BEIJING — As China’s electric vehicle price war intensifies, its top leaders have sounded the alarm with high-profile calls to halt excessive competition, known colloquially as “neijuan” or involution.

While the buzzword has taken on various meanings in China to imply a race to the bottom, the term was mentioned in Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s annual work report in March. The market regulator’s meeting last month also called for “comprehensively rectifying ‘involutionary’ competition.”

Earlier this week, senior executives of several Chinese EV makers were summoned to Beijing to “self-regulate,” Bloomberg reported.

However, industry players and analysts have predicted that the competition will only increase.

“A certain automaker has taken the lead in launching significant price cuts and many companies have followed suit, triggering a new round of ‘price war’ panic,” the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said in a Chinese-language statement Saturday, translated by CNBC.

The government-linked body was taking shots at EV giant BYD, which sparked the latest round of discounts on May 23, including a more than 30% price cut on one of its car models.

“Disorderly ‘price wars’ intensify vicious competition,” the association said, warning of further pressure on profit margins and consumer safety risks. It called for companies to abide by fair competition and not monopolize the market or “dump” goods at prices below the cost of production.

“‘Price wars’ have no winners, much less a future,” People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, subsequently said in an article, citing the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. That’s according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese.

The ministry will increase regulation of non-productive competition and cooperate with other departments to enforce laws promoting fair competition, the report said.

The ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. BYD referred CNBC to its comment to China’s state media, in which the automaker said it firmly supports the manufacturing association’s calls for fair competition and creating a healthy market.

The automaker, which counted Warren Buffett as an early investor, reported 14% growth in sales last month, a slowdown from 19% year-on-year growth in April.

“Given the current oversupply situation in the China auto market, we believe the most intense competitive phase is yet to come, until if we can see a meaningful market consolidation in the future,” the Nomura analysts said.

Despite the rhetoric, there isn’t much that can be done about market competition, Zhong Shi, an analyst with the China Automobile Dealers Association, said last week. He added that other countries are also watching the intense competition in China’s car market and what it could mean for their local auto industries.

The average price of a car exported from China has fallen since 2023, reversing an upward trend previously, according to figures published on social media by the China Passenger Car Association’s Secretary-General Cui Dongshu.

For China auto sales to Germany, the average export price per vehicle has fallen to $21,000 as of this year, down from $30,000 in 2023, the data showed. In Mexico, the top destination for Chinese car exports, was an exception, with the average price rising to $13,000, up from $12,000 two years ago.

In China, the average car retail price has fallen by around 19% over the past two years to around 165,000 yuan ($22,900), according to Nomura, citing industry data from Autohome Research Institute.

There are other signals that the rush into electric cars has created oversupply.

A “strange phenomenon” of secondhand cars being sold with zero mileage has emerged, Great Wall Motor Chairman Wei Jianjun said in a Sina Finance interview conducted in Mandarin on May 23. He added that around 3,000 to 4,000 vendors on Chinese used car platforms were selling such cars.

Vehicles were registered as sales or deliveries for automakers, only to be sold on the secondhand market almost immediately, which inflated sales volumes. But this created “too much chaos”, prompting Wei to call for better regulation within the industry.

The price war has yet to reach its peak, and “competition will become more intense in the next five years,“ EV startup ‘s CEO He Xiaopeng told Chinese media last week, which the company verified with CNBC.

“This is just an ‘appetizer’ of what is to come,” he added. He said that rather than competing on price, Xpeng would compete on technology and expand beyond China to the rest of the world.

The startup has focused on making its driver-assist system a selling point and has delivered more than 30,000 cars a month for the past seven months. Last week, Xpeng released the Max version of its Mona 03 at 129,800 ($18,020), nearly 17% cheaper than when the lower-priced model was initially revealed in August.

Like most electric car startups, Xpeng reported losses attributable to shareholders in the first quarter of around $90 million. Nio, which has focused on more premium vehicles, on Tuesday reported a loss of $949.6 million in the first quarter.

However, Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi on Tuesday predicted its electric car business would turn a profit in the second half of the year, a company spokesperson confirmed to CNBC. The company entered the EV market last year with its SU7 sedan priced cheaper than Tesla’s Model 3, and is expected to take on the Model Y with a YU7 SUV this summer.

LONDON — British money transfer firm Wise on Thursday said that it plans to move its primary listing location to the U.S., dealing a fresh blow to the London stock exchange.

Wise said in its full-year earnings statement that it will move to a dual listing, with its main listing hub shifting to the U.S. while maintaining a secondary listing in London.

“This would allow Wise’s shares to trade on both a US stock exchange and the LSE,” Wise said in its earnings announcement.

Shares of Wise traded 7% higher during early morning deals Thursday.

Wise debuted on London’s stock market in 2021 in a direct listing that valued the company at £8 billion ($10.84 billion) at the time. It is now valued at £11.07 billion, according to LSEG data.

The listing was viewed as a symbolic win for the U.K., as then British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government was looking to encourage more global tech companies to choose London as their IPO destination.

Since then, London has been mired in doubts over whether it can play host to major tech listings. The city is often criticized for lacking the depth of liquidity and industry expertise from investment analysts to accommodate such transactions.

Days after his nomination for NASA was pulled by President Donald Trump, Jared Isaacman told investors in his payments company Shift4 that his “brief stint in politics was a thrilling experience.”

Isaacman said in the letter that he was resigning as CEO of Shift4, which he founded in 1999 at age 16, and will assume the role of executive chairman. He had been planning to leave the company if his nomination was confirmed by the Senate. But it never got that far.

In a post on Truth Social over the weekend, Trump said that he was withdrawing Isaacman’s nomination “after a thorough review of prior associations.” The president didn’t indicate what those associations were, though some reports have suggested that it was a reference to Isaacman’s prior donations to Democrats.

“Even knowing the outcome, I would do it all over again,” Isaacman wrote in the letter.

In an episode of the All-In podcast that went live on Wednesday, Isaacman, who has close ties to Elon Musk, indicated that his past donations weren’t likely the reason for Trump’s decision. He noted that his donations were public long before he was nominated, and he described himself as “right-leaning” and a supporter of the president’s agenda.

“I don’t want to play dumb on this,” he said. “I don’t think the timing was much of a coincidence.”

The timing he was referencing was Musk’s official exit from his government service work at the end of May.

In addition to his career in finance, Isaacman has led two private spaceflights through Musk’s SpaceX, in 2021 and 2024, commanding crews on multiday trips around the Earth. Shift4 also invested $27.5 million in SpaceX, according to a 2021 filing.

Musk became one of Trump’s biggest backers and, until last week, was leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with slashing the size of the federal government. With Musk’s official time as a “special government employee” coming to an end because of the 130-day limit, the world’s richest person has quickly turned into a vocal critic of Trump’s massive tax-cut bill.

On Wednesday, Musk ramped up his attacks on the bill that Trump is pushing Congress to pass, claiming it will condemn America to “debt slavery” and urging lawmakers to “KILL the BILL.” A day earlier, Musk slammed what Trump has dubbed the “big, beautiful bill” as a “disgusting abomination.”

Trump’s decision to pull Isaacman’s nomination came before Musk’s latest tirade. But Musk had been distancing himself from the administration in recent weeks.

“You got one person,” Isaacman said on All-In, referring to Trump as the one making the call. He said he doesn’t “know what the trigger was or wasn’t” and said he doesn’t “fault the president for it.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At Shift4, Isaacman said in Wednesday’s letter that he’ll be succeeded as CEO by Taylor Lauber, who started at the company in 2018 and has been serving as president.

“I have been working since I was a teenager and not planning to stop now,” Isaacman wrote. “I love this company, the strategy and our team. As the largest shareholder, I am eager to continue contributing where I believe my efforts will have the most impact.” 

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this report.

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