In the first half of 2026, BYD earned RMB181.27 billion (about US$26.7 billion) outside China, 52.57% of its total revenue and the first time in the company's history that overseas revenue exceeded domestic revenue. Sales abroad kept rising in the months that followed: from January to October, BYD sold 1,507,395 passenger cars and pickups outside China, passing its full-year overseas target of 1.5 million with two months to spare. In October alone it sold 169,564 passenger cars and pickups abroad, more than double the level of a year earlier, within a record monthly total of 490,168 vehicles.
BYD built its position in China by making its own batteries and core components. It is now taking the same model abroad, first through exports and increasingly through factories in its overseas markets.
How It Started
Wang Chuanfu founded BYD in Shenzhen in 1995 to make rechargeable batteries for mobile phones and other electronics, and it grew into one of the world's main suppliers of phone batteries. In 2003 BYD bought Xi'an Qinchuan Automobile and entered the car industry. In 2008 Berkshire Hathaway, through MidAmerican Energy, bought about a 10% stake in the company.
Over the following years BYD put its money into batteries, motors, electronic controls and vehicle platforms. In 2022 it stopped making cars powered only by internal combustion engines, and it now builds only battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. In 2025 it sold 4.6 million vehicles and, for the first time over a full year, sold more battery electric vehicles than Tesla: about 2.26 million against roughly 1.63 million. The three premium brands — Denza, Fang Cheng Bao and Yangwang — sold 397,000 vehicles in 2025, up 109% year on year. BYD is listed in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and ranked 91st on the 2026 Fortune Global 500 list, its fifth consecutive year on the list.
How It Built Its Business in China
BYD's main advantage is vertical integration. Most carmakers buy batteries and chips from suppliers; BYD makes its own Blade batteries, motors, electronic control systems and some automotive chips, and its electronics business manufactures components as well. In the first half of 2026, electronics and other products brought in RMB69.4 billion, 20.13% of total revenue.
Making its own parts lets BYD control costs and bring new technology into production quickly. The second-generation Blade Battery and BYD's megawatt-level Flash Charging platform — launched in March 2026, able to add the equivalent of 400 km of range in about five minutes — are already in production vehicles, including the refreshed Yangwang U7, U8 and U8L.
As of 7 October 2026, BYD had built 12,165 flash charging stations in 341 Chinese cities, 2,111 of them on expressways, and it plans to reach 20,000 by the end of the year. It has also put China's first self-developed 4 nm automotive-grade smart-driving chip, Xuanji A3, into volume production, and its God's Eye assisted-driving fleet had passed 3.95 million vehicles by the end of September, generating more than 240 million km of driving data a day. In October it released "Didixia AI", an AI super-agent built into its vehicles.
BYD sells across a wide price range under four brands: BYD, Denza, Fang Cheng Bao and Yangwang. In the first half of 2026 the three premium brands together sold about 228,000 vehicles, up 61% year on year and 12.6% of BYD's total, with the Fang Cheng Bao line alone contributing 160,000. The company sold about 1.02 million vehicles in China over the same period. Since January 2026, when China halved the purchase tax exemption for new energy vehicles, overseas markets have taken a larger role in BYD's growth.
Going Global
BYD now sells new energy vehicles in 121 countries and regions across six continents, and in many of them it is the market leader. According to JATO Dynamics data for the first half of 2026, BYD was the best-selling NEV brand in the UK, Italy and Spain, and in Thailand, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and South Africa. In Brazil it led the NEV brand ranking by nearly 100,000 units. In Singapore it was the best-selling brand both overall and among NEVs, and in Australia it ranked second overall and first among NEV brands. Over the same period BYD sold about 792,000 vehicles abroad, up 67.8% year on year and about 44% of its total, and Brazil was its largest overseas market with 194,700 units. In March BYD raised its 2026 overseas target from 1.3 million to 1.5 million vehicles, and after the third-quarter report Wang Chuanfu said the company expected to exceed it.
Exports remain the base of this business, and local production is growing alongside them. BYD runs its own fleet of eight car carriers with more than 60,000 vehicle slots, and it has built dealer networks in Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In markets with import tariffs or local-content rules, it builds cars locally. The plant in Thailand, with annual capacity of 150,000 vehicles, reached full capacity and built its 100,000th car in September 2026, and the plant in Uzbekistan is operating. In Brazil, the plant in Camaçari started production in July 2025, employs more than 5,500 people and rolled out its 100,000th vehicle in October; its first locally made plug-in hybrid has gone on sale there. The Indonesian plant at Subang formally began production in September 2026, assembly operations in Malaysia and Cambodia are ramping up, and a plant in Turkey is planned for the end of 2026.
Europe is the next step. BYD’s plant in Szeged, Hungary, its first in the EU, has planned capacity of 300,000 vehicles. It has completed phase-one line installation and is due to start assembling cars for European customers in the fourth quarter, ahead of an EU quota on imported hybrids and plug-in hybrids that takes effect in December 2026 and does not cover locally assembled vehicles.
BYD is also taking its premium brands and market-specific models abroad. Denza launched in Europe at the Paris Opera in April with the Z9GT flagship, priced from about €115,000, and Fang Cheng Bao models are now also sold overseas. The Racco, designed for Japan, is BYD’s first model developed outside China.
India is one of BYD’s longest-standing overseas markets. The company set up a subsidiary in Chennai in 2007, now has two plants there and has invested more than US$200 million. It sells the Atto 3, eMAX 7, Seal and Sealion 7, now joined by a new Sealion 7 Dynamic variant, and offers its DM-i super hybrid technology. Its network reached 49 showrooms in 40 cities in October 2026, and the Sealion 7 has passed 4,500 cumulative sales in India, the world’s third-largest car market.
The Numbers Behind the Business
In 2025 BYD’s revenue was RMB803.96 billion, up 3.46%, and net profit attributable to shareholders was RMB32.62 billion. Overseas sales of about 1.05 million vehicles, up 145%, generated RMB310.7 billion, 38.65% of revenue. BYD ended the year with cash reserves of about RMB167.8 billion.
In the first half of 2026, BYD reported revenue of RMB344.82 billion and net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB12.33 billion. Profitability improved in the second quarter: net profit rose 29.7% year on year, and the quarterly gross margin reached 18.9%, close to a one-year high. Overseas revenue grew 33.92% year on year, and the overseas business had a gross margin of 21.71%, up 1.9 percentage points, against 15.67% in China; The group gross margin was 18.85%. Research and development spending was RMB28.9 billion, more than the period’s net profit, taking BYD’s cumulative R&D investment past RMB270 billion.
Growth picked up in the third quarter. Revenue rose 13.59% year on year to RMB221.49 billion, and net profit attributable to shareholders rose 28.08% to RMB10.02 billion, the first quarter above RMB10 billion since 2025. Sales rose 18.7% to about 1.32 million vehicles, of which 550,700 were exported, up 137%. For the first three quarters, revenue was RMB566.30 billion and net profit attributable to shareholders RMB22.35 billion. R&D spending over the nine months was RMB36.3 billion, taking cumulative R&D investment past RMB280 billion. Overseas sales over the nine months reached about 1.34 million vehicles, up 91% and about 43% of the total, and the three premium brands sold 410,000 vehicles, up 75%.
What Comes Next?
BYD's next stage of growth is abroad, and it now goes beyond selling cars to exporting the full technology stack. At the Paris Motor Show in October, Denza announced that God's Eye, BYD's in-house assisted-driving system, will come to Europe: the Z9 GT will receive city navigation features via OTA update next year, subject to UN R171 regulatory approval, with calibration to European road conditions under way. Denza plans to operate in more than 30 European countries by the end of 2026 through more than 150 retail outlets, and its N9 flagship SUV and N8 are the next models slated for overseas launch — models that, like the Z supercar launched in Britain in July, sell overseas for the equivalent of more than RMB 1 million. Stella Li, BYD's executive vice-president, has also said the company is studying the possibility of a factory in France.
On batteries, the next step is solid-state. BYD plans to begin demonstration installation of all-solid-state batteries in vehicles in 2027 and to reach large-scale production around 2030; a vehicle-grade pilot line in Shenzhen's Pingshan district began turning out 60Ah test cells in February 2026, and a 20GWh mass-production line in Chongqing's Bishan district started construction in the third quarter of this year.
Energy storage is growing into a business of its own. According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, BYD shipped more than 60GWh of storage systems in 2025 and overtook Tesla as the world’s largest battery-storage integrator. In July 2026 it signed an 11.275GWh supply agreement with Masdar of the UAE, one of the largest single storage orders of the year. In Chile, the 3.5GWh Elena solar-plus-storage plant, equipped with BYD systems, has come online.
Shipping capacity is set to expand as well. BYD's eight car carriers already provide annual capacity above one million vehicles, and maritime trade media report that the company has ordered ten more 9,200-CEU LNG dual-fuel carriers for delivery between 2027 and 2029, which would take the fleet to 18 ships.
For overseas markets, BYD has outlined plans for 6,000 flash-charging stations, with 3,000 located in Europe and a minimum of 300 in the UK. The monorail system inaugurated in Brazil is the company’s first monorail project outside mainland China and represents another revenue stream built on its proprietary battery technology.
The BYD case illustrates that the competitiveness of Chinese EV makers rests on battery technology, vertical integration and manufacturing at scale. Its task now is to carry that cost structure into factories outside China and build its brands in each local market.