China Says EU Hybrid Deal Sets a Floor for Continued Export Growth

Beijing has pushed back on the idea that its hybrid vehicle trade understanding with Brussels amounts to a cap, insisting the arrangement leaves Chinese automakers room to keep expanding shipments to Europe. In a Monday statement, China’s commerce ministry framed the deal around a 2025 baseline rather than a fixed ceiling, a point of contention since the two sides described the outcome quite differently last week.

Citing Eurostat figures, the ministry said the EU took in 302,000 hybrid vehicles from China in 2025, up sharply from 107,000 a year earlier. The arrangement is designed to permit growth on top of that volume, according to the ministry, which added that China’s allocated quota would be no smaller than that granted to any other supplier to the European market. Officials declined to publish exact numbers, a start date or how large the increase might be.

The clarification followed a statement from EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic on October 9 that the deal would cut Chinese hybrid exports to the bloc in half. He did not say what baseline that reduction was measured against, and China’s response did not directly reconcile the two accounts, leaving the precise scale of the arrangement unresolved.

Both sides said they had settled on three guiding principles: respect for facts, non-discrimination and adherence to trade rules. Under those terms, any measures should avoid singling out Chinese goods or companies, and China indicated it retains all rights available under the World Trade Organization, including dispute settlement and requests for trade compensation.

Hybrids have moved to the center of China-EU automotive trade tensions after the bloc applied definitive countervailing duties to China-built battery electric vehicles in October 2024, a move that left hybrids untouched. Reports earlier in October suggested Brussels was weighing safeguard steps such as tariff-rate quotas on hybrids. On the BEV front, the ministry said the two sides reached a “soft landing” in the anti-subsidy case in January through general guidance on price undertakings, with company-specific reviews still ongoing. The talks built on a meeting between Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and Sefcovic in Beijing on October 8 and 9.