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BYD’s profits declined 33 per cent in the third quarter, highlighting the urgency of the Chinese electric vehicle maker’s overseas push following Beijing’s campaign against aggressive competition in the domestic sector.
BYD has become the world’s largest and fastest-growing producer of EVs and the chief global rival to Elon Musk’s Tesla. But the third-quarter results show a continued slowdown for the group after a period of breakneck growth.
The Shenzhen-based group on Thursday reported net income of Rmb7.8bn ($1.1bn), compared with Rmb11.6bn from the same period last year. The result fell short of analysts’ expectation of Rmb9.6bn, but was an improvement from Rmb6.36bn in the second quarter.
The company’s stock hit a record high in May after it made breakthrough announcements on battery charging and driverless technology, but second-quarter earnings came in lower than expected, hit by Beijing’s crackdown on aggressive discounting and supplier payment practices. Share have fallen more than 30 per cent from the May peak.
BYD remains the dominant EV force at home, selling about 30 per cent of new EVs so far this year, but it faces intensifying competition from local rivals such as Geely.
These pressures have forced BYD to double down on plans to rapidly expand sales abroad. Along with factories in Brazil, Hungary, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey and Uzbekistan, it is constructing a fleet of eight purpose-built vessels to ship its cars.
Still, analysts expect BYD to announce further technological breakthroughs in the coming months, including an EV powered by a semi-solid-state battery. The technology, in which the battery’s electrolyte is a gel-like material rather than liquid, promises to increase energy density.
BYD is also testing “gigacasting”, a manufacturing process pioneered by Tesla in which vehicles are pressed with 9,000 tonnes of pressure to cast the underbody. The company said the process would remove the need to install 72 components and make vehicles lighter.
Analysts said they expected a design revamp in 2026, as Chinese consumers have grown weary of the brand’s signature “dragon face” design, which has been in use for seven years.
“This is a more fundamental cause of BYD’s challenges this year,” said Feng Xiao, co-head of China industrial research at CLSA. “BYD is redesigning the look of its cars.”
Revenue for the July to September quarter came in at Rmb195bn, down 3 per cent from the previous corresponding period and below the Rmb216bn forecast by analysts.
Gross margin was 17.6 per cent, up from 16.27 per cent in the previous quarter but still off the 21.89 per cent reported in the third quarter last year. The margin improvement reflects a higher share of premium models in the company’s product mix, including from overseas markets.
BYD’s exports in the first nine months of the year rose 14 per cent to 705,000 cars, according to data from Automobility, a Shanghai-based consultancy, putting it on track to achieve its forecast of 800,000 to 1mn overseas deliveries this year.
The group, which has forecast total sales of 4.6mn this year, has a long-term annual sales target of 10mn cars, with half coming from outside China.
China overtook Japan in 2023 as the world’s biggest car exporter following a boom in shipments of traditional cars with internal combustion engines to developing countries.
But the export mix is shifting, with battery-only and plug-in hybrid vehicles accounting for 35 per cent of shipments so far this year, up from about 20 per cent in 2023 and 2024.
BYD is the biggest driver of this change, capturing about 40 per cent of China’s total EV exports.
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