrepreneurs and local officials using their guanxi to dance around giant SOEs and central government regulation, leverage private and foreign capital, and just like be really excellent business people, which has led to our situation in 2026 of these world-beating companies which have a ton of overcapacity and are set to take over the planet. To discuss, we have ANU Professor Funming Lu, who recently wrote a fantastic paper about this topic we'll link to in the show notes, as well as Irene Zhang, contributor and analyst at China Talk. We also get into the lessons the story holds for other strategic industries like robotics and AI, as well as a little discourse into the Chinese podcasting ecosystem.

   Jordan Schneider — ChinaTalk · The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry · 2026-08-17

2. Yeah, absolutely. So, well, both of you, well, thank you, Jordan and Irene, because, well, you really read my paper rather than, well, just reading the abstract. So back in the '90s, actually, the Chinese automotive industry was in a very different shape compared to what it is now. The size of the market was somewhere— well, if you're talking about passenger vehicles, well, cars, SUVs or whatsoever, it was only about half a million of those sold every year. So it was a much smaller market. It was comparable to the size of Poland back then or Vietnam today. So for the Chinese government, well, their main concern was that actually largely as a legacy of the Maoist era and also was economic decentralization in the 1980s. The Chinese automotive industry was super fragmented. As far as I remember, every province had their own carmaker except for Tibet. All 30 others or 29 others will have their own. And which means actually in the mid-1990s, well, someone did the count, China had about 130 car makers across the country. So it's roughly, well, the same number during the heat or during the peak of the, of the EV boom in China, only making a little bit more than 100 million vehicles, including trucks and so on.

   Fengming Lu — ChinaTalk · The Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry · 2026-08-17