EVWorld’s Bill Moore Speaks with BYD Chairman Wang Chuanfu

I’m always a bit cheesed off when my Monday morning calls to my business partners reveal that they had more exciting weekends than I did. While I was getting a bit of exercise and catching up on my writing, my partner at EVWorld, Bill Moore, was hanging out with one of the world’s most influential people: Wang Chuanfu, BYD’s founder and chairman, whom he met and interviewed at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders’ meeting in Omaha.

I would have ridden my bicycle there to meet Chuanfu.  In 1995, he built a company from scratch that now employs more than 200,000 people, and aspires to be the world leader in electric cars.

And I’m not betting against him, even though the company takes a very interesting and controversial approach to business: vertical integration, taken to the max. They do the mining, build the battery cells, assemble the packs, and then integrate the packs into the cars. On top of that, they’re all over the clean energy required to charge the batteries in the most eco-sensitive manner possible, investing heavily in renewables — especially solar.

Does this extreme level of verticality seem improbable in a world of global commerce where micro-specialization is the order of the day? So it would appear to me. But I’m not one of the world’s wealthiest people — nor did I spend the weekend with one.  Grrr.