Bismarck Brief

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Bismarck Brief
BYD is On Track to Become the Largest Car Company Ever

BYD is On Track to Become the Largest Car Company Ever

A frontrunner in the battery revolution disrupting the global car industry with electric vehicles, China's top auto maker is set to continue reducing prices with growing scale and advanced technology.

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Samo Burja
Aug 13, 2025
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Bismarck Brief
Bismarck Brief
BYD is On Track to Become the Largest Car Company Ever
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A BYD Seal vehicle in 2023. Photo by Michael Förtsch. Source.

The Chinese auto maker BYD has been the world’s largest manufacturer of electric vehicles since 2024, when it overtook Elon Musk’s Tesla by selling 1.8 million fully electric vehicles.1 That year, the company sold a total of 4.3 million passenger vehicles, becoming one of the world’s largest auto makers, larger than Honda or Ford. The company has surpassed annual revenues of $110 billion, making it the ninth-largest auto maker by revenue worldwide.2 BYD has achieved very rapid growth in production and sales. While the company has been making cars since 2003, it only achieved sales of significantly over half a million units in 2021 and, since then, sales have grown eight times over. From 2021 to 2025, BYD’s workforce tripled in size from 290,000 to 970,000, showing an institutional capability to scale and manage a truly gargantuan workforce.3 The company is now the largest industrial company in the world by number of employees. As of 2024, BYD is the best-selling vehicle brand in China, making it a study in the economics and future of the new Chinese middle-class consumer economy.4 BYD has not made a traditional gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine vehicle since 2022.5 The company is a crucial case study in the ongoing technological disruption of legacy auto makers by electric vehicles enabled by advances in battery technology.

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