Europe is coming around on air conditioners. China is happy to help.
Europeans seeking relief from record heat are buying up Chinese AC units, a sales surge that Beijing sees as an “industrial victory.”
As Europe suffered through its worst recorded heat wave a few weeks ago, the majority of homes without air-conditioning, Americans looked on in climate-controlled confusion.
Headlines, not to mention online discourse, reflected the bemusement: Europeans have “different ideas” about physical suffering; European attitudes toward air conditioning are “suicidal”; why didn’t Europe want air conditioning?; what was going on?
But the United States had little to offer to alleviate Europe’s heat wave. Not so for China.
As France, Britain and Spain saw record temperatures in June, Chinese air-conditioning brands became lifelines for a sweltering continent where only about a fifth of households, by some estimates, have air conditioning. Major manufacturers including Midea, Haier and Gree saw their sales surge in recent weeks as temperatures soared into the triple digits and as people across Europe prepared for still more heat to come.
Chinese air conditioning exports in May to France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands surged by more than 55 percent year-on-year, according to Chinese customs data.
Midea’s PortaSplit — a particularly popular portable unit designed to circumvent European regulations prohibiting certain building modifications — quickly sold out, leading some desperate consumers to create websites monitoring PortaSplits as they were restocked. Sales of the model reached more than 200,000 units in Europe this year, double the figure from a year earlier, the company’s regional sales director told the Chinese state-run wire service Xinhua.
Other Chinese cooling devices such as ice-makers, floor standing fans and handheld fans have also poured into Europe. A Chinese merchant told the Beijing News, a state-owned daily newspaper, that factories were running around-the-clock to churn out fans for Europe yet were struggling to keep up with demand.
China has framed its response to Europe’s plight as another sign of the nation’s economic progress. Chinese media outlets celebrated the sold-out air conditioning units as “innovation for overseas markets” and an “industrial victory” that could help the country shed a reputation for cheap and inferior electronics.
Elsewhere, Chinese diplomats shared videos of Midea’s automated factory assembling a new air-conditioning unit in six seconds flat.
And, much like some in America, some in China couldn’t resist taking jabs at Europe. In China, “even landlords install [permanent] air conditioning for their tenants … no one would go out of their way to buy a less effective portable unit,” one Chinese editorial said, pointing to European regulations that limit consumers to less-efficient air conditioning products like the PortaSplit.
China had more air-conditioning units than households as of 2024, according to official statistics cited by Chinese outlets.
With their sprawling supply chains and ability to tailor products to demand, Chinese companies have proved dominant in the face of lagging European manufacturers, adding to broader European anxieties over widening E.U.-China trade imbalances and a “China Shock 2.0.″
“It’s not that European manufacturers lack the technical know-how to produce portable split ACs, but they lack the ability to mass produce them at cheap costs,” said Tianchen Xu, a senior China analyst with the Economist Intelligence Unit, a British research and analysis group.
But the Chinese government downplayed any geopolitical significance behind the air conditioning sales glut. “China-E.U. trade is driven by market demand and shaped by economic complementarity,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a recent news conference.
Geopolitics aside, trade is “about solving people’s everyday needs,” said Ding Chun, the director of the Center for European Studies at China’s Fudan University. “Chinese manufacturers have done exactly that.”
What readers are saying
The comments discuss the increasing demand for air conditioning in Europe due to rising temperatures, with many noting the challenges and regulations associated with installing AC units in historic buildings. Some commenters express concerns about the environmental impact and... Show more
This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.
NewsletterAs news breaks
World News Alerts
Breaking news email alerts for major happenings around the world.