"Leveraging overwhelming advantage" — Phrase of the Week
BYD pressures suppliers to cut prices by 10% in 2025
Our phrase of the week is: "leveraging overwhelming advantage" 降维打击 (jiàng wéi dǎ jī)
Context
A leaked letter from Chinese automaker, BYD, is making waves on the Chinese internet.
In the letter dated 27 November, the company asks its suppliers to reduce prices by 10% starting 1 January, 2025.
It is standard practice for companies like BYD to try and cuts costs every year. In recent years, the industry norm has been around 3-5% annually.
But BYD’s much more aggressive targets are a consequence of its dominant position. BYD sold 3.25 million cars in the first 10 months of 2024, and is projected to reach 4 million by the end of the year (the total output of EVs this year is set to exceed 10 million).
However, suppliers often operate on thin margins, unable to reduce prices further. So in the past two years, according to media reports in China, automakers like BYD have deliberately brought in suppliers from outside the traditional field to secure lower prices. Advanced equipment manufacturers are being encouraged to pivot to product manufacturing of low-tech components.
One traditional manufacturer explains how this creates a huge challenge:
With highly automated production, their product costs almost half of ours, which is essentially leveraging an overwhelming advantage against us. We can't compete on price at all. This line of business is declining rapidly with negative revenue growth this year.
他们自动化程度更高，产品成本几乎是我们的一半，对我们是降维打击。我们根本报不出价来，这块业务下滑很快，今年营业额都是负增长。
Tāmen zìdònghuà chéngdù gèng gāo, chǎnpǐn chéngběn jīhū shì wǒmen de yíbàn, duì wǒmen shì jiàng wéi dǎ jī. Wǒmen gēnběn bào bù chū jià lái, zhè kuài yèwù xiàhuá hěn kuài, jīnnián yíngyè'é dōu shì fù zēngzhǎng.
And with that, we have our Sinica Phrase of the Week!
What it means
The phrase "leveraging an overwhelming advantage" combines two ideas: "Dimensionality reduction" (降维 jiàngwéi), a term from computer science, describing the process of mapping high-dimensional multimedia data vectors to one-dimensional or lower-dimensional spaces; and "attack" (打击 dǎjī), a direct and decisive offensive action.
The concept originates from Liú Cíxīn's 刘慈欣 acclaimed science fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem (三体). In the novel, extraterrestrial beings employ a devastating weapon called the "two-dimensional foil" (二向箔). This weapon reduces a target's spatial dimensions, collapsing four-dimensional space to three dimensions, or three-dimensional space to two dimensions. This form of attack renders the target unable to survive in the new, reduced-dimensional space. The result is catastrophic destruction or complete annihilation.
In modern usage, this four character phrase has evolved to describe situations where one party leverages an unassailable advantage, often rooted in a fundamentally different strategy, perspective, or level of resources, to dominate competitors. The term is especially popular in business and technology contexts, referring to companies that disrupt industries by introducing revolutionary innovations or employing highly efficient operational models.
In BYD's case, with its need to cut costs by 10%, the company is using advanced equipment manufacturers to produce low-tech components through automation, which operate at lower cost and greater efficiency, overwhelming and under-cutting traditional suppliers.
This is why we translate it as "leveraging overwhelming technological advantage" to outpace and disrupt the supply chain and beat competitors on cost.
Andrew Methven is the author of RealTime Mandarin, a resource to help you learn contemporary Chinese in context, and stay on top of the latest language trends in China.
Read more about how this story is being discussed in the Chinese media in this week’s RealTime Mandarin:
