Not just subsidies, even without them, this factory couldn't operate. The main issue is that there are too few educated workers to support a modern factory. I saw a comment from one of their suppliers on Chinese social media, and I use GPT to translate part of it:
- We, as the supplier, provide battery forming equipment, which includes a series of cells for storage. It's common sense for engineers that nothing except batteries should be placed in these cells. However, they used it to store clutter and notebooks, causing the production line to report errors and stop. Our project manager urgently responded to debug the issue, and their workers even asked where they could put all this mess?
- Regarding explosions. Dust explosion is a common knowledge for engineers. Their explosion happened because they used a regular vacuum cleaner to collect dust from the dust box (which contained metal dust from battery cutting), resulting in a dust explosion. No one knows what their maintenance team was doing. They were also looking for documentation from us, just to shift the blame. There was also another explosion with the oven purchased from a Korean supplier due to management issues that allowed air into the baking equipment.
- Their battery process and technology responsible person knows nothing as well. After we weld batteries, there's a leak testing process for ammonia. This person always asked us if we could use hydrogen because it's cheaper. He had no idea that hydrogen is an explosive gas. I wrote back a response of thousands of words explaining the principles, saying that this was absolutely not suitable because hydrogen itself is flammable and mixed with air would be a highly explosive mixture. He finally gave up on the idea.
Although these are just comments from social media, at least regarding the explosion, there have been other media reports on the issue.