Brasília – The 2025 BRICS Summit, hosted this year under Brazil’s presidency, marks a pivotal shift in the bloc’s trajectory. With five new members—UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Iran—joining its ranks, BRICS has evolved beyond its original mission of reforming global financial governance. Today, the bloc presents itself as a platform for strategic insulation from U.S. hegemony, and increasingly, as a conduit for bilateral and multilateral industrial collaboration centered around green technologies.
This year’s agenda, which prioritizes green industrialization, climate finance, and technological sovereignty, reflects the bloc’s accelerated pivot from an aspirational coalition to a functional mechanism for reshaping production and trade in the post-carbon era.
A Shift in the Global Center of Gravity
The summit takes place amid what many observers are calling a second China shock—a period marked by Beijing’s dominance in strategic industries such as EVs, batteries, AI chips, and green manufacturing systems. According to Clean Energy Finance, over $100 billion has been deployed by Chinese firms across 130 clean energy projects globally since 2023.
This investment surge is not merely financial—it reflects deep integration across supply chains, IP transfer, localization targets, and infrastructure financing. The model is being adopted through bilateral partnerships with fellow BRICS nations and beyond.
Strategic Bilateral Cooperation Inside BRICS
- Brazil & China
Brazil’s northeast has become a testbed for Sino-Latin American industrial collaboration. Under President Lula’s Nova Indústria Brasil program, Chinese EV manufacturer BYD took over Ford’s former factory in Bahia to establish its first plant outside Asia. The deal includes local R&D, workforce development, and a projected output of 150,000 vehicles annually. In a parallel transition, Gold Wind—China’s wind energy giant—took over GE’s turbine operations, highlighting South-South value chain realignment. - India & Brazil
Outside China’s orbit, India and Brazil are advancing a Global Biofuel Alliance, combining Brazil’s decades of technological development in ethanol and biodiesel with India’s rising energy demand and industrial capacity. Their focus is on scaling aviation-grade biofuels, addressing both energy needs and agricultural economies. - UAE & China
UAE has emerged as a strategic partner in transition metals, solar energy, and green hydrogen. In exchange for market access, Chinese firms such as LONGi have committed to localization clauses and skill transfer, with the Gulf nation now hosting a solar training academy and advanced processing hubs for green steel production using raw materials from Brazil.
These partnerships illustrate a functional logic of BRICS today: less about political alignment and more about pragmatic industrial synergies, leveraging large domestic markets and demand-driven policy to extract technology, investment, and institutional capital.
BRICS as a Green Industry Platform
What’s notable about BRICS 2025 is its increasing coherence around green industry as a strategic theme. While internal contradictions remain—particularly between fossil fuel exporters like Russia and Iran and green tech leaders like China and India—the bloc’s electricity mix has tilted to below 50% fossil-based generation. China’s export-led green tech strategy is not only enabling industrial diffusion but changing the energy development model for the Global South.
However, key challenges remain. The New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) still operate at limited scale. Financial coordination tools such as “BRICS Pay” remain conceptual. But this hasn’t halted practical, bilateral moves toward dedollarization and decarbonization.
What It Means for Global Business Strategy
For multinational corporations, infrastructure developers, and green tech firms, the evolving BRICS agenda has strategic implications:
- Supply Chain Reconfiguration: Production is increasingly shifting to non-Western industrial hubs with state-brokered localization agreements.
- Technology Transfer as Policy Lever: Governments are using market access to secure advanced technologies, R&D presence, and skills development.
- New Trade and Finance Routes: Local currency trade, strategic reserves, and commodity-backed agreements are shaping a parallel financial architecture.
BRICS, once perceived as symbolic, is becoming an arena for action-oriented South-South cooperation. The emergence of value chain diplomacy—where investment is tied to deeper industrial commitments—presents both risks and opportunities for businesses dependent on legacy trade patterns.
Looking Ahead
As the postwar global order undergoes recalibration, BRICS is shaping its own blueprint—one built not on ideological opposition, but industrial collaboration, resource leverage, and tech-enabled sovereignty.
The question now is whether this coalition, still bound by diverse political systems and economic models, can translate its green industrial alignment into global influence.
For strategic industries—from EVs to renewables to semiconductors—this is no longer theoretical. The future is already being assembled, one bilateral agreement at a time.
