Asked what conditions are like inside the site, a colleague replies: “Nothing out of the ordinary, when you’re a migrant worker.” His supervisors are very strict and living conditions are “quite harsh”, he says.

As an addition: BYD (and all other Chinese companies) not only hires Chinese migrant workers under conditions that are “quite harsh” but “ordinary, when you are migrant worker”, it has also been relying on a fully-integrated supply chain with suppliers exclusively from China, and it has been paying these suppliers by issuing promissory notes issued on Dilian, an electronic payment platform BYD itself launched in 2018 which is not regulated by authorities.

According to LSEG (an independent data provider for financial markets and infrastructure), it took BYD an average of 127 days to pay suppliers and other short-term creditors in 2024, up from 81 days in 2019.

This means that the brutal price war in the Chinese car industry and pressure from companies like BYD has forced parts suppliers to cut prices and accept longer payment periods via payment tools developed and run by BYD itself.

A few months ago, BYD reportedly ditched its Dilian platform, but this remained unconfirmed (to the best if my knowledge). As the report says:

It has been reported that if BYD suppliers want to cash in their notes early with the automaker’s bank partners, they do so at a discounted rate. A discount rate of 6% for some BYD notes was cited by some sources. Bank notes [that are often used by other manufacturers] usually have a discount rate of less than 2% if cashed in early.

Addition: Web Archive link for the article.