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.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now