China’s BYD Co (比亞迪) enjoyed a year-end surge to push total sales to 4.25 million passenger cars last year, narrowing its gap with Tesla Inc as the two vie for the crown of top-selling electric vehicle (EV) maker of the year.
The Shenzhen-based carmaker, which stopped making vehicles entirely powered by fossil fuels in 2022, hit a new monthly sales record last month, spurred on by subsidies and offering extra incentives to buyers.
BYD sold 509,440 plug-in hybrid and pure-electric passenger vehicles last month, the company said yesterday. The figure includes 207,734 EVs, taking the annual tally of battery-powered car sales to 1.76 million. Overall annual sales increased 41 percent year-on-year.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The rise of BYD as a best-selling car brand stands in contrast to the turmoil facing a growing number of legacy auto giants like Nissan Motor Co, Volkswagen AG and Stellantis NV. Western car brands have faced tumbling sales in China, while also lagging behind on the EV transition.
Tesla will unveil its fourth-quarter sales figures later this week. The Elon Musk-led company needs to deliver at least 515,000 EVs in the final three months of last year to meet its guidance for “slight growth” in annual sales, or 1.81 million deliveries, which would be a quarterly record for the company. Analyst estimates are for 510,400 deliveries, just shy of Tesla’s expectations.
By the third quarter, BYD had sold 1.16 million EVs, lagging Tesla by 124,100. However, the Chinese company has seen a last-quarter surge to narrow the gap with its US rival.
BYD’s surge will help cement its place among the top-selling carmakers globally. Its rise in total sales puts it near to beating Ford Motor Co and Honda Motor Co on an annual basis too. Higher sales will tip the company’s annual revenue over US$100 billion for the first time.
BYD’s gains have been fueled by domestic Chinese sales — and aided in the second half of the year by increased subsidies to convince drivers to ditch gasoline cars.
Its target to sell roughly half-a-million vehicles outside China has fallen short of expectations in the face of pushback from the European Union, which has imposed additional tariffs on Chinese EVs.
In Brazil, one of its biggest overseas markets, BYD is under scrutiny over allegations of slave-like conditions for some construction workers building a new EV factory.
France cannot afford to ignore the third credit-rating reduction in less than a year, French Minister of Finance Roland Lescure said. “Three agencies have downgraded us and we can’t ignore this cloud,” he told Franceinfo on Saturday, speaking just hours after S&P lowered his country’s credit rating to “A+” from “AA-” in an unscheduled move. “Fundamentally, it’s an additional cloud to a weather forecast that was already pretty gray. It’s a call for lucidity and responsibility,” he said, adding that this is “a call to be serious.” The credit assessor’s move means France has lost its double-A rating at two of the
Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), founder and CEO of US-based artificial intelligence chip designer Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) on Friday celebrated the first Nvidia Blackwell wafer produced on US soil. Huang visited TSMC’s advanced wafer fab in the US state of Arizona and joined the Taiwanese chipmaker’s executives to witness the efforts to “build the infrastructure that powers the world’s AI factories, right here in America,” Nvidia said in a statement. At the event, Huang joined Y.L. Wang (王英郎), vice president of operations at TSMC, in signing their names on the Blackwell wafer to
AI BOOST: Although Taiwan’s reliance on Chinese rare earth elements is limited, it could face indirect impacts from supply issues and price volatility, an economist said DBS Bank Ltd (星展銀行) has sharply raised its forecast for Taiwan’s economic growth this year to 5.6 percent, citing stronger-than-expected exports and investment linked to artificial intelligence (AI), as it said that the current momentum could peak soon. The acceleration of the global AI race has fueled a surge in Taiwan’s AI-related capital spending and exports of information and communications technology (ICT) products, which have been key drivers of growth this year. “We have revised our GDP forecast for Taiwan upward to 5.6 percent from 4 percent, an upgrade that mainly reflects stronger-than-expected AI-related exports and investment in the third
RARE EARTHS: The call between the US Treasury Secretary and his Chinese counterpart came as Washington sought to rally G7 partners in response to China’s export controls China and the US on Saturday agreed to conduct another round of trade negotiations in the coming week, as the world’s two biggest economies seek to avoid another damaging tit-for-tat tariff battle. Beijing last week announced sweeping controls on the critical rare earths industry, prompting US President Donald Trump to threaten 100 percent tariffs on imports from China in retaliation. Trump had also threatened to cancel his expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in South Korea later this month on the sidelines of the APEC summit. In the latest indication of efforts to resolve their dispute, Chinese state media reported that
RSS