2026-04-22
25 分钟Bloomberg Audio Studios.
Podcasts, Radio, News.
Last year, India's largest company, Reliance Industries, quietly sent hundreds of executives and engineers to China.
They fanned out across industrial hubs on the mainland, including Shenzhen and Wuxi.
They were in a race against time.
China was about to restrict exports of a range of vital technologies.
And Reliance needed to secure critical equipment and tech to build a massive battery factory back home.
The employees had just over a month to pull it off before those export controls were supposed to kick in.
And what they're trying to do is just make sure that the machines they need are first manufactured in time,
and once they're manufactured that they actually pass customs and they're put on ships and they are moving towards India.
Alicia Sachdeva is Bloomberg's business reporter based in New Delhi.
She says the race to secure these machines was just one piece of the puzzle.
What they're now after is something beyond equipment.
They need access to the know-how that makes those machines actually work.
And that's where Reliance is really stuck now, is to really be able to have access to technology, even though it has the machinery.
Reliance needs both the equipment and the know-how, expertise that China dominates in the field.
The problem is China has no plans to share any of it.
China wants to really ring-fence the dominance that it's built over the last decade.
It does not really want to lose its edge that it's built painstakingly in manufacturing sectors.
And for Indian companies which have ambitions to build out battery plants, for example, time is of the essence.