10/04/2026

BIZ & FINANCE FRIDAY | APR 10, 2026

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HONG KONG: Energy crises tend to change driving habits. The oil shock of 1973 encouraged car owners to replace their gas guzzlers with smaller, fuel-efficient engines. This time, the experience of extreme supply shortages and higher petrol prices is prompting consumers and policymakers to reconsider the appeal of electric vehicles. Even if oil prices retreat, big makers of battery-powered cars like China’s BYD stand to benefit. Whether or not the ceasefire announced by the US and Iran on Tuesday marks an end to the war — and a swift return to cheaper energy — the conflict will not be quickly forgotten. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has already called it “the largest supply disruption in history”. By effectively blocking the Strait of Hormuz, Iran strangled a route through which about a fifth of the world’s crude oil trade passed last year. Many countries had alarmingly small oil reserves: Australia’s stockpile was enough to last for just 49 days, per IEA figures. By April, 28 countries had introduced emergency measures to conserve supplies, according to the agency.

Oil shock set to accelerate electric cars’ comeback

prices are also falling thanks to cheaper models like the Citroën ë C3. Policy is another catalyst for changing driving habits. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 inspired US fuel economy standards. More recently, an oil price spike in 2008 encouraged Chinese policymakers to back electric cars, according to Anders Hove of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. By 2024, China had 30 million new energy vehicles on the road, saving some 430,000 barrels of oil a day, according to a study from the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

powered cars sold in the last three months of 2025, per Counterpoint. As sales slow at home, they are redoubling their export efforts. After BYD reported earnings fell by a fifth last year, boss Wang Chuanfu said overseas sales will still rise to “another level” in 2026. Geely is aiming to ramp up overseas deliveries by as much as 80% in 2026, CEO Gan Jiayue said in March. The US$33 billion (RM131 billion) company’s Hong Kong-listed shares are up almost 50% since the Iran war started.

“The ongoing wait for DeepSeek V4 points to friction in scaling advanced models without unrestricted access to top-tier Nvidia hardware,“ Wu said. But some reports allege that DeepSeek skirted the ban to train V4 using thousands of Nvidia’s top end Blackwell chips, dismantled in third countries and smuggled to China. Training AI models requires huge amounts of computing power – much more than for processing generative AI queries, which is known as inference. AFP has contacted DeepSeek for comment. Nvidia did not respond to a comment request but told The Information it had not seen evidence of this and “such smuggling seems farfetched”. Another Chinese AI startup Zhipu, in January unveiled an image generator that it said had been entirely trained on Huawei chips. And Alibaba said this week it would open a new data centre for AI training and inference in southern China, powered by 10,000 of its own chips and operated by China Telecom. As for DeepSeek, “if they have successfully trained V4 entirely on Huawei silicon, it signals a material shift in the geopolitical tech landscape”, Wu said. Gasoline vehicles are less exposed to these inputs. Higher energy prices are another potential headache for makers of electric cars. They fuel inflation, subdue purchasing power, and undermine overall auto sales, as well as eroding the relative advantage of owning an EV. However, the European Union — the world’s second largest EV market and a key export growth driver for China — is less sensitive to fluctuations in gas prices than it was following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Electricity bills in the region have risen by 10% or more in some countries as of mid March, but are extremely unlikely to hit highs seen in 2022, when some nations’ wholesale prices quadrupled or quintupled, HSBC reckons. If the Iran war ends and oil prices subside, drivers around the world will face less petrol price anxiety and the battery boom will likely lose some of its force. However, history suggests the memory of scarcity will linger, giving electric cars a lasting boost. – Reuters Katrina Hamlin is global production editor, based in Hong Kong. She is also a columnist, writing on topics including autos and electric vehicles, as well as the gambling industry in Macau and Asia.

battery-powered 5 Techno+ over four years is £19,073 (RM101,828) for drivers charging at home, well below the £26,407 cost of owning a Volkswagen Tiguan Match diesel model, HSBC estimates. Buyers are already running the numbers. BYD showrooms across Southeast Asia are bustling, one dealer in Manila told Reuters he had seen a month’s worth of orders in two weeks in March. In Australia, where diesel prices increased by more than a third, loans for electric vehicles have doubled, per National Australia Bank. Registrations of Teslas tripled in France in March, while monthly sales of battery electric vehicles in the UK hit a record. Renault

Drivers have already proved they are sensitive to the relative cost of combustion engines and battery power. In the past decade, sales of pure electric and hybrid vehicles grew faster in years when oil prices rose, data from the IEA and LSEG shows. This was the case even when plug-in cars were still more expensive than gasoline powered models. But electric cars have also improved since oil last topped US$100 per barrel after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Batteries cost half as much as they did then, UBS notes. As a result, the recent oil spike has made electric options a better value in markets including China and Europe. In the UK, for example, the total cost of owning a Waiting for DeepSeek: new model to test China’s AI ambitions Other factors are reinforcing the trend. To start, infrastructure for electric vehicles is improving. The world has twice as many chargers compared with 2022, according to the IEA. Fast-charging systems like BYD’s, which the Chinese company claims add 2km of range for every second of charging, help ease drivers’ angst about running out of power. Longer-lasting batteries help too. Meanwhile, consumers around the world enjoy greater choice as made-in-China electric vehicles zoom into global markets. BYD and Geely Automobile accounted for nearly a quarter of all battery International rivals are less prepared for an EV comeback. Carmakers including Ford Motor, General Motors, Stellantis and Honda have written off electric-car related investments worth a combined US$70 billion after demand stuttered in the US. Even then, these companies have kept battery models in their portfolios, while prioritising cost-cutting. Ford CEO Jim Farley has committed to a project to produce an electric vehicle costing US$30,000. While electric cars in the world’s largest economy are still more expensive than petrol alternatives on a cost-of ownership basis, the gap between sticker prices narrowed to US$6,500 in the first quarter, the slimmest ever, according to Cox Automotive. In Europe, average The recent reminder that oil supplies are volatile and potentially unreliable will encourage more governments to prioritise electrification. Cambodia has already reduced import taxes for EV related products, while Chile has introduced a credit system for electric taxis. Electric-car makers will not enjoy an entirely smooth ride, though. The Middle East conflict will push up logistics and production expenses for factories already operating on skinny margins. In China the cost of aluminium, copper, lithium and memory chips needed to make a single electric vehicle is up by 44%, adding roughly US$1,000 to carmakers’ expenses, UBS reckons.

TOKYO: For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek, seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field. More than a year has passed since the startup put Chinese AI on the map in early 2025 with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals. But despite reports and rumours about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight. Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new system: world leading US designs or made-in-China alternatives that the country is racing to develop. “It’s important to know because at one level, it is a signal of China’s AI self sufficiency trajectory,“ Wei Sun, principal AI analyst at Counterpoint Research, told AFP. Tech news outlet The Information reported last week that V4 can be run on the latest chips made by China’s Huawei. Such a shift would mark a milestone for China in its bid to beat US restrictions on the export of top of-the-range AI chips from Californian titan Nvidia to the country. The report cited five people with

“I expect the upcoming DeepSeek V4 release will not just be a software update; it will be a highly capable, open-source model that handles massive context windows at a fraction of the cost,“ he predicted. But DeepSeek’s reputation as a company at the frontier of AI technology is also at stake.

emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Stephen Wu, founder of the Carthage Capital fund, told AFP that V4 – said to be multimodal, meaning it can generate text, pictures and video – could again shock US tech valuations.

direct knowledge of large orders for Huawei chips, made in preparation for the DeepSeek launch by tech giants including Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent. AFP contacted DeepSeek, Huawei, Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent but none were able to comment. DeepSeek started life in 2023 as a side project of a hedge fund that had access to a cache of powerful Nvidia processors. It shot to attention in

Its models previously relied on Nvidia chips, so a move to collaborate with domestic chipmakers would require “substantial re engineering”, Wei said. “That transition can slow development cycles and introduce performance trade-offs, especially for V4, a model expected to be state-of-the-art.” The US cites national security concerns as the reason for its export ban on Nvidia’s most powerful AI processors to China.

January 2025 with its R1 deep-reasoning chatbot, which sent US tech shares tumbling with President Donald Trump calling it a “wake-up call” for American firms. R1 was based on DeepSeek’s last major AI model, V3, which was released in December 2024. The company’s

affordable, customisable AI tools have been widely adopted in China, and are also popular in

DeepSeek’s delayed V4 launch fuels speculation over China’s AI chip strategy and self-sufficiency push. – UNSPLASH PIX